Merchant seaman

“ 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 [Pg 308] those enjoyments common to all seamen. ”

“ In earlier times the merchant seaman, seeking for trade in new and unexplored regions, made his gains at risk of life and liberty from suspicious or hostile nations, and was under great delays in collecting a full and profitable freight. ”

“ For every Seaman of industry and ingenuity, is not only a Navigator, but a Merchant, and also a Soldier; ”

“ 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. ”

“ I have slightly indicated the manner in which discipline is maintained in American ships, viz. by the employment of violence, which is forbidden by law, yet is invariably winked at. In the ships of every other nation but the English-speaking ones, the merchant seaman is not only a native of the country to which his ship belongs, but he is never free from the environment of naval law ”

“ Few merchant vessels are strongly enough manned to perform these evolutions; but they are often of service, as they turn a vessel round quicker on her heel, and will stop her from fore-reaching when near in shore or when close aboard another vessel. ”

“ 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 ”

“ The native-born American seamen are bold, adventurous, and brave. In their merchant vessels the proportion of native seamen is estimated at about one-third, while it was a common remark that “the rest are rascally Spaniards, surly John Bulls, Zealanders, Malays, anything of any country.” The American native-born seaman is frequently promoted to be an officer, and, sometimes, to the command of large ships, but there are perpetual complaints that the people of the United States do not “take to the sea” with alacrity. ”

“ If the sail-maker ships also for seaman, he must do an able seaman’s duty, if called upon; and if he does not so ship, he will still be required to assist in all-hands work, according to his ability; and in bad weather, or in case of necessity, he may be put with a watch, and required to do ship’s duty with the rest. ”

“ 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, [Pg 177] 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. ”

“ As the vessel draws in towards her anchoring ground, the master gives all the orders as to trimming the yards and taking in sail, and has the entire charge of the man at the helm, it being the mate’s duty only to see that a competent seaman is there. In furling the sails the whole superintendence devolves upon the mate, who sends the men aloft, remaining in his place on deck himself, and giving his orders to them while on the yards as to the manner of furling, and seeing the ropes hauled taut, or let go on deck, as may be necessary. ”

“ Williams, of the Board of Trade, together with Captain Pierce, of the Liverpool Sailors’ Home, all concur in the opinion that the time has arrived when a new seamen’s fund should be established on sound principles under Government supervision, and upon such a basis as shall offer to the seaman a strong and powerful inducement to preserve that test which secures to him substantial maintenance in old age, or when prematurely worn out. ”

“ The maritime nations of Europe have long ago recognized the importance of having some definite record of a seaman's service, some means whereby it could be told at a glance whether he was a sailor or not. So that each French, or German, or Italian sailor has a little book wherein is entered what manner of man he is in appearance, and the date of every shipping and discharge he has experienced during his seafaring career. ”

“ In taking in and making sail, and in all things connected with the working of the vessel, there is no duty which may not be required of an able seaman; yet there are certain things requiring more skill and strength, to which he is always put, and others which are as invariably assigned to ordinary seamen and boys. [425] In reefing, [Pg 529] the able seamen go out to the yard-arms, and the light hands stand in toward the slings; while in furling, the bunt and quarters belong to the able seamen, and the yard-arms to the boys. ”

“ In all-hands work he is mustered with either watch, according to circumstances. He usually lives in the steerage [422] with the carpenter, and always, like him, takes his food from [Pg 525] the galley. He has no command, and when on deck his place is on the forecastle with the rest of the crew. In the work of his trade he too is under the sole direction of the master, or of the chief mate in the master’s absence; and in ship’s work he is as strictly under the command of the mates as is a common seaman. ”

“ Their lives were spent in a ceaseless conflict with the forces of nature and of men. They had to deal with a mutinous crew one day and with a typhoon the next. If by skillful seamanship a piratical schooner was avoided in the reaches of the Spanish Main, the resources of diplomacy Page 36would be taxed the next day to persuade some English or French colonial governor not to seize the cargo that had escaped the pirates. The captain must be a seaman, a sea-soldier, a sea-lawyer, and a sea-merchant, shut off from his principals by space which no electric current then annihilated. ”

“ 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 [Pg 291] 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. ”

“ One thinks of the old merchant marine in terms of the clipper ship and distant ports. The coasting trade has been overlooked in song and story; yet, since the year 1859, its fleets have always been larger and more important than the American deep-water commerce nor have decay and misfortune overtaken them. ”

“ On the other hand, the Mercantile Marine remained, and still remains, individualistic, each merchant ship-owner, or company of ship-owners, building the sort of vessel best adapted to the particular enterprise in hand. Thus we have sailing from our ports, ships of all descriptions, ocean-going liners carrying passengers, cargoes and mails, as well as tramps, colliers, cold-storage vessels, and an infinity of other types. ”

“ The shipping reports of the daily newspaper prove more fascinating than the ticker tape, and the tidings of a successful voyage thrill one with a sense of personal gratification. For the sea has not lost its magic and its mystery, and those who go down to it in ships must still battle against elemental odds—still carry on the noble and enduring traditions of the Old Merchant Marine. ”

“ Then—as later, in the keen sailing days of our clipper ships—their hardest taskmasters were foremast hands, watchmates, the men they lived with and ate with and worked with—bitter critics, unpersuadable, who saw only menace and a threat to their own safety in the shipping of a man who could not do man's work. On the decks and about the spars of a merchant vessel, each man of the few seamen carried two lives—his own and a shipmate's—in his ability to 'hand, reef, and steer.' There was no place on board for a 'waister,' a 'swabber,' longshoreman, or sea labourer. ”

“ The condition of the fetid hole at the beginning of the voyage, with four or five apprentices or green hands deathly sick, the hardened seamen puffing out clouds of tobacco smoke, and perhaps all redolent of rum, was enough to disenchant the most ardent lover of the sea. The food, bad enough in all ages of seafaring, was, in the early days of our merchant marine, too often barely fit to keep life in men's bodies. ”

“ A vessel was a community venture, and the custom still survives in the ancient ports of the Maine coast where the shapely wooden schooners are fashioned. The blacksmith, the rigger, the calker, took their pay in shares. They became part owners, as did likewise the merchant who supplied stores and material; and when the ship was afloat, the master, the mates, and even the seamen, were allowed cargo space for commodities which they might buy and sell to their own advantage. Thus early they learned to trade as shrewdly as they navigated, and every voyage directly concerned a whole neighborhood. ”

“ The golden age of the American merchant marine was that of the square-rigged ship, intricate, capricious, and feminine in her beauty, with forty nimble seamen in the forecastle, not that of the metal trough with an engine in the middle and mechanics sweating in her depths. ”

“ But, if we are insistent in our search, we may borrow from the naval charters, and read that not all the glory of our sea-history lies with the thunder of broadsides and the impact of a close boarding. Engagement with the elements—a contest with powers more cruel and implacable than keen steel—efforts to further able navigation, the standard of our seamanship—drew notable recruits to the humbler sea-life. The small crews and less lavish gear on the freighters brought the essentials of the sea-trade to each individual of the ship's company. ”

“ Instead of enjoying a pleasant spell ashore they would be hurried aboard a King’s ship, to all the miseries of a gun-deck. It was the custom to say that a sailor was better situated on a man-of-war than on a merchant-vessel; that he had better food, better treatment, and better [Pg 123] money. As a matter of fact the merchant-seamen regarded the Royal Navy with dread and loathing. There can be little doubt that the thought of the press-gangs, and the fear of service in the navy, drove many of our best merchant-seamen into American ships, where they were rather less subject to impressment. ”

“ The reward of enterprise might be the discovery of an island in which wild pepper enough to load a ship might be had almost for the asking, or of forests where precious gems had no commercial value, or spice islands unvisited and unvexed by civilization. Every ship-master and every mariner returning on a richly loaded ship was the custodian of valuable information. In those days crews were made up of Salem boys, every one of whom expected to become an East Indian merchant. ”

“ At Norfolk the entire crew of a British merchantman deserted to an American sloop-of-war. A lively trade was done in forged papers of American citizenship, and the British naval officer who gave a boat-load of bluejackets shore leave at New York was liable to find them all Americans when their leave was up. Other nations looked covetously upon our great body of able-bodied seamen, born within sound of the swash of the surf, nurtured in the fisheries, able to build, to rig, or to navigate a ship. They were fighting sailors, too, though serving only in the merchant marine. ”

“ The primary reason for the existence of a merchant ship is, of course, her ability to pay her way and earn money for her owners. When a ship ceases to be able to do this, the sooner she is converted into a hulk or broken up, the better. So the true measure of a nation's merchant marine is its earning capacity, not merely the number or tonnage of its ships; and judged by this standard, the merchant marine of the United States was at this time far in advance of the merchant shipping of the whole British Empire. ”

“ Merchant seamen have always been what they are now, from their earliest days, before the Royal Navy had been fashioned out of the material they furnished for the hands of kings and statesmen. Their work has made them, as work undertaken with single-minded devotion makes men, giving to their achievements that vitality and continuity in which their souls are expressed, tempered and matured through the succeeding generations. In its simplest definition the work of merchant seamen has been to take ships entrusted to their care from port to port across the seas ”