WISBUY. 135 



marble ruins, vaulted halls and iron gates, windows decor- 

 ated with copper and brass, afterwards gilded all showing 

 the grandeur of a bygone age. By 1288 the city seems 

 to have become dilapidated through the continual feuds; 

 but, in that year, Magnus, King of Sweden, allowed the 

 citizens to rebuild their walls and fortifications a cir- 

 cumstance which has led some historians into the errone- 

 ous belief that the place was then, for the first time, estab- 

 lished. 



It naturally followed that amid such a vast concourse of 

 foreigners, all seafaring men, disputes constantly arose, 

 based on controversies peculiar to the mariner's calling 

 the relative rights of masters and seamen, of owners 

 and shippers, the adjustment of marine losses, contracts 

 governing the chartering and maintenance of ships and 

 crews, and so on through the great body of that branch 

 of jurisprudence now known as admiralty. 



There is probably no one more stubbornly conservative 

 of his rights than the sailor, or more ready to assert them ; 

 and as this has always been found true of his species since 

 time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the con- 

 trary, there is no reason to believe that the mariners who 

 took their liberty in the streets of Wisbuy differed mate- 

 rially in modes of thought and action from those who 

 congregate to-day in the great maritime ports of the world. 

 Jack came ashore, and probably spent his hard-earned 

 wages and fought the " beach combers" and the "rock 

 scorpions " and became the prey of the crimps of Wisbuy 

 and the terror of its police, just as he does now at Gibral- 

 tar, or Liverpool, or Hong Kong; while the owners and 

 the masters and the average adjusters and the sea-lawyers 

 wrangled over questions of jettison and demurrage and 

 collision with the same fervor that brings them nowadays 

 into the Admiralty Courts. The consequence was that 

 two sets of locally-devised laws came into existence, ad- 

 ministered by the consulate courts or authorities of the 

 city the one known as the Ordinances of Wisbuy, con- 



