as thirty dollars per month. I did not attempt to dissuade them from their purpose; they were just as right to risk their lives from contagion at thirty dollars a month, as to stand and be fired at at a shilling a day. The circumstance of so many of my own men being in American ships, and their assertion that there were no other sailors than English at New York, induced me to enter very minutely into my investigation, of which the following are the results :

The United States, correctly speaking, have no common seamen, or seamen bred up as apprentices before the mast. Indeed a little reflection will show how unlikely it is that they ever should have; for who would submit to such a dog's life (as at the best it is), or what parent would consent that his children should wear out an existence of hardship and dependence at sea, when he could so easily render them independent on shore? The same period of time requisite for a man to learn his duty as an able seaman, and be qualified for the pittance of eighteen dollars per month, would be sufficient

to establish a young man as an independent, or even wealthy, landowner, factor, or merchant. That there are classes in America who do go to sea is certain, and who and what these are I shall hereafter point out; but it may be positively asserted that, unless by escaping from their parents at an early age, and before their education is complete, they become, as it were, lost, there is in the United States of America hardly an instance of a white boy being sent to sea, to be brought up as a foremast man.

It may be here observed that there is a wide difference in the appearance of an English seaman and a portion of those styling themselves American seamen, who are to be seen at Liverpool and other seaports; tall, weedy, narrowshouldered, slovenly, yet still athletic men, with their knives worn in a sheath outside of their clothes, and not with a lanyard round them, as is the usual custom of English seamen. There is, I grant, a great difference in their appearance, and it arises from the circumstance of those men having been continually in the trade to

New Orleans and the South, where they have picked up the buccaneer airs and customs which are still in existence there; but the fact is, that, though altered also by climate, the majority of them were Englishmen born, who served their first apprenticeship in the coasting trade, but left it at an early age for America. They may be considered as a portion of the emigrants to America, having become in feeling, as well as in other respects, bonâ fide Americans.

The whole amount of tonnage of the American mercantile marine may be taken, in round numbers, at 2,000,000 tons, which may be subdivided as follows:

The American merchant vessels are generally sailed with fewer men than the British. We calculate five men to one hundred tons, which I believe to be about the just proportion. Mr. Carey, in his work, estimates the proportion of seamen in American vessels to be 4 to every one hundred tons, and I shall assume his calculation as correct. The number of men employed in the American mercantile navy will be as follows::

And now I will submit, from the examina

tions I have made, the proportions of American and British seamen which are contained in this

aggregate of 85,799 men.

VOL. III.

In the foreign trade we have to deduct the masters of the ships, the mates, and the boys who are apprenticed to learn their duty, and rise to mates and masters (not to serve before the mast). These I estimate at

which, deducted from 30,333, will leave 22,333 seamen in the foreign trade, who, with a slight intermixture of Swedes, Danes, and, more rarely, Americans, may be asserted to be all British seamen.

The next item is that of the men employed in the whale fishery; and, as near as I can ascertain the fact, the proportions are two-thirds Americans to one-third British. The total is