"Look at her flag, you old fool."
"Never see'd the like of it."
"That's the flag of the Principality of Nibby-Gibby. Ever heard of it?"
"Can't say I have."
"No more did I till the day before yesterday, and I won't swear I've got
it right yet. But 'tis somewhere up the Baltic I understand.
That there ship—her name, by the way, is the Burgomeister Van der
Werf—is bound up Channel with sugar from Jamaica—with a licence.
Maybe you folks up to Polperro don't know what that means?"
"I only know that, if I'd ran across her in the old Pride, I'd have clapped a crew on board and run her into a British port and no questions asked."
Says Mr. Rogers, "If that's the way you Polperro men keep abreast of Board of Trade regulations, it strikes me you might have done worse than lose your billet with the Pride of the West."
In the time left before the waterman brought them alongside, Mr. Rogers explained, as well as he could, the new system (as it was then) of licences; by which the Government winked at neutral vessels carrying goods into the enemy's ports, in spite of the blockade, and bringing us back Baltic timber for shipbuilding.
"But a Dutchman isn' no neutral," Captain Jacka objected.
"I did hear," said Mr. Rogers, stroking his chin and looking sideways, "that these licences have their market-price, and that in Amsterdam just now it's seven hundred rix-dollars."