Page:Twenty years before the mast - Charles Erskine, 1896.djvu/276

 

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