Front matter (continued 6)

Having secured my gaskets, I hurried aloft and made the sail fast. When the work was done, I discovered Johnnie, clinging like a bat to the extreme lee-end of the yard. I shouted to him till I was hoarse, but he made no sign, so I left him, for I did not care to run the risk of putting two men's weight upon the lift; and, moreover, I was something scornful at that A.B.'s behaviour. I went below and helped in the work that was being done until the time came for us to go below, and there was Johnnie, the A.B., talking as boldly as the rest, and ordering me to do this, that, and the other. Then a little explanation ensued, and from that night forward I took orders from him no more. But I had learned something, and when the time came I met the bo'sun, and put the question to him whether he did not think I was as well worthy of an A.B.'s discharge as some of the fellows who had been unable to do the work that I had undertaken. In the result I got my coveted piece of paper, and never sailed as O.S. afterwards.

The precise definition of an ordinary seaman's duties has never been laid before me. But I fancy that those three qualifications which are often spoken of as the desiderata for an A.B. should more properly be applied to the O.S., viz. that he should be able to hand, reef, and steer. Once, and once only, was any question raised with me when I was an O.S. about my qualification, and that was by a man who was very sore indeed at having to pay £3 per month for my services. I joined the vessel in Sydney, where A.B.'s wages were, at the time, £5 a month for deep water, resisting all the skipper's efforts to get me for £2 10s. a month. This so annoyed him, that he tried in various ways to pick holes in my work, and at last declared that I could not steer (although I never missed a trick during the whole voyage), and also that I was not competent to "cross a royal yard," which was fantastically untrue. I should very much like to explain how this piece of work is done, but am almost afraid, because of the inevitable use of technical terms. Still, I feel that I have not worried my readers much, so far, with sea language, and that perhaps some would like to hear just a little bit of sailor-talk.

It must be understood that this piece of work is one of the smallest of rigging manœuvres that is performed on board ship. By "rigging manœuvres" I mean work aloft which is not always being done or undone, such as furling or setting sails. In fact, the work aloft of a ship may be divided into three categories—the temporary, the sub-permanent, and the permanent. Under the heading of temporary work comes the setting and furling of sails. Sub-permanent work is the shifting of sails—heavy-weather canvas for that carried in the doldrums and trades, and the manipulation of studding-sail gear—although this latter, except in old ships, rarely troubles sailors much to-day.

But permanent work, by far the most important, and demanding the greatest amount of seamanship, includes all the care of the standing rigging, the sending up or down of masts and yards, and the thousand and one repairs that are necessary in order that the mazy fabric of a sailing ship's top-hamper may do its work of propulsion in association with the wind. Of all the heavier work of this kind, i.e. shifting the yards and masts, that of handling the royal and sky-sail yards is the most frequently indulged in; for many skippers commanding old ships dare not put too much strain upon the lighter masts in heavy weather, and they therefore make a rule of sending down the loftiest yards when they bend their heavy-weather sails. Now, a royal yard in situ is a spar of, say, thirty-five feet in length (varying, of course, with the size of the ship), seven or eight inches in diameter in the slings (the centre), and tapering at both ends, or yard-arms, to four inches, or even less. By means of three (sometimes only one) encircling iron sling-bands in its centre, it is attached to an iron, leather-lined collar, which goes round the royal mast, and is called the "parral." It is also suspended by a chain "tye," which leads through a sheave-hole at the masthead, and is connected on the after-side to a purchase for hoisting the yard, the whole tackle constituting the royal "haulyards," "halliards," or "halyards," the latter for choice.

From each yard-arm to the masthead run pieces of rope, which are tight when the yard is lowered. They are called "lifts," and are for the purpose of keeping the yard horizontal, and of sustaining the extra weight put upon it by men who go upon it for any purpose. Looped abaft the yard are the "foot-ropes," upon which the men stand when furling or bending the sail, and attached to each yard-arm are the "braces" for the purpose of slinging the yard from one side to the other. All this gear is for the yard alone. Then there is the sail, with a rope running through a block under both quarters of the yard, and down to the corners of the sail abaft all, the "clew-lines," while from a block at the masthead another rope runs down through a block or bull's-eye seized on to the tye close down to the yard, and so, being forked before-all to the foot of the sail, where it is seized, one leg on either side to the foot. This is the "bunt-line." The clew-lines, bunt-lines, halyards, and braces are worked from the deck, and constitute the "running-gear" of the sail.

From the foregoing perfunctory description of the gear attached to one of the lightest yards in the ship, some slight idea may be gathered of the immense combination of cordage required to work about thirty sails, some with much more gear than a royal, of course. But my principal object in attempting to describe the gear of the royal yard was to show what used to be considered fair work for an ordinary seaman in "crossing" it. The running gear was, of course, already aloft; the standing gear and the sail were sent up with the yard, which was swayed aloft by a long rope running through the sheave-hole in the masthead, from which the halyards were temporarily unrove. The youngster charged with the duty of crossing the yard goes aloft as it is swayed up, guiding it clear of the rigging as it jerkily ascends. Of course it is so secured that it rises vertically, and the work of keeping it clear of the rigging when the ship tumbles about is by no means easy; and, of course, the higher it ascends the greater is the motion, until, when it is high enough, it often taxes the utmost strength and skill of the smartest youngster to deal with it. As the upper yard-arm reaches the top-gallant masthead he must put on the brace and lift for that side and cast off the "yard-arm stop," then, as speedily afterwards as possible, get the lower brace on, and the lift for that side also secure. As soon as that is done, he can, by casting loose the quarter stop, allow the yard to be lowered in its proper horizontal position. It will now be supported by the lifts, so that he can fix the parral to the mast, and those on deck having steadied the braces tight, the worst of his troubles are over.

He can now "come up" the yard rope by which the yard has been hoisted, and, letting it run down on deck, reeve the tye of the halyards in its place. Then he must secure all the gear to the sail properly, sheets, clew-lines, and bunt-lines, loose the sail, sing out "Sheet home the royal," "light up" the gear, and, when the sail is set, "stop" it loosely with one turn of roping-twine, so that it will not chafe the sail by being stretched tightly over it, and come down. If he can do all that smartly and well, in spite of the ship's uneasy motion, he is superior to two-thirds of the so-called able seamen of to-day.

In the absence of a boy, the ordinary seaman is also the lackey of the watch in an English ship. The law in this respect is unwritten, and I have seen a sturdy youngster successfully appeal against it. There is really no reason why an O.S. should be compelled to sweep up the fo'c'sle after every meal, keep the men's plates, knives, and forks clean, trim the lamp, make the cracker-hash, etc. But few indeed are the fo'c'sles where an O.S. would be able to claim exemption from such servitude. And if he did get off from dancing attendance upon the men in his watch below, he would almost certainly be made to do much of their legitimate work during the watch on deck. For that is one of the worst features of British ships—that, owing to the peculiar want of discipline which obtains, so much work that should be fairly distributed falls upon those who are either indisposed to grumble or are in a junior position.

For instance, in a sailing ship, let us say, which carries no boys or apprentices, but an O.S. in each watch, that young man during his watch on deck will certainly be expected to keep on the qui vive. If he have the good fortune to be commanded by a thoughtful officer, he will probably be allowed to take a regular trick at the wheel, in spite of the grumbling of the men, many of whom will be no better than he is, if as good. But in the great majority of cases he must mount guard near the break of the poop during his watch on deck at night, solely in order that he may pass the word along to the sleeping men, or do himself any job that he can manage without disturbing them. When any work has been done that requires them all, he will do the lion's share of it—I have often seen the whole watch standing waiting for an O.S. to do something, because every one of them was too lazy to make a start, and the young officer did not care to risk a row by sending any particular man; and when the pulling and hauling is done, the last "belay" or "well" has been cried, the men all slouch off to their corners and pipes, or sleep again, leaving the O.S. to go the round of the ship and coil up all the ropes.

Of course I am not quoting this as a great hardship. I only mention it to show how peculiar are the notions held by foremast hands of the duties of boys and ordinary seamen. It was doubtless a very good training for the latter, this being made to do everything possible while the men looked on criticizingly, but it was often carried to cruel lengths. I have myself seen as well as experienced such treatment of an O.S. in a ship's fo'c'sle at the hands of men, who certainly did not deserve to wield any authority, as was sufficient to make a lad wish himself dead. Worse, remember, for the O.S. than the boy. What do you think of a fine young man being compelled to wait for his food till every one else in the fo'c'sle is served, to find then that of his poor allowance he had been robbed nearly half; made to feel at all times that the only object of his existence during his watch below was to be the body-servant of eight or ten men, to preserve before them a silent, respectful demeanour, and to consider himself honoured if any of them addressed him in any other than terms of opprobrium? Yet all this might be changed, has often been changed, in a moment. If one of the little kings in a burst of magnificent rage at some dereliction of duty on the part of his slave—fo'c'sle not swept clean, or plate not washed quickly—struck the O.S. a shameful blow, and the latter had the grit to return it with interest, following it up with a victory over his aggressor, thenceforward that fo'c'sle would not be a bad place for the hitherto-put-upon junior. But under the altered conditions of modern sea-service this fo'c'sle etiquette is being swept away, and soon will have as completely disappeared as the reluctance to sail on Friday has before the necessities of steam.

CHAPTER XXXII.

THE BOY.

At last we have arrived at the very bottom of the social scale of board-ship life. The "boy," as distinguished from the "cabin" boy, has long posed as a hero of romance in sea fiction. We all know that boy. His marvellous deeds have inspired generations of home-bred youths with an unquenchable thirst for the sailor's life, where, to quote one of the most charming of song-writers,

"We watch the waves that glide by our vessel's stately side, Or the wild sea-birds that follow through the air; Or we gather in a ring, and with cheerful voices sing; Oh, gaily goes the ship when the wind blows fair."

How many youngsters, lured by the mysterious air of adventure pervading all things connected with the sea, have run from comfortable homes, and, after hardships innumerable, have compassed the goal of their desire—have found a shipmaster willing to take them to sea with him as boy! And then—well, happily, the young seafarer soon develops a wonderful capacity for patient endurance of evils not to be avoided, and, if of the true grit, in time looks back upon his probationary period of suffering as a training which he was glad to have endured. And the older he grows the more complacently does he recall the days when he learned to expect the blow first and the explanation afterwards, learned to eat what he could get with an appetite like an ostrich, could sleep in drenched clothing with a bare plank beneath him, and find all his consolation in the fact that soon he would be able to look down upon a newcomer with the lofty superiority of the full-blown mariner.

At the risk of being thought tedious, I must repeat that for the ship boy, as for boys everywhere else in our favoured land, a brighter day has dawned. Within the memory of middle-aged men a boy on board a ship was the butt, the vicarious sacrifice to all the accumulated ill-temper of the ship. To-day tales are told of the treatment of boys in "Geordie" colliers that are enough to make the flesh creep to hear. In those days it was the privilege of every man on board to ill-treat the boy; and if, as very often happened, the poor little wretch died under it—well, what of it?—it was only a boy. And the peculiar part of it all was that the brutes who did these evil deeds prided themselves that their actions were right and proper. There was only one way of training a boy—with a rope's-end if it were handy; if not, a fist or a boot would do, but he must be beaten. One man, whom I shall always remember, as smart a seaman as ever trod a ship's deck, beat me until there was not a square inch of my small body unbruised. Scarcely a watch passed that I did not receive some token of his interest in my welfare, and on two occasions he kicked me with such violence that, with all the will in the world to obey his orders, I was perfectly helpless. My only wonder is that he did not kill me.

Yet when I left the ship he bade me quite an affectionate farewell, bidding me remember how hard he had laboured for my benefit, that every blow he had given me was solely aimed at making me more useful, and fitting me for my duties. At the time I felt that he was lying, and that his treatment of me was dictated by that savage lust of cruelty to an unresisting victim that grows alarmingly with the yielding thereto, and that had I only possessed the strength and courage to retaliate, he would speedily have altered his mind. But now I do not know. I feel that perhaps he may have been sincere. Men were self-deceivers ever; and there are few self-deceptions more common among mankind than this—that cruelty is a splendid aid to education. But here let me say that cruelty to boys was far more common among the officers than the men. If a boy was willing and respectful and clean, it was very seldom that he got beaten in the fo'c'sle. There was almost always a certain amount of public spirit which made for justice where half a dozen of even the roughest men were gathered together. I have known one exception to this good rule—have experienced it in my own person—where out of a whole crew of eight there was not one man enough to protest against the daily practice of cruelty to me. More than that, they encouraged a big boy, who was getting the same pay as myself, but whose qualifications, except strength, were far inferior to mine, to pummel me too. Such a gang I have never met with before or since, and I am sure that the combination is uncommon.

The majority of the boys going to sea to-day unapprenticed are drawn from the training ships, those good schools for the boy who is said to be unmanageable ashore. Coming from the wild and precarious life of the streets into such a ship as the Warspite, Arethusa, or Cornwall, is such a revelation to a boy, that for a little while he feels as if the bottom had fallen out of his world. For the anarchical condition, tempered by a salutary dread of the policeman, under which he has been living, there are substituted law and order, cleanliness and discipline; for regular short commons and dog-like snatching of sleep come good food regularly eaten, regular sleep at set times, regular play, and a sound prospect of benefits, very real indeed, for the patient worker in well-doing. Here the boy is taught all the essentials of seafaring except the actual going to sea, and in at least one instance that practical want is supplied, in that a small square-rigged vessel is kept, which, with selected boys for a crew, under the charge of experienced seamen, plies up and down the river under sail. And it may truly be said that a boy who has passed a couple of years under such treatment as this is as well prepared for becoming a good seaman as it is possible for a boy to be.

But, strangely enough, the training is of very little real service to the lads when they go to sea to earn their living. For at once they find themselves under such conditions as they never before dreamed of. In place of the perfect discipline and stringent rules to which they have been accustomed, they find the greatest laxity prevailing. Rules are almost non-existent. In the training ship each of them had his work allotted to him. When the signal was given he knew just what to do, and how to do it; and when it was done, he was done too. In the merchant ship the rigging is different, the method is different, and instead of his having any set duties, he is at everybody's beck and call, given tasks to accomplish single-handed that he has been taught to do man-of-war fashion—that is, with so many hands that the work was done like magic, and in a few seconds a sail was furled or set, or a mast was sent up or down.

They cannot now keep themselves clean and smart-looking. For, in the first place, they have little time allowed, and, in the next, there is not much water (in sailing ships). No longer is it necessary that they should present themselves at stated hours for inspection; no longer is every movement of theirs regulated as if by clock-work. They may be as slovenly, as dirty as they list, there is no one to enforce upon them the keeping of the good rules they have so long been under; and that principally because those who bear rule over them know that such enforcement is impossible. So that the carefully instilled habits of order, regularity, and cleanliness are broken down at once, and in place of the smartly-clad, well-set-up youth who joined the ship, there is presently seen a slouchy, shifty-eyed gamin, who is a profound student of the art of "dodging Pompey," who gets the well-deserved character from his shipmates of being "a young sailor, but a d—— old soldier." There is a greater evil, if possible, than this impending. It is that all the careful training of the lad shall presently be of no avail whatever; because, mixing freely with the crew, he is sedulously taught that the sea as a profession or calling is played out. "Why, just look at it a minnit," says his mentor. "You've never got no time to call yer own" (which is a lie, in an English ship, at any rate), "yer everybody's dorg, yer fed wuss'n a pig, and what y' got t' look forrward ter? T' die in the wukkus. 'Sides, 'n Englishman don't like ter be mucked up all the time with a lot er foreigners in one of his country ships. Why, they looks down on us now 'sif we wus a—— lot of interlopers wot got no right to sail under owr own flag. 'N, after all, wot are yer? Never nothin' but a dirty sailor all yer days. Nobody 'shore knows nothin' about yer; 'n don' care neither. Y' ain't got no vote, y' ain't got no home, y'r jest a bit of wreckage. Quit it, me son, 'n git a job ashore, where, if you're a bloomin' scavenger, you've got yer pull on the vestrymin, because you've got a vote, an' if they don't look after your interests, w'y, out they goes; see!"

This is the kind of pernicious stuff (all the more dangerous because of its half-truth) that the boy is regaled with, along with a great deal more that cannot be reproduced, for reasons that need not be given; and again I say, without fear of being hauled over the coals for repetition, it is quite sufficient to account for the falling off in the numbers of young British seamen. But I feel certain that some such scheme as I have sketched out in the Apprentice chapters would be efficacious in preventing this wholesale waste of good material. From the lowest class of seamen up to the second mate (except in the first-class liners) the evil to be battled with is the lack of continuous employment. It does not admit of the sailor acquiring any interest in his ship. Moreover, there is ever dangling before his eyes the terror of being "outward bound"—those two fateful words that convey such a mountain of meaning to every seafaring man. To be outward bound means that he is ashore penniless, dependent upon the kindness of a boarding-master for a little food; to prowl about the docks, boarding ship after ship, in the remote chance of securing a berth, and to meet with black looks everywhere; to be told continually that he is a cumberer of the ground, a loafer, a fellow that might, if he would, get a ship, but prefers instead to hang around maritime liquor shops, keeping a keen look-out for homeward bounders who will treat him, instead of being, as he really is in nearly every case, feverishly anxious to get back to sea again: these are some of the greatest drawbacks to a deep-water sailor's career.

And they tell with tremendous force against the boy. Friendless and homeless in many cases, or with parents so poor that they can do nothing to help him, earning such small wages that he can hardly purchase necessary clothing, much less pay for board and lodging, and with all a boy's natural carelessness, he is sorely tempted to take the first job that comes in his way, and quit the sea altogether as a means of livelihood. If he does so, even though the new employment may only last for a few months, he will hardly go to sea again. And no one knowing the peculiar difficulties of his lot will be able to blame him.

I have often wished that it were possible to make lads who at school chatter so glibly about "running away to sea," understand how impossible it is to do any such thing nowadays, except, indeed, in such vessels as are the last resort of the unfortunate. Even after I had been at sea for a couple of years I found it difficult to get a ship, on account of the competition of the training-ship lads, who, with their well-replenished outfits and sturdy appearance—to say nothing of the persistence of the agent charged with the duty of getting them shipped—were readily accepted by skippers, to the exclusion of outsiders. The "unfortunate" vessels of which I speak are those small sailing craft which still drag out a precarious existence in competition with steam. They may be seen in all our smaller ports, often lying disconsolately upon mud-banks at ebb-tide, or, looking woefully out of place, at some wharf belonging to a seaside place like Margate or Ramsgate. Oh, so dirty, so miserable they look! They only carry such rough cargoes as it does not pay to put in steam, and, in consequence, their freight-earning capacity is very low. That, again, reacts upon the equipment. Worn-out gear, wretched food, and not enough men or boys to do the heavy work, they provide a hard school for the young seaman. In them may still be found lingering some of the bad traditions of half a century ago.

Yet among even these poor relations of the sea may be found varieties of grade. The great majority of them are coasters—that is to say, they do not leave the vicinity of our shores except for ports just across the Channel. In these, though the conditions of life are hard for a boy, who usually does the cooking (?) at an open stove on deck, the food, if coarse, is much better than it is on vessels of the same kind going "deep water." There no relief can be found for months, while in the home trade it is but a few days from port to port, so that the ill-used or aggrieved youngster has but to step ashore and be off. And under the peculiar slipshod method of engagement and discharge in these vessels there is little danger to the deserter.

In my day there used to be regular houses of call for men and boys shipping in such vessels in London. One public-house of the kind I knew well, having, when very young, spent many a weary hour in its dingy tap-room waiting for a chance of shipment. To it used to come burly skippers clad in pilot-cloth, with blue jerseys in lieu of vests, and fur caps. They sought first a stout, well-spoken man, who was always hanging about there from ten till six, and told him their requirements. He knew what men and boys were available, and where to find them—in the tap-room or just at the door. He introduced master to man, and the first preliminary was always to feel the applicants' hands. If they were horny enough to satisfy the skipper that their possessor had not been too long out of work, a few questions ensued relative to wages, destination, etc. There was seldom any difficulty raised by the sailors. Poor fellows, by the time they had got to waiting at the King's Head or Arms, they were in no mood for haggling, and in this way wages were often cut down very low for men, while I have seen boys going for five shillings a month. When the bargain was made, a handsel of a shilling was given to the sailor. Whether he gave the agent anything I never knew, for although I waited there a long time—some three months off and on—I never got a ship or a barge there. Of course the skipper paid something to the agent, who looked fat and prosperous; but beyond the shillings I never saw any money change hands. And that money was always spent forthwith in the same manner—it was like performing a mystic rite. Two pots of four ale and two half-ounces of shag were purchased at the bar, and all the waiting hands, without being invited, stepped up and partook. It looked so strange to me, I remember, for many of the poor fellows looked as if a meal would have done them so much more good.

There were never lacking participants, either. No matter if the tap-room was quite deserted by candidates when the bargain was concluded, the appearance of the beer and tobacco always found them present—drawn thither, I suppose, by some mysterious influence. Another peculiar thing about that place was that men with money did not frequent it—sailor men, that is to say. It had its own customers among the workers of Thames Street, but they never intruded upon the apartment sacred to the shipping interest.

It was all very sordid and pitiful, a side path of seafaring that must have lent itself to many abuses, through which many a poor misguided lad got away to sea, and found no place for repentance until too late. I have only mentioned it here, because in speaking of the boy I am painfully reminded of the great number of miserable little sea-drudges who are still to be found in these vessels, leading the hardest of lives, and uncared for by any one. They are worthy of all sympathy, being so helpless, so unable to raise themselves. Their environment is as bad as it can well be, for, whether ashore or afloat, the company they are in is usually of a very bad kind. Now and then, of course, such a vessel will have a good, steady seaman, who has an interest in her, for a skipper. A man like that will often carry his wife, and will endeavour to keep a respectable crew with him voyage after voyage. And as likely as not he will take an interest in the boy, and try to make something of him.

Here, as far as the sailor personnel of merchant ships is concerned, my task ends. Several times during its performance I have felt that perhaps I should have done better to begin with the boy and end with the skipper, as being the more natural way. But I hope that what I have done, as well as the way in which it has been done, will be acceptable to shore-folks, for whom it is written. Sailors do not require any information of the kind.

And now for a few words on behalf of the men of iron who toil below.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

THE ENGINEER.

These concluding chapters should be written by an engineer; for no sailor, whatever his position may have been, is fully competent to judge of the work performed by the handlers of marine engines. Much less is he able to appreciate the position of those toiling helots of civilization, the firemen and trimmers. The benefits of steam are vast and undeniable; but it is not good to forget that the service of steam to-day means a truly awful burden of labour and risk laid upon a large army of civilized men. I believe I shall carry with me the assent of every one who knows anything about the facts when I say that of all modern occupations there is not one so terribly exhausting, so full of peril, as that of the servants of the marine engine at work. The marvel of marvels to me is that men can be found to undertake the task so readily. And if this be true of the Merchant Service, as I hold it is, plain unvarnished truth, it is doubly true of the same work, or what answers to the same description of work, in the Royal Navy. For there the manifold complications of ship-propelling machinery are immensely more intricate, the conditions under which the men labour are far more arduous, and, in addition, there is always the fighting risk superadded.

But I must not stray into the fighting line of engineering—I have said, perhaps, more than enough on that subject recently. Nevertheless, I honestly believe that I have only been able to put in the tamest and most colourless way what I feel about these men. When I say that such a chapter as this should be written by an engineer, I mean that only an expert in the wonderful profession can fully appreciate the difficulties and dangers thereof. Outsiders may, as I do, admire and wonder, but we cannot fully enter into these things as an engineer can. The country badly needs a writer on engineering matters who knows his business thoroughly, and at the same time is able to tell the people who don't know, what marine engineering means. No amount of sympathy and admiration can make up for lack of expert knowledge, yet, as far as it is possible, I feel constrained to draw the attention of my countrymen to the work of the men who, far below the water-line, amid the clanging chorus of their gigantic slaves, bend watchful brows to their mighty task; who for the four hours of their watch on deck (see how the sailor crops up), no, their watch below at work, know not one moment's respite. Vigilance unremitting is theirs; the price of effective manipulation must be paid, for no eastern Afrit was ever more jealous of the power over him held by the enunciator of the master-word than is the high-pressure marine engine of the governance of the engineer.

The casual observer, glancing down into the engine-room of a sea-going steamer, is apt to imagine that the men who wait upon the engines have an easy time of it. He is inclined to think that once the engines are started—"full speed ahead" sounded—watch after watch need only sit and look at them doing their work. Nothing could well be more false, while nothing is more natural. For engineers, like the best workmen everywhere and of every sort, make no fuss about their work. Quietly, without ostentation, they tend their engines, their trained ears noting the faintest change of tone in the uproar which sounds so chaotic to the ear of the outsider. Every single part of those engines, the amount of strain that it is bearing, the need for nursing, lubricating, watching that it has, is in the mind of that quiet, nonchalant man who steps cat-like into the thick of the flying steel cranks, and accommodating his movements to the swing of the thrusting shafts, feels their temperature, the amount of lubricant they are carrying, and regains his perforated platform with an air of indifference as if he had merely looked over the side on deck, instead of having been on the most intimate terms with an unspeakable form of death.

Perhaps the most noticeable feature about the marine engineer in the Merchant Service is the high respect in which he is held by every one. The merchant seaman instinctively recognizes in him a man whose attainments are not merely theoretical, but eminently practical. Every merchant seaman realizes that with the engineer has arrived a new stamp of seafarer, whose stern stress of duty cuts him off from those enjoyments common to all seamen. For him there is no meditative contemplation of the glories of the tropical night, when in the midst of the mighty solitudes of the untainted ocean man draws near to the great heart of Nature, feels himself akin to the stars and the wind and the waves; no heart-uplifting view of the apocalyptic splendours of the dawn, when the grey shadow of night melts away before the palpitating glow of the approaching sun; no speechless delight in the indescribable panorama sweeping past when the swift ship skirts closely the wonders of many shores.

At such times the engineer and his crew, deep in the bowels of the ship, are shut in from all sights and sounds and perfumes save those of the engine-room and stokehold, which are akin to those of Tartarus. And when through the swart night the vessel plunges madly athwart the raging seas, remorselessly driven against the combined forces of wind and wave and current, the engineer works on, all depending upon him. Then do his anxieties enormously increase, as at one moment the whirling blades of the propeller are buried deep beneath the surface and their thrust vibrates through every fibre and rivet of the ship, and the next by a downward plunge of the vessel's head they are lifted into the air, spinning madly with a frightful acceleration of speed on their release from the element in which they have been toiling. Then, see the engineer erect upon his iron platform, facing his Titanic charges, throttle-valve in hand, and steady eye fixed upon index glasses; every sense on the alert, muscles tense to shut off the supply of force sooner than the "governor" can act, so that the engines shall not be torn from their foundations by the fearful strain imposed upon them by the sudden taking away of their work while the driving steam is still bursting in through the main feed and slide-valves.

No other engineering in the world can for one moment compare in vital importance with this. The conditions are so onerous, the complications are so many, the need for watchfulness is so great, that a new race of men has been bred to compete with them. The engineer ashore may, and does, have all his repairs done by other people; the engineer at sea must, in the very nature of things, be not only the prince of engine-drivers, whose care of his charge, under the most severe tests, not applied occasionally but continuously, is beyond all praise, but he must be ready at any moment by day or night to undertake the most radical repairs. With improvised adjuncts he must undertake on the instant to do such things with masses of steel that if they were described would sound impossible except to the large room and full equipment of a first-class factory ashore. Not only so, but the work must be done under conditions of heat, imperfect lighting, and cramped space that render the duty enormously more difficult.

Yes, it must be done, because if not——? Well, they have taken away the steamship's masts, so that the sailor, even with the best ability and good-will in the world, can hardly get steerage way on the vessel by means of sails, and then there is a great ship, perhaps with an immense perishable cargo and a large number of passengers, lying like a log upon the ocean, at the mercy of currents that are most likely to be drifting her away out of the track of ships, away into the ocean solitudes that are to-day, owing to the method of following beaten tracks which is so universally pursued, more solitary than they have been for centuries.

The performance of duties like these calls for the highest qualities of mind and muscle ever possessed by men. The forces dealt with are so terrific, the dangers so great, that a weak man could not so much as face them, much less perform the wonderful pieces of work that are necessary in opposition to them. Occasionally a curt paragraph appears in the shipping papers, conveying to underwriters and owners the information that the steamship So-and-so, long overdue, has arrived, her broken-down machinery having been repaired by the engineer. Beneath that brief intimation lies a volume of tragic story—the dauntless conflict of man with fire, steam, and steel, and his final triumph over them. But these stories are never told as they ought to be. Some day, perhaps, an engineer-writer will step forth and unfold to an admiring world the Iliad of the engine-room. May I live to read it.

For the evolution of a marine engineer, it is first of all necessary that he serve his apprenticeship in a "shop" where marine engines are made. This is essential, and a moment's consideration will convince any one that it must be so. Then, having mastered all the details of engine construction, if the aspirant has a desire for the sea, he will, in some way, of which I do not pretend to understand the details, obtain a subordinate position in an engine-room of some sea-going steamship. Here will he become conversant with the duties expected of him as an engineer-in-charge, and will, moreover, devote all his spare time to scientific study, in order that he may be fit to pass his examination in theoretical engineering. And if he shows himself worthy of the position, there will be little doubt that, having passed the required examination before the Board of Trade officials appointed for that purpose, and received his second engineer's certificate, he will find little difficulty in getting a berth as junior engineer. His foot once upon the ladder, the ascent is easy. There is only one more examination to pass compulsorily, that of chief engineer, although there is, as in the seafaring branch, a voluntary examination which all self-respecting engineers will take, "Chief Engineer Extra." Now he may rise to be chief engineer of the Oceanic or the Lucania, with twenty or thirty engineers under him, and a whole host of firemen and trimmers.

It would ill become a mere sailor like myself to say anything about the polity of the engine-room, even if I had ever been in a position to study it. No doubt there are occasional hitches, instances of petty tyranny, of jealousies, of hindrances to getting on, since, with all their virtues, engineers are but human. But I do not know. I know that, except in the way of official routine, such as the control of the engines from the bridge, the officer of the watch has nothing to do with the engineer at all. The chief engineer is responsible to the master, and to him alone. Only the master can punish, and all cases of insubordination, etc., among the "black gang" must be reported to him. The master is in supreme command, and knows quite well what is due to the engineer. More, he seldom fails to grant him his full due. But I should be sorry to sail in any steamships where the officers took upon themselves to meddle with engineering matters. There would be much unpleasantness, from which the officers would suffer most. In brief, the engineer's importance is recognized.

They live, too, in a little world of their own. They have their mess-room, with a steward to wait upon them, and the best food the ship can supply. Their accommodation, too, is good, and their pay—well, it varies much with the class of ship, but, taken all round, it is much better than the officers'. And they are British to a man. I would not give much for the peace of a foreign engineer who by any chance found himself in a British ship's engine-room. The engineers in this respect enjoy peculiar advantages. Some people begrudge them their unique position in the seafaring world, and profess to see danger ahead because of it. I do not. I confess that my feeling with regard to the engineer is that, remembering the awful stress of his duties, the way in which he is not only cut off from home delights, like the sailor, but is also debarred from participation in the real joys of the sea, he deserves every advantage in pay, position, and prospects that he can obtain.

The unique position he holds among seafarers of which I speak is, that he is in close touch with powerful Trade Unions ashore. Since every engineer must learn his business ashore before going to sea, he becomes a member of the hierarchy of mechanical workers. Let him go to sea for never so many years, he must remember the workshop where he received his training; he has numbers of associates and relatives who are still working ashore, and who, in safeguarding their own interests in parliamentary ways, are all unlikely to forget him. They are his proxies, can speak for him, can use their votes on his behalf. Presently we shall find this great organization having something to say about the prototype of the Mercantile Marine engineer in the Navy, the engine-room artificer. The Admiralty, in their wisdom, have chosen to train up the naval engineer officer themselves, so that he shall be free from the influence of the workshop, shall become a class apart from and above the mechanical engineer. But in the doing of this they have been compelled to build up another corps to do the work. They are known in the Navy as E.R.A.'s (Engine Room Artificers), and it may be said, without any fear of contradiction, that they are, as far as ability and experience go, always the equals, and often the superiors, of the merchant engineer. Indeed, their period of service and the knowledge required of them before they can become Chief E.R.A.'s in the Navy is much greater than the Board of Trade require for the granting of engineers' certificates for the Mercantile Marine.

Then comes the great anomaly—the immense gulf that divides the two classes of men. As I have said, the merchant-ship engineer knows no superior on board the ship except the master. He deserves the best treatment, the best pay, and the greatest respect; and he gets them. His work cannot be made lighter, it must always be full of danger and toil, but all that can be done by way of mitigation of these onerous conditions is done. On the other hand, the E.R.A. in the Navy is a nobody. His pay is trivial compared with his congener in a merchant ship, he gets no respect from anybody, the youngest officer in the ship is his despot, whom to answer back means degradation and loss of pension, and he is berthed and fed much as a fireman is on board a merchant steamer; so that he continually smarts under a sense of injustice, and looks with longing and envious eyes upon his chums who, wiser than he, have gone into the Merchant Service. More than that, he knows full well that there are no reserves of E.R.A.'s, there are not nearly enough of them to man properly the ships that are now afloat; in case of an outbreak of war with a European Power, huge bribes would be offered to merchant-ship engineers to come and help in the Navy; knows, too, that not one of them would come without being rated as an officer, and receiving all the deference due to an officer in her Majesty's service. And so he may find himself, after years of the most arduous experience, ruled by a nephew who was a babe in arms when he served his time, who has all his life been engaged in one steady occupation on the same kind of engines, never hurried, never bullied, and probably with a sea experience of one-third of his uncle's, the E.R.A.

Therefore, because of these reflections and this knowledge, the E.R.A. is continually warning youngsters from the home shops not to enter the Navy by any means. The Merchant Service is the place for them if they want to be treated properly; the Navy is a place where they will never be anything else but a "dirty Tiffy," looked down upon by the youngest blue-jacket, and liable to be docked of many years' hard-earned pension for pointing out a mistake to an officer who, instead of accepting expert information gratefully, reports them for insolence.

I trust that these remarks about the E.R.A.'s may not be considered malapropos, remembering the great importance of the subject; remembering, too, that in the engineer of to-day we have not a mere mechanic, a man with no thought beyond his day's work and the receipt of his wages. I am afraid that the importance of the engineer, especially at sea, is insufficiently recognized by non-engineers. Every class of the community is benefited by the work of the engineer, and in modern sea-traffic he is, as Kipling has finely said, the kingpin of the ship. He cheerfully takes upon himself a burden of toil and danger such as the ancient world never knew—takes it, too, with the full consciousness of what he is doing; holds himself ready at any time to sacrifice his body for the safety of those whom he is serving,—and the least we who are thus served can do, is to recognize his value to the full.

For my part, I look upon the modern marine engineer as the true nineteenth-century hero. Some day I hope that a roll of honour will be drawn up, giving a list of heroic deeds performed by engineers out of sight, unostentatiously, just as a part of their duty. It would be an inspiring record; and from no source would more details be drawn than from the engine-rooms in the Navy, where, as has been abundantly proved, the engineer is thought but little of; so little, indeed, that all his efforts to obtain some meed of official recognition are at present in vain. Good for us that this does not obtain in the Merchant Service. There the engineer is estimated by his shipmates at his proper worth.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

THE FIREMAN AND TRIMMER.

It is a standing mystery to me however men can be found who are willing to become the firemen of marine boilers. Use dulls the edge of apprehension, of course, and in time the mind refuses to be impressed by the sense of imminent danger. Whether on the battle-field or in the stokehold this is so; but apart altogether from that, the nature of the work is such that I always wonder what the state of a man's mind can be who is willing to undertake it, or who, having undertaken it, remains in such a business. The engine-room of a large steamship is a terrible place, with its infinite suggestions of incalculable forces exerting themselves in orderly ways under the steady control and guidance of man; but there is a sense of exultation, of high satisfaction, in the realization of their own powers that goes a long way towards compensating the engineers for the dangers they confront, the discomforts they undergo; and where, as in the Mercantile Marine, their high abilities and undaunted courage are fully recognized, their treatment in pay and provisioning and accommodation as good as can be got, they have also something which atones for a great deal of physical suffering. Yes; I can understand a man choosing to become a marine engineer. But a fireman! The very thought of such a life is terrifying. The sailor in his watch on deck at night is seldom called upon to do anything but stand quietly at the helm or on the look-out. If he be a man of any observation, he may hold sweet communion with Nature, may meditate in the sweetest solitude in the world, gazing out upon the ever-beautiful face of the deep. In any case he may smoke, or doze undisturbed by any call to duty, except some shift of wind calling for trimming or setting sail. It is a pleasant mellow time for the sailor, the night watch at sea.

The fireman is called with the sailor at eight bells. Hastily putting on his shirt, trousers, and boots, he descends by many iron ladders past grim walls of iron that glow with fervent heat, and give out a vibrant hum, telling of the pent-up power within. Down, down he goes, until at last he stands upon an iron floor slightly raised above the very bottom of the vessel. Over his head there is a circular opening, down which comes a steady draught of cool air—that is, if the ship be in regions where the temperature will allow of the air being cool. At any rate, this air is fresh. It is conducted below by the intervention of those huge bell-mouthed ventilators, which are so prominent a feature of every steamship's deck equipment. In front of him towers the face of the boiler, that now claims him as its slave for four hours. It is ornamented by divers strange-looking taps and gauges and tubes, with the use of which he must be familiar. And it has a voice, an utterance that, while not loud, is so penetrating that soon it seems to a novice as if it were reverberating within his skull. It is the speech of imprisoned steam that finds no outlet by any channel except the one provided for it, the complaint of the awful giant who is rending at every square inch of his prison walls in the one supreme, never-ceasing effort to escape. It is utterly disregarded by the fireman: doubtful, indeed, whether he even hears it, or is in any way conscious of it, for it is more to be felt by the whole of the nerve centres than merely through the ears. His concern is with the three vast throats that occupy the lower third of the boiler. And there is no time to be lost. Seizing a shovel, he lifts with it the latch of one of the doors, and flings it wide open with a clang. The ship may be rolling furiously, tumbling to and fro with that peculiarly disconcerting motion that seems to a landsman the subversion of all principles of uprightness, but he must balance himself somehow. With legs spread wide apart, he stands upon that slippery iron floor, stoops, and peers within at the roaring cavern of almost white-hot coals. His trained eye can see just how they are burning; where clinkers are forming, whether perfect combustion is going on, or certain expert manipulation is necessary in order to make it do so. If all is satisfactory he shifts his position slightly sideways, so that he can swing his shovel on one side to the bunker door, at the sill of which a heap of coal is lying, fill it, and then, with a peculiar stroke, send its contents broadcast over the lambent surface of the furnace bed. The mere shovelling of coals into a fire has no relation to the careful, intelligent stoking of a steamship's furnaces, as engineers are never weary of saying. There is as much difference between a good fireman and an incompetent one—although the latter may work far harder than the former—as there is between a good and bad carpenter, or any other skilled worker.

When I was lamp-trimmer in the A.S.N. Company's employ on the Australian coast I was shipmate with an old Scotch fireman whose invariable practice it was to get most methodically drunk every time we left port. So drunk did he always become, that he could not stand, much less walk. But, crawling to the fidley, sometimes on hands and knees, he would somehow get down into the stokehold when his turn came, and there, balancing himself in some mysterious fashion, he would feed his fires. No sooner had he slammed to the furnace door than he would collapse, his legs bending every which way, as if they had been made of india-rubber. Yet the chief engineer used to declare that Andra could keep steam better drunk than any other fireman in the ship could sober. I have known him after a watch of firing to be still so drunk that he could not climb on deck, but lay huddled up in one corner of the stokehold like a heap of rags, utterly oblivious of the work going on around him.

It must, however, be remembered that pitching coal into the furnace, though it is the principal work of a fireman, does not by any means complete his work. After he has been "firing" for a certain length of time he perceives the necessity for "cleaning fires." He has been carefully raking and poking his fires at intervals so that no clogging of the bars shall hinder the free upward draught, and this operation, performed with long tools called a slice, a rake, and a devil, is very severe. The operator must stand very close to the furnace mouth and peer within at the fervent glow, while he searches the vitals of his fire as quickly and deftly as may be, lest the tell-tale gauge shall reveal to the watchful engineer that the pressure of steam is lessening, bringing him into the stokehold on the run to know what the all-sorts-of-unprintable-words that particular fireman is doing. But this is only the merest child'splay to cleaning fires. When that time comes the other furnace or furnaces (each fireman has two or three under his charge) must be at the top of their blast, doing their very utmost. Then the fireman flings wide the door of the furnace to be cleaned, plunges his tools into the heart of the fire, and thrusts, rakes, and slices, until he presently, half roasted, drags out on to the stokehold floor a mass of clinker. This sends out such a fierce upward heat that it must needs be damped down, the process being accompanied by clouds of suffocating steam-smoke. But there is no time to be lost. Again and again he dives into the heart of the furnace, each time purging it of some of the deadening clinker, until, at last, with smarting eyeballs, half choked, half roasted, and wholly exhausted for the time, he flings a shovelful or so of coal upon the now comparatively feeble fire, and retires to call up his reserve of strength.

And this work, of course, must go on continuously, no matter how the vessel is behaving, even if, as often happens, there descends occasionally from on high a flood of sea-water as waves break right over the labouring ship. The fireman must, to be efficient, nurse his fires, keep them clean, and hand them over to his successor in first-class going order, with the steam up to its ordered pressure; and failure to do this is provocative of bad language and much ill-feeling. Surely it hardly needs pressing upon the reader that such an occupation involves a truly awful strain upon the human animal, especially in tropical climates. The amount of strain has been officially recognized in the arrangement of firemen's watches. Instead of getting four hours on and four hours off, as do the sailors, they have four hours on and eight hours off, so that the exhausted frame may be able in some measure to recuperate. And in addition, wherever it is possible to do so, they get somewhat better food. I do not know certainly whether the institution is general, but I have been in several steamers where, at supper time, the firemen received a mess from the galley called the "black pot." It consisted of the remains of the saloon passengers' fare, sometimes made into a savoury stew, sometimes simply of itself, according to its component parts. But it was looked upon as the firemen's right, and no sailor ever participated in its contents.

It has probably occurred to the reader before this to ask the question, "How, if the fireman is so hard-worked in the stokehold and the space there be so limited, does he manage to get at the truly enormous quantity of coal that must be required to feed those devouring furnaces?" The explanation of this brings us to the lowest deep of all on board-ship life to-day. The providing of the coal for the use of the firemen is the duty of the "trimmer," the nature of whose work is so terrible that he should receive the sympathy of every kindly man and woman whom he serves. The coal is kept in vast magazines called bunkers, giving on to the stokeholds by means of watertight doors. In merchant ships these bunkers are placed so as to be most convenient for the transmission of coal to the stokeholds, and are as little subdivided as possible. What their capacity is may be imagined from the fact that some ships require three thousand tons of coal for a single passage, it being consumed at the rate of between twenty and thirty tons per hour! At the commencement of the passage the trimmer's work is comparatively easy. The coal lies near the outlet, and by a little skilful manipulation it is made to run out upon the stokehold floor handy for the fireman's shovelling. But as the consumption goes on, and the "face" of the coal recedes from the bulkhead, the trimmer's work grows rapidly more heavy. His labour knows no respite as he struggles to keep the fireman's needs supplied. And there is no ventilator pouring down fresh air into the bunker. In darkness, only punctuated by the dim light of a safety-lamp, in an atmosphere composed of the exhalations from the coal and a modicum of dust-laden air, liable at any moment to be overwhelmed by the down-rushing masses of coal as the ship's motion displaces it, the grimy, sweat-soaked man works on. By comparison with him the coal-hewer in the mine has a gentleman's life. Darkness and danger and want of breath are his inevitable environment. What wonder is it that he becomes a hard citizen? The fact is that no man with longings for decent life would or could remain in such employment. Only those who by carelessness and disregard of all that for the majority of us makes life worth living stay in it, and enable the ocean traffic of to-day to go on.

It is absolutely impossible to exaggerate the miseries of such a mode of life, made necessary by the imperious demand for swift travel. Yet, severe as is the lot of the coal-trimmer in an ocean liner, it again is comparatively easy when compared with the lot of the second-class stoker in her Majesty's Navy. For him another set of conditions comes into play. The necessity for using the coal as a means of protection from shot and shell leads to the bunkers being subdivided into a host of "pockets" holding but a few tons and communicating with each other deviously. The work of getting the coal passed from one to the other of these is far worse than anything of the kind in the Merchant Service, as much worse as is the firing under forced draught for a Belleville boiler than the steady supply of fuel to a well-equipped, natural-draught stokehold of any of our great merchant steamships, where Belleville boilers, thank God, will never be used. And, coming deeper still, there is the firing and trimming of a "destroyer." That occupation defies any attempt to describe it. No words could give an adequately forceful idea of what the firemen, trimmers, and E.R.A.'s must endure in order that a vessel no larger than an above-bridge steamer shall be driven by engines of five thousand horse-power at the rate of thirty miles per hour. We do not seem to have reached finality yet in this direction; but I should think that since human endurance has its limits, there must of necessity be a halt soon from the utter impossibility of finding human beings able to live and work under such awful conditions. When you find the long quivering hull of a destroyer, only a plate of steel not much thicker than a crown piece keeping out the sea, packed full of boilers, whizzing machinery, and coal, the tiny air space left containing something, of which one inhalation would make you or me, reader, feel as if we had been suddenly strangled, and the heat greater than one would find in the hottest room of a Turkish bath, it seems time to consider whether there can be any justification in compelling our fellow creatures, whom the need for bread has driven to accept such employment, to endure imprisonment like that, let alone work in it.

It is somewhat comforting to know that the exigencies of peaceful travel, severe as they are undoubtedly, do not require such suffering as that from their servants. Of course there are times, such as upon the outbreak of fire or the sudden springing of a leak, when the toilers below are literally between the devil and the deep sea. Also in the case of a boiler explosion or a sudden breakdown of machinery in full career, when the danger and attendant suffering are very great. But then, we all have to face dangers at times in burning houses, railway accidents, and so on, which come so seldom that we do not lose any sleep in anticipating them. Therefore we do not reckon the possibilities of calamity among the drawbacks to a fireman's or trimmer's business. It is the steady stress of such conditions of labour which is to be deplored.

Before the black watch below can be relieved there is always a duty to be performed that makes no unfitting climax to the preceding tale of toil. It is "ashes up." Some steamers have been fitted with a contrivance for obviating this piece of hard work—the fitting of a sort of valve in the ship's side or bottom through which the ashes and débris of the fire can be blown into the sea. These, however, are few. The usual way is for the ashes to be filled into long iron buckets, just as much as a strong man can lift when full, down in the stokehold. Some of the trimmers go on deck (how sweet the sea air is after their long sojourn below!), and sliding open a door in the tube of one of the ventilators, discover there a winch. The chain of this winch runs down into the stokehold, where it is hooked on to the ash-bucket. The trimmers on deck heave away with all their might (for when their task is ended they may go below), and when the bucket reaches them, they snatch it and carry it to the ash-shoot, where they dump its contents overboard. In some very well-found ships there is a small steam-winch for doing this work, but usually it is performed as described, and a heavy piece of business it is, involving the raising of several tons of ashes from the bottom of the ship.

Here I must leave the fireman and trimmer. I hope that engineers and their crews will forgive me, being a sailor, for having had the hardihood to say anything about them at all. They know very well the prejudice that even now exists against them in the minds of most sailors, and they will probably look closely into what I have written for some sign of sneering depreciation. But they will not find it. My sympathies are most fully with them. My admiration for them is great. And I think that as regards the firemen and trimmers, that their work in tropical seas is so utterly unfit for white men to do that, in spite of the hardship attendant upon loss of employment at first, it would be a good thing if stokeholds were entirely manned by negroes, who, from their constitutional experience of heat, must be far better fitted to endure the conditions of the stokehold. Many southern-going ships carry them now. I should not be sorry to see them the rule, and my countrymen doing something better.

CHAPTER XXXV.

CONCLUSION.

And now, approaching the conclusion of the whole matter, the end of what I feel to have been an important task, while the way in which it has been performed is an open question, I ask myself, "What is likely to be the effect of this book upon the minds of those for whom it has been written? Will they think that the British Mercantile Marine is a profession which they should exert all their influence to keep their young friends and relatives out of, or will they feel, as I do, that, in spite of all its obvious drawbacks, it should be by no means neglected as an opening for enterprising adventurous youngsters, the right stuff of which British sailors are made?"

I have been compelled, in truth, to say many hard things of the Merchant Service, but there is such a thing as speaking the truth in love. And as I love the Merchant Service with all my heart, and desire most earnestly to see it flourish and prosper more and more, I am the more anxious that nothing I have said will be taken as spoken in a carping or pessimistic spirit. I want to see the Mercantile Marine purged of the foreigner, not because I hate the foreigner of any nation, but because this peculiarly and particularly maritime nation of ours cannot afford, in the face of the undoubted hatred manifested towards it by practically every continental people, to allow the life of its citizens to be dependent upon the good-will of aliens. In spite of what not only continental writers, but many of our own scribes, may and do say about our unctuous hypocrisy, there can be no doubt that the chief characteristic of the British nation to-day is its careless magnanimity. Warned by innumerable writers of the risks we wilfully expose ourselves to, we go on with a good-natured shrug of the shoulders in the same reckless fashion. We welcome, as if we were in a new colony with millions of acres undeveloped, with all our resources at their spring-tide, a continuous flood of aliens to our shores and in our ships. We not only give them all the advantages we ourselves possess, but actually strain a point, wherever possible, in their favour. Finding no reciprocity anywhere, no feeling of kindliness for all our generous treatment of aliens, we are unmoved, nor is our policy, or want of policy, altered. And this grand air of indifference, which is not assumed, but real, is to the last degree galling to our continental neighbours. Their attitude becomes daily more difficult to understand. Rejoicing to see how we are, as they firmly believe, exposing all our most vital, most vulnerable points to their attack, both in matters of war and peace, they are yet almost frantic with rage at what they are pleased to call our abominable insular insolence, our refusal to be frightened of them. I do not pretend to justify our insouciant attitude, I only note its universal presence.

In the matter of our Mercantile Marine, I feel sure that we are heaping up for ourselves a most awful mountain of disaster in the way in which we are allowing it to become really a foreign service. One thing we could do, and should do at once—apply the same rule to the Merchant Service that is in force in the Royal Navy. There no alien, unless he has become naturalized, can hold any post whatever. It sounds a small reform; but it would have, I am sure, the most far-reaching effects. At present it is quite possible—indeed, it will be found actually the case in some instances—for a British ship to be wholly manned by foreigners, from the master to the boy—sailing ships, that is. Foreigners in steam are mostly confined to the crew; and, as I have said before, I know of no instance where foreign engineers are employed in our ships at all. Because, in the first place, they, our home-bred engineers, are the best in the world; and, secondly, because they have behind them the support of a great Trade Union, that—although I do not suppose many sea-going engineers are active members of it—would speedily make its voice heard and its influence felt, if any attempt was made to bring in foreign engineers.

For reasons which I hope I have made abundantly clear in the preceding pages, such support cannot be found for the seaman—that is, for the foremast hand. But the officers might do much more than they are doing. There are several societies for the mutual help and defence of Mercantile Marine officers, some doing excellent work, others doing scarcely anything at all. I will not particularize, for that would do no good. I will merely say that if all these societies would amalgamate, would all pull together and enlist the sympathy and active support of shipmasters and officers, retired as well, they would be a body extremely powerful in their influence on behalf of the best interests of their profession. Such a body, composed of serious-thinking, well-informed, and trustworthy men in full touch with the subject, could do more in one year for the upraising and nationalizing of the Merchant Service than will ever be done by isolated efforts, however earnest. For their own sakes they would not neglect the foremast hand; in the best interests of the service they could not. Even by the present local efforts of some of these societies much good has been done, enough to show what might be done were they all united.

As to the ships themselves, perhaps enough has been said already to indicate the transition stage through which we are passing. For while it is undoubtedly true that the sailing ship is doomed to extinction in the near future, at the present day there is still an enormous amount of sailing tonnage afloat. Thousands of good seaworthy sailing ships still come and go between distant shores, doing good work, not only in earning profits for their owners, but in rearing sailors for the British Mercantile Marine. But we are not building any more to replace them. We have come to the conclusion that the future of sea-traffic is to the steamer. Doubtless many ship-owners, in the present abnormally inflated state of the coal market, are sighing over the fact that they are so dependent upon the black dirty stuff for the due working of their ships, and vainly wishing for the days to return when the clean free winds furnished all the motive power needed. But we cannot go back again to sail. Even the Norwegian timber droghers are taking to steam, and that is a portent indeed. It is the beginning of the end. The end will come, for all sailing ships still making long voyages, with the opening of the Panama Canal. Then, at one fell swoop, the 'Frisco trade in grain, the South American trade in nitrate, will pass into the hands or holds of the steamships. Huge cargo carriers, able to stow eight or ten thousand tons away with ease, will go lumbering steadily down the gulf and through the canal. They will range the western sea-board of the Americas, sweeping into their capacious maws every ounce of cargo, and stimulating production in an amazing way.

Presently also will come the petroleum-propelled ship, the electrically-engined ship, as the carriage of coal becomes more and more of a burden, while its price steadily rises. Meanwhile, the inventive genius of America will surely find some way of re-creating for herself a splendid Mercantile Marine. I cannot think that she will always be content to see all her vast carrying trade over-sea practically in the hands of Britain and foreigners. At present it seems to be evident to all, except the average Americans, that such efforts as have recently been made with that object in view are foredoomed to failure. Only one thing is required for the rehabilitation of the American Mercantile Marine, and that is, that owing to the rapid filling up of all uninhabited land on the American continent, the teeming millions along her sea-board shall turn their earnest attention to the possibilities of money-getting that there are in ship-owning and sailing. Then they will insist upon some reasonable laws being passed that shall help, not hinder, the expansion of American sea-traffic, and the thing will be as good as done.

That, however, will require some considerable time yet. Meanwhile, the sailing ships, wooden ships too, will probably linger longest in our North American colonies. But they too must disappear. Already they are feeling the pinch very sorely, with economically run tramp-steamers cutting them out everywhere. This is obvious now when the thrifty Norwegians are running tramp-steamers in lieu of the ramshackle old craft with which they have so long monopolized the lumber and ice trade. To a seaman the spectacle of steamers in the home ports discharging ice comes as something of a shock, for he remembers what class of vessels have always been used for this, perhaps the roughest of all the carrying trades known.

But the great work to be done is the dissemination of popular information with regard to maritime matters. To burn into the minds of our people at home what the merchant ship means to them; to make the villager understand that the cheap and abundant food, which may be purchased even in remotest inland hamlets, has been brought thus to his door from the other side of the world by the unceasing strenuous labours of seamen and the sleepless enterprise of ship-owners. I look earnestly for the day when every newspaper in the kingdom will be considered incomplete without its column of readable shipping matter—true tales of latter-day daring, of courage as high as any manifested in the attempt to destroy life in battle; when the British seaman shall no longer feel that he is as completely isolated from the thoughts and sympathies of his countrymen as if he were an inhabitant of another planet; when the British man-o'-war's man, whether he be blue-jacket or stoker, shall know of a truth that his friends at home realize what he is doing during his long absence from home: how he, for their sakes, in order that the steady stream of food-bearing ships from prolific lands far away shall never cease by day or by night through the years, keeps sleepless watch all round the world.

Let no one think that this is a small matter. The acquisition of knowledge like this is not only of the highest importance in itself, but it will bring with it a vast amount of cognate information that now is much neglected. Geography will become what it should be, a popular science, because the immense value of it will be recognized. Economical science will also assume an interest which it has long lacked for all but the minutest percentage of fairly well-educated people. Politically, such an education of the people will be of the highest value, preventing them from being led away by clap-trap and jargon, and enabling them to understand why our country has risen to its present enviable height of prosperity, and how essential it is to the well-being of every man, woman, and child in the community that the peaceful flow of over-sea traffic shall never be interrupted.

Beyond and above all this there is the liquidation of the debt due to the sailor; the recognition of the fact in practical ways that without him we should not merely be without at least half of what he has taught us to look upon as the necessities of life, necessities which less than a century ago were looked upon as the highest luxuries, but that we should be a feeble population of slaves groaning under the iron rule of some military continental despot, who would rob us of our very blood and marrow, and give us in return leave to live that we might toil for him and his satraps until, early worn out, we were flung aside to die and obtain that liberty in death that we were denied in life. We want to atone as far as we may for our long neglect, through ignorance, and by our united intelligent efforts to show that at last we have awakened to the fact that in our Mercantile Marine we possess the most magnificent heritage ever built up for a free people by the courage and endurance of its sons.

THE END.

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