Robert Welles Ritchie

“ The trawlers of the North Sea and the Banks fishers off Newfoundland snatch a precarious living when the sea is sleeping, then turn and attempt to run when the swift anger of the sea strikes at them. Little coastwise steamers, whose owners risk their all on one voyage, yet balk at a shoestring requisition from their captains, play with the inshore current set, not daring to nose out where the big winds blow. ”

“ Now, with the deck boards exploding under the pressure of the water-driven air below, the passengers, goaded by a gold lust even stronger than fear, fought the purser and one another for the canvas sacks in the purser's safe. The sea snatched the ship from under their trampling feet. Sixty-seven of the total number aboard perished.
They course the tracks of seven seas, these dingy, laboring tramps—these overladen, wallowing barks. In fair weather and in foul they go and come. The Aleutians plot to trap them with fog. ”

“ As a taunt they cast upon the beach, nearly a year after the disaster, a gold watch-case engraved with the name of Captain Ward.
A thoroughly modern liner forges across the ocean at express speed, carrying near a villageful of passengers, half of them coddled in luxury, all of them secure. The giant hull beneath their feet is honeycombed into water-tight compartments, operating automatically. The first spark of fire in the wrong place is the signal for the banging of steel doors against the flame and the almost instant smothering of it by steam. ”

“ Tragedy is inherent, mystery is embodied in the term. Swift disaster under remote stars, lingering suffering beneath a pitiless sun, heroic sacrifice, black cowardice, prayers unavailing, cursings in madness, hopes that dwindle to dumb despair, the hearts of men shriveled by terror unplumbed—tales all told in the sinister ear of ocean alone and unheard by the world.
Ships crash into ships; one of them at least usually survives the shock to bring to the nearest port tidings of the accident if not survivors from the craft that disappeared. Ships drive upon some savage coast ”

“ Though a Republic collides and sinks after all aboard her are saved, and a Dakota is hurled on the rocks by a treacherous Japanese current, of such aristocrats among ships the records of the statisticians of marine disasters are not often compiled.
It is the workers of the sea who pay. Lame tramps, rotten in hull and palsied in engine, hiccough their way from port to port, luck and death casting dice for the men in them at every turn of the screw. Ancient barks and schooners staggering under top-heavy deck-loads risk the Hatteras gale and the Formosa typhoon. ”

“ They believed they rode the sea through sufferance, not as masters. Then no sure pathways plotted to the very mile spanned the oceans, prescribed and circumscribed by weekly bulletins of hydrographic offices, charts of iceberg limits, forecasts of fog areas. No tremendous ships, tuned to the veriest fraction of resistance to disaster, made thousand-mile jumps from channel to channel so surely that variations of minutes in their schedules were matters of comment. When workers went out on ships in those days Divine Providence was not a negligible factor. ”

“ Brief are the obituaries of the common workers of the sea who have essayed too many times the sunny, smiling waterpaths, only to feel at last the sullen stroke of the element they have tempted. For these plebeians of the world's merchant marine there is little money and less ingenuity expended on a wide margin of safety. ”

“ No count is kept of the men who go down in the ships that are lost. The statisticians deal only with commercial values. No bureau in the world finds profit or incentive in keeping count of the thousands of sea-workers who are claimed as toll by the sea we reckon tamed. ”

“ They are not expected to carry luxurious passengers five decks above a sea which they in their crass innocence call a pond; these plebeian workers are expected to carry only cargoes. Furthermore, ships and cargoes can be insured against loss; captains and crews have value only as they labor day by day, and they can always be replaced without loss. ”

“ Most of these older boats have a single collision bulkhead in the bow, as if the theory of probabilities were that in any collision they would do the ramming. Gashed in any spot behind their collision bulkheads, these ships are as helpless as they would be with the hull construction of a ferry-boat. None but the most modern freighters have the "inside skin" or double hull that safeguards the giant steamships of the passenger service. ”

“ Captain William Roberts was her commanding officer; a crew of sixty worked her, and fourteen cattlemen were booked as passengers. The 5,780-ton ship was weeks overdue when the first whisper of disaster came sifting in from the Atlantic. The British steamer Coventry put into Bremen, out of Fernandina, with word that when about five hundred miles southeast of St. John's, Newfoundland, it had one morning passed a life-boat, riding bottom up on the long swell. The name on the stern of the capsized boat was hidden by the water. ”

“ Careful French statisticians compile each year for the "Bureau Veritas" a record of the accidents and losses suffered for a twelvemonth by the merchant marine of all nations from which data are obtainable. ”