The Rhyme of the Three Sealers

Away by the lands of the Japanee / Where the paper lanterns glow / And the crews of all the shipping drink / In the house of Blood Street Joe, / At twilight, when the landward breeze / Brings up the harbour noise, / And ebb of Yokohama Bay / Swigs chattering through the buoys, / In Cisco's Dewdrop Dining-Rooms / They tell the tale anew / Of a hidden sea and a hidden fight, / When the _Baltic_ ran from the _Northern Light_ / And the _Stralsund_ fought the two.

Now this is the Law of the Muscovite, that he proves with shot and steel, / When ye come by his isles in the Smoky Sea ye must not take the seal, / Where the gray sea goes nakedly between the weed-hung shelves, / And the little blue fox he is bred for his skin / and the seal they breed for themselves; / For when the _matkas_ seek the shore to drop their pups aland, / The great man-seal haul out of the sea, a-roaring, band by band; / And when the first September gales have slaked their rutting-wrath, / The great man-seal haul back to the sea and no man knows their path. / Then dark they lie and stark they lie -- rookery, dune, and floe, / And the Northern Lights come down o' nights to dance with the houseless snow; / And God Who clears the grounding berg and steers the grinding floe, / He hears the cry of the little kit-fox and the wind along the snow. / But since our women must walk gay and money buys their gear, / The sealing-boats they filch that way at hazard year by year. / English they be and Japanee that hang on the Brown Bear's flank, / And some be Scot, but the worst of the lot, and the boldest thieves, be Yank!