Seaman

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

“ Though there may be shades among them, yet the grand distinction between men of the sea and men of the land endures,—it is impossible to confound them together. A seaman is ever so easily amused, so reckless of consequences, so cheerful amid difficulties, so patient under privations. ”

“ Hark to the boatswain's call, the cheering cry, While through the seaman's hand the tackle glides Or schoolboy midshipman that, standing by, Strains his shrill pipe, as good or ill betides, And well the docile crew that skilful urchin guides. ”

“ When a young seaman is first made the master of a ship, and is about to set out upon a voyage which he has never tried before, it is the practice for him to seek some old mariner who has been that way, and to ask him for sailing directions. ”

“ A good SEAMAN is able to make all the various knots, splices, and other arrangements in hempen or wire rope, without which a ship cannot be rigged; he can make a sail, send up or down yards and masts, and do many other things, the sum total of which need several years of steady application to learn, although a good seaman is ever learning. ”

“ Cabin-boy at twelve, ship’s boy at fourteen, ordinary seamen at sixteen, able seaman at seventeen, and cock of the fo’c’sle, infinite ambition and infinite loneliness, receiving neither help nor sympathy, I did it all for myself—navigation, mathematics, science, literature, and what not. ”

“ Still, the point may be raised that only in our actual seafaring are we recognized. We are poor citizens, nomads, who have little part with settled grooves and communal life on shore. The naval seaman is a known figure on the streets. His trim uniform, the cut of his hair, the swing of a muscular figure, his high spirits, are all in part with a stereotyped conception. ”

“ Now, if any young reader thinks he would like to be a sailor, and has been led to believe, from books or otherwise, that a seaman’s life is one of unmitigated pleasure and general jollity, let him induce his father or guardian to place him on a grain, tar, or timber ship bound for Norway or the Baltic. ”

“ I can promise the reader that if he loves ships, if he has a sympathetic interest in that curious composite creature the seaman—who throughout history has been compelled to endure the greatest hardships and deprivations for the benefit of those whose happy fortune it is to live on shore—he will find in the ensuing pages much that will both surprise him and entertain him. ”

“ The duties of the seaman appear to be to obey the master in all lawful matters relating to the navigation of the ship and, to resist enemies, to encourage him in which he may become entitled to prize money under 22 and 23 Car. ”

“ Men, therefore, prefer rather to underrate than to run any risk of overrating themselves.
An ordinary seaman is expected to hand, reef, and steer, under common circumstances, (which includes 'boxing the compass;') to be well acquainted with all the running and standing rigging of a ship; to be able to reeve all the studdingsail gear, and set a topgallant or royal studdingsail out of the top; to loose and furl a royal, and a small topgallant sail or flying jib; and perhaps, also, to send down or cross a royal yard. ”

“ Every day does the seaman, on a voyage, take his observations, to know whereabouts he is; he compares his position with his charts; he considers the direction of the wind, and the set of the current, or tide ”

“ The accomplishments that make the seaman confuse the landsman by their strangeness and intricacy. Indeed, if one wishes to express the extremity of bewilderment, he does so best by the metaphor which describes the sailor’s normal environment. ”

“ A is an Anglo-Saxonism for in or on; as a'board, a'going, &c.
A.B. The rating of Able Seamen on the ship's books: these two letters are often used as an epithet for the person so rated. He must be equal to all the duties required of a seaman in a ship—not only as regards the saying to "hand, reef, and steer," but also to strop a block, splice, knot, turn in rigging, raise a mouse on the main-stay, and be an example to the ordinary seamen and landsmen. ”

“ Coasters, fishermen, or small vessels on short voyages, do not preserve the same rule; but no seaman who has been accustomed to first class ships will object to a strictness as to conversations and laughing, while at day's work, very nearly as great as is observed in a school. ”

“ Every officer and seaman in each vessel was required to perform his duty in getting under way, in making and furling sail, and coming to anchor. Evolutions in reefing, tacking, wearing, scudding, laying to, bending sails, and sending down topmasts, were performed, and each student marked according to his merit. In addition to this, each student was separately examined in problems in seamanship; and his knowledge of the standing and running rigging of a ship, bark, brig, hermaphrodite brig, schooner, and sloop, was tested. ”

“ I can handle a ship in action, and there are one or two men aboard who can assist me; but of the higher mysteries of seamanship and of the art of finding a way over the trackless wastes of ocean, we know nothing. ”

“ He may ask advice, but he must act upon his own account, and is equally answerable for what he does himself, and what he permits to be done on board his vessel by others. The seaman is entitled to be dealt with by his own captain, under whom he shipped, and whom he may hold responsible at the end of the voyage ”

“ They drove the white sails from the face of the sea, drove them to refuge in the skies. And so sweeps the majestic pageant of the ships into the golden age of seamanship. "There shall be no more sea," for man has taken wings to cleave the air. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Let us take an imaginary voyage on a ship in order to see what seamanship is required of her officers and crew. Suppose we board a ship of 3,500 tons, loaded with coal, at Philadelphia, bound for Havana. The voyage is short, but a variety of conditions of weather and of climate will be contended with and the voyage will be a test of seamanship. Remember, however, that such a ship is far different from ships intended for passengers. Heavy weather will dash waves across her decks when the decks of passenger ships will remain entirely dry. ”

“ It is the seamanship that will give him trouble; for to acquire that a long apprenticeship and considerable natural capacity are necessary.
For coasting purposes and for crossing narrow seas such as the Channel, and the North Sea, and even for a voyage to the Baltic, sextants, chronometers, and other instruments of navigation proper are not required, and the following is a complete list of all that is needed for the purpose of finding one’s way. 1. The necessary charts. 2. A mariner’s compass. 3. A parallel rule. 4. A pair of compasses or dividers. 5. A log ship and line. ”

“ The seas, subdued by the progress of navigation to the service of man, had begun to yield their own riches in great abundance; and the whale, seal, herring, cod, and other fisheries, prosecuted with ample capital and hardy seamanship, had become the source of no small traffic in themselves. ”

“ Seamanship, being an art, can be acquired only by practice, and seamen being formerly an all-but-unlettered class, jealous of their calling, wrote no textbooks of their art until Captain John Smith, the famous old adventurer in Virginia, and Sir Henry Mainwayring, of the Elizabethan navy, wrote their treatises on the subject in the early part of the 17th Century. ”

“ The success of their valuable services is evidence of a high degree not only of nautical [Pg 315] skill, judgment, and experience, but of the admirable seamanship displayed under the very unusual conditions of steaming without lights while continuously manœuvring in close formation. ”

“ It is therefore time that we should collect and set forth the ways and customs of a fast-dying race. Seamanship is, of course, a changing quality, but at heart it is less different than one might at first imagine. ”

“ But with the issue of life and death always dependent on sea power, and with so many men of every class following the sea, there was at all events the biggest rough-and-tumble school of practical seamanship that any leading country ever had. ”

“ Practical seamanship and the art of navigation may be acquired on the cruises of the squadrons which from time to time are dispatched to distant seas, but a competent knowledge even of the art of ship building, the higher mathematics, and astronomy ”

“ However, good seamanship and excellent behaviour on the part of the men saved the vessel to perform its present humane duty, and to endure as a type and example of the sort of ship which once maintained our supremacy on all the seas of the world. ”

“ Tower-hill, anno 1631, November 1.'
My edition is the third, 1656; and there hath been one since.
The Seaman's practice, containing a fundamental probleme in navigation experimentally verified, namely, touching the compasse of the earth and sea, and the quantity of a degree, in our English measure; also an exact method or form of keeping a reckoning at sea in any kind or manner of sayling, with certain tables and other rules usefull in navigation ”

“ Specially with regard to ships and navigation, a generation or two ago, vessels in construction and appearance were not only beautiful objects as such, but required also all the skill, foresight, courage, and dexterity which taxes the resources of manhood to the utmost, and forms the basis of true seamanship, for their guidance and control. ”

“ SMALL-HELM. One of the principal results of sound seamanship is the proper trim of the vessel and the sail carried; by which means the action of the rudder is reduced to a minimum, not requiring the tiller to be moved either hard up or hard down. Also used to denote that a turbulent jaw-me-down bully has been brought to his senses by a more vigorous mind.
SMALL SAILS. Top-gallant-studding-sails and the kites.
SMALL STUFF. The term for spun-yarn, marline, and the smallest kinds of rope, even for yarns.
SMART. Ready, active, and intelligent. ”

“ When the ship was in the trough of the sea, you could distinguish nothing but a waste of tumultuous water; but when she was borne up on the summit of the enormous waves, you then looked down, as it were, upon a low, sandy coast, close to you, and covered with foam and breakers. "She behaves nobly," observed the captain, stepping aft to the binnacle, and looking at the compass; "if the wind does not baffle us, we shall weather." ”

“ Untroubled by any foam, so that the ship-boy sees
All the world's water, and thinks his voyage never done:
Some day thou wilt stay thy wings and stoop to land
Where the sea's edge lies sharp like a bright sword,
And hardly break the waves, and sweet is the sand
Where the keel runs home and ships are gently shored.
There sit the solemn seamen, with rings in their brown ears,
Who are grave when they laugh and are not ashamed to weep;
Their hair and their beards are grown long with the long years,
And some are too old and too wise for speaking, and some sleep. ”

“ If you were to see the ship, mother dear, on a calm day, with the sails like birds' white wings, with a deck as clean as this kitchen and the sailors sitting about mending sails and splicing ropes, while the grand albatrosses are flying over us, and shoals of beautiful fish are leaping like deer in the sea--if you were to see it then, you would almost wish you had been a man, so that you might be a sailor. ”

“ We do truly make [Pg 101] the ship our home; we have no other thoughts of professional duty or of happiness but what are connected with the vessel in which we swim; we take a pride in her very looks, as we might in those of a daughter; and bring up her crew to honourable deeds, as we should wish to instruct our sons. The rate of sailing of each ship in a fleet, is a subject of never-ending discussion amongst all classes of the officers, midshipmen, and crews, every one of whom considers his own individual honour involved in all that his ship does, or is capable of doing. ”

“ Merry sailor lads are we,
Upon the sea we go;
Singing quite new-fangled tunes,
And songs of long ago.
As we journey on our way
We sing, “Ye-ho, ye-ho”
While we are sailing the ocean. Chorus.
Away, away, our ship’s a tidy craft,
Away, away, we never stoop to graft ”

“ The sailor who spends his life on the ocean might just as well attempt to awaken enthusiasm for a seafaring life in the minds of inland country-folk, by describing the magnificence of a storm at sea, when the racing waves drive by the ship and the wind shrieks in the rigging, or by telling them of voyages through summer seas when the fresh breezes and the long rolling billows speed the ship on its homeward way through the ever-changing waters. ”

“ A stouter ship was never launched
Of all the Clyde-built whalers;
And forty years of a life at sea
Haven't matched her crowd of sailors.
Picked men they were, all young and strong,
And used to the wildest seas. ”

“ Within a while after we saw men travelling the seas, and a new found manner of navigation, themselves supplying the office both for ship and sailor, and I will tell you how. As they lie upon their backs in the water and their privy members standing upright, which are of a large size and fit for such a purpose, they fasten thereto a sail, and holding their cords in their hands, when the wind hath taken it, are carried up and down as please themselves. ”

“ The sea is flying heavily over the weather rail of the prostrate ship, and adding its peculiar bursting noise to the din of the furiously-shaken canvas, to the deafening booming of the wind, and the hoarse long-drawn cries of the sailors hauling upon the ropes. ”