As Mr. Zerk went aft he picked up the knife from the scuppers. "Irons for you!" he hissed at the Dago as they took him to the fo'c'sle.
But we heard nothing more of it. The captain had come out on deck in the height of the excitement, following the fight, and called the mate to his side; he was wise in his day, and knew a thing or two about the tactics of his officers.
Soon we were tailing again to the halyard, tautening out the leeches of the tops'l, an embittered crowd who but a few moments before were singing at the ropes. Peter, in the meantime, was swabbing up the bloody deck.
One who has never been there can hardly realize the absolute subjugation under which a crew may be placed by their officers, especially if they are on a deep-sea voyage under sail. None of us is perfect, and the humble sailor-man as well as the rest of the human race is prone to take things as easy as the law of the craft on which he sails will allow. This fact, coupled with the hard circumstances under which a small crew is compelled to work a very large ship, may, in a measure, condone the tactics which have for their object the putting the "fear of God" into a crew.
Young officers at times are inclined to be a bit "easy" with men, thinking it will result in more willingness. The more seasoned members of the cloth, men who have sailed as merchant officers for many years, realize that the maintenance of discipline aboard ship is only possible under a rule of autocratic severity, demanding instant obedience to orders and quick punishment for the first departure from the iron bonds. This is as necessary as life itself. The least hesitation, the slightest possibility of argument, when ordering men to places of danger or extreme difficulty, would soon result in disaster.
At sea we have the sharp distinction of caste--the wonderful potency of _Mister_ So and So. He is an officer, if not always a gentleman. To forget the "_sir_" when addressing one of our mates would have been a dangerous thing to do. In fact only one man ever did it, but he was a Kanaka and signs on later in the story.
In many ships, captain and mates never fail to use their "handles" in addressing each other, and this was so on the _Fuller_, in fact there was as little familiarity aft, in the personal relations of our officers, as one might expect to find between the representatives of two armies meeting to arrange a truce. And the wonderful part of it was that they left the ship at the end of the voyage as coldly distant as the day they stepped aboard; that is all but the second mate, which is again running me ahead of the lawful progress of this yarn.