necessity forced upon him by Mr. P-'s desperate goings on. It was
in Captain S-'s tradition rather to reprove his officers for not
carrying on quite enough--in his phrase "for not taking every ounce
of advantage of a fair wind." But there was also a psychological
motive that made him extremely difficult to deal with on board that
iron clipper. He had just come out of the marvellous Tweed, a
ship, I have heard, heavy to look at but of phenomenal speed. In
the middle sixties she had beaten by a day and a half the steam
mail-boat from Hong Kong to Singapore. There was something
peculiarly lucky, perhaps, in the placing of her masts--who knows?
Officers of men-of-war used to come on board to take the exact
dimensions of her sail-plan. Perhaps there had been a touch of
genius or the finger of good fortune in the fashioning of her lines
at bow and stern. It is impossible to say. She was built in the
East Indies somewhere, of teak-wood throughout, except the deck.
She had a great sheer, high bows, and a clumsy stern. The men who
had seen her described her to me as "nothing much to look at." But
in the great Indian famine of the seventies that ship, already old
then, made some wonderful dashes across the Gulf of Bengal with
cargoes of rice from Rangoon to Madras.

She took the secret of her speed with her, and, unsightly as she
was, her image surely has its glorious place in the mirror of the
old sea.

The point, however, is that Captain S-, who used to say frequently,
"She never made a decent passage after I left her," seemed to think
that the secret of her speed lay in her famous commander. No doubt
the secret of many a ship's excellence does lie with the man on
board, but it was hopeless for Captain S- to try to make his new