"Come ye, all my jolly sailors bold,
We’ll never have it said
That the Yankee tars exploring go
Were ever yet afraid."
Well, we just did drink, dance, and sing. After a dance it was "All hands splice the mainbrace." Maybe eighteen or twenty would drink, when two hundred drinks would be charged to us.
The commodore had his weather eye open, and had foreseen all this, and had caused notices to be issued forbidding any one to trust any of the crews, as he should not pay any debts of their contracting on any account whatever.
After having a jolly time, if you can call it a jolly time, and our liberty being up, we returned on board our respective ships, every — man — sober. Soon these soulless landlords and rumsellers presented their bills to the commodore, amounting to nearly two thousand dollars. He asked them if they had not seen the notices. They acknowledged that they had, but made complaints against the measure, and demanded the payment of these bills. The commodore listened to their arguments very attentively, and they inferred that they had softened him somewhat in his resolution, in which, however, they were mistaken, for he told them that he pitied them, and was very sorry, and that his sorrow was still greater that the bills did not amount to fifty thousand dollars instead of two thousand, for in any case he would not allow one cent of it to be paid; so the bills were squared by the foretop-sails, as Jack before the mast has it.
Having completed our surveys and researches in this
