OUGHT A BOY TO GO TO SEA?

BY W. CLARK RUSSELL.

wo sorts of boys go to sea—one for love, the other for necessity. Those who go to it for love stand, perhaps, more in need of advice than those who are sent to it for a living. The young lover of the sea is nearly always a boy of lively imagination. He has read romances, he has watched the passage of a ship through an ocean sunset, he has haunted pier-heads and quay-sides; the creak of a block has fired his enthusiasm, the fabric of a squalid little butter-rigged schooner has despatched his spirit into distant purple seas studded with islands like emeralds, and perfumed with gales of Arabian sweetness.

This boy, to be sure, will be disappointed. A boy going on board a ship without a day-dream sulkily accepts the new conditions; he has no illusions which a ship can destroy. But no sooner has the young lover of the sea climbed over the ship's side than his fine imaginations vanish in the twinkling of an eye. The romance is gone, the tender coloring that distance lends has disappeared; the young sea-lover hears himself rudely bawled at; nobody shows him any respect or consideration; if he asks a civil question about his bed or berth the answer he gets may probably be a thrust in the ribs from the elbow of a drunken sailor. He is bewildered, without finding anything to fascinate him. On the fo'c's'le some noble hurricane chorus is timed by the pulses of the windlass pawls. Men dangling high aloft are shrieking to their shipmates below to "sheet-home!" The tug is manœuvring to catch hold of the tow-rope. The pilot is cracking his pipes in strong commands on the forecastle head. The very cook is full of business, and seems to find everybody in his way.

Much such is the scene of a ship leaving the docks of London river. There is no sentiment. Presently the young sea-lover begins to feel a little sick, and with sickness come heart-chill and the sense of friendlessness. But I would bid such a boy to be of good cheer, nevertheless, for by-and-by, when the roughnesses of the life are worn down by use and custom, he may find his old shore-going sentiments recur. He will fall in love with the tall white beauty under whose starry trucks he is floating towards countries which are strange and therefore wonderful to him. He may find the Captain equal to the expression of a civil word now and again; the mate may be good-natured enough to answer his questions occasionally. He may meet amongst the crew some plain, steady, respectable old sailor from whose conversation, practical advice, and teaching he will pick up more about his calling in a month than he could acquire in a whole round voyage from the mere mechanical routine of laying aloft or going below and standing a watch.

But illusion or no illusion, the boy who goes to sea must make up his mind to suffer from end to end a hard life. Some call it a dog's life. And depend upon it, there are a great many dogs who, if they knew how sailors fare and toil, would not exchange places with them even to be men.

I deal in this brief essay with sailing-ships because a boy must first serve an apprenticeship to tacks and sheets before he is qualified to serve in steam. In England a boy may pass three years of still-water seafaring life on board such training-ships, for example, as the Worcester or the Conway, and the service will be accepted as a considerable contribution towards the whole period required. The training-ship has, no doubt, certain features of merit. A boy may enter at a comparatively tender age. He is rescued from the violent hardships of the life and the temptations of the ports, and he is fairly equipped as a sailor when he goes to sea in earnest. It is a question, however, whether, if the sea be decided on as a career for a lad, it is not better to dismiss him heroically and at once, to acquire a knowledge of the real life in a ship sailing the ocean, than to keep him playing at sailor aboard a gigantic toy moored in a smooth stream.

But the question is that of earning a living. A boy comes to me and says, "Can I get a living by going to sea as a sailor?" I assume he is a lad of respectable antecedents, and that he has parents or "friends" who are willing to give him a start. I would tell him, first of all, that his going to sea—supposing him to be a lad of, say, fourteen years of age—would be cheaper to his parents than going to school. The boy would be bound apprentice for a fee in guineas—from twenty to fifty; one cannot talk positively on this head, as some owners take apprentices at much cheaper rates than others.

Now, to be sure, whilst my young friend is at sea as an apprentice he is not earning a living; but then he is at no cost to himself nor to his parents outside the premium and the outfit. Meanwhile he is learning a profession, and that means a great deal. He is finding out all about the intricacies of a ship's hull and rigging; he discovers how her cargo is stowed; some old salt in the crew will point out the difference between the screws and iron rigging of to-day and the dead eyes and the immensely thick shrouds of thirty years ago. He will take sights at noon, for his father will surely provide for his being instructed in the use of the sextant on board ship. A boy will not qualify for a Board-of-Trade examination by dipping his hand in the tar-bucket only; he will have to prove to the examiners that he knows how to find a ship's situation by several processes in the art of navigation. And the examiners will require a great deal more than that. But I should need a page of this publication to explain what is expected of a second mate before a certificate is granted to him.

When my young friend has successfully passed as second mate—he will not find it very hard—he will go to work for a chief mate's certificate. Meanwhile he is at sea as second officer, let us say of a small barque. On what wages? Shall I suggest twenty dollars a month? This is no liberal income; but it suffices to keep a man's sea-chest filled with good clothes, and all the while he is at sea and in harbor abroad he is maintained at the ship's expense. My young friend must think of that. Forecastle sailors complain of the poorness of their pay, and I have again and again said that it is miserable enough as a return for the services rendered; but Jack forgets one feature of his money-getting; what he receives, to use the commercial phrase, is net—his money is not taxed for what he has eaten and drunk, and for the use of his bedroom and sea-parlor. A man might step ashore and draw for his services thirty or forty pounds. If he is a careful man he will know what to do with as much of it as he can put away; and after several voyages there is no reason why he should not have saved money enough to establish himself in a little business, or to purchase an interest in some longshore or water-borne industry. But this refers to forecastle Jack, and I must recover the hand of my young friend.

He will naturally start with high ambitions. He will think of the fine berths which must be constantly falling vacant on board the grand Atlantic expresses through officers tumbling overboard or being left sick behind. Dreams of the Peninsular & Oriental Company, of the Cape Mail lines, of many services which need not be named here, will have haunted his young imagination; but for the most part he will find them but stars, which a man may see without being able to approach. I should say that it is only a little less difficult to secure a berth, in this age of interest and directors, on board of the great mail-steamers than it is to enter the royal navy. If I were my young friend I should not look very high, though. I should still think cheerily of the sea as a vocation. First and foremost it is the calling of and for a man. That is good. Hundreds of sailing-ships and of steamers crowd the docks and harbors, and whiten the sea with sail or wake. They are not necessarily P. & O.'s or White Star liners, yet they will yield a young fellow the chance he seeks; they will give him a living; they will find him posts of trust and command.

One condition of the sea should be indicated by every one who offers advice to the young as to the life. I refer to the engine-room. When parents talk of sending their sons to sea, they seem to think only of the old traditional quarter-deck; they forget that amidships of the steamer is a well, filled with resplendent arms of steel, and with the innumerable machinery of perhaps the most marvellous and perfect of human inventions. The engine-room requires men. It must be fed with men of the workshops of the rivers, as the furnace is fed with coal from the bunkers. There is still a great plenty of sailing-ships afloat, and there will always be a demand for masters and mates for these vessels. But a boy intent on a sea life should be invited to dwell upon the liberal and popular side of it—the side where there is most abundance, where the pickings are fairly plentiful if seldom handsome. Now a steamer needs two sets of men, a crew for her fo'c's'le and a crew for her engine-room. They are perfectly independent of each other, and though no doubt the captain is master of the ship, it is often the engineer who, by virtue of his post of enormous trust and usefulness, subtly but certainly holds the real command.

The suggestion of the engine-room to a young lover of the sea might affect him with something like a shock; he wants to be on deck, to climb the masts, to behold the blue sea foaming to the horizon. But waiving all romance, if I am to be asked should a boy go to sea for a living, I am bound to annex the engine-room as a present considerable and ever-growing chance. The theoretical examinations are no doubt a little stiff (in the British royal navy they are simply man-killing, and I marvel that any young fellow is able to obtain even a third-class certificate, so numerous and abstruse are the subjects he is examined in; the merchant-service examinations are much easier), and there is plenty of hard work involved in the probationary term of labor in a shipwright's yard, but then the opportunities of employment are plentiful as compared with the chilling toil of seeking a situation in sailing-ships; the pay is, all round, better than the money received on the bridge or the quarter-deck. Socially, moreover, the marine engineer is fast lifting his head. Time was when, only a very rough class of men could be found for the engine-room. The tradition of roughness lingers. It is well known and complained of in British war-ships, that though the officers of the engine-room mess with the officers of the vessels there is a "feeling"; in a word the lieutenants and midshipmen have not yet got to regard the engineers as of themselves, as men as fully entitled to the same degree of respect as is exacted by the quarter-deck. But the lad who thinks of the sea as a profession, and who may lightly or seriously turn his thoughts to the engine-room, should consider that everyday witnesses the growing importance and dignity of the marine engineer. Science is asserting him. He has scarcely had time to declare himself. He is mainly hidden in the bowels of the ship, and is little seen, though the safety of the whole magnificent fabric is as much in his hands as in the captain's. Let us consider that there are plenty of people now living who remember the time when there was not a passenger steamship afloat. So the marine engineer still advances socially and commercially, while the master and mate of the sailing-ship walk in footprints as old as the red flag of Great Britain.

The profession of the sea, however, is so full of hardships, perils, and difficulties, that the friends of a lad should endeavor to make him as clearly understand it as a vocation as his unformed intellect will allow. He might be sent on a short excursion to sea as a sailor-boy; in his presence seafaring men might be consulted, and their words would weigh with him. The peculiarity of the sea is this, that when once adopted as a calling it generally unfits a young man for any form of steady, monotonous life ashore. Richard Dana used to say that had he remained another year on the coast of California he should have been a sailor forever. A lad, or rather the lad's friends, before deciding should, unless the little fellow be an enthusiast, weigh the chances of payment and promotion at sea with the opportunities a boy is likely to obtain ashore. Such is the stress of life nowadays that I do not think a serious consideration of chances ashore and afloat would tell very heavily against the sea. It is the life of a man, as I have said, and sailors are always wanted. And for my own part, I would rather be the master of a vessel on fifty dollars a month than the manager of a bank on two thousand dollars a year.