yachtsmen in so short a time. Had the Emperor of Germany tried to convert some of his seafaring subjects into a crew for the Meteor, he might have met with a far different result.
Sailors are a queer lot, and good ones are to be found in every maritime country. In their native climes a crew of lascars, hard as nails and agile as monkeys, cannot be surpassed. Ship them aboard a vessel bound to the English Channel and due there in midwinter, and you might just as well have a ship's company of frozen earwigs. In the Bay of Bengal, blow high or blow low, you couldn't wish for smarter sailors. I speak from personal knowledge, having had command of a smart schooner engaged in a certain lucrative trade on the Coromandel coast and in the China seas, the precise nature of which I decline to divulge, but which called for quick work. Never have I sailed with a more satisfactory crew than Abdool, the Serang, and his twenty alert followers. They made that schooner talk. In the Bay of Biscay they would have been as useless as a dead steam-engine. They were the most economical sailors I ever knew—five rupees a month and a modest ration consisting principally of curry and rice. I wonder in what seas my faithful Abdool and his lithe and dusky shipmates are cruising today, for I am writing of thirty years ago, when I was a little spryer on my pins than I am at present.
