"WHAT is the use of you lobsters?" said the bluejacket to the marine. "You don't know nothing, and you ain't no good." "The use of us," said the marine with solemn brevity, "is to keep you from mutineying." This traditional exchange of taunt and retort may, like many other and more famous historical speeches, belong to the great book of words never uttered. It is a small matter whether any particular bluejacket made this particular attempt to best "the jollies' "" and was thus answered. The dialogue conveys in brief dramatic form the undeniable historic truth that the sailor was a man prone to mutiny, and that it was not the least important of the duties of the marine to reduce him to subordination. Like other duties, it was at times very ill performed by the fallible humans who were called upon to carry it out. The unhappy Lieutenant Pigot, of the Dido, who was mutinously murdered at the beginning of the Crimean War, in the Pacific, was not slain by a bluejacket but by a marineand by a marine who was on duty as sentry, when in blind rage he drew his bayonet and mortally wounded his officer. Marines had a share in the great general mutinies at Spithead and the Nore in 1797—a twice told tale, of which no more will be said here. Some of them were among the most

ruthless of the mutineers of the Hermione, of whom more will be said. Yet in a general way the marines made "band apart" from the sailors, and were the supporters of authority. How much their help was needed becomes plain when we find the Admiral Philip Patton writing at the end of the eighteenth century that he had seen frequent cases of mutiny in the course of his service.

The statement is not quite so startling as at the first instance it looks. There were mutinies and mutinies. But even when we give full weight to the fact that all of them were not identical in kind with, nor approximate in degree to, the seizure of the Danae in 1800 by the mutineers, who carried her into Brest, it is somewhat surprising to the reader who knows only of the glories and the discipline of the Royal Navy to find so experienced an officer as Admiral Patton recording the frequency of outbreaks of rebellious violence. There they were none the less, and they, their causes, their leaders, and their degrees of crime and fury, formed an element in the old sea life which it is both foolish and dishonest in the historian or the critic to ignore. The general reader, who simply wishes to hear and know, loses many pictures which, if they are nothing else, are significant and illustrative, when the naval historian is unwilling or is debarred by lack of space

from conveying to his public the facts which he can extract out of the mine wherein they lie-the yellow, cracked, too often ill-written minutes of court-martial which lie mouldering in half-rotten calf bindings at the Record Office.

Por el hilo se saca el ovillo, as the Spanish proverb has it -by the loose end you undo the tangle. A small fact will supply a useful start for the solution of a historical problem. We begin to understand why trials for mutiny are so numerous in the volumes of minutes of court martial, when we see that the name was applied to offences which ranged all the way from simple assaults on a superior, or mere insolence and threats, to such scenes of horror as took place on the Hermione on that dreadful night when Mr Southgate, her master, was drawn from his cabin, where he lay hurt, by the noise of riot, and coming out saw a crowd of armed men forcing their way into the cabin of Captain Hugh Pigot, and heard the voice of some one within "crying in a dismal manner. On the 6th August 1748, Captain Knowles of the Dover brought his boatswain to a court-martial for mutiny at Portsmouth. The man bore the unexpected name of Aaron Correa, which seems to show that he must have been a Portuguese Jew. When Captain Knowles was asked to describe Correa's carriage on board, he answered in words which will sound very strange to a modern naval officer, that it was

"Very disrespectful to his officers and very ill to the men, beating and particularly one of the best unmerciabusing the best men in the ship, fully with a great kane. I told him that was one of the best men in the ship, and he must have some Pique to him or he would not have beaten him so, but that I would not have him carry such a stick or strike any one with it. In a day or two after he beat the same man I think it was, or a very good man I am sure, with the same kane, as I was told."

It will probably occur to the reader that Correa was tried for this disobedience and brutality. But he came before a court-martial for no such matter. On a certain afternoon when Lieutenant Hall had the watch he sent a boy into the foretop. The messenger was thrashed and driven out by the captain of the top, and on reaching the deck fell into the hands of Correa, who thrashed him again. The boy thought it hard, and Lieutenant Hall thought it insolent. He asked the boatswain what this meant, and was answered saucily that stores had been stolen from the top, and that nobody should go into it without his-the boatswain's

leave. The master, who was standing by them, told Correa that this was not the way to answer an officer. Whereupon the boatswain shouldered up to him and said, "I am as good a man as you at sea or on shore." Lieutenant Hall reported him to the captain, and while he was speaking Correa shook his head and growled, "By God, you shall pay for it." "I answered," says Captain Knowles, "tis very well, boatswain, before my face-this!" face-this!" Correa

was sentenced to be degraded, and sent to serve as a sailor before the mast in a ship going abroad. This bad old business of driving men "like cattle " with a stick was supposed to have been amended during Anson's long administration. If so, it came in again, for it was common in the wars of the Revolution and the Empire. Of course it was not discipline. It was only brutality, which degraded him who did it and him to whom it was done.

If Correa had kept a civil tongue to the commissioned officers he might have gone on beating the men with his "kane." We come across another of his kidney in the trial of John Deane, mariner, of the Pearl, at Fort St David's, on the coast of Coromandel, for "mutiny in collaring the Boatswain and threatening to throw him overboard." The prisoner is generally a doubtful authority, but poor John Deane's story, told to the court-martial in his defence, is a plain tale, and consistent with all the evidence

"We was all night in the barge to the northward of Pondicherry. We

was ashore in a Mossola Boat, which overset in the surf with us as we was

coming off. Between eight and nine we got on board the ship, and being very much tired with the fatigue of the night, was very desirous of Rest. At three o'clock in the afternoon the barge was ordered to be hoisted out. I and about four men of the boat's

crew were bouseing upon the Quarter Tackle, till the Boat's Bow was clear of the Backstays, when, thinking she had been aft enough, and also weakly handed, we left off Bouseing. Upon which the Boatswain, who was standing on the Main Deck, said, 'Damn ye, you Dogs; I'l make you know you

shant leave off Bouseing until I order you.' We then fell to Bouseing again ran up into the Gangway, pass'd Will as soon as possible, but the Boatswain Penny, the first man in his way, struck Thomas Gale, who was second, and then left off beating him and fell upmuch as we were able, and then he on me. I then said we boused as returned a second time, and beat me more furiously than he had done before. I was then in my shirt. I told the Boatswain that I could not bear to be used so, and catch'd hold of his arm to prevent his beating me any more, and said I would sooner jump overboard than bear to be served in that manner. His arm was uplifted his hand recoil upon himself, and the when I catch'd hold of it, which made end of the rattan scratched his own cheek. My reason for catching hold of his arm was that I knew him to be a man of such a furious passion, does not know to leave of." when he begins to abuse any one, he

that