Front matter (continued 4)

One more old carpenter I must mention who, with a broken leg and covered from head to foot with suppurating mosquito bites, crawled from his bunk when our vessel was found to be on shore in the middle of the night. In this pitiable condition of body he immediately began to caulk the only serviceable boat we had, which, lying bottom upward upon the skids, had got so impoverished by the sun that her seams were gaping wide, rendering her absolutely useless. And from thenceforward, without one word of complaint, for over twenty hours that heroic man laboured on until all that he could do was done. He did not seem to think that his doing so was in any way extraordinary.

Perhaps the carpenters who read this may smile at the presumption of a mere sailor in praising their work, but I hope they will believe that I do but express toward them the ordinary sentiments of their shipmates of all grades.

CHAPTER XIX.

THE SAILMAKER.

This most useful man's position on board ship will give me less trouble to deal with than any other that I have either handled or shall handle; for the sufficient reason that steam knows him not—has no need of him. It is quite true that on board ships of war the sailmaker is still in evidence, is still most busily employed, but not in making sails. His work is much simpler now. It consists of making deckcloths, awnings, mast and yard covers, and all the varied canvas screens whereby alone it is possible for so complicated a machine as the modern ship of war to be kept in anything like cleanliness. People are apt to inquire what can be found for so large a crew to do as a man-of-war carries. They either forget or do not know how defiling, how all-pervading is the grime from the funnels and the dust of the coal used. As far as making work goes, it far more than compensates for the disappearance of sail power. Even with all the canvas protectors that are made and kept in repair by the sailmaker and his crew, the dirt is so persistent that one is tempted sometimes to cry despairingly, "All the protection we get from these covers is so inadequate that it is more than counterbalanced by the necessity for keeping them clean; we should be better off without them."

On board the sailing ship, however, going as she does for long voyages, sometimes extending to two or even three years before returning home again, the sailmaker is indispensable. Not that even in ships like these a sailmaker as such is always shipped. Sailmaking has always exercised a certain fascination upon seamen, and it will sometimes happen that a master or mate will be so excellent at the business that they will dispense with a sailmaker altogether, relying upon finding among the crew some men sufficiently expert to do the stitching as it should be done, while they design, cut out, and fit. But where it is any one else than the master who thus adds the sailmaker's duties to his own, the practice is rather dangerous. For there may be many things happen which will cause the amateur sailmaker to declare rather suddenly that he will have no more to do with it, that he has quite enough of his own work to do; and then the consequences may be awkward. Owing to the tremendous stress of competition, and the resultant cutting down of crews, a far less number of sailmakers are carried than used to be, ships of 1000 tons now being turned into barques, and all their complement reduced, until it seems marvellous how she is handled at all. In vessels of this size the sailmaking must be done by the seamen, and with the decrease in number of thorough seamen who along with their other accomplishments are capable sail-sewers (it would hardly be fair to call them sailmakers), the problem of how to keep the vessel clothed aloft is not an easy one to solve.

Possibly landsmen think very little about the matter, but they may be assured that the making of a sail is by no means what they might suppose—say, as easy as preparing a pair of sheets for a bed. There is considerably more art required in cutting out a jib, for instance, than there is in cutting out a suit of clothes. In a properly equipped sail-loft ashore the various measurements may be laid off upon the floor in chalk, and then it is comparatively easy to cut the numerous cloths of canvas out by simply laying them down. There need be no calculation of angles, only allowances made for "roach," i.e. curves at the edges, so that the sail shall set properly, not hang like a wrinkled rag when it is hoisted. But to do this on board ship in the same way is impossible, so the sailmaker must make a tiny draft of the sail to scale. From this he must calculate the length of each cloth required, and, what is more important still, if possible, the number of cloths which the width of the sail will take. For a cloth of canvas is only two feet wide, and from this must be deducted the width of the seam, which is usually about an inch and a half, but varies a little according to individual fancy. Then there are the angles to be calculated, and certain allowances made, which only practice can estimate so correctly as to insure a well-fitting sail when finished.

Even with all the care imaginable in cutting, a bad workman will spoil the set of a sail by not keeping the right amount of stress upon each cloth as he stitches. It would not be an easy task to cut out a sail if the material were all in one piece; when it is made up of a number of pieces as it is, the work needs a master of the trade in order to produce a well-finished article. And when it is remembered that some sails will contain forty-five cloths of canvas, each ten yards long, canvas, too, that is stout enough for the heaviest work that ship-sails are called upon to do, it ought to be seen that sailmaking has nothing in it of the nature of unskilled labour at all. In fact, so much skill is required for sailmaking, so much innate ability, that it may be truly said of the perfect sailmaker that, like the perfect tailor's cutter, he is born, not made. Even then the dead hand of tradition weighs heavily upon the sailmaker. Certain fashions in sail-cutting exist in this country which are scouted in America as being in the last degree clumsy. And the Yankee sailmaker goes so far as to say that a British sailmaker cannot cut a sail! This taunt does really seem justified to an impartial observer when looking at the difference between a British and American ship's sails set side by side. I have often seen a new set of sails hoisted on board a British ship that looked more like a miscellaneous collection of rags hung out to dry than the "white wings" famous in song. And it was not till long after, when a great deal of stretching and humouring had taken place, that the sails came to look at all neat and unwrinkled.

I don't know whether it is justifiable in a work of this kind to say so much about sails; but I feel that since the popular imagination is so stimulated by a sight of that most beautiful picture, a ship under full sail, that it would hardly be fair to pass the subject over perfunctorily, especially when it is so deeply studied and argued upon board ship. There is nothing in a ship's equipment that excites so much interest among her crew as the sails. Every one on board who has any claim to be called a sailor poses as a critic when a new sail is set, or when another ship heaves in sight, and as many intelligent opinions may then be heard as might be expected from a party of trained workmen going through an exhibition of work with which they were well acquainted.

It must not be supposed that sailmaking is merely a matter of stitching together a certain number of pieces of canvas of a certain shape. Far from that being the case, the strength of the sail lies in its borders. These are first "tabled," i.e. a broad piece is turned over and stitched down all round the sail. Then a tarred rope, technically "bolt rope," of the very best make, is carefully stretched, having a number of turns taken out of it to prevent its cockling up the sail when it is wet. It varies in thickness, not only on each sail, but on different parts of the same sail, according to the strain that it may be expected to bear. When duly prepared it is stitched on to the tabling with several parts of stout twine (roping twine) well tarred. This work demands considerable skill, for the canvas must be gathered up in the process, so that the strain shall come on the rope, yet not so much as to leave wrinkles in the sail. And at intervals small loops of rope (technically "cringles") must be worked on the rope, from which they stand out at right angles. They have grooved iron rings fitted into them, so they be not chafed through by wear, and they serve to secure the sail by "sheet," "tack," or "earing" (although the earing cringles are seldom iron-lined). Of late years the fine hemp bolt-rope has been much discarded in favour of flexible wire rope, neatly covered with canvas and spun-yarn to prevent rust. This is stronger and more durable in itself, but it makes the sail far more refractory to handle, and cannot be stitched on to the canvas as of old by pushing the big needle in between the strands of the rope. It has to be "marled" on, a method of securing it that always looks clumsy and insecure.

But I fear that in all this I am straying far away from the sailmaker himself. It may very reasonably be supposed that on leaving her home-port a ship would have a sufficient supply of sails to last her (barring accident) for the voyage. That is really so in all well-found ships. Two, and sometimes three, complete suits of sails are carried, the best or newest suit for seas where the stormiest weather may be expected, the next best suit for general use, and the fine-weather suit for regions where light, variable airs are always found, and where it would be a great waste of money to allow good canvas to bang itself all to pieces against the masts as the vessel rolls idly upon the sleepy swell. Now, the sailmaker's first duty is to keep these sails in repair; and since they have a great deal of wear, it will usually be found that he has not only quite sufficient to do himself, but can find constant employment for some favoured seaman out of each watch at sewing seams. Generally speaking, he is a man who has served his apprenticeship to the trade, although a good discharge from his last ship where he has been engaged in a similar capacity is all that a skipper looks for from him upon engagement. That is hardly correct, though: many skippers will ask in addition for a written personal reference, regarding the official certificate of discharge as a mere formality that signifies little concerning the quality of the man. But this applies generally to all seamen above the rank of A.B.

It will often be found, however, that a master who is an observant man will have noted during the voyage that one of his A.B.'s has shown a special aptitude for sailmaking. Then, at the end of the voyage, he will inform such a man that if he cares to come next voyage as sailmaker he will employ him—of course at a lower wage than he would give a regular tradesman. In this way many seamen have risen from the forecastle to be sailmakers. Very good men they are, too; but I never saw or heard of one of them who had attained to the competency of cutting and fitting new sails. Not that there is any personal reason why they should not do so, but they do not get sufficient practice. They are smart hands with the "palm and needle" and the "fid," that is all. Of course regularly trained sailmakers are very wroth at this cheating them of their privileges, as they consider it, but they are quite powerless in the matter.

Sometimes, however, they have their revenge, as in the case of a ship carrying an amateur "sails" that meets with a dreadfully sudden squall and "carries away" all her sails. This term does not mean that the sails are stripped entirely from the yards, but that they are rent into ribbons, mere outlines of sails. An enormous amount of construction as well as repairing sailmaking is thus thrown suddenly upon the sailmaker, and every available stitcher on board is then pressed into his service. Then, if he be a regular tradesman, he is in his glory; but if a promoted seaman, he will usually be just a terrified unit of the crew, badgered by the master and flouted by the men. And the ship herself suffers accordingly. It is false economy, saving at the most but a few shillings a month, and should never be indulged in. The sailmaker, poor man, useful though he may be, is never very well paid, fifteen shillings or a pound a month more than the A.B.'s wages being about his maximum. And, like the carpenter, although not so indispensable, he is almost always a good, reliable man whom it is well to have on board a ship in a position of some responsibility.

As with the bo'sun, it will be found in American and Canadian vessels that a sailmaker as such is rarely carried. The business of sailmaking, like carpentry, is in those vessels considered tacitly to be part of the education of a thorough seaman, and it would be a rare thing to find one of them without an expert amateur sailmaker among the officers. They get some beautiful patterns to work from when leaving home, and doubtless study them deeply, for, in spite of their habit of not carrying professional sailmakers, it is an unknown thing to meet one of them anywhere with badly-fitting sails. I know of no lovelier sight than a full-rigged American ship on a bright day with a new suit of sails set to a good beam wind. The canvas being of cotton (ours is made of flax unbleached), is dazzlingly white. Catching the glint of the sun, it gleams against the deep blue of the sea or the lighter azure of the sky like the wing of a mighty angel, so pure and clean that the eye cannot bear more than a passing glance at it. Not a thread is slack, not a curve untrue; she has the very poetry of motion induced by a gloriously beautiful arrangement of wings, that make her look like nothing earthly. Alas, that this splendid canvas should, when wet, become like a plank for stiffness, so that in the stormy Atlantic, when searching cold, howling gale, and drenching rain combine, and the hapless sailors are strung aloft to furl those fiercely-straining wings, the task is too terrible for words! The naked hands, torn and bleeding, cannot bend the stiffened canvas, and in the fight many a broken sailor has gone to the rest that was denied him in life.

CHAPTER XX.

THE STEWARD (IN STEAM).

The consideration of this worthy official's position has flung me back again into all the difficulty of differentiation from which my dealing with the sailmaker was free. More; because of all the men who serve in the Mercantile Marine, there are none who know such changes of fortune, such a range in value of their position as does the steward. From the chief steward of an Atlantic liner to the cook-and-steward of a small foreign-going brig what a tremendous distance there is! And yet, given push, a gentlemanly appearance, and ability in organization, there is really no reason why the holder of the latter position should not aspire to, and reach, the former, with all its emoluments and the command over a couple of hundred men. These hierarchs of the steward order are really very closely allied to the managers of great hotels. In fact, speaking from an outsider's point of view, I am inclined to think that a man who can manage the domestic arrangements of a couple of hundred people at sea—that is, in a floating hotel which is quite cut off from any external source of supply for a week or more—has a far greater task in hand than any hotel manager ashore can have. Such an official has naturally enormous weight in deciding the question of a certain ship's popularity. Her master may be one of the most splendid and genial of seamen, her officers the best of their kind, but after all, if the creature comforts are not well looked after she gets branded as an uncomfortable ship. Therefore the chief steward is in close touch with the office ashore. He and the purser—an officer whom I have left out of my list, because he is really one of the shore officials carried to sea for business purposes—are really the autocrats of the passenger department. Like every one else on board, they are under the master's command, but he has nothing else to do with them. Carefully selected men as they are, they take care that their part of the business shall not trouble his majesty. If he were troubled by them the chances are that there would be changes in the personnel of their department very soon.

Most people will need no argument to convince them that the position of chief steward of a big liner is a most lucrative post. It is also one whereof the holder should be a man of good appearance and gentlemanly manners. Yet—and I say this delicately, because I would not for a great deal give pain to any member of a most estimable body of men—every seaman, no matter how humble, feels towards them, no matter how high, a certain disdainful sense of superiority. He can never quite get rid of the feeling that they are menials. I do not excuse or encourage such a feeling, but that it exists is quite certain. Nor, in spite of the rich prizes that are to be won in the business, do you ever find parents who can afford to pay a premium for their youngsters being apprenticed to the sea contemplating their being made stewards. I see no reason why the steward's post should not be considered as honourable as the master's myself, and certainly, taking the chances of promotion one with the other, the prospects of fortune are far brighter for the accomplished steward than they are for the most valuable master to-day. But there is among sailors a marked repugnance to the tip, to being expected to do body-service to other people, unless in an emergency or as an act of charity, and this feeling can by no means be explained away.

Below his high mightiness the chief steward in a liner come a host of subordinates in as many varying grades as are to be found in a big hotel. Unto each is allotted work, which goes on like clock-work, day and night, in fair weather or foul. Efficient service in your hotel means a great deal, one cannot help feeling, not only a great deal of thought on the part of the management, but a great deal of hard work and manual dexterity on the part of those who actually do the work. And these toiling ones are always expected to wear a smile, no matter what their physical condition may be; must always be ready to spring at your call, and do for you whatever you choose to desire. But what does such service as this mean at sea? When what the sailor calls a stiff breeze is blowing, with "a nasty bit of a cross sea on," and the big ship is writhing her way through the green masses with a perfectly indescribable combination of pitches and rollings, the seasoned passengers must have their meals in due order, with all the usual accompaniments; the helpless ones must be waited on. How is it done? Only by the most loyal, eager subordination of self in the desire to please, backed up, if you will, by a wish to get on, and tempered by the prospect of a substantial tip by-and-by. Whatever the motive, the work goes on with a regularity that is so unostentatious that the passenger ceases to wonder at it after a day or two, and accepts it as he does the unseen machinery below.

At the head of each department of bed-room stewards, waiters, pantrymen, and what-not—I do not know the designations—is a gentleman who is steadily working his way to the top, climbing to the giddy height where he may go about all day long in the dress of a private gentleman, and use only his brains, not his hands, for the prosecution of his work. As in all businesses, efficient devolution is the whole secret of success. But let the work be devolved as much as it may, every one beneath the chief has quite as much as he can do by steadily working on with little sleep, little rest, but abundant food. This is so in the finest weather at sea and in harbour; in bad weather at sea work is greatly added to, not only in quantity, but in the difficulty of doing it. There is no mere child's play in the distribution of food alone, without the arrangement of all the paraphernalia of the meal tables. And in the cleaning up afterwards, and carrying away of china and glass, the washing and stacking thereof in secure places while the decks dance beneath the feet and every little bit of panelling complains, there is very much severe toil, done no less thoroughly because out of sight.

This ocean hotel service has grown to great dimensions, but not without dragging into its toils a great many burden-bearers, whose labours are essential to the luxurious comfort of latter-day passengers. It is to be hoped that those who enjoy this wonderful attendance while crossing the great and wide sea do at times give a thought to the human machinery ever at work on their behalf. For a little thought would surely make them less intolerant of mistakes or seeming neglect.

As we come down the scale of passenger steamers and lengthen the voyages, the position of the stewards gets worse, while their wages (that is to say their entire gains, which means wages and backsheesh) get less. Their labours increase by reason of the shortness of hands and lack of accommodation provided for them. They are not to be envied at all. Yet they are a cheerful crowd and a respectable, for any dereliction of duty, misbehaviour of any kind, means dismissal from the ship, a serious matter, which often carries with it a great difficulty in finding another.

Coming down still lower, to the cargo-carrying steamer, or tramp pure and simple, the stewards have dwindled to one, and a mess-room boy, who waits upon the engineers; and although the steward of a tramp does not get much of a salary, his duties are simple and his masters are few. Indeed, he may be said to have but one master—the skipper—if he be well up to his work. With that proviso and civility, no other officer in the ship will ever interfere with him. Even here he is a most responsible man. Upon him devolves the outlay of the consumable stores. They are placed under his charge, and he is expected to see them duly served out to all, keeping due record of their going, so that he may not be unable at any time to answer a question put to him by the master as to how the ship is prepared for the next portion of her voyage. His part it is, too, to do battle with wily "dhubash" or "compradore" in the far East, who will cheat not only in quantity, but quality of stores on every possible or even impossible occasion. Upon entering ports abroad, one of these worthies, or their prototypes, is always engaged to supply harbour-food, fresh meat, vegetables, fruit, etc., and a good, honest steward will make a tremendous difference to the comfort and well-being of the ship's company. A dishonest one is of the devil, because bribes will be offered him to wink at short weight and inferior quality, and he will accept. Then there is discontent, and often blame cast upon the wrong shoulders.

His other duties consist in keeping the saloon and the skipper's berth clean—the officers must get their berths cleaned by somebody else, usually a deck-boy, the steward being no body-servant of theirs—and waiting at table. Where the cook is incompetent, the steward will have, in addition, the duty thrown upon him of preparing food for cooking. In fact, some stewards prefer to do this, considering that their pastry-making cannot be excelled by anybody. But the practice is by no means so common in steam as it is in sailing ships.

I can hardly close this portion of the subject without an allusion to the curious principle that obtained when I was sailing in inter-colonial steamers, and may still be in force for all I know to the contrary. It was there usual for all the ship's provisions to be supplied by a speculator on shore, whom we called the providore, at a fixed rate per head for every member of the crew, i.e. so much for a sailor per day, for a fireman, for an officer, for a second-class passenger, for a saloon passenger—the rate varying from one shilling to half a crown a day. For this the providore not only supplied food, but cooks and attendance. The chief stewards were always supposed to be deeply interested in making the scheme pay, but their peculiar position often led to their being very unjustly abused. Any attempt on their part to stop waste was almost certain to be met by the accusation that they were stinting the food in the interests of the providore, and naturally they could look for no countenance from the master or officers. And as the waste forrard was simply abominable, they were always in more or less hot water. Of course they could, and did, control the expenditure of food aft and among the passengers, but the crew did as they liked. I have seen a man go to the galley for breakfast, and receive a tin dish containing four or five pounds of chops and steaks for six men. It is true that they were vilely cooked, and therefore usually as tough as leather. The fellows would turn the meat over, saying bad words the while, and presently one would say, "Well, this isn't good enough for me." Then taking the tin to a port, he would cast its contents overboard, and go calmly to the galley for more. And if he were refused he had only to complain to the master, who would, of course, give no sympathy to a providore's man. Enough food was wasted on that ship to feed a large ship's company every day, and by men who had all known what it meant to be very hungry.

CHAPTER XXI.

THE STEWARD (SAILING SHIPS).

There are even now a few sailing ships which carry passengers, but in these no such luxury is to be expected as in steamers, for obvious reasons. Nevertheless, a great deal of comfort may be got out of a voyage in one of these grand flyers—comfort of a kind that, while it does not appeal to the passenger pressed for time, is to the invalid a perfect godsend, one of the most sumptuous rest-cures in the world. In such vessels the steward is a man of some importance, as well as skill, for he must do a great deal of contriving in order that such food as may be carried on a passage lasting, perhaps, for over a hundred days without a break by calling at any port, may not become too monotonous to a landsman's pampered appetite. Live stock is carried—poultry, and sheep, and pigs; and the steward is a good deal exercised about the care of these useful passengers, although it is a matter over which he has little control. He attends to their feeding, but the cleaning of them and their protection from the weather does not rest with him, while it makes all the difference possible to their condition. A bad feeling towards him by the crew may often mean serious trouble in respect of his live-stock. Or for other reasons trouble may be made. As, for instance, in one ship wherein I was an ordinary seaman there were two fine sets of coops on the forward-house, which contained ducks and geese. Now, geese at sea are a great nuisance, owing to their noise and wakefulness. We had many passengers; and it was well known among the crew that not one fragment of the meat we carried alive would ever find its way to their mouths, although the food supplied to the crew forward was disgraceful to the last degree. Therefore, after enduring the brutal cackling of the geese for a few nights, some revengeful fellow's climbed up to their quarters in the darkness, armed with belaying pins, and as the long necks were thrust out between the bars to give vent to strident songs, one after another received a blow which quieted them effectually.

In the morning there was not one left alive. The steward was inconsolable, but all efforts to find out the perpetrators of the deed were in vain.

It is, however, rather late in the day, I fear, to talk about stewards in passenger sailing ships. Their palmy days are over. But in the ordinary sailing cargo-carrier they still flourish, a race apart, and as distinct from the steamship steward as can well be. Their berth is by no means a bad one, assuming that they know their duty and do it. There are many instances where a steward has sailed so long in the same ship as to be almost as much a part of her as the mizen-mast, a faithful servant of the owners, and a privileged member of the ship's company, who is a prime favourite with all on board. Occasionally a master will make a favourite of the steward, allowing him privileges which he denies to any of his officers. This is exceedingly bad, leading to all sorts of trouble on board with both men and officers; for it is too much to expect that any man occupying such a position, and pampered in such a way, should retain his respect for those whose rightful claims to authority are ignored by the head of affairs. I have in mind two such cases. In one of them the steward was undoubtedly a clever man, who ran his department like clock-work, and although undoubtedly petted overmuch by the skipper, did not take the advantage that he might have been expected to do; at least, not until we arrived in India, where he suddenly exhibited an amazing aptitude for getting drunk, and keeping so for intervals of about a week at a time. This led to complications of various sorts, and disagreeable scenes in the cabin, where the skipper, when he was exasperated beyond measure by the filthy behaviour of his favourite, often went the length of rope's-ending him. But he (the skipper) expected his officers to endure all the drunken abuse and neglect that the steward was inclined to favour them with, and make no demonstration. The whole thing ended in a fierce fight between the master and the mate, much to the edification of the crew, peace being restored only by the discharge of the steward.

The other was in a big ship where I was second mate. I joined her in India, and on the first day of my service was struck by the calm way in which the steward bandied doubtful jokes with the mate and third mate. Me he had not yet become sufficiently acquainted with. Not, of course, that there was anything wrong or unpleasant in that of itself; it might, I reasoned, be merely exercising the freedom of an old servant, who meant nothing like insolence. But I could not help wondering very much at the way in which that steward omitted to give the mate his title of Sir, or Mr. Evans. I had never heard a chief mate called by his surname, all short, before, by any inferior, without a full measure of immediate trouble ensuing. Yet this man did this amazing thing, while the mate made no objection. The master was not at the table. I, of course, said nothing, but meditated much, and at the earliest opportunity broached the subject to the third mate, a very fine young officer just out of his time in that ship, asking him what I was to understand by it. His explanation was that the steward, a gross, flabby man, by no means smart or remarkable for ability in any way, was so great a favourite with the skipper that he was allowed to do practically whatever he chose. And this was the more remarkable because the skipper was not only part owner, but a man who was very sharp with his subordinates as a rule.

For a month I was very comfortable. The master used to chat with me amicably during my dog, or first watches, and even went out of his way to compliment me on the way I did my work, until, in an evil hour, I offended the steward. It was in this wise. He came to my room door in my watch below, saying to the third mate as he passed his door, "Where's that feller Bullen?" And then he flung my door open, crying, "Here, you, I want a cask o' beef got up as soon as the devil'll let ye after eight bells." Now, I maintain that if an officer is to have any authority on board a ship, such language from one of his subordinates to him cannot, must not be permitted at all. The man was not drunk; he was deliberately insolent, because backed by a foolish skipper. Of course I resented his words, receiving more insolence; and then, instead of knocking him endways, as I ought to have done, I went and reported him to his master, who jeered at me, and warned me that I had better let his steward alone. I tried to explain, but only succeeded in drawing abuse from the skipper. And from that day forward my life was utter torment, such misery as I have never experienced on board ship before or since.

But such cases as these are by no means common. The average sailing-ship steward of to-day is a quiet, inoffensive man, who does his duty unostentatiously, lives rather a solitary life, since the only person he can associate with is the cook, and endeavours to serve out the provisions to the men with perfect justice. If the master carries his wife with him, the steward may be very happy or very much the reverse—he can never plod along in the same easy, jog-trot way as is usual when there is no woman on board. In American and Canadian vessels he is often a negro, and sometimes a Chinaman; but it may be taken for granted that whatever countryman he may be, he is also a paragon, because the American skipper will have nothing less than perfection in cleanliness and service. That must be rendered him whether the steward be white, black, or yellow. And he is ready to enforce it by the rudest and readiest means to hand. Wherefore it follows that he is served as probably no other seafarers in the world are served.

But even here the officers are not personally attended by the steward, except when they are at meals. It is the commander who must needs have his every wish anticipated, his linen kept spotlessly white, and the woodwork and the adornments of his cabin as clean, yea, cleaner than on the day they were first fitted into place. Many of the old ships carried stewardesses instead of stewards, often the wife of the cook; and although to some people such an experiment might seem to be one of the extra-hazardous kind, it was not so. The American is a wonderfully chivalrous man towards all women-folk, especially when under his protection.

Stewardesses are carried, of course, in British steamers—must be, for attendance upon the ladies. They are well treated by everybody on board except their charges, but some of them can tell some queer stories of endurance at the hands of these, who owe them so much comfort. These quiet, deft-handed women, who balance themselves so featly, roll the ship never so heavily, could tell many strange tales. Strange, is it not, in these days of reminiscence-writing, how carefully they hold their peace? Once I was shipmate with a lady passenger, one of the most accomplished ladies that it has ever been my privilege to speak to. She knew all that a woman should know, and many things that good, useful men did not know. And whatsoever she learned, if it seemed good to her, that she would put into practice. She was going out to that far country with a little capital, to prove to a sceptical world that a lady who could ride, shoot, swim, and run a farm as well as play the piano, sing, paint, and talk several languages, could make her way alone in a new world as well as any man. But fortune was unkind to her, and she failed in those days. Then she took on a stewardess's berth in a coasting steamer that carried some hundreds of passengers from port to port around one of the stormiest coasts in the world. We met when she had been at this for some months, and she had aged ten years in appearance. She was weary of life by her look, but she made no moan. Then in an awful gale her ship went ashore on an outlying reef. There were ninety female passengers on board, whom she considered a sacred charge. That charge she fulfilled, seeing them all safely boated away, while she retired to her cabin and locked herself in to meet the death that she had grown to look upon as a delivering friend.

I would not close this all-too-brief account of the steward without again emphasizing the fact of his heavy claim to the consideration of all men. His business is not a showy one, and Jack is far too fond of hurling the opprobrious epithet, flunkey, at him; but there is a great deal of quiet heroism in his annals, and, in any case, his work is just as important as any other seafarer's. For men must be fed and their food taken care of. The doing of this with regularity, cleanliness, and cheerfulness is the part of the steward, and how well he does it let all sailors testify.

CHAPTER XXII.

THE COOK (IN STEAM).

In many respects the cook is the most interesting figure on board ship. From him of the vast floating hotel, where the cook is a man of many attainments, an artist in foods, who should, but does not, command as great a salary as the chef of a first-class London hotel, down to the miserable urchin who crouches low over his scarcely-shielded pot on the open deck of a foreign-going barge, they not only deserve our attention, they demand it, dumbly yet imperiously. How are the cooks of first-class passenger steamers trained? Whence are obtained those able manipulators of provisions who are always to be found on board of excursion steamers that are laid up half the year, as soon as they commence running? What do they do in the dead seasons, these magicians who, in a space no larger than a reasonably-sized cupboard, succeed in turning out a dinner of several courses for five hundred people, no matter what the weather may be? Magician is surely the word, if only for the marvellous way in which every corner of cramped space is utilized, every trick of the culinary art—whereby the same thing is presented under two or three totally different aspects and flavours, and roasting, boiling, frying, and stewing go on apparently in the same glowing chamber at the same moment—is practised. These things amaze me; but, after all, much of the work may be done ashore, or in the quiet of the moorings before starting-time in the morning, and pastry may be bought all ready for table, also cold side-dishes.

But none of these adjuncts are available to the sea-going ship. His dinners must be prepared, down to the smallest item, by the cook himself and his subordinates. It is true that he has a large staff in a liner, and that those assistants are carefully selected for their several duties; but he has not, as his far better paid brother ashore has, the power of dismissing any assistant summarily if that assistant be incompetent or worse. That is, he has not such a power at the time when it would be of use. In the day of battle, when the great organization of an Atlantic liner's catering is going on, he must use such men as he has; they cannot be exchanged for others. But how very striking is the moral to be drawn from such a state of affairs. It is that, considering the excellence of the work performed by these men, there must be a most exalted standard of quality among them. And they would seem to be a contented folk. We know, most of us, that the great steamship companies have a reputation for treating their servants generously, but generously-entreated workpeople are not always the most contented. The cook and steward class in these vessels must be, or we should hear them, for they are by no means a feeble folk. You will find them occupying comfortable positions ashore while still in the prime of life, having earned sufficient within a few years to enable them to abandon the strenuous toil demanded of them at sea. They have earned every penny, and have not been compelled to "carry the banner" in order to get more. And in strangest out-of-the-way places of this wonderful England of ours, you will come across quiet, gentlemanly men who, upon opportunity arising, will inform you that they were cook of the steamship So-and-so, or steward of such another one. They enjoyed the life, but presently, like sensible men, they felt the need of a wife and home and children, and they therefore looked about for something suitable ashore, found it, and made room for a younger man.

No one, unless he belongs to the cooking-staff, has much opportunity afforded him for prying into the galley on board a big passenger ship during working hours. Those splendidly-fitted hives of industry may be viewed at other times, but then they reveal nothing to the outsider. This exclusiveness is not malicious, or for fear of being found fault with. It is solely because there is no room for any but the workers, who work indeed. Every inch of space is needed. Look down through the hatch above, or peer in through the ports, and you will be astounded at the way in which the cooks are handling the food, how in a space where, by all ordinary rules of cookery, they should not have room to move, they are turning out with conjurer-like dexterity a state dinner of ever so many courses for a couple of hundred saloon passengers. And then contrast their surroundings, if your previous experience enables you so to do, with the palatial spaces of a grand hotel kitchen. Only, you must remember at the same time the gale raging over the wide sea, and the complicated movements indulged in by the ship as she strides over the tremendous waves. So shall you acquire a respect for the sea-cook that will endure all your days.

To compare great things with small, this mental picture brings before me by association the cooks in the Australian coasting steamers. We have nothing like the same lavish arrangements for cooks and stewards on our own coasts, because our system is different. Here the fare is exclusive of food. You may dine or not as it suits your purse or your appetite. When you dine, you pay. But in the colonies the fare between ports includes sumptuous feeding arrangements for the first-class passenger, for the second—there are no third or deck passengers, as with us—rough accommodation, but an unlimited supply of excellent plain food. Australasia is truly the land of plentiful eating. And the cooks—well, they are good, some of them super-excellent, and all of them trained by hard experience to do much work in a very small compass and with a tiny staff. The cook of the Wonga Wonga stands out boldly in my memory as one of the characteristic figures of my sea experience. A huge negro with a voice of thunder, and an effervescing humour that made him a prime favourite, he succeeded in his vocation where many a better man might have failed. He was a fairly good cook, but in his details of work reminded me strongly of the elderly negress in "Uncle Tom's Cabin," who dished up a dinner out of chaos and old night somewhere down below. Such an extraordinary jumble of pastry-making, poultry-trimming, and all the varied operations required in the preparation of a dinner was surely never seen. And out from the weird confusion of things Sam would burst, smeared with blood and grease and dusty with flour, brandishing a big knife and declaiming Shakespeare on the slightest provocation. But in spite of the fact that the whole preparation of a dinner for sometimes as many as five hundred people, except peeling potatoes and the actual cooking, devolved upon Sam alone, he was always up to time. It was dangerous to come near him, though, as that time drew near. For then he drew perilously near being a howling maniac. Yet no sooner had the last dish disappeared aft, than Sam would sally forth from the galley, his ebony countenance aglow with satisfaction, and a big pipe in his mouth. Down anywhere he would fling himself, ready to discuss any question in the world, from the ruling of an empire to the winning moves in a game of draughts. His successor, when he got promoted to the City of Melbourne, was a far better cook, and a paragon of order and cleanliness, but there wasn't a man in the ship to say a good word for him. He was a shy Englishman.

Then, dropping still lower, I have every reason to remember the cook of the Helen M'Gregor, sweetest of small passenger steamers had she been on the London-Margate route, but a grisly terror when scaling the steeps of the Southern Pacific waves in a "southerly buster" between Grafton and Sydney. She was far too small for such an arduous service. Yet we carried over a hundred passengers when full. All her cooking was done in a caboose—just such a square box as may be seen on the deck of any old sailing barque—a cube of about eight feet clamped to the deck by iron rods. There was no table within it, only a locker seat which contained coals running across it in front of the stove. Two men could not pass between this locker and the stove without careful edging or one of them getting burnt. Most of the implements had permanent abiding places on the stove, but a few lived on racks above when not in use; and when the skittish little ship was dancing they would clatter down at intervals. Outside, in an angle between the back of the galley and the steam-chest, was a movable board for pastry (and other things). Its dimensions, with liberal measurement, may have been two feet square—not another inch, if I were bribed to say so.

The presiding genius of this most primitive of arrangements was a hunchback, a shrewd little Yankee with a French face, who received £11 per month and earned £50. He had one assistant, a nondescript man of indefinite age, who never wore an apron, and whose duties were confined to peeling potatoes, stoking the fire, plucking fowls, and washing up pots. But these things he would do as long as there were any of them to do, mechanically, even though, as was frequently the case, the conditions all about us looked as if another ten minutes would see us all at the bottom of the sea. He earned £5 a month. But what he lacked in ability or initiative was more than made up by his chief. That man was a miracle. On that two-feet slab he would make pastry of all kinds, prepare most elaborate dishes, yes, although the salt spray whistled around him, and on occasion an eddy of the gale would flip a dish with its contents off his board far away to leeward. He would shout an order to his acolyte for half a dozen fowls and a bucket of boiling water. A few rapid motions of the hands, and they were all gyrating in the scuppers, while one after another he plunged them into the steaming bucket and slithered the feathers off, flinging each as he did so to his waiting henchman for the minor picking. Thus I have seen him serve six fowls at noon—at 12.35 they were being eaten. Ask me not how, for the details are unpalatable.

But his great achievement was butchering in bad weather—butchering sheep. Stolid Joe would bring the sacrifice along, mercurial Bill would seize it, stab it, and unaided commence to rip off its hide immediately. There, on the deck, outside his galley door, the struggle would go on as if it were a fight to the death, so great was the fury that little man displayed. And it was one of the commonest sights to see, in the midst of the operation, a green comber of a wave come hissing along, embracing carcase and cook, and sweeping them clean off in a dishevelled heap bang aft up against the second-class berths. Knife in one hand, half-skinned sheep gripped by the other, he had no buffers wherewith to ward off bruises; but he had a voice. And he used it, not in canticles of praise. Yet punctually the meal for which that sheep was being prepared would appear on the table. And it would not be an unsavoury dinner, either. The one thing that always seemed to dishearten him was the lifting clean out of its fiery bed of a copper or kettle, that fitted into a hole on the stove-top, by a vicious plunge of the vessel. And as such an event was usually followed by a green sea thundering over all, and flooding him and his lieutenant clean out of the galley amid a smother of steam, coal grit, and spoilt food, his temporary subdual could not be wondered at.

But I must forbear. Mental pictures of that super-excellent cook's doings arise before me in almost interminable succession, tempting me to forget the fact that there were many others doing almost precisely the same things unsung, and unrewarded save by the meagre pay they drew. Who, for instance, could envy the cook of a "weekly" tramp?—a steamer, that is, which, making quite long voyages, has engaged her crew at so much a week and find themselves. Perhaps there are no cooks at sea who are more worried than these. For Jack, left to his own devices for supplying himself with food, does some of the queerest things that ever were or could be recorded. And each individual expects his own mess to be as carefully looked after as a whole saloon dinner. Natural, perhaps, on his part, but for the hapless cook purgatorially inconvenient. I was once a passenger from an Irish port to Liverpool in a weekly boat, and in the grey of the dawn was waiting at the galley door to buy a cup of coffee. Men came and went incessantly, banging oven doors and flinging utensils from side to side of the red-hot stove-top. The cook was absent, engaged aft in some business or other. Presently he appeared with a teapot, and immediately snatched at a huge copper kettle which stood on the stove in the middle, where the top plate was almost transparent with heat. The kettle flew up in his grasp, being empty. "Why, there's nothin' in it!" he screamed. "No," replied a fireman who was groping in the starboard oven; "I tried it ten minutes ago, and it was empty then." "An' you putt it back on that stove!" said the cook tragically. "Course I did," was the calm reply; "think I was goin' ter fill it?" I really thought the cook would have died of suppressed emotion before he found words wherein to express himself. But his tongue was loosened presently, and then his remarks, if sulphurous, were fairly comprehensive. The fireman only laughed.

What shall I say of the cook of the tramp pure and simple? Only this, I am afraid that, while he has a bitter, hard berth of it, he gets little better pay than his brother of the sailing ship. One consolation he has, and that not a little one—he has more to cook, and consequently he is, taken generally, a better workman. For there is nothing tends to disgust a man more, no matter of what trade he be, than the being compelled to make bricks without straw. And there can be no doubt that, hard as are the tramps in many respects for their crews, the food is much better than that provided in sailing ships, taking the average. Having such a rough crowd to cater for, however, does not tend to improve the quality of the cooks carried in tramp steamers. A decent man hardly cares to face the possibility of being violently assaulted, for no fault of his own, by members of a gang of ruffians of every nation under heaven save his own countrymen. And this is the state of affairs that any man in such a position as a cook holds must be prepared to face in most tramps. If he be fortunate enough to get into one of the north-east coast tramps, owned by canny firms, who like to have their ships manned by their own people, and whose highest ambition is to see efficiency combined with comfort on board of them, he will be as well off as any sea-cook, not an artist, can reasonably ask to be.

CHAPTER XXIII.

THE COOK (SAILING SHIPS).

It may, perhaps, have appeared strange to many that, in dealing with the cook in the preceding chapter, I hardly mentioned anything about the materials with which he is called upon to deal. Most people have heard something about the badness of food in the Merchant Service, and therefore it might seem at first sight a great mistake to write a chapter on the sea-cook, and say nothing about the kind of food. My excuse must be, that in the kind of ships with which I have been dealing the food question rarely causes any trouble. In the finest steamships I doubt very much whether the workers are not fed quite as well as are any corresponding class of toilers ashore; and even in the lowest tramps there is not that general lack of decent food which does press so hardly upon the seamen in sailing ships.

For one reason, the steamship is never so long away from port, except she breaks down, as to give the same excuse for carrying the kind of food considered necessary in sailing ships. And in many, as I have said, there is a system in vogue of paying the men so much per week, and permitting them to "find" themselves—a hateful system, and one that can only be indulged in by the authorities at the cost of much suffering and loss of efficiency by the improvident men who are under it. How can a man do his work who, without more forethought than a babe, comes to sea for a fortnight's passage with a few ship-biscuits and a dozen salt herrings? Without any of the minor comforts, such as tea, coffee, cocoa, or sugar, he is in misery all the time, besides being an unmitigated nuisance to those of his shipmates who have come provided with what they need. Then when the vessel arrives in port, and such a man gets his pay, it is but rarely that his bitter experience results in his being more careful. He will have an extensive drunk, and again face the passage in a condition of starvation. But, in any case, his behaviour does not affect the cook.

Therefore, to see what manner of man it is whom sailors have had to deal with their food in the majority of vessels up till the advent of the great passenger-steamers, and who is carried as a cook of to-day in thousands of sailing vessels, it is necessary to take a trip in a vessel dependent upon sail-power for propulsion—a vessel wherein you may be a matter of five or even six months at sea without making a call anywhere, for ever so short a time. It is perfectly safe to say that, even at the present day, seven out of ten sailing-ship cooks are only so styled by courtesy, or for want of a better name to give them. And this is in despite of the well-meant, and, in most cases, philanthropic efforts that have recently been made to train cooks for ship work. The good people who, with the welfare of the seaman at heart, take so much pains in order that he shall have his food properly prepared are undoubtedly doing a good work for their pupils; but the unhappy sailing-ship man seldom gets the benefit from those educated cooks that their teachers hope for. And this for the simple reason that, when once a ship's cook has really learned cookery, he will use his utmost endeavours to get a ship where there is something that requires skill in cooking. So he gets into steam, and, once there, only some dire misfortune will bring him back to a wind-jammer again.

Yet, strangely enough, even the elementary skill required for cooking the staple food served out in the great majority of sailing ships to-day is generally wanting. Surely it is only reasonable to expect a man who engages to serve as cook of a ship to be able to boil salt beef and pork, make pea-soup, and bread, and boil rice. Nothing more is required of him at sea than this, for the better food carried for the cabin is prepared by the steward, who will generally give an eye to it also during preparation. But it is seldom that you will find a sailing-ship cook who will, or who can, do these things properly. And as to taking a little trouble to make this coarse food palatable by varying its treatment, such cooks would be astounded, indignant, at the revolutionary idea. Then, when in port the fare is changed to that of fresh meat and vegetables, the only thing that the cook seems capable of doing is to make one kind of soup. That is usually good, but soon becomes monotonous. As to roasting meat or cooking potatoes nicely, such a thought is not to be entertained; or, if the cook does try to do such a thing, the meat is usually so hard as to be uneatable by any one but a sailor or a savage.

Now, I am aware that these statements of mine will be met with indignant denials in some quarters. I shall be told that things have altered so much for the better since my day (sixteen years ago) that I should hardly recognize them. Unfortunately for the makers of such remarks, I have taken pains to find out whether this is really the case, ready and eager to rejoice in the fact, if it were a fact. And I have found to my sorrow that among sailing ships the improvement is practically nil. When I was going to sea there were good-living ships, where plenty of preserved meats were carried, and the crews treated periodically to fresh messes; ships where abundance of potatoes and turnips and onions were put on board, and served out liberally to the crew forward as well as the officers; where a regular allowance of butter and pickles was made, and in cold weather oatmeal porridge was served out for breakfast. And there were lines of sailing ships where a scale of provisions such as these was drawn up on generous lines, and incorporated in the ship's articles instead of the shameful Board of Trade scale. There are such ships to-day, but their proportion is no greater than it was then. And if any will speak of official inspection of provisions, in order to ensure a high standard of quality, I would respectfully call their attention to the innumerable statements made and uncontradicted this present winter of the abominable condition of the food supplied on board many of the transports to our troops on their way to South Africa. Not that I believe such food would find its way into the kids of the crews of those transports in the ordinary course of things. No; but such food as that is in the ordinary course of things carried by sailing ships, the majority of them for the supply of their foremast hands.

Now, in these days such behaviour on the part of those whose business it is to supply ships with food is unpardonable, not only because it is cruel, but because it is unbusinesslike. It would be cheaper to supply preserved fresh meat than salt, cheaper to vary the food instead of giving hapless men the infernal monotony of beef and duff, pork and pea-soup, every other day for a matter of a hundred to a hundred and fifty days on end. There is really no reason why every ship afloat should not have a pound of butter per week served out to each sailor, or why a sufficient quantity of such easily kept vegetables as potatoes, turnips, and onions should not form a regular portion of a sailor's dietary. It is also very well to talk of the healthiness of sailors; but you will very seldom find a hale, deep-water sailor over fifty years of age. Nor is this due to volcanic outbursts of intemperance and other forms of vice while on shore. It is due to privation of vegetables, and bad, highly-salted meat as the only flesh food for long periods. Dried peas can never make up for the want of fresh vegetables, although apparently they are expected to do so, even when flavoured by the boiling with them of pork so salt that if allowed to remain in the soup for more than half an hour the latter is rendered uneatable. And then so many cooks are fond of an over-dose of carbonate of soda in the soup in order to ensure the peas bursting. No one ashore can have any idea of the craving which seamen on long voyages feel for fresh vegetables, the thought of them at times being almost maddening.

It may be said—although, from the real importance of the subject just touched upon in the few preceding paragraphs, I sincerely hope it will not be—that I have been making a purely gratuitous digression from my text. At any rate, I will now drop the subject-matter of cookery, and proceed to deal with the cook himself as fairly as I may. Unfortunately, my experience has been so unhappy that it is rather difficult for me to remember that there must be many good cooks in sailing ships, even if I have not had the good fortune to be shipmates with them during my sailing-ship voyages. However, I will do my best to be impartial.

In the first place, the routine of a cook's duties in a sailing ship is fairly fixed; there is not much room for variation. We will suppose that it is Monday morning in the middle of a long passage. At 4 a.m., when the middle watch is relieved, the cook is called. Going at once to his galley, he lights his fire with a handful of tarry yarns and a little wood, and pops the kettle on. Then a grating noise and a pleasant smell are manifest; he is grinding coffee. While the water is boiling he will attend to the mixing of the sponge set overnight for bread or duff, whichever it is his custom to make out of the half-pound of flour which every man is entitled to on that day of the week. At two bells (five o'clock) he puts his head out of the galley door and cries "Coffee." On the word every man of the watch on deck, except the steersman, brings his pannikin to the galley door and receives a little more than half a pint of—well, we'll call it coffee; but really, when you come to think of it, the name is somewhat misapplied. For the daily allowance is half an ounce of green beans, which, by the time they are roasted and ground, are hardly capable of yielding sufficient caffeine to make a pint and a half of drinkable infusion, or rather decoction, since the cook must boil it to get any flavour at all. But that is a detail. At any rate, the liquid is hot, and it may be sweet, if the drinker is economical with his twelve ounces of sugar, careful enough to make it last him the week.

This morning coffee is a great institution. However unsavoury it may be as a beverage, it is looked forward to as no other meal of the day is, for it breaks up the long and sleepy morning watch, it ushers in the day, and its medicinal effects are undoubted. After it has been drunk, the man at the wheel relieved for his share, and a smoke indulged in, the cry of "Wash decks" is heard, and the day's work begins. The cook's duties are light. He has nothing to prepare for the men's breakfast—that is, in eight ships out of ten—except another jorum of questionable coffee, about a pint for each man. In most ships breakfast for the men is the grimmest farce imaginable. A few fragments of dry ship-biscuit, and a pint of coffee, cannot by any stretch of courtesy be called a meal. A little butter would go far to make it one. A few potatoes wherewith to make dry hash or lobscouse with a few remaining fragments of meat left from the two preceding meals, and an onion to flavour it with, would cause the ship to be gratefully regarded as a "good-living" packet. In American ships this is the rule; few indeed of them are to be found where a good breakfast is not provided for the men, and, what is quite as important, the quality of the bread (biscuit) supplied is usually superior to that found in the cabins of British sailing ships. Not so in Canadian vessels. It is a profound mystery to me, the way in which Canadian sailors, or, for the matter of that, longshoremen in Canadian coast villages feed. The fattest of fat pork, potatoes, and salt cod seem to be the staple food in the coasters, and as often as not "coffee" is made with burnt bread, and sweetened with exceedingly dubious molasses.

Lying in a Nova Scotian harbour once, loading lumber from a large schooner, I went on board at breakfast time. I found the skipper preparing breakfast for all hands—four of them. They did not muster a cook. He unearthed a mass of cold cooked potatoes and a block of pale pink fat, got out a big square tin, which he put on top of the hot stove, and, carving up the lump of fat into dice, sprinkled them over the bottom of the pan. He then peeled his potatoes, and dropped them into the pan on top of the hissing fat, stirring them round with his knife. As soon as the mass was warm through, breakfast was ready. The "coffee" was warmed up from yesterday, and its aroma was enough to kill a mosquito. I should think it would have made a fine disinfectant. Yet in that splendid country there is no want of the best food. There is a serious lack of cooking ability. I stayed in a "hotel" in one coast village for nearly two months one winter, where at least thirty always sat down to meals. Those meals never varied. Fried blocks of meat, potatoes boiled in their skins, soggy bread, and "pies," a sort of stew of cranberries or dried apples, spread over a dough-covered plate, and indurated in an oven, always formed the menu: never a bit of green vegetable, or any suggestion that even the same kind of meat might be made just as palatable, if not more so, by being treated in a different kind of way. I suppose these strong men look down with a certain contempt upon any careful treatment of food as being effeminate.

But to return to the British sailing-ship cook getting ready for breakfast. As I have said, the men's repast does not burden him. He may have in the oven a panful of "cracker-hash," a mess of pounded biscuit, chopped beef or pork mixed with water, and plentifully anointed with grease skimmed from the cook's coppers. This will have been got ready overnight by the younger members of the forecastle crowd. In many ships, however, this form of filling is strictly forbidden; that is to say, the cook is not allowed to have it in his oven, because it is well known to be most unwholesome, producing various intestinal disorders, and covering the men with boils. But the temptation to invent some means of distending the craving stomach is great, so most men break up the biscuit into their coffee, and shovel it down soaked, to the ruin of their digestions. Meanwhile the watch on deck are getting a razor-keen edge on their appetites. The strong, pure air, and the vigorous exercise of thoroughly cleansing the decks with a flood of water and much scrubbing, from stem to stern, is enough to do this, even if it were not aided by an occasional appetizing whiff from the galley of frying bacon or cunning stew, which is being got ready for the officers' morning meal. Those who have been sleeping in the crowded forecastle are naturally not so sharp set; they can do with a drink of coffee and a smoke. But when at eight bells (8 a.m.) the watch is relieved, and those who have been at work all the morning come below to the mockery that awaits them, there is much bitterness and bad language.

No sooner has the cook cleared off the cabin breakfast than he turns his attention to the duff or bread. The former curious compound is peculiar to British Merchant sailing ships. It is really boiled bread. It is made, like bread, with hop yeast, but a certain quantity of grease is mixed with it, and it is not put into the bags dry, like dough, but slack enough to run. The bags are made of canvas, conical in shape, to allow of the duff being turned out easily. Before the mixture is poured into them they are dipped in hot water—salt, of course; you cannot afford to use fresh at sea for such cooking purposes, except in steamers, where a condenser is always at work. When the due amount is poured into each bag it is loosely tied to admit of its rising, and plunged into a boiling copper, whence, if all be well, it will emerge at seven bells light and spongy. Usually a modicum of molasses is provided, to give it some flavour; but I have been in ships where even that poor adjunct was wanting.

CHAPTER XXIV.

THE COOK (SAILING SHIPS)—continued.

Having got the duff off his mind—and allow me to assure you that a sailing-ship cook's reputation hangs principally upon his ability to turn out a satisfactory duff—there is the beef. It has been soaking in sea water since the previous evening, to mollify in some measure its terrible salinity, and now the cook removes it therefrom, unless, as often happens in small ships, the steep-tub is the wash-deck tub also, in which case the meat must be taken out at 6 a.m. in order to allow the tub in which it has been soaking to play its part in the cleansing of the ship. But that is only a detail. If the cook be a clean man he will now wash the meat carefully (it needs washing badly) before putting it in the copper. But he may, and often does, think that process not at all necessary; it will be clean enough by the time it is cooked. With the duff bubbling fiercely, and the beef on the other side of the stove keeping in tune with it, the men's dinner needs no more thought on his part except to keep the fire going; so that he will be able to do a bit of cleaning up, if he has a weakness in that direction, or he may sit and smoke and meditate. The steward is preparing the cabin dinner aft in his pantry: a fruit pie, some tasty combination of tinned meat and potatoes, or even a fowl, if they are carried. In any case, as a rule the cook has only to see the food for the cabin through the actual cooking.

At seven bells (twenty minutes past eleven, the ten minutes to the half-hour being allowed for the men to turn out) some one, usually an ordinary seaman, or boy where they are carried, in other cases the "cook of the mess," comes to the galley for the dinner. It must be ready, and is, almost invariably. Any delay is unpardonable, for there is only the "chunk" of beef and the "phallus" of duff. Since they have probably been fasting since the previous supper time, except for such few morsels as they have been able to get down at breakfast or "coffee-time," the arising watch are usually very sharp set, and the duff disappears like magic. The beef, too, although there be nothing to eat with it but the flinty biscuit, receives considerable attention, but is generally spared for supper, as it is better cold—if "better" can be used in connection with it at all.

But the watch that have been working all the forenoon on an empty stomach are ravenous. At eight bells (noon) they come below, and eat like starving men. If it were not for the filling "whack" of duff, though, their hunger would soon be destroyed, not satisfied. In some ships the cook is not allowed to make duff, for the same reason that he is not allowed to cook cracker-hash; and then the men's principal meal on flour days is a sad business. A roll of just-made bread, seldom palatable, and a chunk of salt beef, is not a fair meal for a hard-worked man under such conditions; and in these days of cheap, good, and tasteful food ashore, it is not to be wondered at that seamen before the mast embrace the earliest opportunity available of quitting such positions and getting work ashore, where even the convicts in our prisons are far better fed. This is the more to be deplored because it is so totally unnecessary. The difference between a good-living ship and a bad one to the sailor may be expressed in the simplest terms. It is not true that the sailor is never satisfied. Men will speak for years afterwards of a ship in the most grateful terms where, instead of the incessant salt meat, they had a fresh mess three times a week, where potatoes and onions were served out occasionally, and where butter and pickles were given. And these things make a mighty small difference to the total expenses of the voyage—nay, by slightly reducing the quantity of salt meat, the expenditure might be kept almost, if not quite, at the same level. And then good cooks would become the rule.

American ships have earned their reputation for good living solely on the strength of their bountiful supply of potatoes and onions and flour, their lavishness in the matter of dried apples and cranberries, and their high standard in the matter of cooks. And Americans are not extravagant in business matters, either. They know how to run a ship economically as well as any seafarers in the world, and they think it is the most wasteful thing imaginable to starve a ship's company for the sake of a little attention to detail. This is a vital principle with them. They will work their crew to the last ounce, often in what cannot by any stretch of courtesy be called necessary tasks. I have been with men who have actually known what it is to be slung aloft scraping yards in a gale of wind at night; but they said that when they got below there was always a tasty meal ready for them, and any neglect on the part of the cook would have resulted immediately in his feeling the burden of severe suffering.

Once the dinner is over and the gear washed up, the cook's work is practically done for the day. He may find a few minutes' relaxation in "burning coffee," as the sailors call it—that is, roasting it in the oven. But that is about all. He has nothing to prepare for the men's supper. He may have a little dry hash to get ready for the cabin, but in many cases the steward will do even that; so that there is really no excuse for his being dirty. Yet, unless the skipper is a man who rigorously practises that most essential part of a shipmaster's daily round, i.e. goes all over the ship every day, a cook will often get so dirty that it is a wonder the men are not poisoned. And I am sorry to say that this is by no means confined to negroes and Asiatics, who have the worst reputation. I can remember three cooks, each of whom was my countryman, and I do not believe it would have been possible to find dirtier men.

Tuesday's work is like Monday's, except that instead of bread or duff, pea-soup is the staple; and since board-ship pea-soup is simply peas boiled in water, with a piece of pork allowed to simmer with it for about half an hour to give it flavour, one would think that on pea-soup days, at any rate, the poor sailor would be sure of getting his meal properly prepared. But if you ask a foremast hand bow often he gets good pea-soup, please look out for strong language. He will most probably tell you, although that would be an exaggeration, that the only time the pea-soup is good is when there's a heavy sea on, so that the tumbling about of the ship renders stirring unnecessary—otherwise it is almost sure to be burned, because the cook is too lazy to stir it. And therefore it is often burnt. Now, burned pea-soup is perhaps one degree worse than burned oatmeal porridge, which, it is said, a pig will refuse. Or it may be that the cook cannot learn the secret of getting the peas to mash, so that the soup is like yellowish water with a collection of yellow shot at the bottom, a food that would disarrange the digestion of an ostrich.

Another thing that always seemed radically wrong to me was the making of tea and coffee in the same pot used for soup, and making these infusions as if they were soups; serving them out, too, like soup, by ladlefuls, stirring up the leaves or grounds, as if afraid of defrauding some critical sailor of his due allowance. Surely it should not be so difficult to utilize a kettle for making tea and coffee. But these observances grow into the most conservative of customs, and it is like suggesting mutiny if some enterprising individual dares to hint at a change. One cook that I was shipmates with, a Maltese, perpetrated a piece of cookery that I am never able to forget. Some one had caught a dolphin, and, instead of frying it (in the oven) as usual, the cook boiled it, and indeed it was very palatable. But the next morning at coffee-time the coffee was too funny for anything. We were not at all dainty, but that mixture would not go down. So one of our number, a sarcastic old Yankee, went to the galley and said, "Hyar, cook, what in thunder hey ye ben improvin' th' coffee fur? It may be all right, but I'll be doggoned ef I kaint do better with it ez before. I've gut used t' it." So saying, he held out his pannikin invitingly. The cook took it, smelt it, tasted it, looked puzzled for a second or two, and then said triumphantly, "Oah, yez, I know. I boil him in de same pot I boil de fish las' night, 'n' I don' wash her out, see!" He was quite struck with his ingenuity in finding it out. And he wasn't punched either.

I mentioned the cook of the mess just now—but that is a term applied solely to a man who takes his turn with the others, where there are no boys or ordinary seamen in the fo'c'sle, to carry in the food, wash up the plates, or clean the fo'c'sle out, and trim the lamp. Now, in an American ship the crew's plates are washed by the cook, who also keeps the tin dishes in which their food is served to them as bright as silver. That, again, is a point where an American ship's cook differs widely from his British confrère. Indeed, it is not too much to say that a cook who would be called a very clean man in a British ship would be looked upon as dirty on board of a Yank, so high is the standard maintained there in matters of cleanliness.

Really I am half afraid to say what I have seen done by cooks on board British ships, it seems so incredible to landsmen. But the subject is so important in its bearing upon the well-being of the men, that one hardly likes to leave it without telling all the truth. I have seen a cook who did not know how to open a tin of meat, who tried to chop it in half with an axe; who was too lazy and filthy to wash the saucepans out, but wiped them out instead; another, who made duff without yeast, and boiled it in salt water without a bag—a lump of dough that was like a piece of grey india-rubber when it was served up; another, who did not use a frying-pan for steaks in harbour, but flung the chunks of meat upon the top of the red-hot stove, and unblushingly sent the charred flesh into the fo'c'sle for the men to eat.

But the strangest thing of all, a thing that puzzles me to this day, was the action of a crew in one vessel where we were cursed with the queerest specimen of an incapable for cook. We shipped a man in Rangoon as A.B. who was really a good cook as ship-cooks go; and as soon as he found out how things were, he volunteered to teach that wretched food-spoiler his duties in his (the seaman's) own time. Then, wonderful to relate, the very men who were suffering from the vile messes the pseudo-cook was making, turned round upon that volunteer, saying that if they were the cook they wouldn't allow no —— interloper to meddle with their work, so they wouldn't. Of course this discouraged the reformer, and he desisted from his laudable efforts, with the result that we were in a state of semi-starvation all the way home. Truly a sailor is a strange being.

There is a lower depth still, impossible as it may seem—in small vessels where the galley dwindles to a "caboose," a sort of sooty cupboard on deck, too small for the miserable youth who is both cook and steward to get into. So he stands on deck, often swathed in oilskins, his head in the grimy hole, with the smoke from the stove nearly stifling him, doing his "cooking." Does this state of things need any comment? Fancy cooking under such conditions, if you can. In bad weather, of course, the fire cannot be kept alight, so that the crew must go without any other comfort for their craving stomachs than biscuit and cold water. A short meditation upon such conditions of living should bring to many of us a sense of shame for our complainings at food which, were it ten times as bad, would be an unheard-of luxury to the sailors on board some of our ships.

Let me conclude with one more reminiscence. In a brig of which I was mate, on the East African coast, we shipped two Zanzibar Arabs as cook and steward. The skipper had his wife on board, and she, poor woman, on the passage home, was in danger of being starved to death. So the bo'sun and myself took it in turns to oversee those savages, cannily, too, for they valued not their life one jot, and would as soon have murdered us as look. Oh, how we suffered! At last we reached St. Helena, and got some fresh beef and vegetables. I cooked a dinner of these luxuries, and when it was brought into the cabin, the lady actually wept with delight at the prospect of one decent meal.

CHAPTER XXV.

THE APPRENTICE (SUGGESTIONS).

I may as well admit at the outset of this chapter that I approach it with a heavy sense of responsibility. For many reasons. I am exceedingly anxious about the future of our Merchant Service; and the decay of the apprentice system at sea is full of menace for that future. Again, I know that many dear friends throughout the length and breadth of this land of ours are looking with pathetic eagerness for some guidance upon this subject. They want to gratify their sons' inbred craving for a sea-life; but what are the prospects? How will it affect their boys, supposing they find, after a short acquaintance with the sea, that they are not fit for it at all?

In short, there are so many middle-class folks ready to apprentice their boys in the Merchant Service, if that service is worth their attention as a probable life occupation, and they are so pathetically eager and earnest to obtain reliable information and enlightenment on their utter ignorance of all the details of a nautical life, that it behoves all who have that information, to give it carefully, without bias, and intelligibly. That is therefore no reason why they should withhold it altogether, from craven fear of being upbraided for after-consequences of following the advice they had given.

With this in my mind, I would say at the outset that I believe the system of apprenticeship might be revived, with great advantage to the country and to individuals, but it needs revision. As it exists at present its only effect is to flood the Merchant Service with an enormous number of certificated men, who cannot get ships as officers, and who find the fo'c'sle society disgusting, having trained themselves to expect something better. Worse still, it will be found to have unsettled many lads for any steady land occupation, while completely disenchanting them as to the fine life they expected at sea. It has just aroused in these well-brought-up, home-keeping youths the nomad instinct that is latent in every human breast, and the love of wandering once established, nothing short of main force will make that man a settled citizen again until he reaches middle age.

Apprenticeship is often spoken of as a means to the laudable end of replenishing the British Merchant Service with British seamen. But in its present form such a suggestion about apprenticeship is utterly absurd. Respectable people who have spent money upon their sons' education do not pay a heavy premium, and apprentice him to a ship, with the object of his becoming an able seaman. They expect him to be an officer as soon as possible, and that is the goal to which the lad looks forward. Now, it must be said at once, plainly and frankly, that the supply of officers far exceeds the demand. The fact that there are many foreign officers in our Merchant Service does not affect this statement at all. All that it means is, that as the pay of officers is a matter of individual bargaining, and not a fairly fixed quantity like that of the seamen, there is always an opportunity for underselling. Let me give an instance. Before my last voyage I had been prowling about the docks, looking for a ship, until I was in very low water indeed, and glad of almost anything. Yet, as I was married and had one child, there was a minimum wage below which I could not go without the prospect of my dear ones starving. Receiving information that there was a brig in the St. Katherine dock wanting a mate, I hastened down to her, finding the master a pleasant, genial man, and English. I told him my errand, showed my credentials, and was asked what wages I wanted. I suggested £6 10s. per month, feeling as I did so that I might as well ask for the moon while I was about it. We finally agreed upon £5 15s. a month, which made my wife's income while I was at sea about 14s. a week. But I went home light-hearted enough in the feeling that I was no longer a dock-slouching mendicant, and that something was sure for at least twelve months.

The next morning, when I came on board to work, the skipper told me that he had received an offer from a German, fully certificated, to come as mate for £3 a month, and one from an Englishman, who said that, as he had money of his own, and only wanted to get his time in for master, he would come for nothing. "I didn't take the German," said Captain W——, "entirely because I had given you my word, but because I hold that it is a national crime to permit foreign officers to have charge of our ships, apart altogether from the shame of having them cut the already too scanty wages. And I didn't take the other fellow, because I wanted a man to earn his wages, and I knew that he was likely to earn what he offered to go for—nothing." So I kept the berth, but, as the skipper truly remarked, had the owner known that he was paying much more for my services than there was any necessity for him to do, he would have been very angry.

My contention is that the apprentice should be classified. If there were two grades established, one with a view to making foremast hands, and another for training officers, I think much good might be done. For instance, the poor lads who go in such charitable training ships as the Warspite and Chichester, the Exmouth, Shaftesbury, and Cornwall, should not be sent adrift as they are now, shipped as boys in whatever ship will take them, and discharged with the rest of the crew on their return to the home port. It is true that the authorities ruling the training ships are always ready to befriend these young sea-boys when they return, to a certain extent; but it should be remembered that there are always many fresh lads to be disposed of, boys who have finished their training-time, and are waiting for a ship in which to begin their sea-life. It is not always an easy task to provide ships for them either, and therefore it is hardly fair to expect the training-ship people to handicap them by looking after the shipment of old boys as well. But if those lads were apprenticed without premium, at a small wage, increasing each year, and with the definite object of making good foremast hands of them, I am sure much good might be done. They would certainly be no worse off than any lad ashore who serves his time as a mason, a carpenter, or a plumber. In the vast majority of cases the horizon of such apprentices is bounded by the prospect of becoming a good journeyman, for which the demand is always greater than the supply. If they develop habits of thrift, a faculty of organization, and power of command, the way is open for them to become master, and in like manner there would be nothing to prevent the non-premium apprentice from rising higher than a mere "journeyman" sailor, if I may thus use the expression, in the fact that he had been apprenticed on a lower grade than those intended for officers from the beginning.

The treatment of such apprentices would be no different to that in force now on board ship for "boys" so called. They would probably live in the forecastle among the men, or with the petty officers. I know that some people will raise an outcry against the idea of boys being sent to live in the forecastle with the men, but from experience I am sure that this would not be detrimental to the boys at all. When a boy has spent two or three years on board a training ship (I do not mean a training college like the Worcester or Conway, although I don't suppose all the boys there are unfledged angels), he has nothing to learn in the way of evil in a ship's fo'c'sle. Please, my good friends the officers in charge of these ships, don't imagine that I am casting any reflections upon you. You do your best, but it is simply impossible for you to keep such a crowd of young rascals as you have to deal with like an ideal Sunday school. I have been shipmate with a great number of these boys—good, bad, and indifferent; but in one respect their education was never wanting: the knowledge of such evil as we do not write about, only hint at in conversation.