Accounts of insubordination, fights among the crew, drunkenness, and utterly incompetent seamanship

From the excellent Perilous Fight by Stephen Budiansky, an account of the naval aspects of the War of 1812. Page 291.

Privateers’ memoirs and logs brim with accounts of insubordination, fights among the crew, drunkenness, utterly incompetent seamanship, and men assigned stations they had no qualifications whatever to perform. Browne on joining the Frolic was promptly made captain’s clerk, purser, and sergeant of marines and told to drill the other green landsmen in the use of muskets, boarding pikes, and boarding hatchets. Recruiting surgeons to serve on privateers was so difficult that the George Washington’s specimen seemed to have been all too typical of the type who could be enticed aboard; Little described his ship’s doctor as a man “somewhat advanced in years” who had “read physic in a doctor’s office, and listened to some half-dozen lectures in a medical college,” and whose standard prescription for nearly every ailment was a pint of salt water.