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Common sailors, therefore, more frequently get some fortune and

preferment than common soldiers; and the hope of those prizes is

what principally recommends the trade. Though their skill and

dexterity are much superior to that of almost any artificers; and

though their whole life is one continual scene of hardship and

danger; yet for all this dexterity and skill, for all those

hardships and dangers, while they remain in the condition of

common sailors, they receive scarce any other recompence but the

pleasure of exercising the one and of surmounting the other.

Their wages are not greater than those of common labourers at the

port which regulates the rate of seamen's wages.