28704	----	FREE SHIPS. THE RESTORATION OF THE AMERICAN CARRYING TRADE BY JOHN CODMAN. NEW YORK G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 182 FIFTH AVENUE 1878 FREE SHIPS. The Restoration of the American Carrying Trade. It may seem surprising that an American House of Representatives should have been so ignorant of the meaning of a common word as to apply the term "commerce" to the carrying trade, when in the session of 1869 it commissioned Hon. John Lynch, of Maine, and his associated committee "to investigate the cause of the decadence of American commerce," and to suggest a remedy by which it might be restored. But, it was not more strange than that this committee really appointed to look into the carrying trade to which the misnomer commerce was so inadvertently applied, should have entirely ignored its duty by constituting itself into an eleemosynary body for the bestowal of national charity upon shipbuilders. Its Report fell dead upon the floor of the House, and was so ridiculed in the Senate that when a motion was made to lay the bill for printing it upon the table, Mr. Davis, of Kentucky, suggested, as an amendment, that it be kicked under it. Nevertheless, the huge volume of irrelevant testimony was published for the benefit of two great home industries--paper making and printing. The theory of this committee was that the Rebellion had destroyed another industry nearly as remote from the proper subject of inquiry as either of these. These gentlemen concluded that shipbuilding was becoming extinct, because the Confederate cruisers had destroyed many of our ships--a reason ridiculously absurd, in view of the corollary that the very destruction of those vessels should have stimulated reproduction. Since that abortive attempt to steal bounties from the Treasury for the benefit of a favored class of mechanics, Government, occupied with matters deemed of greater importance, has totally neglected our constantly diminishing mercantile marine. By refusing to repeal the law that represses it, it may truly be said that had every ingenuity been devised to accomplish its destruction, its tendency to utter annihilation could not have been more certainly assured than it has been by this obstinate neglect. In the session of 1876, Senator Boutwell of Massachusetts renewed the proposition of Mr. Lynch, but his Bill was not called up in the Senate. In the course of intervening years a little more light may be presumed to have dawned upon Congress, and, therefore, it is to be regretted that the Senator did not obtain a hearing, in order that the fallacy of his argument might have been exposed. If any one cares to study the origin of our restrictive navigation laws, he can consult a concise account of it given by Mr. David A. Wells, in the _North American Review_, of December, 1877. It came out of a compromise with slavery. The Northern States agreed that slavery should be "fostered"--that is a favorite word with protectionists--provided that shipbuilding should also be fostered, and that New England ships--for nearly all vessels were built in that district--should have the sole privilege of supplying the Southern market with negroes! That sort of slavery being now happily at an end, shipbuilders still inherit the spirit of their guild, merely transferring the wrong they perpetrated on black men by binding all their white fellow citizens with the bonds of their odious monopoly. Moreover, although the arbitrary law of the mother country forcing the colonists to conduct their commerce in British built ships was one exciting cause of the Revolutionary Rebellion, Americans had no sooner obtained their independence than they created a monopoly quite as tyrannical among themselves. And yet, they were not then without excuse. At the time when the Convention for forming the Federal Constitution convened in 1789, every civilized nation was exercising a similar restrictive policy. But while all of them have either totally abolished or materially modified their stringent laws touching their shipping interests--America, "the land of the free," the boasting leader of the world's progress and enlightenment, stands alone sustaining this effete idea. She persists in maintaining an ordinance devised originally for the protection of the home industry of her shipbuilders, which has now become a most stalwart protection for the industry of every foreign shipowner whom we encourage in the transportation of our persons and property over the ocean--an industry in which this law forbids a similar class of her own citizens to participate! Whatever may be the arguments in favor of, or opposed to, the protection of industries under the control of our own Government, none of them can apply to those pursued upon an area which is the common property of the world. It is a proposition so evident that no words need be wasted in its demonstration, that, other things being equal, the cheapest and best ships, most adapted for the purpose, by whomsoever owned, will have preference in the carrying trade over the ocean. You may pile the duty, for instance, on iron, and grant bounties on the production of the American article if you please, to any extent; you may, if you choose, prohibit the importation of ploughs, and then assess farmers ten times the cost of their ploughs for the benefit of the home manufacturer. You would undoubtedly succeed in compelling them to purchase American ploughs. They must have them or starve, and we should all starve likewise if they did not use those protected ploughs to cultivate the soil. Indeed, in a less exaggerated way we are doing something very like this continually under the guise of "protecting home industry." It is a legitimate business for the advocates of that doctrine. If they believe in it they are quite right in "trying it on," and in making the people at large pay as much as can possibly be got out of them for the benefit of a few. But fortunately they cannot build a Chinese wall around the country. We are necessitated to have intercourse with other nations. We have a surplus of agricultural products to dispose of to them which they cannot pay for unless to a certain extent we take the merchandise they offer in exchange. This exchange, with all due respect to Mr. Lynch, his committee and the House of Representatives appointing those astute investigators, is commerce. The carrying trade is the means whereby commerce is conducted, and this carrying trade, an industry once of vastly greater importance to our people than all shipbuilding has been, is now, or ever can be, is a business that Congress by its supine neglect has deliberately thrown into the hands of Europeans, and sacrificed American shipowners at the instigation of American shipbuilders. In face of the prosperity achieved in consequences of the abandonment of a ruinous system by other nations, in face of the lamentable decadence its maintenance has brought upon ourselves, we still persist in packing this Sindbad of prohibition, the worst offspring of protection, upon our back, and then we wonder that we alone make no progress! Certain political economists are in the habit of raking up records of the past wherewith to justify their theories for the present age. They tell us of England's protective laws in Cromwell's time, and say that as by them she then established her mercantile marine, we should endeavor to regain what we have lost, by a return to the policy of that period, from which by the by, we have varied only in a small degree. Upon the same principle we should abandon steam, which, like the progress made by our competitors, in free trade, is merely another improvement in the train of advancing civilization. When such men talk of the steamship enterprises which have triumphed in spite of their antediluvian ideas, they tell us that England supported the Cunard line by subsidies, and thus put her shipbuilding on a firm basis. The inference is that we should go back to 1840, build some 1200 ton wooden paddle steamers and subsidize them. That this is no idle supposition is shown by the fact that long after England had abandoned that class of vessels in favor of iron screw steamships, we did build and subsidize the unwieldly tubs, some of which are still in the employment of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company. We became the laughing stock of the rest of the world who classed us with the Chinese, and our steamships with Chinese junks. The Japanese just emerged from barbarism exceeded us in enterprise. They now own one line of fifty-seven steamships, more of them engaged in foreign trade than all the steamships we thus employ upon the ocean! At a late day we did commence the use of iron screw steamships of such description and at such cost as one or two domestic ship-yards chose to supply, and thus we were as far from resisting competition as ever. Now, if there was no ocean traffic of which we should be deprived, the hardship to our shipowners would be comparitively trifling, although the tax upon ships of inferior workmanship and higher cost would, like all the operations of the tariff, be felt by the community at large. This is evident enough. The Pacific Mail Steamship Company, for example, in order to pay expenses, to say nothing of profits, are obliged to charge a higher fare to passengers, to exact higher rates of freight from shippers and to demand a larger postal contract from government than they could afford to take, if by being allowed to supply themselves with ships in the cheapest markets of the world and of the best quality that competing shipyards could turn out, they might save one-third of their cost and have better steamers. If, therefore, we had only the coasting trade to consider, we might say that the prohibitory statute would not pinch the shipowner particularly, but its evil would be generally distributed. We are actually carrying on the coasting trade in this way, and as it is all that shipowners have left, of necessity they oblige the community to pay them the excess of cost in order that protection may inure to the benefit of the few monopolists who build iron steamships and are able to force the quality and price upon their unwilling purchasers. We can, and do without considering the pockets of the majority, make whatever laws we please for our own coasting trade. But now let us look at the ocean rolling from continent to continent, unfettered by the chains with which "protection" can bind the lands and coasts upon its borders appropriated by nations to themselves. It is independent of an American tariff and of them all, as it was in the days when-- "It rolled not back when Canute gave command." It welcomes the people of all nations on equal terms to its bosom, and Commerce is the swift-winged messenger ever travelling from shore to shore. Look at it, and if our eyes could scan it all at once, we should see the smoke darkening the air as it rises from hundreds of chimneys, telling of fires that make the steam for propelling the mighty engines that bring the great leviathans of commerce almost daily into our ports and into those whom we supply and by whom we are supplied with the products of mutual labor. The flags of all nations are at their peaks--the British, German, Dutch, Danish, Belgian, French--but among the three hundred and more there are only four that carry the stars and stripes, and these were put afloat mainly at the cost of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company. Three hundred steamships, employing fifty thousand men earning a million and a half of dollars monthly; these men supporting and educating families, and themselves becoming reserves for their respective countries to call upon for naval service in time of war! Look at the ports from which these vessels wherever built, now hail, and which they enrich by the capital they distribute. Behold the warehouses, repairing shops, foundries, and other various industries connected with these enterprises, and the shipowners engaged in promoting them pursuing a legitimate business. Then look at home. First calculate the sum of one hundred and thirty millions of dollars that has been annually paid by us to those foreigners for transporting ourselves and our merchandise. Then go back in memory to the time when in the days of sailing ships, our packets almost monopolized the ocean on account of the skill of our officers and seamen. Reflect that if a policy of ordinary foresight had prevailed in our national councils when these sailing ships were killed off by the competition of the newly-invented iron screw, their old commanders and their noble crews would have kept their employment, and as they died would have been succeeded by men as worthy as themselves, adding to our revenue in time of peace, and, when needed, supplying a navy now maintained at an immense expense--God save the mark!--for the protection of an extinct merchant service! See how few American steamship offices, how few repairing shops we have need of for these foreigners, who employ their own agents instead of our merchants, and naturally endeavor to do all the work required upon their vessels at home. Then search for the American shipowners engaged in trade beyond the seas. Look for them in their deserted counting-rooms of South street, in New York. As their old captains have retired in poverty and are begging for such offices as that of inspector or port warden, or for same subordinate place in the Custom-House, while the seamen are mostly dead with none to come after them, so South street is abandoned by its honorable merchants, who have, in too many cases, moved up to Wall street, and become gamblers by being deprived of their original business. When you have done all this, finish up your investigation by estimating how much sooner the rebellion might have been overcome, if in years past we had owned our share of the world's shipping, and multiply the $130,000,000 of freight money we annually pay to foreigners by the number of years we have been engaged in this suicidal policy of protecting them in earning money that of right belonged to our own people! Having sketched this result of American legislation, let us glance at that of other nations in late years for it is as useless to dwell upon what it was a century or two centuries ago as it would be to study the navigation laws of the Phoenicians, or to inquire if Solomon exacted that the ships bringing his spices from India and his gold from Ophir should be of Jewish construction. Old things did not pass away and all things did not fairly become new until the discovery of gold in California and Australia revolutionized values, created universal national intercourse, and by thus giving a sudden impetus to commerce, made the carrying trade an industry of far greater importance than it had ever been before. At that epoch, our restrictive laws were productive of no harm to us, because it so happened that most of the business of the seas was done in wooden sailing ships, and it also happened, fortunately for us, that we had the faculty and the means of constructing them better and cheaper than they could be produced elsewhere. Accordingly our shipyards became wonderfully active in supplying the demands of our shipowners, and the _personnel_ as well as the material of our merchant fleet being of the highest character, it was consequently in active employment. In the ratio of the increasing value of our carrying trade there was a corresponding decrease in that of Great Britain, simply because her restrictive laws, which were the same then as ours are now, prevented her people from owning such magnificent clippers as we were able to build, on equal terms with us. But British statesmen were not inattentive to the situation. They wasted no time in appointing committees to investigate the cause of the difficulty, for it was as clear to them as the noonday sun, as clear as the occasion of our "decadence" should have been to the House of Representatives that appointed Mr. Lynch--as clear as it should be to the Congress now assembled. Parliament deputed no half dozen of its members to spend six months in running around among shipbuilders, asking them what bounty they required to build clippers like the Americans, and how long it would take them to equal American shipbuilders in skill, material and cost. But, realizing that the interests of commerce and ship owning were of infinitely greater value than that of mere shipbuilding, they did not propose to lose them, while the latter industry should endeavor to gain a new life. Regardless of any such consideration as that which solely actuated our investigators, Parliament at once abolished the prohibition to purchase foreign built ships. The greatest good of the greatest number was the motive of this wise decision. As soon as they were thus allowed to do so, English shipowners ordered clippers from our shipyards, and putting them into profitable employment under their own flag, kept on with their business, sharing with us the supremacy of the seas, which but for the timely action of their government they would inevitably have lost. In this way they maintained it until there came a new era in shipbuilding, when circumstances becoming reversed, their mechanics were enabled to accomplish what ours could not, in the construction of iron screw steamships. Had Congress then been as wise as Parliament was in 1849, our shipowners would, in their turn, have maintained their prestige by supplying themselves from abroad with the new vehicles of commerce they could not procure at home, and we should never have heard of "decadence." Instead of such obviously judicious action, it has done nothing but condemn us year after year to enforced idleness in the name of "protection." So we have endeavored to compete with these new motors on the sea by means of wooden sailing ships and paddle steamers, until they are of service only in our coastwise monopoly or rotting at the docks, if not broken up. We have gone on steadily protecting ourselves to death, and protecting England and Germany, the chief of our rivals, to life at our own expense of vitality. England's justice to her shipowners, which at first seemed harshness to her shipbuilders, was eventually the means of their prosperity. It set them to "finding out knowledge of witty inventions," and now they have one hundredfold the capital invested and labor employed in iron steamship building, more than ever found occupation in their old shipyards. In a recent address before the New York Free Trade Club, Mr. Frothingham humorously described a visit made by him a few years ago to the studio of an artist. He found him seated in despair, amidst a gallery of his unfinished pictures, his pallet, brushes and colors scattered about upon the floor, complaining bitterly of his lack of business. "This importation of French pictures," he said, "is ruin to American artists. Something must be done for our protection; we intend to get Congress to raise the tariff on those productions so that we shall not have to contend with the cheap labor that takes the bread out of our mouths." It may be noticed that this common phrase is very generally employed by those who are too lazy to supply their own mouths with bread. "Something," added the desponding artist, "must positively be done, and that very soon, or our occupation will be gone!" "I thought," said Mr. Frothingham, "that I could more easily convince him of his mistake by entering for the time into his humor, and so with apparently deep sympathy, I condoled with him and promised to exert my influence in behalf of his profession. He thanked me heartily for my good will. But then I continued, "I want you to do something for me and for my profession in return." "How can I!" exclaimed my friend with some amazement. "Why," I replied, "We must get up what they call an omnibus bill, including relief for painters and preachers. Don't you know that one of the Presbyterian churches in New York, has imported, duty free, the Rev. Dr. Taylor from England, another, the Rev. Dr. Hall, from Ireland, and the Princeton Theological Seminary has brought over, without Custom House charges, the Rev. Dr. McCosh from Scotland? Now that is "taking the bread out of our mouths." There are plenty of American clergymen who would be glad to obtain these positions, and what right, therefore, have those congregations and that institution to supply themselves from abroad? The wants of the people ought not to be considered, but an art monopoly, a pulpit monopoly, a monopoly of any kind should be protected." In a style of satirical reasoning, of which the foregoing is an abstract, conviction was brought to the mind of the painter. Changing his tone to one of serious advice, the clergyman counselled him to go to work, to let competition become an incentive to action, instead of paralysing his energy. He then told him how the advent of these foreign divines had been a stimulus to him and to his brethren in the ministry. The result was that to-day there is a higher standard of pulpit eloquence in New York than in any other city of the Union. The lecture of the preacher was serviceable to the artist who is now at the head of his profession, caring no more for French rivalry than for that of a tavern sign painter. The appositeness of this illustration will be evident when it is applied to the subject under consideration. Almost immediately after the repeal of the British Navigation Laws the revolution in shipbuilding to which I have referred had its commencement, and we have seen how British shipowners availed themselves of it. Nor were they alone in adopting the change from sail to steam and from wood to iron. We can remember what a large trade we had with Germany twenty-five years ago, although it was small compared with that of the present. At that time it was chiefly conducted in American vessels. But when iron steamships came into vogue, wooden vessels, both American and German, were abandoned. If we had been permitted to do so, we should have still kept the greater part of that important carrying trade in our hands. But we were shackled by our navigation laws, while the Germans were unconstrained by any such impediment. The _personnel_ of our mercantile marine was, in every respect, superior to theirs, but it was consigned to annihilation by our protective government; while Hamburg and Bremen took their old galliot skippers in hand and educated them to the responsible places they now fill in command of the splendid lines of iron steamships, making their semi-weekly trips across the Atlantic, having absolutely monopolized the whole American trade! Thus our government protected the Germans as well as the English. By citing other examples, we might show how the "fostering" hand of protection has been extended by our government to every nation choosing to trade upon the necessities of prohibited Americans. Now, if the United States persist in maintaining a policy long since abandoned by Europeans, South American and Asiatic nations, even by Japan, leaving us only China as a companion, there must surely be some arguments to support it, and to account in some other way than has been pointed out for the decadence of our carrying trade. It was the theory of Mr. Lynch's committee that we were going on very successfully until the civil war supervened, and then the Confederate cruisers destroyed our "commerce," as they termed the industry we have lost. If this is not disposed of by what I have already said, permit me to quote from my scrap-book an extract from a letter addressed by me to the New York _Journal of Commerce_, in the spring of 1857, _nearly four years previous to the commencement of the rebellion_: "In an article, written some months since, it was assumed that steam was destined to be the great moving power for emigration, and that it would supplant, almost entirely, the use of sails. Experience is every day justifying this view, and still more, it is becoming evident that in proportion as steam can be economized, it will serve for the transportation of very much of the merchandise now carried by sailing vessels. In fact, the time is not far distant when the latter class of ships will be required only for articles of great bulk and comparatively little value. "The only question now is, who are to be the gainers by this revolution in navigation? Figures are very convincing arguments to American minds. Let us use them: In January last it was stated that less than eighteen years have elapsed since the first steamship propelled wholly by steam crossed the Atlantic; and now there are fourteen lines of steamers, comprising forty-eight vessels, plying between Europe and America."[A] Upon looking into this with a view to test its correctness, it was found to be within the truth; for, including transient steamers, the number was greater than stated. And it incidentally appeared that of them all, there were but seven under the American flag--all seven, side wheel ships--and, on the average, unprofitable, even with the support of government, upon which they leaned." [Footnote A: In twenty-one years the number of our transatlantic steamships has decreased from seven to four, while those under foreign flags have increased two hundred and fifty.] Maintaining then, as now, that the screw must supersede the side-wheel for all purposes, excepting perhaps those of mail carriage, and that iron screw steamers are, in all commercial respects, preferable to wood steamers, the argument was adduced that England, being able to construct this class of vessels more economically than we can, must of necessity have the monopoly of building them. Her monopoly, in this respect, we cannot prevent; but it depends upon ourselves and our government whether she shall share with us the monopoly of owning and sailing them. I have taken a bold, and it may be, _apparently_, an unpatriotic stand, in assuming that the only way in which we can participate in ocean steam navigation is by adopting a system of reciprocity with England in so changing our laws that we may buy her steamers as she now buys our sailing ships, because she finds it for her interest to do so." These views, _entertained twenty-one years ago_, were applicable then. They have been applicable ever since--they are applicable now. They have been the staple of all that I have ever written on the subject before the war, during the war, and since its termination. Iron steamship building was in its infancy in 1857. Its great development was merely coincident with our civil war. That war was a horrid nightmare. We found that our navigation interests, with many other things we could ill afford to lose, the lives of hundreds of thousands of our young men, vast sums of our money, and not a little of our morality, were gone. Those lives can never be restored, while our money may be regained, and it is to be hoped our morality may be improved, but as to our ships, we simply refuse to replace them with those that are better. One argument in opposition to free ships is founded upon the injustice that would be done to our shipbuilders. Were this true, it might be said that ship-owners and the general public have some rights that shipbuilders are bound to respect. The interests of our whole people are paramount to theirs as were those of the English people in 1849, when the proportion of their shipbuilders was greatly beyond that of ours at this day. In point of fact, however, the suffering of our shipbuilders by the repeal of the navigation laws, would, from the first, be scarcely appreciable, and, in the end, would be more than compensated by increased business. It would matter very little either to the builders of wooden vessels or to the public if that provision of the statute which touches that department, and which really was intended for that alone, should be repealed or not. Our mechanics build mainly for the coasting trade, and they build wooden vessels so good, and at such low prices, on account of the material at their hands, that there is little danger of any competition with them on the part of foreigners. We never had any reason, and probably never shall have, to fear the rivalry of other nations in this particular line of business. So long as it constituted the only method of construction, as we have seen, England found her advantage in coming to our market for her ships. Therefore, what Congress does, or neglects to do, regarding this branch of shipbuilding, is of very small moment. Our wants do not lie in that direction. The iron screw steamship is now the great and profitable carrier upon the ocean, and all we care to ask is the privilege to avail ourselves of this "survival of the fittest." Whence then comes the opposition to what should be the inalienable right of an American citizen to own the best ship that he can buy with his own money? Naturally, from the few iron shipbuilders in this country, the chief of whom happens to be an Irishman. I would not be understood as speaking disrespectfully of his nationality, for I am aware that our political machinery depends very much upon the votes of his countrymen for its running order. Nevertheless we do object to this perpetual cry of the "Protection of Home Industry" which simply means the protection of Mr. John Roach at the cost of the forty million citizens whom he has adopted. This personal allusion is unavoidable. Mr. Roach is omnipresent in the lobbies of Congress, and by his persuasive blarney exerts an undue influence there. Withal he is my personal friend, and I have often had occasion to compliment him upon the ingenuity of his appeals. When we approach Congress with the modest request to be allowed to buy ships where we can do so upon the most satisfactory terms, Mr. Roach is always on hand to give assurance that it is needless for us to go abroad, for by his skill and his labor-saving processes he is able to supply us with all the ships we require cheaper than they can be bought upon the Clyde. Again when there is a subsidy bill before the Senate or House, our versatile friend is equally ready to go down upon his knees as a beggar, telling Congress that the only way to regain our ocean prestige is to subsidize the companies from whom he expects to get orders, as otherwise they cannot compete with the "pauper labor" of the country he has abandoned. In either case, as will be readily seen, the object is to have us contribute to the prosperity of Mr. Roach. With pride the iron shipbuilders of the Delaware point to the increase of their business, infinitesimal as it is, compared to the ever multiplying production of British shipyards. But whence does this increase arise? From the demand of our people for carrying grain, cotton and other products to Europe, and bringing back merchandise therefrom in competition with the great fleet of foreign steamers to whom we have given the monopoly of that business? By no means. It will be found upon critical enquiry that every one of our home-built iron steamers, excepting two or three in the W. India business, is built for our coastwise trade or for some line that had been subsidized. Even the three or four ships belonging to what is called the "American Line," running between Philadelphia and Liverpool, may be said to be subsidized, as without an entire remission of taxes from the State and the aid of the Pennsylvania Railroad, they could not have been put afloat. Now, why cannot American shipbuilders compete on equal terms with those of Great Britain? That they cannot is evident from the fact that they do not; for it would be unreasonable to suppose that the ability to sail ships, on the part of our seamen, vanished with the departure of wooden vessels. It is true that we need a revision of other maritime laws besides those under discussion, but it is sufficient now to say that we cannot prove our ability to sail ships unless we are permitted to own the ships we desire to sail. Ships are but the tools of commerce, and if we have not the tools we cannot do the work. Foreign mechanics cannot sell us these tools; our own mechanics cannot provide them; therefore the workmen of the sea are idle. If one of Mr. Roach's theories is correct, if he can build steamships cheaper and better than those we desire to buy, why does he object to the introduction of an article that can do him no harm? If the other is true, and undoubtedly it is, that he cannot build the ships that are needed without the aid of a bounty or a subsidy, what then? Manifestly, unless the prohibition to purchase such ships is removed, it being the duty of Congress to protect the individual interests of Mr. Roach and his confreres by subsidies, equal justice demands that every person as well as every company who is forced to come to them for ships, should be subsidized to the extent of the difference of the cost of a ship in the United States, and that in the country where they are most advantageously built, and this difference is at least twenty-five per cent. Call it rather more or rather less as we please, but a vast difference is on all hands acknowledged, and the fact of our non-production proves it. The shipbuilders have already had exceptional legislation by a considerable remission of duties in their favor. But it is not enough. In order to compete successfully with foreigners, they should obtain the repeal of all duties which make their daily life so much more expensive to them than it is to their fellow craftsmen in Scotland. But having already more protection than any other class of mechanics, they have scarcely the presumption to demand any partiality to that extent. Another, and a more forcible reason for their lack of success is that there has been no competition in the importation of ships to stir them to exertion. Had there been, the first difficulty might more readily be overcome. The illustration used by Mr. Frothingham already given, applies with greater force to ship building than to any other industry. The importation of ships is absolutely prohibited, whereas that of all other articles is either free or accompanied by a duty. And it is worthy of notice that the smaller the duty on whatever is introduced, the greater is the constantly improving skill of our domestic manufacturers in its production. As an argument against free ships, opponents of the measure a few years since circulated and placed on the desks of members of Congress, a lithographed drawing. It represented among other things the destruction of our vessels by the _Alabama_, and a personal caricature, the compliment of which it does not become me to more than acknowledge. Its chief ground was occupied by starving mechanics, standing listlessly around deserted ship-yards and machine-shops. There was some truth in this part of the picture. There was no reason why mechanics should starve at that time when a common laborer obtained from two to three dollars per day for his work, but there was a reason for the abandonment of wooden ship-yards and old-fashioned machine-shops. Wooden ships were no longer in demand at home or abroad, and the world had discovered better machinery to propel better ships. As an offset to this pictorial argument, another might have been introduced, exhibiting in the background the mere blacksmiths' shops of the free cities of Hamburg and Bremen, as they existed before the era of iron steamship building, and in the front the subsequent appearance of great workshops and foundries, first built for the purpose of keeping in repair the fleet of steamships bought by unhampered Germans to do our American carrying trade, and afterwards kept in more active employment, by the ability their workmen have since acquired to supply their home market with steamers of their own construction. The advocates of subsidies have committed a grievous error in arguing that postal contracts, given to one or more steamship companies, will tend to a revival of shipbuilding for public benefit. It is evident, on the contrary, that those ships, a part of whose cost is defrayed by National bounty, would be run as monopolies against individuals who have no such charitable aid. A subsidy given for the protection or the assistance of shipbuilders is a downright robbery of the people's purse. There can be no question about the propriety of giving a proper compensation to steamship companies who carry the mails. They ought to be paid as liberally as railroad or stage-coach companies, according to the miles they traverse and the difficulties they surmount. Their true policy is first to advocate a measure whereby they can be supplied with the best ships for their purposes in the cheapest markets of the world, not only because in ordinary traffic they can thus better compete with rivals under foreign flags, but because they can better afford to accept a moderate compensation from our government for carrying its mails. Mr. Charles S. Hill of New York, has recently published a pamphlet of elaborate statistics, his object being to prove that Great Britain has protected not only her commerce, but her shipbuilding, by subsidies. In one respect he is right. By liberal payment for the carriage of her mails she has indirectly fostered commerce in maintaining regular postal intercourse. But there is not the slightest evidence to show that she paid out her public money to encourage either private shipbuilding or ship owning. In England each of these industries stands by itself, and is able to maintain itself. All that either of them asks, and all that they both receive, is liberty. It is this, and this alone, that has given them their overshadowing success. _It is the want of it, and only the want of this great element of prosperity, that has brought upon them in the United States the oft-lamented "decadence."_ In this one sentence the whole story may be read. In giving her postal contracts, England never enquires where the ships that carry the mails are built. It is sufficient that under her flag they perform their work. It was only the other day that a British subsidized line on the coast of South America, bought the steamers of a bankrupt French line, put them under the British flag, and went on with their accustomed regularity in carrying the mails--all that was required at their hands. Now, if any of the companies who are seeking for postal contracts from our government are to have their proposals acceded to, it should be with the express proviso that they and all of us may be provided with the best and cheapest ships wherever they can be obtained, as in this way the public and individuals can be most profitably and advantageously served. I have observed in the preceding pages, that the reason why our American shipbuilders are unable to compete with those upon the Clyde is, in a great measure, owing to the fact that a high tariff, making it more costly for mechanics to live, necessitates the demand, on their part, for higher wages. In the construction of an iron steamship, as will be seen in reading a communication herewith presented, the labor may be estimated at 27-1/2 per cent. of the total cost. The writer, of course, means to be understood as speaking of the labor in putting the ship together, having the material in shape of angle iron, plates, &c., &c., already prepared. If the labor from the time of extracting the iron from the mines, reducing it to ore, and working it up from thence to the shape required by the shipbuilder, had been included, nearly the whole cost of the ship would be comprehended under that term. Indeed, in working out this problem, we ought actually so to consider it. It will be seen that the difference in the cost of labor, even in its depressed condition in this country, without taking the higher cost of materials into account, is so great as to absolutely preclude any attempt at equality upon our part, notwithstanding what may be said to the contrary by Mr. Roach, when it suits his convenience to boast of his ability to compete with foreign shipbuilders. At Dumbarton, I once carefully went over the books of Messrs. Wm. Denny & Brothers, a member of whose firm, Mr. James Denny, now furnishes me with some statistics. It was found that to build the _Parthia_, a Cunard steamship of 3,000 tons, 162,500 days' labor was required; I mean with the materials already prepared. Now, although the figures given in the tables below ought to be convincing at a glance, it is easy for any one with an ordinary knowledge of arithmetic, to make a close calculation of the labor difference in cost of British and American steamships _of the same quality_. I do not deny that a teakettle may be cheaply rivetted together anywhere. Naturally, in this line of argument, I shall be met by the oft-repeated question: "Do you then advocate the reduction of the wages of our mechanics to the level of 'pauper labor' in Scotland?" By no means but while explicitly in favor of such free trade in general as will make a dollar go as far in the United States as four shillings now go in Great Britain, I maintain that in the particular industry of ship owning, so long as the necessity for higher wages is imposed upon us, we ought to avail ourselves of any labor, "pauper" or otherwise, by which steamships are built, because other nations are so doing and are prosecuting for their manifest advantage this vastly more important business upon the ocean, which we are forbidden to engage in, because we cannot build ships. The homely illustration at the close of the parable on the concluding page, is certainly applicable. We are not allowed to whittle, because we cannot make jack-knives. On the other hand, my friend Mr. Roach will, if he is not engaged for the moment in asking for subsidies for the very reasons I have just adduced, most confidently assert that, on account of the superiority of his machinery, and the energy of his workmen, attained by "breathing the pure air of liberty," he can overcome all the difference in wages, that he has already done so, and that he "can now build steamships cheaper and better than they can be built upon the Clyde." Mr. Denny sends the following memorandum under date of February 5th, 1878: "_Prices of steamers of various sizes similar to those at present employed in the Atlantic passenger trade._ 1st, 2,000 gross tons, speed on trial, 13 knots, cost £44,000 2d, 3,000 " " 13-3/4 " " 62,000 3d, 4,000 " " 14-3/4 " " 96,000 4th, 5,000 " " 16 " " 147,500 The whole of these prices include the builders' profit, which has been put down at the usual one we expect for our work. I enclose rates of payment our men get while employed on time, but our boiler-platers work almost wholly by the piece. Also rates paid to men in the ship-yard while on time, but this system of payment has been almost entirely abandoned there in favor of piece work, which you may safely say reduces the cost of labor from ten to twenty per cent., as compared with time work. However, for such of them as are employed on time, the rates I give you are correct. In the foregoing prices of ships I have given you, you may say that 27-1/2 per cent. of the total cost at present price of materials may be put down against labor, but of course this will vary as the prices of materials vary. _Rates of wages paid on Clyde to men employed in the manufacture of iron ships--apprentices excluded_: d. Carpenters 7 Joiners 7-1/4 Blacksmiths 6-1/2 Platers 6-1/2 Rivetters 5-3/4 Laborers 3-3/4 Angle iron-smiths 6-1/4 Riggers 6-3/4 Hammer-men 4-1/4 Holders up 4-1/4 _Rates of wages paid on Clyde to men employed in the manufacture of marine engines and boilers--apprentices excluded_: d. Smiters 6.6 Strikers or hammer-men 4.23 Angle iron-smiths 6.5 Boiler platers 7.07 Rivetters and caulkers 6.23 Holders up 4.7 Iron turners 6.47 Iron finishers 6.10 Engine fitters and erectors 6.16 Planing machinists 5.64 Shaping 5.17 Slotting 5.3 Drilling 4.9 Pattern-Makers 7.53 Carpenters 7 Joiners 5.5 Engine-drivers 4.55 Ordinary laborers 4 _N. B._--The above are the average rates of each class of men as detailed, and the rates given are the amount paid in pence and in fractions or decimals of pence per hour. Fifty-one hours constitute a working week. Boiler-platers work mostly by the piece, but the rates given are those paid when they are on time. January, 1878." I have endeavored in vain to procure from Mr. Roach his corresponding prices of steamships and labor rates. The nearest approach to the latter has been obtained from the Secretary of the New York Free Trade Club, who has handed me a note under date of February 7th, from a well known iron ship and engine building firm of New York. They enclose their tariff of wages with those remarks: "In regard to shipyards, you know there is no such thing around New York any more, but I give you such rates as we are now paying. We are building three small iron steamers at present. "In regard to rates of wages, compared with Wilmington and Chester, they are about 8 to 10 per cent. under us." RATES OF WAGES IN SHIPYARD. Carpenters $2 50 @ $2 75 Joiners 2 50 @ 3 00 Blacksmiths 2 10 @ 2 75 Platers 2 25 @ 2 75 Rivetters 2 10 @ 2 50 Angle iron-smiths 2 00 @ 2 20 Hammer-men 2 00 @ 2 25 Holders up 1 60 @ 1 75 Riggers 2 00 @ 2 50 Laborers 1 40 @ 1 50 ENGINE AND BOILER WORKS. Carpenters $2 50 @ $2 75 Joiners 3 00 Hammer men 2 00 @ 2 25 Smiters 1 50 Angle iron smiths 2 00 @ 2 25 Boiler platers 2 25 @ 2 75 Rivetters and caulkers 2 10 @ 2 50 Holders up 1 60 @ 1 75 Iron turners 2 25 @ 2 75 Iron finishers 2 50 @ 3 00 Engine fitters and erectors 2 50 @ 3 00 Planing machinists 2 25 @ 2 75 Shaping " 2 25 @ 2 75 Slotting " 2 25 @ 2 75 Pattern makers 2 75 @ 3 25 Engine drivers 2 25 @ 2 75 Laborers 1 40 @ 1 50 Having quoted both these lists, their data will now be arranged in a tabular form, so that the difference in the cost of labor employed on the Clyde and on the Delaware will be at once apparent. For this purpose, the Scotch prices are reduced to American money, one pound sterling being represented by five dollars currency, and the hourly pay multiplied by ten, to make a day's work. An average is made of the wages paid in New York, and 10 per cent., the largest allowance mentioned by the New York firm, is deducted from the average prices paid by them, resulting in the rates upon the Delaware. COMPARATIVE TABLE. _Shipyards._ Labor on the Clyde. Labor on the Delaware. Carpenters, per day, 10 hours, $1 40 $2 36 Joiners, " " 1 45 2 48 Blacksmiths, " " 1 30 2 18 Platers, " " 1 30 2 25 Rivetters, " " 1 15 2 07 Laborers, " " 75 1 31 Angle iron-smiths, " " 1 25 1 89 Riggers, " " 1 35 2 03 Hammer-men " " 85 1 91 Holders up " " 85 1 51 _Engine and Boiler Works._ Smiters, per day, 10 hours, $1 32 $1 35 Hammer-men, " " 85 1 91 Angle iron-smiths, " " 1 30 1 91 Boiler-platers, " " 1 41 2 25 Riveters and caulkers, " " 1 25 2 07 Holders up, " " 94 1 51 Iron turners, " " 1 29 2 25 Iron Finishers, " " 1 20 2 48 Engine fitters and erectors, " " 1 23 2 47 Planing machinists " " 1 13 2 25 Shaping " " " 1 03 2 25 Slotting " " " 1 06 2 25 Pattern makers, " " 1 51 2 70 Carpenters, " " 1 40 2 36 Joiners, " " 1 10 2 70 Engine drivers, " " 91 2 25 Laborers, " " 80 1 31 There are two horns to the dilemma, either of which Mr. Roach may lay hold of, but he cannot swing on a pivot between them. If he accepts these figures, or anything approaching them,--and the fact that the ocean is covered by foreign built ships to the exclusion of his own is proof of their correctness,--he may go on asking for a bounty on every ton he builds equivalent to the difference in cost. Will he get it? No! If, on the contrary, he chooses to repeat his assertion that his ships cost less than those built in Scotland, what inference is naturally drawn? Simply, that his ships are too cheap to be good. Whatever position he may take, Section 21st of the new Tariff Bill meets every just demand of the ship owner whose rights have never been considered at all, and of the ship builder who has always been a mendicant in the lobby at Washington. "All materials for the construction, equipment or repair of vessels of the United States may be imported in bond, and withdrawn therefrom under such regulations as may be prescribed by the Secretary of the Treasury; and upon proof that such materials have been used for such purpose no duties shall be paid thereon. And all vessels owned wholly by citizens of the United States shall be entitled to registry, enrollment and license, or license, and to all the benefits and privileges of vessels of the United States; and all laws, or parts of laws, conflicting with the provisions of this section shall be, and the same are hereby, repealed." This is all the privilege that ship owners demand, and with the favoritism over all other mechanics shown to shipbuilders, how can they complain? Even now, Mr. Roach says that he "can build steamships cheaper and better than they can be built on the Clyde." What will he not be able to accomplish with the provisions of this bill! His angle iron and his plates, his rivets and his brass work, his copper, his wire rigging, his sails, his paints, his cabin upholstery, mirrors, and everything appertaining to the completeness of his equipment--a great part of which would cost him vastly more at home--anything and all that he requires may be imported, duty free! Happy Mr. Roach! Why need he fear the effect of the clause in favor of ship owners? Who will avail themselves of it? But alas for the ship-builders upon the Clyde, in Newcastle and Belfast! Their occupation will be gone. Already building ships at a lesser cost than theirs, this remission of duties will enable Mr. Roach to build them from ten to twenty per cent. cheaper still. What will England then do? Will she grant bounties to her ship-builders, to meet the emergency? She did not do it in 1849, to sustain her wooden ship-builders; she will not do it now in order to "protect" an industry infinitely greater than ours, but infinitely less in importance than that of her ship owning. She will protect that, by leaving it _free_, and every Englishman who desires to buy a ship will come for that purpose to the Delaware. Mr. Roach objects to our buying British ships now; will he decline to sell American ships then? In view of this glorious future, how can you, Mr. Roach, oppose the 21st section of this bill? * * * * * I have thus adduced some of the principal arguments in favor of the free importation of ships, the only method by which the lost prestige of our commercial marine can be restored. I have given a very close attention to the subject for many years, having in the outset come to the conclusion which subsequent time and events have abundantly confirmed. If this essay should prove too long to be carefully read by our law-makers, for whose perusal it is mainly intended, I still trust that they may turn over the leaves sufficiently to recognize the condition of our carrying trade compared with that of England and Germany, as I shall endeavor to portray it in the shorter form of a parable, of which I earnestly hope they will make the application. THE THREE FERRIES. There are two large towns on the opposite banks of a wide river. There is a constantly increasing passenger and business employment, supporting several ferries, between them. In former days the principal ferry masters were an American, an Englishman, and a German. They all employed boats propelled by sails, and especially the first did a very profitable business. Indeed, the American was the most successful, as he and his boys had a way of handling their craft much superior to either of the others. Each had a large family of relatives, and, naturally, as these relatives of theirs were willing to work for the same wages as other people, they built new boats for their kindred whenever they were required. It so happened, however, that the American's family built much better than the Englishman's. When the latter noticed that the superior craft of the former were better patronized by the public than his own, he asked the Yankee boys if they wouldn't build some boats in their style for him? "Sartain," they said, "if you'll pay us what Uncle Sammy pays for his'n?" "Aye, of course I wull," said Mr. Bull, "for boats like yon I mast have, or Sam will run away with all my business, and my family will starve." So Uncle Sam's boys built the boats for Mr. Bull, and the two old gentlemen got on amicably, for there was business enough for them both, and the Dutchman did not interfere with them a great deal. The few carpenters among Mr. Bull's relations did not like this very well, but the old man said to them squarely, "Look you here, now, d'ye think I'm going to let fifty of my relatives stand still because two or three of you, who can't build boats as well as Sam's people, are growling about it? That's not my way; I work for the good of my family at large. Go to work, now, and see if you can invent a better boat than they build; if you can, I will employ you, and so will Sam." They took the old man's advice, for they saw the sense of it, and in a short time they studied out a craft superior in every respect to anything they had before, or that Sam had now. "That's right, boys," exclaimed old Bull, rubbing his hands with glee, "now build some of them, and I'll buy them of you, and so will Sam if he isn't a fool." They did build some excellent boats, to which the public took at once; and everybody who wanted to cross the river, or to send any goods over immediately, gave Mr. Bull their custom. He grew rich suddenly, not so much from _building_ boats as from _using_ them. Nobody patronized Sam's now old-fashioned craft. Uncle Sam, generally supposed to be a "smart old cuss," couldn't understand it at all. "It's one of those things that no fellow can find out," he said, "but next time we have a family meeting we'll appoint a committee to get at what this here 'decadence' comes from." So he appointed a committee, and they ran around six months among the carpenters of the family, and came back with a report that "Whereas, a few years ago, during a family row, a lot of old ferry boats had been stolen by or sold to Mr. Bull, this had killed boat building ever since and it always would be dead until every one of the family put their hands in their pockets and supported the carpenters till they had learned to build just such boats as Bull was using." In the meantime it may be remarked that the Dutchman had got Bull's boys to build some new boats for him, and he was now doing a better business than he had ever done before. Uncle Sam looked on and observed, "By jingo, this here's a fix; I've asked my family to hand over the cash to support these carpenters of mine, and they say they'll see me----; well, never mind what, and now that whole raft of boys, who were earning money for me on the ferry, are digging clams or gone to farming, and when I want to go across the river I have to go with Bull or the Dutchman, and pay them for it, instead of getting money for doing what they do, myself." His boys, who were thrown out of employment on the ferry, thereupon approached the old gentleman and said, "Uncle Samuel, don't you remember how, a while ago, when those carpenters of ours built better boats than Mr. Bull's could build, the old fellow came to you, and asked you to let them build some for him? If he hadn't got them from us his fellows would shortly have been high and dry, as we are now; but we sold them to him, and so he kept up his business on the ferry. Now, why don't you do what he did, and give us something to do, instead of spending your money going across in his boats and the Dutchman's?" Uncle Sam reared right up at this mild remonstrance. "Git out," he exclaimed, "you ain't no account, the ferry's no account, there ain't nothing of no account in this here family but just a half a dozen boat builders. Say, Jonathan, what are you doin' with that ar jack-knife? Did you make it?" "No, sir I bought it of one of Bull's boys." "Well, then, lay it right down; _I ain't a goin' to have you whittle till you can make one for yourself._" And then the old man went off--mad! And in another sense of the word, he is still mad. Transcriber's Note Variant and inconsistent spellings in the original 1878 text have been retained in this ebook. Variable usage of quotation marks has also been retained. The following typographical corrections have been made: Page 15: Changed , to . (exclaimed my friend with some amazement.) Page 20: Changed . to ? (buy with his own money?) Page 22: Changed Britian to Britain Page 23: Changed searcely to scarcely 
3099	----	University, Alev Akman, Dianne Bean, and Carrie Lorenz THE OLD MERCHANT MARINE, A CHRONICLE OF AMERICAN SHIPS AND SAILORS By Ralph D. Paine CONTENTS I. COLONIAL ADVENTURERS IN LITTLE SHIPS II. THE PRIVATEERS OF '76 III. OUT CUTLASES AND BOARD! IV. THE FAMOUS DAYS OF SALEM PORT V. YANKEE VIKINGS AND NEW TRADE ROUTES VI. "FREE TRADE AND SAILORS' RIGHTS!" VII. THE BRILLIANT ERA OF 1812 VIII. THE PACKET SHIPS OF THE "ROARING FORTIES" IX. THE STATELY CLIPPER AND HER GLORY X. BOUND COASTWISE BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE THE OLD MERCHANT MARINE CHAPTER I. COLONIAL ADVENTURERS IN LITTLE SHIPS The story of American ships and sailors is an epic of blue water which seems singularly remote, almost unreal, to the later generations. A people with a native genius for seafaring won and held a brilliant supremacy through two centuries and then forsook this heritage of theirs. The period of achievement was no more extraordinary than was its swift declension. A maritime race whose topsails flecked every ocean, whose captains courageous from father to son had fought with pike and cannonade to defend the freedom of the seas, turned inland to seek a different destiny and took no more thought for the tall ships and rich cargoes which had earned so much renown for its flag. Vanished fleets and brave memories--a chronicle of America which had written its closing chapters before the Civil War! There will be other Yankee merchantmen in times to come, but never days like those when skippers sailed on seas uncharted in quest of ports mysterious and unknown. The Pilgrim Fathers, driven to the northward of their intended destination in Virginia, landed on the shore of Cape Cod not so much to clear the forest and till the soil as to establish a fishing settlement. Like the other Englishmen who long before 1620 had steered across to harvest the cod on the Grand Bank, they expected to wrest a livelihood mostly from salt water. The convincing argument in favor of Plymouth was that it offered a good harbor for boats and was "a place of profitable fishing." Both pious and amphibious were these pioneers whom the wilderness and the red Indian confined to the water's edge, where they were soon building ships to trade corn for beaver skins with the Kennebec colony. Even more energetic in taking profit from the sea were the Puritans who came to Massachusetts Bay in 1629, bringing carpenters and shipbuilders with them to hew the pine and oak so close at hand into keelsons, frames, and planking. Two years later, Governor John Winthrop launched his thirty-ton sloop Blessing of the Bay, and sent her to open "friendly commercial relations" with the Dutch of Manhattan. Brisk though the traffic was in furs and wampum, these mariners of Boston and Salem were not content to voyage coastwise. Offshore fishing made skilled, adventurous seamen of them, and what they caught with hook and line, when dried and salted, was readily exchanged for other merchandise in Bermuda, Barbados, and Europe. 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. This kind of enterprise was peculiar to New England because other resources were lacking. To the westward the French were more interested in exploring the rivers leading to the region of the Great Lakes and in finding fabulous rewards in furs. The Dutch on the Hudson were similarly engaged by means of the western trails to the country of the Iroquois, while the planters of Virginia had discovered an easy opulence in the tobacco crop, with slave labor to toil for them, and they were not compelled to turn to the hardships and the hazards of the sea. The New Englander, hampered by an unfriendly climate, hard put to it to grow sufficient food, with land immensely difficult to clear, was between the devil and the deep sea, and he sagaciously chose the latter. Elsewhere in the colonies the forest was an enemy to be destroyed with infinite pains. The New England pioneer regarded it with favor as the stuff with which to make stout ships and step the straight masts in them. And so it befell that the seventeenth century had not run its course before New England was hardily afloat on every Atlantic trade route, causing Sir Josiah Child, British merchant and economist, to lament in 1668 that in his opinion nothing was "more prejudicial and in prospect more dangerous to any mother kingdom than the increase of shipping in her colonies, plantations, or provinces." This absorbing business of building wooden vessels was scattered in almost every bay and river of the indented coast from Nova Scotia to Buzzard's Bay and the sheltered waters of Long Island Sound. It was not restricted, as now, to well-equipped yards with crews of trained artisans. Hard by the huddled hamlet of log houses was the row of keel-blocks sloping to the tide. In winter weather too rough for fishing, when the little farms lay idle, this Yankee Jack-of-all-trades plied his axe and adze to shape the timbers, and it was a routine task to peg together a sloop, a ketch, or a brig, mere cockleshells, in which to fare forth to London, or Cadiz, or the Windward Islands--some of them not much larger and far less seaworthy than the lifeboat which hangs at a liner's davits. Pinching poverty forced him to dispense with the ornate, top-heavy cabins and forecastles of the foreign merchantmen, while invention, bred of necessity, molded finer lines and less clumsy models to weather the risks of a stormy coast and channels beset with shoals and ledges. The square-rig did well enough for deepwater voyages, but it was an awkward, lubberly contrivance for working along shore, and the colonial Yankee therefore evolved the schooner with her flat fore-and-aft sails which enabled her to beat to windward and which required fewer men in the handling. Dimly but unmistakably these canny seafarers in their rude beginnings foreshadowed the creation of a merchant marine which should one day comprise the noblest, swiftest ships driven by the wind and the finest sailors that ever trod a deck. Even then these early vessels were conspicuously efficient, carrying smaller crews than the Dutch or English, paring expenses to a closer margin, daring to go wherever commerce beckoned in order to gain a dollar at peril of their skins. By the end of the seventeenth century more than a thousand vessels were registered as built in the New England colonies, and Salem already displayed the peculiar talent for maritime adventure which was to make her the most illustrious port of the New World. The first of her line of shipping merchants was Philip English, who was sailing his own ketch Speedwell in 1676 and so rapidly advanced his fortunes that in a few years he was the richest man on the coast, with twenty-one vessels which traded coastwise with Virginia and offshore with Bilbao, Barbados, St. Christopher's, and France. Very devout were his bills of lading, flavored in this manner: "Twenty hogsheads of salt, shipped by the Grace of God in the good sloop called the Mayflower.... and by God's Grace bound to Virginia or Merriland." No less devout were the merchants who ordered their skippers to cross to the coast of Guinea and fill the hold with negroes to be sold in the West Indies before returning with sugar and molasses to Boston or Rhode Island. The slave-trade flourished from the very birth of commerce in Puritan New England and its golden gains and exotic voyages allured high-hearted lads from farm and counter. In 1640 the ship Desire, built at Marblehead, returned from the West Indies and "brought some cotton and tobacco and negroes, etc. from thence." Earlier than this the Dutch of Manhattan had employed black labor, and it was provided that the Incorporated West India Company should "allot to each Patroon twelve black men and women out of the Prizes in which Negroes should be found." It was in the South, however, that this kind of labor was most needed and, as the trade increased, Virginia and the Carolinas became the most lucrative markets. Newport and Bristol drove a roaring traffic in "rum and niggers," with a hundred sail to be found in the infamous Middle Passage. The master of one of these Rhode Island slavers, writing home from Guinea in 1736, portrayed the congestion of the trade in this wise: "For never was there so much Rum on the Coast at one time before. Not ye like of ye French ships was never seen before, for ye whole coast is full of them. For my part I can give no guess when I shall get away, for I purchast but 27 slaves since I have been here, for slaves is very scarce. We have had nineteen Sail of us at one time in ye Road, so that ships that used to carry pryme slaves off is now forced to take any that comes. Here is seven sail of us Rum men that are ready to devour one another, for our case is desprit." Two hundred years of wickedness unspeakable and human torture beyond all computation, justified by Christian men and sanctioned by governments, at length rending the nation asunder in civil war and bequeathing a problem still unsolved--all this followed in the wake of those first voyages in search of labor which could be bought and sold as merchandise. It belonged to the dark ages with piracy and witchcraft, better forgotten than recalled, save for its potent influence in schooling brave seamen and building faster ships for peace and war. These colonial seamen, in truth, fought for survival amid dangers so manifold as to make their hardihood astounding. It was not merely a matter of small vessels with a few men and boys daring distant voyages and the mischances of foundering or stranding, but of facing an incessant plague of privateers, French and Spanish, Dutch and English, or a swarm of freebooters under no flag at all. Coasts were unlighted, charts few and unreliable, and the instruments of navigation almost as crude as in the days of Columbus. Even the savage Indian, not content with lurking in ambush, went afloat to wreak mischief, and the records of the First Church of Salem contain this quaint entry under date of July 25, 1677: "The Lord having given a Commission to the Indians to take no less than 13 of the Fishing Ketches of Salem and Captivate the men... it struck a great consternation into all the people here. The Pastor moved on the Lord's Day, and the whole people readily consented, to keep the Lecture Day following as a Fast Day, which was accordingly done.... The Lord was pleased to send in some of the Ketches on the Fast Day which was looked on as a gracious smile of Providence. Also there had been 19 wounded men sent into Salem a little while before; also a Ketch sent out from Salem as a man-of-war to recover the rest of the Ketches. The Lord give them Good Success." To encounter a pirate craft was an episode almost commonplace and often more sordid than picturesque. Many of these sea rogues were thieves with small stomach for cutlasses and slaughter. They were of the sort that overtook Captain John Shattuck sailing home from Jamaica in 1718 when he reported his capture by one Captain Charles Vain, "a Pyrat" of 12 guns and 120 men who took him to Crooked Island, plundered him of various articles, stripped the brig, abused the crew, and finally let him go. In the same year the seamen of the Hopewell related that near Hispaniola they met with pirates who robbed and ill-treated them and carried off their mate because they had no navigator. Ned Low, a gentleman rover of considerable notoriety, stooped to filch the stores and gear from a fleet of fourteen poor fishermen of Cape Sable. He had a sense of dramatic values, however, and frequently brandished his pistols on deck, besides which, as set down by one of his prisoners, "he had a young child in Boston for whom he entertained such tenderness that on every lucid interval from drinking and revelling, I have seen him sit down and weep plentifully." A more satisfying figure was Thomas Pounds, who was taken by the sloop Mary, sent after him from Boston in 1689. He was discovered in Vineyard Sound, and the two vessels fought a gallant action, the pirate flying a red flag and refusing to strike. Captain Samuel Pease of the Mary was mortally wounded, while Pounds, this proper pirate, strode his quarter-deck and waved his naked sword, crying, "Come on board, ye dogs, and I will strike YOU presently." This invitation was promptly accepted by the stout seamen from Boston, who thereupon swarmed over the bulwark and drove all hands below, preserving Thomas Pounds to be hanged in public. In 1703 John Quelch, a man of resource, hoisted what he called "Old Roger" over the Charles--a brigantine which had been equipped as a privateer to cruise against the French of Acadia. This curious flag of his was described as displaying a skeleton with an hour-glass in one hand and "a dart in the heart with three drops of blood proceeding from it in the other." Quelch led a mutiny, tossed the skipper overboard, and sailed for Brazil, capturing several merchantmen on the way and looting them of rum, silks, sugar, gold dust, and munitions. Rashly he came sailing back to Marblehead, primed with a plausible yarn, but his men talked too much when drunk and all hands were jailed. Upon the gallows Quelch behaved exceedingly well, "pulling off his hat and bowing to the spectators," while the somber Puritan merchants in the crowd were, many of them, quietly dealing in the merchandise fetched home by pirates who were lucky enough to steer clear of the law. This was a shady industry in which New York took the more active part, sending out supplies to the horde of pirates who ravaged the waters of the Far East and made their haven at Madagascar, and disposing of the booty received in exchange. Governor Fletcher had dirtied his hands by protecting this commerce and, as a result, Lord Bellomont was named to succeed him. Said William III, "I send you, my Lord, to New York, because an honest and intrepid man is wanted to put these abuses down, and because I believe you to be such a man." Such were the circumstances in which Captain William Kidd, respectable master mariner in the merchant service, was employed by Lord Bellomont, royal Governor of New York, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts, to command an armed ship and harry the pirates of the West Indies and Madagascar. Strangest of all the sea tales of colonial history is that of Captain Kidd and his cruise in the Adventure-Galley. His name is reddened with crimes never committed, his grisly phantom has stalked through the legends and literature of piracy, and the Kidd tradition still has magic to set treasure-seekers exploring almost every beach, cove, and headland from Halifax to the Gulf of Mexico. Yet if truth were told, he never cut a throat or made a victim walk the plank. He was tried and hanged for the trivial offense of breaking the head of a mutinous gunner of his own crew with a wooden bucket. It was even a matter of grave legal doubt whether he had committed one single piratical act. His trial in London was a farce. In the case of the captured ships he alleged that they were sailing under French passes, and he protested that his privateering commission justified him, and this contention was not disproven. The suspicion is not wanting that he was condemned as a scapegoat because certain noblemen of England had subscribed the capital to outfit his cruise, expecting to win rich dividends in gold captured from the pirates he was sent to attack. Against these men a political outcry was raised, and as a result Captain Kidd was sacrificed. He was a seaman who had earned honorable distinction in earlier years, and fate has played his memory a shabby trick. It was otherwise with Blackbeard, most flamboyant of all colonial pirates, who filled the stage with swaggering success, chewing wine-glasses in his cabin, burning sulphur to make his ship seem more like hell, and industriously scourging the whole Atlantic coast. Charleston lived in terror of him until Lieutenant Maynard, in a small sloop, laid him alongside in a hammer-and-tongs engagement and cut off the head of Blackbeard to dangle from the bowsprit as a trophy. Of this rudely adventurous era, it would be hard to find a seaman more typical than the redoubtable Sir William Phips who became the first royal Governor of the Massachusetts Colony in 1692. Born on a frontier farm of the Maine coast while many of the Pilgrim fathers were living, "his faithful mother," wrote Cotton Mather, "had no less than twenty-six children, whereof twenty-one were sons; but equivalent to them all was William, one of the youngest, whom, his father dying, was left young with his mother, and with her he lived, keeping ye sheep in Ye Wilderness until he was eighteen years old." Then he apprenticed himself to a neighboring shipwright who was building sloops and pinnaces and, having learned the trade, set out for Boston. As a ship-carpenter he plied his trade, spent his wages in the taverns of the waterside and there picked up wondrous yarns of the silver-laden galleons of Spain which had shivered their timbers on the reefs of the Bahama Passage or gone down in the hurricanes that beset those southerly seas. Meantime he had married a wealthy widow whose property enabled him to go treasure-hunting on the Spanish main. From his first voyage thither in a small vessel he escaped with his life and barely enough treasure to pay the cost of the expedition. In no wise daunted he laid his plans to search for a richly ladened galleon which was said to have been wrecked half a century before off the coast of Hispaniola. Since his own funds were not sufficient for this exploit, he betook himself to England to enlist the aid of the Government. With bulldog persistence he besieged the court of James II for a whole year, this rough-and-ready New England shipmaster, until he was given a royal frigate for his purpose. He failed to fish up more silver from the sands but, nothing daunted, he persuaded other patrons to outfit him with a small merchantman, the James and Mary, in which he sailed for the coast of Hispaniola. This time he found his galleon and thirty-two tons of silver. "Besides that incredible treasure of plate, thus fetched up from seven or eight fathoms under water, there were vast riches of Gold, and Pearls, and Jewels.... All that a Spanish frigot was to be enriched withal." Up the Thames sailed the lucky little merchantman in the year of 1687, with three hundred thousand pounds sterling as her freightage of treasure. Captain Phips made honest division with his backers and, because men of his integrity were not over plentiful in England after the Restoration, King James knighted him. He sailed home to Boston, "a man of strong and sturdy frame," as Hawthorne fancied him, "whose face had been roughened by northern tempests and blackened by the burning sun of the West Indies.... He wears an immense periwig flowing down over his shoulders.... His red, rough hands which have done many a good day's work with the hammer and adze are half-covered by the delicate lace rues at the wrist." But he carried with him the manners of the forecastle, a man hasty and unlettered but superbly brave and honest. Even after he had become Governor he thrashed the captain of the Nonesuch frigate of the royal navy, and used his fists on the Collector of the Port after cursing him with tremendous gusto. Such behavior in a Governor was too strenuous, and Sir William Phips was summoned to England, where he died while waiting his restoration to office and royal favor. Failing both, he dreamed of still another treasure voyage, "for it was his purpose, upon his dismission from his Government once more to have gone upon his old Fishing-Trade, upon a mighty shelf of rock and banks of sand that lie where he had informed himself." CHAPTER II. THE PRIVATEERS OF '76 The wars of England with France and Spain spread turmoil upon the high seas during the greater part of the eighteenth century. Yet with an immense tenacity of purpose, these briny forefathers increased their trade and multiplied their ships in the face of every manner of adversity. The surprising fact is that most of them were not driven ashore to earn their bread. What Daniel Webster said of them at a later day was true from the beginning: "It is not, sir, by protection and bounties, but by unwearied exertion, by extreme economy, by that manly and resolute spirit which relies on itself to protect itself. These causes alone enable American ships still to keep the element and show the flag of their country in distant seas." What was likely to befall a shipmaster in the turbulent eighteenth century may be inferred from the misfortunes of Captain Michael Driver of Salem. In 1759 he was in command of the schooner Three Brothers, bound to the West Indies on his lawful business. Jogging along with a cargo of fish and lumber, he was taken by a privateer under British colors and sent into Antigua as a prize. Unable to regain either his schooner or his two thousand dollar cargo, he sadly took passage for home. Another owner gave him employment and he set sail in the schooner Betsy for Guadaloupe. During this voyage, poor man, he was captured and carried into port by a French privateer. On the suggestion that he might ransom his vessel on payment of four thousand livres, he departed for Boston in hope of finding the money, leaving behind three of his sailors as hostages. Cash in hand for the ransom, the long-suffering Captain Michael Driver turned southward again, now in the schooner Mary, and he flew a flag of truce to indicate his errand. This meant nothing to the ruffian who commanded the English privateer Revenge. He violently seized the innocent Mary and sent her into New Providence. Here Captain Driver made lawful protest before the authorities, and was set at liberty with vessel and cargo--an act of justice quite unusual in the Admiralty Court of the Bahamas. Unmolested, the harassed skipper managed to gain Cape Francois and rescue his three seamen and his schooner in exchange for the ransom money. As he was about to depart homeward bound, a French frigate snatched him and his crew out of their vessel and threw them ashore at Santiago, where for two months they existed as ragged beachcombers until by some judicial twist the schooner was returned to them. They worked her home and presented their long list of grievances to the colonial Government of Massachusetts, which duly forwarded them--and that was the end of it. Three years had been spent in this catalogue of misadventures, and Captain Driver, his owners, and his men were helpless against such intolerable aggression. They and their kind were a prey to every scurvy rascal who misused a privateering commission to fill his own pockets. Stoutly resolved to sail and trade as they pleased, these undaunted Americans, nevertheless, increased their business on blue water until shortly before the Revolution the New England fleet alone numbered six hundred sail. Its captains felt at home in Surinam and the Canaries. They trimmed their yards in the reaches of the Mediterranean and the North Sea or bargained thriftily in the Levant. The whalers of Nantucket, in their apple-bowed barks, explored and hunted in distant seas, and the smoke of their try-pots darkened the waters of Baffin Bay, Guinea, and Brazil. It was they who inspired Edmund Burke's familiar eulogy: "No sea but is vexed by their fisheries. No climate that is not a witness to their toils. Neither the perseverance of Holland nor the activity of France, nor the dexterous and firm sagacity of England ever carried this most perilous mode of hardy industry to the extent to which it has been pushed by this recent people--a people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood." In 1762, seventy-eight whalers cleared from American ports, of which more than half were from Nantucket. Eight years later there were one hundred and twenty-five whalers out of Nantucket which took 14,331 barrels of oil valued at $358,200. In size these vessels averaged no more than ninety tons, a fishing smack of today, and yet they battered their way half around the watery globe and comfortably supported six thousand people who dwelt on a sandy island unfit for farming and having no other industries. Every Nantucket lad sailed for his "lay" or share of the catch and aspired to command eventually a whaler of his own. Whaler, merchantman, and slaver were training a host of incomparable seamen destined to harry the commerce of England under the new-born Stars and Stripes, and now, in 1775, on the brink of actual war, Parliament flung a final provocation and aroused the furious enmity of the fishermen who thronged the Grand Bank. Lord North proposed to forbid the colonies to export fish to those foreign markets in which every seacoast village was vitally concerned, and he also contemplated driving the fishing fleets from their haunts off Newfoundland. This was to rob six thousand sturdy men of a livelihood afloat and to spread ruin among the busy ports, such as Marblehead and Gloucester, from which sailed hundreds of pinks, snows, and schooners. This measure became law notwithstanding the protests of twenty-one peers of the realm who declared: "We dissent because the attempt to coerce by famine the whole body of the inhabitants of great and populous provinces is without example in the history of this, or perhaps, of any civilized nation." The sailormen bothered their heads very little about taxation without representation but whetted their anger with grudges more robust. They had been beggared and bullied and shot at from the Bay of Biscay to Barbados, and no sooner was the Continental Congress ready to issue privateering commissions and letters of marque than for them it was up anchor and away to bag a Britisher. Scarcely had a shipmaster signaled his arrival with a deep freight of logwood, molasses, or sugar than he received orders to discharge with all speed and clear his decks for mounting heavier batteries and slinging the hammocks of a hundred eager privateersmen who had signed articles in the tavern rendezvous. The timbered warehouses were filled with long-toms and nine-pounders, muskets, blunderbusses, pistols, cutlases, boarding-pikes, hand grenades, tomahawks, grape, canister, and doubleheaded shot. In the narrow, gabled streets of Salem, Boston, New York, and Baltimore, crowds trooped after the fifes and drums with a strapping recruiting officer to enroll "all gentlemen seamen and able-bodied landsmen who had a mind to distinguish themselves in the glorious cause of their country and make their fortunes." Many a ship's company was mustered between noon and sunset, including men who had served in armed merchantmen and who in times of nominal peace had fought the marauders of Europe or whipped the corsairs of Barbary in the Strait of Gibraltar. Never was a race of seamen so admirably fitted for the daring trade of privateering as the crews of these tall sloops, topsail schooners, and smart square-riggers, their sides checkered with gun-ports, and ready to drive to sea like hawks. In some instances the assurance of these hardy men was both absurd and sublime. Ramshackle boats with twenty or thirty men aboard, mounting one or two old guns, sallied out in the expectation of gold and glory, only to be captured by the first British cruiser that chanced to sight them. A few even sailed with no cannon at all, confident of taking them out of the first prize overhauled by laying alongside--and so in some cases they actually did. The privateersmen of the Revolution played a larger part in winning the war than has been commonly recognized. This fact, however, was clearly perceived by Englishmen of that era, as "The London Spectator" candidly admitted: "The books at Lloyds will recount it, and the rate of assurances at that time will prove what their diminutive strength was able to effect in the face of our navy, and that when nearly one hundred pennants were flying on our coast. Were we able to prevent their going in and out, or stop them from taking our trade and our storeships even in sight of our garrisons? Besides, were they not in the English and Irish Channels, picking up our homeward bound trade, sending their prizes into French and Spanish ports to the great terror of our merchants and shipowners?" The naval forces of the Thirteen Colonies were pitifully feeble in comparison with the mighty fleets of the enemy whose flaming broadsides upheld the ancient doctrine that "the Monarchs of Great Britain have a peculiar and Sovereign authority upon the Ocean... from the Laws of God and of Nature, besides an uninterrupted Fruition of it for so many Ages past as that its Beginnings cannot be traced out." * * "The Seaman's Vade-Mecum." London, 1744. In 1776 only thirty-one Continental cruisers of all classes were in commission, and this number was swiftly diminished by capture and blockade until in 1782 no more than seven ships flew the flag of the American Navy. On the other hand, at the close of 1777, one hundred and seventy-four private armed vessels had been commissioned, mounting two thousand guns and carrying nine thousand men. During this brief period of the war they took as prizes 733 British merchantmen and inflicted losses of more than two million pounds sterling. Over ten thousand seamen were made prisoners at a time when England sorely needed them for drafting into her navy. To lose them was a far more serious matter than for General Washington to capture as many Hessian mercenaries who could be replaced by purchase. In some respects privateering as waged a century and more ago was a sordid, unlovely business, the ruling motive being rather a greed of gain than an ardent love of country. Shares in lucky ships were bought and sold in the gambling spirit of a stock exchange. Fortunes were won and lost regardless of the public service. It became almost impossible to recruit men for the navy because they preferred the chance of booty in a privateer. For instance, the State of Massachusetts bought a twenty-gun ship, the Protector, as a contribution to the naval strength, and one of her crew, Ebenezer Fox, wrote of the effort to enlist sufficient men: "The recruiting business went on slowly, however, but at length upwards of three hundred men were carried, dragged, and driven abroad; of all ages, kinds, and descriptions; in all the various stages of intoxication from that of sober tipsiness to beastly drunkenness; with the uproar and clamor that may be more easily imagined than described. Such a motley group has never been seen since Falstaff's ragged regiment paraded the streets of Coventry." There was nothing of glory to boast of in fetching into port some little Nova Scotia coasting schooner with a cargo of deals and potatoes, whose master was also the owner and who lost the savings of a lifetime because he lacked the men and guns to defend his property against spoliation. The war was no concern of his, and he was the victim of a system now obsolete among civilized nations, a relic of a barbarous and piratical age whose spirit has been revived and gloried in recently only by the Government of the German Empire. The chief fault of the privateersman was that he sailed and fought for his own gain, but he was never guilty of sinking ships with passengers and crew aboard, and very often he played the gentleman in gallant style. Nothing could have seemed to him more abhorrent and incredible than a kind of warfare which should drown women and children because they had embarked under an enemy's flag. Extraordinary as were the successes of the Yankee privateers, it was a game of give-and-take, a weapon which cut both ways, and the temptation is to extol their audacious achievements while glossing over the heavy losses which their own merchant marine suffered. The weakness of privateering was that it was wholly offensive and could not, like a strong navy, protect its own commerce from depredation. While the Americans were capturing over seven hundred British vessels during the first two years of the war, as many as nine hundred American ships were taken or sunk by the enemy, a rate of destruction which fairly swept the Stars and Stripes from the tracks of ocean commerce. As prizes these vessels were sold at Liverpool and London for an average amount of two thousand pounds each and the loss to the American owners was, of course, ever so much larger. The fact remains, nevertheless--and it is a brilliant page of history to recall--that in an inchoate nation without a navy, with blockading squadrons sealing most of its ports, with ragged armies on land which retreated oftener than they fought, private armed ships dealt the maritime prestige of Great Britain a far deadlier blow than the Dutch, French, and Spanish were able to inflict. In England, there resulted actual distress, even lack of food, because these intrepid seamen could not be driven away from her own coasts and continued to snatch their prizes from under the guns of British forts and fleets. The plight of the West India Colonies was even worse, as witness this letter from a merchant of Grenada: "We are happy if we can get anything for money by reason of the quantity of vessels taken by the Americans. A fleet of vessels came from Ireland a few days ago. From sixty vessels that departed from Ireland not above twenty-five arrived in this and neighboring islands, the others, it is thought, being all taken by American privateers. God knows, if this American war continues much longer, we shall all die of hunger." On both sides, by far the greater number of captures was made during the earlier period of the war which cleared the seas of the smaller, slower, and unarmed vessels. As the war progressed and the profits flowed in, swifter and larger ships were built for the special business of privateering until the game resembled actual naval warfare. Whereas, at first, craft of ten guns with forty or fifty men had been considered adequate for the service, three or four years later ships were afloat with a score of heavy cannon and a trained crew of a hundred and fifty or two hundred men, ready to engage a sloop of war or to stand up to the enemy's largest privateers. In those days single ship actions, now almost forgotten in naval tactics, were fought with illustrious skill and courage, and commanders won victories worthy of comparison with deeds distinguished in the annals of the American Navy. CHAPTER III. OUT CUTLASES AND BOARD Salem was the foremost privateering port of the Revolution, and from this pleasant harbor, long since deserted by ships and sailormen, there filled away past Cape Ann one hundred and fifty-eight vessels of all sizes to scan the horizon for British topsails. They accounted for four hundred prizes, or half the whole number to the credit of American arms afloat. This preeminence was due partly to freedom from a close blockade and partly to a seafaring population which was born and bred to its trade and knew no other. Besides the crews of Salem merchantmen, privateering enlisted the idle fishermen of ports nearby and the mariners of Boston whose commerce had been snuffed out by the British occupation. Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Charleston sent some splendid armed ships to sea but not with the impetuous rush nor in anything like the numbers enrolled by this gray old town whose fame was unique. For the most part, the records of all these brave ships and the thousands of men who sailed and sweated and fought in them are dim and scanty, no more than routine entries in dusty log-books which read like this: "Filled away in pursuit of a second sail in the N. W. At 4.30 she hoisted English colors and commenced firing her stern guns. At 5.90 took in the steering sails, at the same time she fired a broadside. We opened a fire from our larboard battery and at 5.30 she struck her colors. Got out the boats and boarded her. She proved to be the British brig Acorn from Liverpool to Rio Janeiro, mounting fourteen cannon." * But now and then one finds in these old sea-journals an entry more intimate and human, such as the complaint of the master of the privateer Scorpion, cruising in 1778 and never a prize in sight. "This Book I made to keep the Accounts of my Voyage but God knows beste what that will be, for I am at this time very Impashent but I hope soon there will be a Change to ease my Trubled Mind. On this Day I was Chaced by Two Ships of War which I tuck to be Enemies, but coming on thick Weather I have lost site of them and so conclude myself escaped which is a small good Fortune in the midste of my Discouragements." * * A burst of gusty laughter still echoes along the crowded deck of the letter-of-marque schooner Success, whose master, Captain Philip Thrash, inserted this diverting comment in his humdrum record of the day's work: "At one half past 8 discovered a sail ahead. Tacked ship. At 9 tacked ship again and past just to Leeward of the Sail which appeared to be a damn'd Comical Boat, by G-d." * From the manuscript collections of the Essex Institute, Salem, Mass. * * From the manuscript collections of the Essex Institute, Salem, Mass. There are a few figures of the time and place which stand out, full-length, in vivid colors against a background that satisfies the desire of romance and thrillingly conveys the spirit of the time and the place. Such a one was Captain Jonathan Haraden, Salem privateersman, who captured one thousand British cannon afloat and is worthy to be ranked as one of the ablest sea-fighters of his generation. He was a merchant mariner, a master at the outbreak of the Revolution, who had followed the sea since boyhood. But it was more to his taste to command the Salem ship General Pickering of 180 tons which was fitted out under a letter of marque in the spring of 1780. She carried fourteen six-pounders and forty-five men and boys, nothing very formidable, when Captain Haraden sailed for Bilbao with a cargo of sugar. During the voyage, before his crew had been hammered into shape, he beat off a British privateer of twenty guns and safely tacked into the Bay of Biscay. There he sighted another hostile privateer, the Golden Eagle, larger than his own ship. Instead of shifting his course to avoid her, Haraden clapped on sail and steered alongside after nightfall, roaring through his trumpet: "What ship is this? An American frigate, sir. Strike, or I'll sink you with a broadside." Dazed by this unexpected summons in the gloom, the master of the Golden Eagle promptly surrendered, and a prize crew was thrown aboard with orders to follow the Pickering into Bilbao. While just outside that Spanish harbor, a strange sail was descried and again Jonathan Haraden cleared for action. The vessel turned out to be the Achilles, one of the most powerful privateers out of London, with forty guns and a hundred and fifty men, or almost thrice the fighting strength of the little Pickering. She was, in fact, more like a sloop of war. Before Captain Haraden could haul within gunshot to protect his prize, it had been recaptured by the Achilles, which then maneuvered to engage the Pickering. Darkness intervened, but Jonathan Haraden had no idea of escaping under cover of it. He was waiting for the morning breeze and a chance to fight it out to a finish. He was a handsome man with an air of serene composure and a touch of the theatrical such as Nelson displayed in his great moments. Having prepared his ship for battle, he slept soundly until dawn and then dressed with fastidious care to stroll on deck, where he beheld the Achilles bearing down on him with her crew at quarters. His own men were clustered behind their open ports, matches lighted, tackles and breechings cast off, crowbars, handspikes, and sponge-staves in place, gunners stripped to the waist, powder-boys ready for the word like sprinters on the mark. Forty-five of them against a hundred and fifty, and Captain Haraden, debonair, unruffled, walking to and fro with a leisurely demeanor, remarking that although the Achilles appeared to be superior in force, "he had no doubt they would beat her if they were firm and steady and did not throw away their fire." It was, indeed, a memorable sea-picture, the sturdy Pickering riding deep with her burden of sugar and seeming smaller than she really was, the Achilles towering like a frigate, and all Bilbao turned out to watch the duel, shore and headlands crowded with spectators, the blue harbor-mouth gay with an immense flotilla of fishing boats and pleasure craft. The stake for which Haraden fought was to retake the Golden Eagle prize and to gain his port. His seamanship was flawless. Vastly outnumbered if it should come to boarding, he handled his vessel so as to avoid the Achilles while he poured the broadsides into her. After two hours the London privateer emerged from the smoke which had obscured the combat and put out to sea in flight, hulled through and through, while a farewell flight of crowbars, with which the guns of the Pickering had been crammed to the muzzle, ripped through her sails and rigging. Haraden hoisted canvas and drove in chase, but the Achilles had the heels of him "with a mainsail as large as a ship of the line," and reluctantly he wore ship and, with the Golden Eagle again in his possession, he sailed to an anchorage in Bilbao harbor. The Spanish populace welcomed him with tremendous enthusiasm. He was carried through the streets in a holiday procession and was the hero of banquets and public receptions. Such a man was bound to be the idol of his sailors and one of them quite plausibly related that "so great was the confidence he inspired that if he but looked at a sail through his glass and told the helmsman to steer for her, the observation went round,'If she is an enemy, she is ours.'" It was in this same General Pickering, no longer sugar-laden but in cruising trim, that Jonathan Haraden accomplished a feat which Paul Jones might have been proud to claim. There lifted above the sky-line three armed merchantmen sailing in company from Halifax to New York, a brig of fourteen guns, a ship of sixteen guns, a sloop of twelve guns. When they flew signals and formed in line, the ship alone appeared to outmatch the Pickering, but Haraden, in that lordly manner of his, assured his men that "he had no doubt whatever that if they would do their duty he would quickly capture the three vessels." Here was performance very much out of the ordinary, naval strategy of an exceptionally high order, and yet it is dismissed by the only witness who took the trouble to mention it in these few, casual words: "This he did with great ease by going alongside of each of them, one after the other." One more story of this master sea-rover of the Revolution, sailor and gentleman, who served his country so much more brilliantly than many a landsman lauded in the written histories of the war. While in the Pickering he attacked a heavily armed royal mail packet bound to England from the West Indies, one of the largest merchant vessels of her day and equipped to defend herself against privateers. A tough antagonist and a hard nut to crack! They battered each other like two pugilists for four hours and even then the decision was still in the balance. Then Haraden sheered off to mend his damaged gear and splintered hull before closing in again. He then discovered that all his powder had been shot away excepting one last charge. Instead of calling it a drawn battle, he rammed home this last shot in the locker, and ran down to windward of the packet, so close that he could shout across to the other quarter-deck: "I will give you five minutes to haul down your colors. If they are not down at the end of that time, I will fire into you and sink you, so help me God." It was the bluff magnificent--courage cold-blooded and calculating. The adversary was still unbeaten. Haraden stood with watch in hand and sonorously counted off the minutes. It was the stronger will and not the heavier metal that won the day. To be shattered by fresh broadsides at pistol-range was too much for the nerves of the gallant English skipper whose decks were already like a slaughterhouse. One by one, Haraden shouted the minutes and his gunners blew their matches. At "four" the red ensign came fluttering down and the mail packet was a prize of war. Another merchant seaman of this muster-roll of patriots was Silas Talbot, who took to salt water as a cabin boy at the age of twelve and was a prosperous shipmaster at twenty-one with savings invested in a house of his own in Providence. Enlisting under Washington, he was made a captain of infantry and was soon promoted, but he was restless ashore and glad to obtain an odd assignment. As Colonel Talbot he selected sixty infantry volunteers, most of them seamen by trade, and led them aboard the small sloop Argo in May, 1779, to punish the New York Tories who were equipping privateers against their own countrymen and working great mischief in Long Island Sound. So serious was the situation that General Gates found it almost impossible to obtain food supplies for the northern department of the Continental army. Silas Talbot and his nautical infantrymen promptly fell in with the New York privateer Lively, a fair match for him, and as promptly sent her into port. He then ran offshore and picked up and carried into Boston two English privateers headed for New York with large cargoes of merchandise from the West Indies. But he was particularly anxious to square accounts with a renegade Captain Hazard who made Newport his base and had captured many American vessels with the stout brig King George, using her for "the base purpose of plundering his old neighbors and friends." On his second cruise in the Argo, young Silas Talbot encountered the perfidious King George to the southward of Long Island and riddled her with one broadside after another, first hailing Captain Hazard by name and cursing him in double-shotted phrases for the traitorous swab that he was. Then the seagoing infantry scrambled over the bulwarks and tumbled the Tories down their own hatches without losing a man. A prize crew with the humiliated King George made for New London, where there was much cheering in the port, and "even the women, both young and old, expressed the greatest joy." With no very heavy fighting, Talbot had captured five vessels and was keen to show what his crew could do against mettlesome foemen. He found them at last well out to sea in a large ship which seemed eager to engage him. Only a few hundred feet apart through a long afternoon, they briskly and cheerily belabored each other with grape and solid shot. Talbot's speaking-trumpet was shot out of his hand, the tails of his coat were shorn off, and all the officers and men stationed with him on the quarter-deck were killed or wounded. His crew reported that the Argo was in a sinking condition, with the water flooding the gun-deck, but he told them to lower a man or two in the bight of a line and they pluckily plugged the holes from overside. There was a lusty huzza when the Englishman's mainmast crashed to the deck and this finished the affair. Silas Talbot found that he had trounced the privateer Dragon, of twice his own tonnage and with the advantage in both guns and men. While his crew was patching the Argo and pumping the water from her hold, the lookout yelled that another sail was making for them. Without hesitation Talbot somehow got this absurdly impudent one-masted craft of his under way and told those of his sixty men who survived to prepare for a second tussle. Fortunately another Yankee privateer joined the chase and together they subdued the armed brig Hannah. When the Argo safely convoyed the two prizes into New Bedford, "all who beheld her were astonished that a vessel of her diminutive size could suffer so much and yet get safely to port." Men fought and slew each other in those rude and distant days with a certain courtesy, with a fine, punctilious regard for the etiquette of the bloody game. There was the Scotch skipper of the Betsy, a privateer, whom Silas Talbot hailed as follows, before they opened fire: "You must now haul down those British colors, my friend." "Notwithstanding I find you an enemy, as I suspected," was the dignified reply, "yet, sir, I shall let them hang a little bit longer,--with your permission,--so fire away, Flanagan." During another of her cruises the Argo pursued an artfully disguised ship of the line which could have blown her to kingdom come with a broadside of thirty guns. The little Argo was actually becalmed within short range, but her company got out the sweeps and rowed her some distance before darkness and a favoring slant of wind carried them clear. In the summer of 1780, Captain Silas Talbot, again a mariner by title, was given the private cruiser General Washington with one hundred and twenty men, but he was less fortunate with her than when afloat in the tiny Argo with his sixty Continentals. Off Sandy Hook he ran into the British fleet under Admiral Arbuthnot and, being outsailed in a gale of wind, he was forced to lower his flag to the great seventy-four Culloden. After a year in English prisons he was released and made his way home, serving no more in the war but having the honor to command the immortal frigate Constitution in 1799 as a captain in the American Navy. In several notable instances the privateersmen tried conclusions with ships that flew the royal ensign, and got the better of them. The hero of an uncommonly brilliant action of this sort was Captain George Geddes of Philadelphia, who was entrusted with the Congress, a noble privateer of twenty-four guns and two hundred men. Several of the smaller British cruisers had been sending parties ashore to plunder estates along the southern shores, and one of them, the sloop of war Savage, had even raided Washington's home at Mount Vernon. Later she shifted to the coast of Georgia in quest of loot and was unlucky enough to fall athwart Captain Geddes in the Congress. The privateer was the more formidable ship and faster on the wind, forcing Captain Sterling of the Savage to accept the challenge. Disabled aloft very early in the fight, Captain Geddes was unable to choose his position, for which reason they literally battled hand-to-hand, hulls grinding against each other, the gunners scorched by the flashes of the cannon in the ports of the opposing ship, with scarcely room to ply the rammers, and the sailors throwing missiles from the decks, hand grenades, cold shot, scraps of iron, belaying-pins. As the vessels lay interlocked, the Savage was partly dismasted and Captain Geddes, leaping upon the forecastle head, told the boarders to follow him. Before they could swing their cutlases and dash over the hammock-nettings, the British boatswain waved his cap and yelled that the Savage had surrendered. Captain Sterling was dead, eight others were killed, and twenty-four wounded. The American loss was about the same. Captain Geddes, however, was unable to save his prize because a British frigate swooped down and took them both into Charleston. When peace came in 1783, it was independence dearly bought by land and sea, and no small part of the price was the loss of a thousand merchant ships which would see their home ports no more. Other misfortunes added to the toll of destruction. The great fishing fleets which had been the chief occupation of coastwise New England were almost obliterated and their crews were scattered. Many of the men had changed their allegiance and were sailing out of Halifax, and others were impressed into British men-of-war or returned broken in health from long confinement in British prisons. The ocean was empty of the stanch schooners which had raced home with lee rails awash to cheer waiting wives and sweethearts. The fate of Nantucket and its whalers was even more tragic. This colony on its lonely island amid the shoals was helpless against raids by sea, and its ships and storehouses were destroyed without mercy. Many vessels in distant waters were captured before they were even aware that a state of war existed. Of a fleet numbering a hundred and fifty sail, one hundred and thirty-four were taken by the enemy and Nantucket whaling suffered almost total extinction. These seamen, thus robbed of their livelihood, fought nobly for their country's cause. Theirs was not the breed to sulk or whine in port. Twelve hundred of them were killed or made prisoners during the Revolution. They were to be found in the Army and Navy and behind the guns of privateers. There were twenty-five Nantucket whalemen in the crew of the Ranger when Paul Jones steered her across the Atlantic on that famous cruise which inspired the old forecastle song that begins 'Tis of the gallant Yankee ship That flew the Stripes and Stars, And the whistling wind from the west nor'west Blew through her pitch pine spars. With her starboard tacks aboard, my boys, She hung upon the gale. On an autumn night we raised the light Off the Old Head of Kinsale. Pitiful as was the situation of Nantucket, with its only industry wiped out and two hundred widows among the eight hundred families left on the island, the aftermath of war seemed almost as ruinous along the whole Atlantic coast. More ships could be built and there were thousands of adventurous sailors to man them, but where were the markets for the product of the farms and mills and plantations? The ports of Europe had been so long closed to American shipping that little demand was left for American goods. To the Government of England the people of the Republic were no longer fellow-countrymen but foreigners. As such they were subject to the Navigation Acts, and no cargoes could be sent to that kingdom unless in British vessels. The flourishing trade with the West Indies was made impossible for the same reason, a special Order in Council aiming at one fell stroke to "put an end to the building and increase of American vessels" and to finish the careers of three hundred West Indiamen already afloat. In the islands themselves the results were appalling. Fifteen thousand slaves died of starvation because the American traders were compelled to cease bringing them dried fish and corn during seasons in which their own crops were destroyed by hurricanes. In 1776, one-third of the seagoing merchant marine of Great Britain had been bought or built to order in America because lumber was cheaper and wages were lower. This lucrative business was killed by a law which denied Englishmen the privilege of purchasing ships built in American yards. So narrow and bitter was this commercial enmity, so ardent this desire to banish the Stars and Stripes from blue water, that Lord Sheffield in 1784 advised Parliament that the pirates of Algiers and Tripoli really benefited English commerce by preying on the shipping of weaker nations. "It is not probable that the American States will have a very free trade in the Mediterranean," said he. "It will not be to the interest of any of the great maritime Powers to protect them from the Barbary States. If they know their interests, they will not encourage the Americans to be carriers. That the Barbary States are advantageous to maritime Powers is certain." Denied the normal ebb and flow of trade and commerce and with the imports from England far exceeding the value of the merchandise exported thence, the United States, already impoverished, was drained of its money, and a currency of dollars, guineas, joes, and moidores grew scarcer day by day. There was no help in a government which consisted of States united only in name. Congress comprised a handful of respectable gentlemen who had little power and less responsibility, quarreling among themselves for lack of better employment. Retaliation against England by means of legislation was utterly impossible. Each State looked after its commerce in its own peculiar fashion and the devil might take the hindmost. Their rivalries and jealousies were like those of petty kingdoms. If one State should close her ports is to English ships, the others would welcome them in order to divert the trade, with no feeling of national pride or federal cooperation. The Articles of Confederation had empowered Congress to make treaties of commerce, but only such as did not restrain the legislative power of any State from laying imposts and regulating exports and imports. If a foreign power imposed heavy duties upon American shipping, it was for the individual States and not for Congress to say whether the vessels of the offending nation should be allowed free entrance to the ports of the United States: It was folly to suppose, ran the common opinion, that if South Carolina should bar her ports to Spain because rice and indigo were excluded from the Spanish colonies, New Hampshire, which furnished masts and lumber for the Spanish Navy, ought to do the same. The idea of turning the whole matter over to Congress was considered preposterous by many intelligent Americans. In these thirteen States were nearly three and a quarter million people hemmed in a long and narrow strip between the sea and an unexplored wilderness in which the Indians were an ever present peril. The Southern States, including Maryland, prosperous agricultural regions, contained almost one-half the English-speaking population of America. As colonies, they had found the Old World eager for their rice, tobacco, indigo, and tar, and slavery was the means of labor so firmly established that one-fifth of the inhabitants were black. By contrast, the Northern States were still concerned with commerce as the very lifeblood of their existence. New England had not dreamed of the millions of spindles which should hum on the banks of her rivers and lure her young men and women from the farms to the clamorous factory towns. The city of New York had not yet outgrown its traffic in furs and its magnificent commercial destiny was still unrevealed. It was a considerable seaport but not yet a gateway. From Sandy Hook, however, to the stormy headlands of Maine, it was a matter of life and death that ships should freely come and go with cargoes to exchange. All other resources were trifling in comparison. CHAPTER IV. THE FAMOUS DAYS OF SALEM PORT In such compelling circumstances as these, necessity became the mother of achievement. There is nothing finer in American history than the dogged fortitude and high-hearted endeavor with which the merchant seamen returned to their work after the Revolution and sought and found new markets for their wares. It was then that Salem played that conspicuous part which was, for a generation, to overshadow the activities of all other American seaports. Six thousand privateersmen had signed articles in her taverns, as many as the total population of the town, and they filled it with a spirit of enterprise and daring. Not for them the stupid monotony of voyages coastwise if more hazardous ventures beckoned and there were havens and islands unvexed by trade where bold men might win profit and perhaps fight for life and cargo. Now there dwelt in Salem one of the great men of his time, Elias Hasket Derby, the first American millionaire, and very much more than this. He was a shipping merchant with a vision and with the hard-headed sagacity to make his dreams come true. His was a notable seafaring family, to begin with. His father, Captain Richard Derby, born in 1712, had dispatched his small vessels to the West Indies and Virginia and with the returns from these voyages he had loaded assorted cargoes for Spain and Madeira and had the proceeds remitted in bills of exchange to London or in wine, salt, fruit, oil, lead, and handkerchiefs to America. Richard Derby's vessels had eluded or banged away at the privateers during the French War from 1756 to 1763, mounting from eight to twelve guns, "with four cannon below decks for close quarters." Of such a temper was this old sea-dog who led the militia and defiantly halted General Gage's regulars at the North River bridge in Salem, two full months before the skirmish at Lexington. Eight of the nineteen cannon which it was proposed to seize from the patriots had been taken from the ships of Captain Richard Derby and stored in his warehouse for the use of the Provincial Congress. It was Richard's son, Captain John Derby, who carried to England in the swift schooner Quero the first news of the affair at Lexington, ahead of the King's messenger. A sensational arrival, if ever there was one! This Salem shipmaster, cracking on sail like a proper son of his sire, making the passage in twenty-nine days and handsomely beating the lubberly Royal Express Packet Sukey which left Boston four days sooner, and startling the British nation with the tidings which meant the loss of an American empire! A singular coincidence was that this same Captain John Derby should have been the first mariner to inform the United States that peace had come, when he arrived from France in 1783 with the message that a treaty had been signed. Elias Hasket Derby was another son of Richard. When his manifold energies were crippled by the war, he diverted his ability and abundant resources into privateering. He was interested in at least eighty of the privateers out of Salem, invariably subscribing for such shares as might not be taken up by his fellow-townsmen. He soon perceived that many of these craft were wretchedly unfit for the purpose and were easily captured or wrecked. It was characteristic of his genius that he should establish shipyards of his own, turn his attention to naval architecture, and begin to build a class of vessels vastly superior in size, model, and speed to any previously launched in the colonies. They were designed to meet the small cruiser of the British Navy on even terms and were remarkably successful, both in enriching their owner and in defying the enemy. At the end of the war Elias Hasket Derby discovered that these fine ships were too large and costly to ply up and down the coast. Instead of bewailing his hard lot, he resolved to send them to the other side of the globe. At a time when the British and the Dutch East India companies insolently claimed a monopoly of the trade of the Orient, when American merchant seamen had never ventured beyond the two Atlantics, this was a conception which made of commerce a surpassing romance and heralded the golden era of the nation's life upon the sea. His Grand Turk of three hundred tons was promptly fitted out for a pioneering voyage as far as the Cape of Good Hope. Salem knew her as "the great ship" and yet her hull was not quite one hundred feet long. Safely Captain Jonathan Ingersoll took her out over the long road, his navigating equipment consisting of a few erroneous maps and charts, a sextant, and Guthrie's Geographical Grammar. In Table Bay he sold his cargo of provisions and then visited the coast of Guinea to dispose of his rum for ivory and gold dust but brought not a single slave back, Mr. Derby having declared that "he would rather sink the whole capital employed than directly or indirectly be concerned in so infamous a trade"--an unusual point of view for a shipping merchant of New England in 1784! Derby ships were first to go to Mauritius, then called the Isle of France, first at Calcutta, and among the earliest to swing at anchor off Canton. When Elias Hasket Derby decided to invade this rich East India commerce, he sent his eldest son, Elias Hasket, Jr., to England and the Continent after a course at Harvard. The young man became a linguist and made a thorough study of English and French methods of trade. Having laid this foundation for the venture, the son was now sent to India, where he lived for three years in the interests of his house, building up a trade almost fabulously profitable. How fortunes were won in those stirring days may be discerned from the record of young Derby's ventures while in the Orient. In 1788 the proceeds of one cargo enabled him to buy a ship and a brigantine in the Isle of France. These two vessels he sent to Bombay to load with cotton. Two other ships of his fleet, the Astrea and Light Horse, were filled at Calcutta and Rangoon and ordered to Salem. It was found, when the profits of these transactions were reckoned, that the little squadron had earned $100,000 above all outlay. To carry on such a business as this enlisted many men and industries. While the larger ships were making their distant voyages, the brigs and schooners were gathering cargoes for them, crossing to Gothenburg and St. Petersburg for iron, duck, and hemp, to France, Spain, and Madeira for wine and lead, to the French West Indies for molasses to be turned into rum, to New York, Philadelphia, and Richmond for flour, provisions, and tobacco. These shipments were assembled in the warehouses on Derby Wharf and paid for the teas, coffees, pepper, muslin, silks, and ivory which the ships from the Far East were fetching home. In fourteen years the Derby ships made one hundred and twenty-five voyages to Europe and far eastern ports and out of the thirty-five vessels engaged only one was lost at sea. It was in 1785 when the Grand Turk, on a second voyage, brought back a cargo of silks, teas, and nankeens from Batavia and China, that "The Independent Chronicle" of London, unconsciously humorous, was moved to affirm that "the Americans have given up all thought of a China trade which can never be carried on to advantage without some settlement in the East Indies." As soon as these new sea-trails had been furrowed by the keels of Elias Hasket Derby, other Salem merchants were quick to follow in a rivalry which left no sea unexplored for virgin markets and which ransacked every nook and corner of barbarism which had a shore. Vessels slipped their cables and sailed away by night for some secret destination with whose savage potentate trade relations had been established. It might be Captain Jonathan Carnes who, while at the port of Bencoolen in 1793, heard that pepper grew wild on the northern coast of Sumatra. He whispered the word to the Salem owner, who sent him back in the schooner Rajah with only four guns and ten men. Eighteen months later, Jonathan Carnes returned to Salem with a cargo of pepper in bulk, the first direct importation, and cleared seven hundred per cent on the voyage. When he made ready to go again, keeping his business strictly to himself, other owners tracked him clear to Bencoolen, but there he vanished in the Rajah, and his secret with him, until he reappeared with another precious cargo of pepper. When, at length, he shared this trade with other vessels, it meant that Salem controlled the pepper market of Sumatra and for many years supplied a large part of the world's demand. And so it happened that in the spicy warehouses that overlooked Salem Harbor there came to be stored hemp from Luzon, gum copal from Zanzibar, palm oil from Africa, coffee from Arabia, tallow from Madagascar, whale oil from the Antarctic, hides and wool from the Rio de la Plata, nutmeg and cloves from Malaysia. Such merchandise had been bought or bartered for by shipmasters who were much more than mere navigators. They had to be shrewd merchants on their own accounts, for the success or failure of a voyage was mostly in their hands. Carefully trained and highly intelligent men, they attained command in the early twenties and were able to retire, after a few years more afloat, to own ships and exchange the quarterdeck for the counting-room, and the cabin for the solid mansion and lawn on Derby Street. Every opportunity, indeed, was offered them to advance their own fortunes. They sailed not for wages but for handsome commissions and privileges--in the Derby ships, five per cent of a cargo outward bound, two and a half per cent of the freightage home, five per cent profit on goods bought and sold between foreign ports, and five per cent of the cargo space for their own use. Such was the system which persuaded the pick and flower of young American manhood to choose the sea as the most advantageous career possible. There was the Crowninshield family, for example, with five brothers all in command of ships before they were old enough to vote and at one time all five away from Salem, each in his own vessel and three of them in the East India trade. "When little boys," to quote from the memoirs of Benjamin Crowninshield, "they were all sent to a common school and about their eleventh year began their first particular study which should develop them as sailors and ship captains. These boys studied their navigation as little chaps of twelve years old and were required to thoroughly master the subject before being sent to sea.... As soon as the art of navigation was mastered, the youngsters were sent to sea, sometimes as common sailors but commonly as ship's clerks, in which position they were able to learn everything about the management of a ship without actually being a common sailor." This was the practice in families of solid station and social rank, for to be a shipmaster was to follow the profession of a gentleman. Yet the bright lad who entered by way of the forecastle also played for high stakes. Soon promoted to the berth of mate, he was granted cargo space for his own adventures in merchandise and a share of the profits. In these days the youth of twenty-one is likely to be a college undergraduate, rated too callow and unfit to be intrusted with the smallest business responsibilities and tolerantly regarded as unable to take care of himself. It provokes both a smile and a glow of pride, therefore, to recall those seasoned striplings and what they did. No unusual instance was that of Nathaniel Silsbee, later United States Senator from Massachusetts, who took command of the new ship Benjamin in the year 1792, laden with a costly cargo from Salem for the Cape of Good Hope and India, "with such instructions," says he, "as left the management of the voyage very much to my own discretion. Neither myself nor the chief mate, Mr. Charles Derby, had attained the age of twenty-one years when we left home. I was not then twenty." This reminded him to speak of his own family. Of the three Silsbee brothers, "each of us obtained the command of vessels and the consignment of their cargoes before attaining the age of twenty years, viz., myself at the age of eighteen and a half, my brother William at nineteen and a half, and my brother Zachariah before he was twenty years old. Each and all of us left off going to sea before reaching the age of twenty-nine years." How resourcefully these children of the sea could handle affairs was shown in this voyage of the Benjamin. While in the Indian Ocean young Silsbee fell in with a frigate which gave him news of the beginning of war between England and France. He shifted his course for Mauritius and there sold the cargo for a dazzling price in paper dollars, which he turned into Spanish silver. An embargo detained him for six months, during which this currency increased to three times the value of the paper money. He gave up the voyage to Calcutta, sold the Spanish dollars and loaded with coffee and spices for Salem. At the Cape of Good Hope, however, he discovered that he could earn a pretty penny by sending his cargo home in other ships and loading the Benjamin again for Mauritius. When, at length, he arrived in Salem harbor, after nineteen months away, his enterprises had reaped a hundred per cent for Elias Hasket Derby and his own share was the snug little fortune of four thousand dollars. Part of this he, of course, invested at sea, and at twenty-two he was part owner of the Betsy, East Indiaman, and on the road to independence. As second mate in the Benjamin had sailed Richard Cleveland, another matured mariner of nineteen, who crowded into one life an Odyssey of adventure noteworthy even in that era and who had the knack of writing about it with rare skill and spirit. In 1797, when twenty-three years old, he was master of the bark Enterprise bound from Salem to Mocha for coffee. The voyage was abandoned at Havre and he sent the mate home with the ship, deciding to remain abroad and gamble for himself with the chances of the sea. In France he bought on credit a "cutter-sloop" of forty-three tons, no larger than the yachts whose owners think it venturesome to take them off soundings in summer cruises. In this little box of a craft he planned to carry a cargo of merchandise to the Cape of Good Hope and thence to Mauritius. His crew included two men, a black cook, and a brace of boys who were hastily shipped at Havre. "Fortunately they were all so much in debt as not to want any time to spend their advance, but were ready at the instant, and with this motley crew, (who, for aught I knew, were robbers or pirates) I put to sea." The only sailor of the lot was a Nantucket lad who was made mate and had to be taught the rudiments of navigation while at sea. Of the others he had this to say, in his lighthearted manner: "The first of my fore-mast hands is a great, surly, crabbed, raw-boned, ignorant Prussian who is so timid aloft that the mate has frequently been obliged to do his duty there. I believe him to be more of a soldier than a sailor, though he has often assured me that he has been a boatswain's mate of a Dutch Indiaman, which I do not believe as he hardly knows how to put two ends of a rope together.... My cook... a good-natured negro and a tolerable cook, so unused to a vessel that in the smoothest weather he cannot walk fore and aft without holding onto something with both hands. This fear proceeds from the fact that he is so tall and slim that if he should get a cant it might be fatal to him. I did not think America could furnish such a specimen of the negro race... nor did I ever see such a simpleton. It is impossible to teach him anything and... he can hardly tell the main-halliards from the mainstay. "Next is an English boy of seventeen years old, who from having lately had the small-pox is feeble and almost blind, a miserable object, but pity for his misfortunes induces me to make his duty as easy as possible. Finally I have a little ugly French boy, the very image of a baboon, who from having served for some time on different privateers has all the tricks of a veteran man-of-war's man, though only thirteen years old, and by having been in an English prison, has learned enough of the language to be a proficient in swearing." With these human scrapings for a ship's company, the cutter Caroline was three months on her solitary way as far as the Cape of Good Hope, where the inhabitants "could not disguise their astonishment at the size of the vessel, the boyish appearance of the master and mate, and the queer and unique characters of the two men and boy who composed the crew." The English officials thought it strange indeed, suspecting some scheme of French spies or smuggled dispatches, but Richard Cleveland's petition to the Governor, Lord McCartney, ingenuously patterned after certain letters addressed to noblemen as found in an old magazine aboard his vessel, won the day for him and he was permitted to sell the cutter and her cargo, having changed his mind about proceeding farther. Taking passage to Batavia, he looked about for another venture but found nothing to his liking and wandered on to Canton, where he was attracted by the prospect of a voyage to the northwest coast of America to buy furs from the Indians. In a cutter no larger than the Caroline he risked all his cash and credit, stocking her with $20,000 worth of assorted merchandise for barter, and put out across the Pacific, "having on board twenty-one persons, consisting, except two Americans, of English, Irish, Swedes and French, but principally the first, who were runaways from the men-of-war and Indiamen, and two from a Botany Bay ship who had made their escape, for we were obliged to take such as we could get, served to complete a list of as accomplished villains as ever disgraced any country." After a month of weary, drenching hardship off the China coast, this crew of cutthroats mutinied. With a loyal handful, including the black cook, Cleveland locked up the provisions, mounted two four-pounders on the quarterdeck, rammed them full of grape-shot, and fetched up the flint-lock muskets and pistols from the cabin. The mutineers were then informed that if they poked their heads above the hatches he would blow them overboard. Losing enthusiasm and weakened by hunger, they asked to be set ashore; so the skipper marooned the lot. For two days the cutter lay offshore while a truce was argued, the upshot being that four of the rascals gave in and the others were left behind. Fifty days more of it and, washed by icy seas, racked and storm-beaten, the vessel made Norfolk Sound. So small was the crew, so imminent the danger that the Indians might take her by boarding, that screens of hides were rigged along the bulwarks to hide the deck from view. Stranded and getting clear, warding off attacks, Captain Richard Cleveland stayed two months on the wilderness coast of Oregon, trading one musket for eight prime sea-otter skins until there was no more room below. Sixty thousand dollars was the value of the venture when he sailed for China by way of the Sandwich Islands, forty thousand of profit, and he was twenty-five years old with the zest for roving undiminished. He next appeared in Calcutta, buying a twenty-five-ton pilot boat under the Danish flag for a fling at Mauritius and a speculation in prizes brought in by French privateers. Finding none in port, he loaded seven thousand bags of coffee in a ship for Copenhagen and conveyed as a passenger a kindred spirit, young Nathaniel Shaler, whom he took into partnership. At Hamburg these two bought a fast brig, the Lelia Byrd, to try their fortune on the west coast of South America, and recruited a third partner, a boyish Polish nobleman, Count de Rousillon, who had been an aide to Kosciusko. Three seafaring musketeers, true gentlemen rovers, all under thirty, sailing out to beard the viceroys of Spain! From Valparaiso, where other American ships were detained and robbed, they adroitly escaped and steered north to Mexico and California. At San Diego they fought their way out of the harbor, silencing the Spanish fort with their six guns. Then to Canton with furs, and Richard Cleveland went home at thirty years of age after seven years' absence and voyaging twice around the world, having wrested success from almost every imaginable danger and obstacle, with $70,000 to make him a rich man in his own town. He was neither more nor less than an American sailor of the kind that made the old merchant marine magnificent. It was true romance, also, when the first American shipmasters set foot in mysterious Japan, a half century before Perry's squadron shattered the immemorial isolation of the land of the Shoguns and the Samurai. Only the Dutch had been permitted to hold any foreign intercourse whatever with this hermit nation and for two centuries they had maintained their singular commercial monopoly at a price measured in terms of the deepest degradation of dignity and respect. The few Dutch merchants suffered to reside in Japan were restricted to a small island in Nagasaki harbor, leaving it only once in four years when the Resident, or chief agent, journeyed to Yeddo to offer gifts and most humble obeisance to the Shogun, "creeping forward on his hands and feet, and falling on his knees, bowed his head to the ground, and retired again in absolute silence, crawling exactly like a crab," said one of these pilgrims who added: "We may not keep Sundays or fast days, or allow our spiritual hymns or prayers to be heard; never mention the name of Christ. Besides these things, we have to submit to other insulting imputations which are always painful to a noble heart. The reason which impels the Dutch to bear all these sufferings so patiently is simply the love of gain." In return for these humiliations the Dutch East India Company was permitted to send one or two ships a year from Batavia to Japan and to export copper, silk, gold, camphor, porcelain, bronze, and rare woods. The American ship Franklin arrived at Batavia in 1799 and Captain James Devereux of Salem learned that a charter was offered for one of these annual voyages. After a deal of Yankee dickering with the hard-headed Dutchmen, a bargain was struck and the Franklin sailed for Nagasaki with cloves, chintz, sugar, tin, black pepper, sapan wood, and elephants' teeth. The instructions were elaborate and punctilious, salutes to be fired right and left, nine guns for the Emperor's guard while passing in, thirteen guns at the anchorage; all books on board to be sealed up in a cask, Bibles in particular, and turned over to the Japanese officials, all firearms sent ashore, ship dressed with colors whenever the "Commissaries of the Chief" graciously came aboard, and a carpet on deck for them to sit upon. Two years later, the Margaret of Salem made the same sort of a voyage, and in both instances the supercargoes, one of whom happened to be a younger brother of Captain Richard Cleveland, wrote journals of the extraordinary episode. For these mariners alone was the curtain lifted which concealed the feudal Japan from the eyes of the civilized world. Alert and curious, these Yankee traders explored the narrow streets of Nagasaki, visited temples, were handsomely entertained by officers and merchants, and exchanged their wares in the marketplace. They were as much at home, no doubt, as when buying piculs of pepper from a rajah of Qualah Battoo, or dining with an elderly mandarin of Cochin China. It was not too much to say that "the profuse stores of knowledge brought by every ship's crew, together with unheard of curiosities from every savage shore, gave the community of Salem a rare alertness of intellect." It was a Salem bark, the Lydia, that first displayed the American flag to the natives of Guam in 1801. She was chartered by the Spanish government of Manila to carry to the Marianne Islands, as those dots on the chart of the Pacific were then called, the new Governor, his family, his suite, and his luggage. First Mate William Haswell kept a diary in a most conscientious fashion, and here and there one gleans an item with a humor of its own. "Now having to pass through dangerous straits," he observes, "we went to work to make boarding nettings and to get our arms in the best order, but had we been attacked we should have been taken with ease. Between Panay and Negros all the passengers were in the greatest confusion for fear of being taken and put to death in the dark and not have time to say their prayers." The decks were in confusion most of the time, what with the Governor, his lady, three children, two servant girls and twelve men servants, a friar and his servant, a judge and two servants, not to mention some small hogs, two sheep, an ox, and a goat to feed the passengers who were too dainty for sea provender. The friar was an interesting character. A great pity that the worthy mate of the Lydia should not have been more explicit! It intrigues the reader of his manuscript diary to be told that "the Friar was praying night and day but it would not bring a fair wind. His behavior was so bad that we were forced to send him to Coventry, or in other words, no one would speak to him." The Spanish governors of Guam had in operation an economic system which compelled the admiration of this thrifty Yankee mate. The natives wore very few clothes, he concluded, because the Governor was the only shopkeeper and he insisted on a profit of at least eight hundred per cent. There was a native militia regiment of a thousand men who were paid ten dollars a year. With this cash they bought Bengal goods, cottons, Chinese pans, pots, knives, and hoes at the Governor's store, so that "all this money never left the Governor's hands. It was fetched to him by the galleons in passing, and when he was relieved he carried it with him to Manila, often to the amount of eighty or ninety thousand dollars." A glimpse of high finance without a flaw! There is pathos, simple and moving, in the stories of shipwreck and stranding on hostile or desert coasts. These disasters were far more frequent then than now, because navigation was partly guesswork and ships were very small. Among these tragedies was that of the Commerce, bound from Boston to Bombay in 1793. The captain lost his bearings and thought he was off Malabar when the ship piled up on the beach in the night. The nearest port was Muscat and the crew took to the boats in the hope of reaching it. Stormy weather drove them ashore where armed Arabs on camels stripped them of clothes and stores and left them to die among the sand dunes. On foot they trudged day after day in the direction of Muscat, and how they suffered and what they endured was told by one of the survivors, young Daniel Saunders. Soon they began to drop out and die in their tracks in the manner of "Benjamin Williams, William Leghorn, and Thomas Barnard whose bodies were exposed naked to the scorching sun and finding their strength and spirits quite exhausted they lay down expecting nothing but death for relief." The next to be left behind was Mr. Robert Williams, merchant and part owner, "and we therefore with reluctance abandoned him to the mercy of God, suffering ourselves all the horrors that fill the mind at the approach of death." Near the beach and a forlorn little oasis, they stumbled across Charles Lapham, who had become separated from them. He had been without water for five days "and after many efforts he got upon his feet and endeavored to walk. Seeing him in so wretched a condition I could not but sympathize enough with him in his torments to go back with him" toward water two miles away, "which both my other companions refused to do. Accordingly they walked forward while I went back a considerable distance with Lapham until, his strength failing him, he suddenly fell on the ground, nor was he able to rise again or even speak to me. Finding it vain to stay with him, I covered him with sprays and leaves which I tore from an adjacent tree, it being the last friendly office I could do him." Eight living skeletons left of eighteen strong seamen tottered into Muscat and were cared for by the English consul. Daniel Saunders worked his passage to England, was picked up by a press-gang, escaped, and so returned to Salem. It was the fate of Juba Hill, the black cook from Boston, to be detained among the Arabs as a slave. It is worth noting that a black sea-cook figured in many of these tales of daring and disaster, and among them was the heroic and amazing figure of one Peter Jackson who belonged in the brig Ceres. While running down the river from Calcutta she was thrown on her beam ends and Peter, perhaps dumping garbage over the rail, took a header. Among the things tossed to him as he floated away was a sail-boom on which he was swiftly carried out of sight by the turbid current. All on board concluded that Peter Jackson had been eaten by sharks or crocodiles and it was so reported when they arrived home. An administrator was appointed for his goods and chattels and he was officially deceased in the eyes of the law. A year or so later this unconquerable sea-cook appeared in the streets of Salem, grinning a welcome to former shipmates who fled from him in terror as a ghostly visitation. He had floated twelve hours on his sail-boom, it seemed, fighting off the sharks with his feet; and finally drifting ashore. "He had hard work to do away with the impressions of being dead," runs the old account, "but succeeded and was allowed the rights and privileges of the living." The community of interests in these voyages of long ago included not only the ship's company but also the townspeople, even the boys and girls, who entrusted their little private speculations or "adventures" to the captain. It was a custom which flourished well into the nineteenth century. These memoranda are sprinkled through the account books of the East Indiamen out of Salem and Boston. It might be Miss Harriet Elkins who requested the master of the Messenger "please to purchase at Calcutta two net beads with draperies; if at Batavia or any spice market, nutmegs or mace; or if at Canton, two Canton shawls of the enclosed colors at $5 per shawl. Enclosed is $10." Again, it might be Mr. John R. Tucker who ventured in the same ship one hundred Spanish dollars to be invested in coffee and sugar, or Captain Nathaniel West who risked in the Astrea fifteen boxes of spermaceti candles and a pipe of Teneriffe wine. It is interesting to discover what was done with Mr. Tucker's hundred Spanish dollars, as invested for him by the skipper of the Messenger at Batavia and duly accounted for. Ten bags of coffee were bought for $83.30, the extra expenses of duty, boat-hire, and sacking bringing the total outlay to $90.19. The coffee was sold at Antwerp on the way home for $183.75, and Mr. Tucker's handsome profit on the adventure was therefore $93.56, or more than one hundred per cent. It was all a grand adventure, in fact, and the word was aptly chosen to fit this ocean trade. The merchant freighted his ship and sent her out to vanish from his ken for months and months of waiting, with the greater part of his savings, perhaps, in goods and specie beneath her hatches. No cable messages kept him in touch with her nor were there frequent letters from the master. Not until her signal was displayed by the fluttering flags of the headland station at the harbor mouth could he know whether he had gained or lost a fortune. The spirit of such merchants was admirably typified in the last venture of Elias Hasket Derby in 1798, when unofficial war existed between the United States and France. American ships were everywhere seeking refuge from the privateers under the tricolor, which fairly ran amuck in the routes of trade. For this reason it meant a rich reward to land a cargo abroad. The ship Mount Vernon, commanded by Captain Elias Hasket Derby, Jr., was laden with sugar and coffee for Mediterranean ports, and was prepared for trouble, with twenty guns mounted and fifty men to handle them. A smart ship and a powerful one, she raced across to Cape Saint Vincent in sixteen days, which was clipper speed. She ran into a French fleet of sixty sail, exchanged broadsides with the nearest, and showed her stern to the others. "We arrived at 12 o'clock [wrote Captain Derby from Gibraltar] popping at Frenchmen all the forenoon. At 10 A.M. off Algeciras Point we were seriously attacked by a large latineer who had on board more than one hundred men. He came so near our broadside as to allow our six-pound grape to do execution handsomely. We then bore away and gave him our stern guns in a cool and deliberate manner, doing apparently great execution. Our bars having cut his sails considerably, he was thrown into confusion, struck both his ensign and his pennant. I was then puzzled to know what to do with so many men; our ship was running large with all her steering sails out, so that we could not immediately bring her to the wind, and we were directly off Algeciras Point from whence I had reason to fear she might receive assistance, and my port Gibraltar in full view. These were circumstances that induced me to give up the gratification of bringing him in. It was, however, a satisfaction to flog the rascal in full view of the English fleet who were to leeward." CHAPTER V. YANKEE VIKINGS AND NEW TRADE ROUTES Soon after the Revolution the spirit of commercial exploration began to stir in other ports than Salem. Out from New York sailed the ship Empress of China in 1784 for the first direct voyage to Canton, to make the acquaintance of a vast nation absolutely unknown to the people of the United States, nor had one in a million of the industrious and highly civilized Chinese ever so much as heard the name of the little community of barbarians who dwelt on the western shore of the North Atlantic. The oriental dignitaries in their silken robes graciously welcomed the foreign ship with the strange flag and showed a lively interest in the map spread upon the cabin table, offering every facility to promote this new market for their silks and teas. After an absence of fifteen months the Empress of China returned to her home port and her pilgrimage aroused so much attention that the report of the supercargo, Samuel Shaw, was read in Congress. Surpassing this achievement was that of Captain Stewart Dean, who very shortly afterward had his fling at the China trade in an eighty-ton sloop built at Albany. He was a stout-hearted old privateersman of the Revolution whom nothing could dismay, and in this tiny Experiment of his he won merited fame as one of the American pioneers of blue water. Fifteen men and boys sailed with him, drilled and disciplined as if the sloop were a frigate, and when the Experiment hauled into the stream, of Battery Park, New York, "martial music and the boatswain's whistle were heard on board with all the pomp and circumstance of war." Typhoons and Malay proas, Chinese pirates and unknown shoals, had no terrors for Stewart Dean. He saw Canton for himself, found a cargo, and drove home again in a four months' passage, which was better than many a clipper could do at a much later day. Smallest and bravest of the first Yankee East Indiamen, this taut sloop, with the boatswain's pipe trilling cheerily and all hands ready with cutlases and pikes to repel boarders, was by no means the least important vessel that ever passed in by Sandy Hook. In the beginnings of this picturesque relation with the Far East, Boston lagged behind Salem, but her merchants, too, awoke to the opportunity and so successfully that for generations there were no more conspicuous names and shipping-houses in the China trade than those of Russell, Perkins, and Forbes. The first attempt was very ambitious and rather luckless. The largest merchantman ever built at that time in the United States was launched at Quincy in 1789 to rival the towering ships of the British East India Company. This Massachusetts created a sensation. Her departure was a national event. She embodied the dreams of Captain Randall and of the Samuel Shaw who had gone as supercargo in the Empress of China. They formed a partnership and were able to find the necessary capital. This six-hundred-ton ship loomed huge in the ayes of the crowds which visited her. She was in fact no larger than such four-masted coasting schooners as claw around Hatteras with deck-loads of Georgia pine or fill with coal for down East, and manage it comfortably with seven or eight men for a crew. The Massachusetts, however, sailed in 411 the old-fashioned state and dignity of a master, four mates, a purser, surgeon, carpenter, gunner, four quartermasters, three midshipmen, a cooper, two cooks, a steward, and fifty seamen. The second officer was Amasa Delano, a man even more remarkable than the ship, who wandered far and wide and wrote a fascinating book about his voyages, a classic of its kind, the memoirs of an American merchant mariner of a breed long since extinct. While the Massachusetts was fitting out at Boston, one small annoyance ruffled the auspicious undertaking. Three different crews were signed before a full complement could be persuaded to tarry in the forecastle. The trouble was caused by a fortune-teller of Lynn, Moll Pitcher by name, who predicted disaster for the ship. Now every honest sailor knows that certain superstitions are gospel fact, such as the bad luck brought by a cross-eyed Finn, a black cat, or going to sea on Friday, and these eighteenth century shellbacks must not be too severely chided for deserting while they had the chance. As it turned out, the voyage did have a sorry ending and death overtook an astonishingly large number of the ship's people. Though she had been designed and built by master craftsmen of New England who knew their trade surpassingly well, it was discovered when the ship arrived at Canton that her timbers were already rotting. They were of white oak which had been put into her green instead of properly seasoned. This blunder wrecked the hopes of her owners. To cap it, the cargo of masts and spars had also been stowed while wet and covered with mud and ice, and the hatches had been battened. As a result the air became so foul with decay that several hundred barrels of beef were spoiled. To repair the ship was beyond the means of Captain Randall and Samuel Shaw, and reluctantly they sold her to the Danish East India Company at a heavy loss. Nothing could have been more unexpected than to find that, for once, the experienced shipbuilders had been guilty of a miscalculation. The crew scattered, and perhaps the prediction of the fortune-teller of Lynn followed their roving courses, for when Captain Amasa Delano tried to trace them a few years later, he jotted down such obituaries as these on the list of names: "John Harris. A slave in Algiers at last accounts. Roger Dyer. Died and thrown overboard off Cape Horn. William Williams. Lost overboard off Japan. James Crowley. Murdered by the Chinese near Macao. John Johnson. Died on board an English Indiaman. Seth Stowell. Was drowned at Whampoa in 1790. Jeremiah Chace. Died with the small-pox at Whampoa in 1791. Humphrey Chadburn. Shot and died at Whampoa in 1791. Samuel Tripe. Drowned off Java Head in 1790. James Stackpole. Murdered by the Chinese. Nicholas Nicholson. Died with the leprosy at Macao. William Murphy. Killed by Chinese pirates. Larry Conner. Killed at sea." There were more of these gruesome items--so many of them that it appears as though no more than a handful of this stalwart crew survived the Massachusetts by a dozen years. Incredible as it sounds, Captain Delano's roster accounted for fifty of them as dead while he was still in the prime of life, and most of them had been snuffed out by violence. As for his own career, it was overcast by no such unlucky star, and he passed unscathed through all the hazards and vicissitudes that could be encountered in that rugged and heroic era of endeavor. Set adrift in Canton when the Massachusetts was sold, he promptly turned his hand to repairing a large Danish ship which had been wrecked by storm, and he virtually rebuilt her to the great satisfaction of the owners. Thence, with money in his pocket, young Delano went to Macao, where he fell in with Commodore John McClure of the English Navy, who was in command of an expedition setting out to explore a part of the South Seas, including the Pelew Islands, New Guinea, New Holland, and the Spice Islands. The Englishman liked this resourceful Yankee seaman and did him the honor to say, recalls Delano, "that he considered I should be a very useful man to him as a seaman, an officer, or a shipbuilder; and if it was agreeable to me to go on board the Panther with him, I should receive the some pay and emoluments with his lieutenants and astronomers." A signal honor it was at a time when no love was lost between British and American seafarers who had so recently fought each other afloat. And so Amasa Delano embarked as a lieutenant of the Bombay Marine, to explore tropic harbors and goons until then unmapped and to parley with dusky kings. Commodore McClure, diplomatic and humane, had almost no trouble with the untutored islanders, except on the coast of New Guinea, where the Panther was attacked by a swarm of canoes and the surgeon was killed. It was a spirited little affair, four-foot arrows pelting like hail across the deck, a cannon hurling grapeshot from the taffrail, Amasa Delano hit in the chest and pulling out the arrow to jump to his duty again. Only a few years earlier the mutineers of the Bounty had established themselves on Pitcairn Island, and Delano was able to compile the first complete narrative of this extraordinary colony, which governed itself in the light of the primitive Christian virtues. There was profound wisdom in the comment of Amasa Delano: "While the present natural, simple, and affectionate character prevails among these descendants of the mutineers, they will be delightful to our minds, they will be amiable and acceptable in the sight of God, and they will be useful and happy among themselves. Let it be our fervent prayer that neither canting and hypocritical emissaries from schools of artificial theology on the one hand, nor sensual and licentious crews and adventurers on the other, may ever enter the charming village of Pitcairn to give disease to the minds or the bodies of the unsuspecting inhabitants." Two years of this intensely romantic existence, and Delano started homeward. But there was a chance of profit at Mauritius, and there he bought a tremendous East Indiaman of fourteen hundred tons as a joint venture with a Captain Stewart and put a crew of a hundred and fifty men on board. She had been brought in by a French privateer and Delano was moved to remark, with an indignation which was much in advance of his times: "Privateering is entirely at variance with the first principle of honorable warfare.... This system of licensed robbery enables a wicked and mercenary man to insult and injure even neutral friends on the ocean; and when he meets an honest sailor who may have all his earnings on board his ship but who carries an enemy's flag, he plunders him of every cent and leaves him the poor consolation that it is done according to law.... When the Malay subjects of Abba Thule cut down the cocoanut trees of an enemy, in the spirit of private revenge, he asked them why they acted in opposition to the principles on which they knew he always made and conducted a war. They answered, and let the reason make us humble, 'The English do so.'" In his grand East Indiaman young Captain Delano traded on the coast of India but soon came to grief. The enterprise had been too large for him to swing with what cash and credit he could muster, and the ship was sold from under him to pay her debts. Again on the beach, with one solitary gold moidore in his purse, he found a friendly American skipper who offered him a passage to Philadelphia, which he accepted with the pious reflection that, although his mind was wounded and mortified by the financial disaster, his motives had been perfectly pure and honest. He never saw his native land with so little pleasure as on this return to it, he assures us, and the shore on which he would have leaped with delight was covered with gloom and sadness. Now what makes it so well worth while to sketch in brief outline the careers of one and another of these bygone shipmasters is that they accurately reflected the genius and the temper of their generation. There was, in truth, no such word as failure in their lexicon. It is this quality that appeals to us beyond all else. Thrown on their beam ends, they were presently planning something else, eager to shake dice with destiny and with courage unbroken. It was so with Amasa Delano, who promptly went to work "with what spirits I could revive within me. After a time they returned to their former elasticity." He obtained a position as master builder in a shipyard, saved some money, borrowed more, and with one of his brothers was soon blithely building a vessel of two hundred tons for a voyage into the Pacific and to the northwest coast after seals. They sailed along Patagonia and found much to interest them, dodged in and out of the ports of Chili and Peru, and incidentally recaptured a Spanish ship which was in the hands of the slaves who formed her cargo. This was all in the day's work and happened at the island of Santa Maria, not far from Juan Fernandez, where Captain Delano's Perseverance found the high-pooped Tryal in a desperate state. Spanish sailors who had survived the massacre were leaping overboard or scrambling up to the mastheads while the African savages capered on deck and flourished their weapons. Captain Delano liked neither the Spaniard nor the slavetrade, but it was his duty to help fellow seamen in distress; so he cleared for action and ordered two boats away to attend to the matter. The chief mate, Rufus Low, was in charge, and a gallant sailor he showed himself. They had to climb the high sides of the Tryal and carry, in hand-to-hand conflict, the barricades of water-casks and bales of matting which the slaves had built across the deck. There was no hanging back, and even a mite of a midshipman from Boston pranced into it with his dirk. The negroes were well armed and fought ferociously. The mate was seriously wounded, four seamen were stabbed, the Spanish first mate had two musket balls in him, and a passenger was killed in the fray. Having driven the slaves below and battened them down, the American party returned next morning to put the irons on them. A horrid sight confronted them. Thirsting for vengeance, the Spanish sailors had spread-eagled several of the negroes to ringbolts in the deck and were shaving the living flesh from them with razor-edged boarding lances. Captain Delano thereupon disarmed these brutes and locked them up in their turn, taking possession of the ship until he could restore order. The sequel was that he received the august thanks of the Viceroy of Chili and a gold medal from His Catholic Majesty. As was the custom, the guilty slaves, poor wretches, were condemned to be dragged to the gibbet at the tails of mules, to be hanged, their bodies burned, and their heads stuck upon poles in the plaza. It was while in this Chilean port of Talcahuano that Amasa Delano heard the tale of the British whaler which had sailed just before his arrival. He tells it so well that I am tempted to quote it as a generous tribute to a sailor of a rival race. After all, they were sprung from a common stock and blood was thicker than water. Besides, it is the sort of yarn that ought to be dragged to the light of day from its musty burial between the covers of Delano's rare and ancient "Voyages and Travels." The whaler Betsy, it seems, went in and anchored under the guns of the forts to seek provisions and make repairs. The captain went ashore to interview the officials, leaving word that no Spaniards should be allowed to come aboard because of the bad feeling against the English. Three or four large boats filled with troops presently veered alongside and were ordered to keep clear. This command was resented, and the troops opened fire, followed by the forts. Now for the deed of a man with his two feet under him. "The chief officer of the Betsy whose name was Hudson, a man of extraordinary bravery, cut his cable and his ship swung the wrong way, with her head in shore, passing close to several Spanish ships which, with every vessel in the harbor that could bring a gun to bear, together with three hundred soldiers in boats and on ship's decks and the two batteries, all kept up a constant fire on him. The wind was light, nearly a calm. The shot flew so thick that it was difficult for him to make sail, some part of the rigging being cut away every minute. "He kept his men at the guns, and when the ship swung her broadside so as to bear upon any of the Spanish ships, he kept up a fire at them. In this situation the brave fellow continued to lie for three-quarters of an hour before he got his topsails sheeted home. The action continued in this manner for near an hour and a half. He succeeded in getting the ship to sea, however, in defiance of all the force that could be brought against him. The ship was very much cut to pieces in sails, rigging, and hull; and a considerable number of men were killed and wounded on board. "Hudson kept flying from one part of the deck to the other during the whole time of action, encouraging and threatening the men as occasion required. He kept a musket in his hand most part of the time, firing when he could find the leisure. Some of the men came aft and begged him to give up the ship, telling him they should all be killed--that the carpenter had all one side of him shot away--that one man was cut in halves with a double-headed shot as he was going aloft to loose the foretopsail and the body had fallen on deck in two separate parts--that such a man was killed at his duty on the forecastle, and one more had been killed in the maintop--that Sam, Jim, Jack, and Tom were wounded and that they would do nothing more towards getting the ship out of the harbor. "His reply to them was, 'then you shall be sure to die, for if they do not kill you I will, so sure as you persist in any such cowardly resolution,' saying at the same time, 'OUT SHE GOES, OR DOWN SHE GOES.'" By this resolute and determined conduct he kept the men to their duty and succeeded in accomplishing one of the most daring enterprises perhaps ever attempted. An immortal phrase, this simple dictum of first mate Hudson of the Betsy, "Out she goes, or down she goes," and not unworthy of being mentioned in the same breath with Farragut's "Damn the torpedoes." Joined by his brother Samuel in the schooner Pilgrim, which was used as a tender in the sealing trade, Amasa Delano frequented unfamiliar beaches until he had taken his toll of skins and was ready to bear away for Canton to sell them. There were many Yankee ships after seals in those early days, enduring more peril and privation than the whalemen, roving over the South Pacific among the rock-bound islands unknown to the merchant navigator. The men sailed wholly on shares, a seaman receiving one per cent of the catch and the captain ten per cent, and they slaughtered the seal by the million, driving them from the most favored haunts within a few years. For instance, American ships first visited Mas a Fuera in 1797, and Captain Delano estimated that during the seven years following three million skins were taken to China from this island alone. He found as many as fourteen vessels there at one time, and he himself carried away one hundred thousand skins. It was a gold mine for profit while it lasted. There were three Delano brothers afloat in two vessels, and of their wanderings Amasa set down this epitome: "Almost the whole of our connections who were left behind had need of our assistance, and to look forward it was no more than a reasonable calculation to make that our absence would not be less than three years... together with the extraordinary uncertainty of the issue of the voyage, as we had nothing but our hands to depend upon to obtain a cargo which was only to be done through storms, dangers, and breakers, and taken from barren rocks in distant regions. But after a voyage of four years for one vessel and five for the other, we were all permitted to return safe home to our friends and not quite empty-handed. We had built both of the vessels we were in and navigated them two and three times around the globe." Each one of the brothers had been a master builder and rigger and a navigator of ships in every part of the world. By far the most important voyage undertaken by American merchantmen during the decade of brilliant achievement following the Revolution was that of Captain Robert Gray in the Columbia, which was the first ship to visit and explore the northwest coast and to lead the way for such adventurers as Richard Cleveland and Amasa Delano. On his second voyage in 1792, Captain Gray discovered the great river he christened Columbia and so gave to the United States its valid title to that vast territory which Lewis and Clark were to find after toiling over the mountains thirteen years later. CHAPTER VI. "FREE TRADE AND SAILORS' RIGHTS" When the first Congress under the new Federal Constitution assembled in 1789, a spirit of pride was manifested in the swift recovery and the encouraging growth of the merchant marine, together with a concerted determination to promote and protect it by means of national legislation. The most imperative need was a series of retaliatory measures to meet the burdensome navigation laws of England, to give American ships a fair field and no favors. The Atlantic trade was therefore stimulated by allowing a reduction of ten per cent of the customs duties on goods imported in vessels built and owned by American citizens. The East India trade, which already employed forty New England ships, was fostered in like manner. Teas brought direct under the American flag paid an average duty of twelve cents a pound while teas in foreign bottoms were taxed twenty-seven cents. It was sturdy protection, for on a cargo of one hundred thousand pounds of assorted teas from India or China, a British ship would pay $27,800 into the custom house and a Salem square-rigger only $10,980. The result was that the valuable direct trade with the Far East was absolutely secured to the American flag. Not content with this, Congress decreed a system of tonnage duties which permitted the native owner to pay six cents per ton on his vessel while the foreigner laid down fifty cents as an entry fee for every ton his ship measured, or thirty cents if he owned an American-built vessel. In 1794, Congress became even more energetic in defense of its mariners and increased the tariff rates on merchandise in foreign vessels. A nation at last united, jealous of its rights, resentful of indignities long suffered, and intelligently alive to its shipping as the chief bulwark of prosperity, struck back with peaceful weapons and gained a victory of incalculable advantage. Its Congress, no longer feeble and divided, laid the foundations for American greatness upon the high seas which was to endure for more than a half century. Wars, embargoes, and confiscations might interrupt but they could not seriously harm it. In the three years after 1789 the merchant shipping registered for the foreign trade increased from 123,893 tons to 411,438 tons, presaging a growth without parallel in the history of the commercial world. Foreign ships were almost entirely driven out of American ports, and ninety-one per cent of imports and eighty-six per cent of exports were conveyed in vessels built and manned by Americans. Before Congress intervened, English merchantmen had controlled three-fourths of our commerce overseas. When Thomas Jefferson, as Secretary of State, fought down Southern opposition to a retaliatory shipping policy, he uttered a warning which his countrymen were to find still true and apt in the twentieth century: "If we have no seamen, our ships will be useless, consequently our ship timber, iron, and hemp; our shipbuilding will be at an end; ship carpenters will go over to other nations; our young men have no call to the sea; our products, carried in foreign bottoms, will be saddled with war-freight and insurance in time of war--and the history of the last hundred years shows that the nation which is our carrier has three years of war for every four years of peace." The steady growth of an American merchant marine was interrupted only once in the following decade. In the year 1793 war broke out between England and France. A decree of the National Convention of the French Republic granted neutral vessels the same rights as those which flew the tricolor. This privilege reopened a rushing trade with the West Indies, and hundreds of ships hastened from American ports to Martinique, Guadeloupe, and St. Lucia. Like a thunderbolt came the tidings that England refused to look upon this trade with the French colonies as neutral and that her cruisers had been told to seize all vessels engaged in it and to search them for English-born seamen. This ruling was enforced with such barbarous severity that it seemed as if the War for Independence had been fought in vain. Without warning, unable to save themselves, great fleets of Yankee merchantmen were literally swept from the waters of the West Indies. At St. Eustatius one hundred and thirty of them were condemned. The judges at Bermuda condemned eleven more. Crews and passengers were flung ashore without food or clothing, were abused, insulted, or perhaps impressed in British privateers. The ships were lost to their owners. There was no appeal and no redress. At Martinique an English fleet and army captured St. Pierre in February, 1794. Files of marines boarded every American ship in the harbor, tore down the colors, and flung two hundred and fifty seamen into the foul holds of a prison hulk. There they were kept, half-dead with thirst and hunger while their vessels, uncared for, had stranded or sunk at their moorings. Scores of outrages as abominable as this were on record in the office of the Secretary of State. Shipmasters were afraid to sail to the southward and, for lack of these markets for dried cod, the fishing schooners of Marblehead were idle. For a time a second war with England seemed imminent. An alarmed Congress passed laws to create a navy and to fortify the most important American harbors. President Washington recommended an embargo of thirty days, which Congress promptly voted and then extended for thirty more. It was a popular measure and strictly enforced by the mariners themselves. The mates and captains of the brigs and snows in the Delaware River met and resolved not to go to sea for another ten days, swearing to lie idle sooner than feed the British robbers in the West Indies. It was in the midst of these demonstrations that Washington seized the one hope of peace and recommended a special mission to England. The treaty negotiated by John Jay in 1794 was received with an outburst of popular indignation. Jay was damned as a traitor, while the sailors of Portsmouth burned him in effigy. By way of an answer to the terms of the obnoxious treaty, a seafaring mob in Boston raided and burned the British privateer Speedwell, which had put into that port as a merchantman with her guns and munitions hidden beneath a cargo of West India produce. The most that can be said of the commercial provisions of the treaty is that they opened direct trade with the East Indies but at the price of complete freedom of trade for British shipping in American ports. It must be said, too, that although the treaty failed to clear away the gravest cause of hostility--the right of search and impressment--yet it served to postpone the actual dash, and during the years in which it was in force American shipping splendidly prospered, freed of most irksome handicaps. The quarrel with France had been brewing at the same time and for similar reasons. Neutral trade with England was under the ban, and the Yankee shipmaster was in danger of losing his vessel if he sailed to or from a port under the British flag. It was out of the frying-pan into the fire, and French privateers welcomed the excuse to go marauding in the Atlantic and the Caribbean. What it meant to fight off these greedy cutthroats is told in a newspaper account of the engagement of Captain Richard Wheatland, who was homeward bound to Salem in the ship Perseverance in 1799. He was in the Old Straits of Bahama when a fast schooner came up astern, showing Spanish colors and carrying a tremendous press of canvas. Unable to run away from her, Captain Wheatland reported to his owners: "We took in steering sails, wore ship, hauled up our courses, piped all hands to quarters and prepared for action. The schooner immediately took in sail, hoisted an English Union flag and passed under our lee at a considerable distance. We wore ship, she did the same, and we passed each other within half a musket. A fellow hailed us in broken English and ordered the boat hoisted out and the captain to come aboard, which he refused. He again ordered our boat out and enforced his orders with a menace that in case of refusal he would sink us, using at the same time the vilest and most infamous language it is possible to conceive of. ... We hauled the ship to wind and as he passed poured a whole broadside into him with great success. Sailing faster than we, he ranged considerably ahead, tacked and again passed, giving us a broadside and furious discharge of musketry, which he kept up incessantly until the latter part of the engagement. His musket balls reached us in every direction but his large shot either fell short or went considerably over us while our guns loaded with round shot and square bars of iron were plied so briskly and directed with such good judgment that before he got out of range we had cut his mainsail and foretopsail all to rags and cleared his decks so effectively that when he bore away from us there were scarcely ten men to be seen. He then struck his English flag and hoisted the flag of The Terrible Republic and made off with all the sail he could carry, much disappointed, no doubt, at not being able to give us a fraternal embrace. We feel confidence that we have rid the world of some infamous pests of society." By this time, the United States was engaged in active hostilities with France, although war had not been declared. The news of the indignities which American commissions had suffered at the hands of the French Directory had stirred the people to war pitch. Strong measures for national defense were taken, which stopped little short of war. The country rallied to the slogan, "Millions for defense but not one cent for tribute," and the merchants of the seaports hastened to subscribe funds to build frigates to be loaned to the Government. Salem launched the famous Essex, ready for sea six months after the keel was laid, at a cost of $75,000. Her two foremost merchants, Elias Hasket Derby and William Gray, led the list with ten thousand dollars each. The call sent out by the master builder, Enos Briggs, rings with thrilling effect: "To Sons of Freedom! All true lovers of Liberty of your Country! Step forth and give your assistance in building the frigate to oppose French insolence and piracy. Let every man in possession of a white oak tree be ambitious to be foremost in hurrying down the timber to Salem where the noble structure is to be fabricated to maintain your rights upon the seas and make the name of America respected among the nations of the world. Your largest and longest trees are wanted, and the arms of them for knees and rising timber. Four trees are wanted for the keel which altogether will measure 146 feet in length, and hew sixteen inches square." This handsome frigate privately built by patriots of the republic illuminates the coastwise spirit and conditions of her time. She was a Salem ship from keel to truck. Captain Jonathan Haraden, the finest privateersman of the Revolution, made the rigging for the mainmast at his ropewalk in Brown Street. Joseph Vincent fitted out the foremast and Thomas Briggs the mizzenmast in their lofts at the foot of the Common. When the huge hemp cables were ready for the frigate, the workmen carried them to the shipyard on their shoulders, the parade led by fife and drum. Her sails were cut from duck woven in Daniel Rust's factory in Broad Street and her iron work was forged by Salem shipsmiths. It was not surprising that Captain Richard Derby was chosen to command the Essex, but he was abroad in a ship of his own and she sailed under Captain Edward Preble of the Navy. The war cloud passed and the merchant argosies overflowed the wharves and havens of New England, which had ceased to monopolize the business on blue water. New York had become a seaport with long ranks of high-steeved bowsprits soaring above pleasant Battery Park and a forest of spars extending up the East River. In 1790 more than two thousand ships, brigs, schooners, and smaller craft had entered and cleared, and the merchants met in the coffee-houses to discuss charters, bills-of-lading, and adventures. Sailors commanded thrice the wages of laborers ashore. Shipyards were increasing and the builders could build as large and swift East Indiamen as those of which Boston and Salem boasted. Philadelphia had her Stephen Girard, whose wealth was earned in ships, a man most remarkable and eccentric, whose career was one of the great maritime romances. Though his father was a prosperous merchant of Bordeaux engaged in the West India trade, he was shifting for himself as a cabin-boy on his father's ships when only fourteen years old. With no schooling, barely able to read and write, this urchin sailed between Bordeaux and the French West Indies for nine years, until he gained the rank of first mate. At the age of twenty-six he entered the port of Philadelphia in command of a sloop which had narrowly escaped capture by British frigates. There he took up his domicile and laid the foundation of his fortune in small trading ventures to New Orleans and Santo Domingo. In 1791 he began to build a fleet of beautiful ships for the China and India trade, their names, Montesquieu, Helvetius, Voltaire, and Rousseau, revealing his ideas of religion and liberty. So successfully did he combine banking and shipping that in 1813 he was believed to be the wealthiest merchant in the United States. In that year one of his ships from China was captured off the Capes of the Delaware by a British privateer. Her cargo of teas, nankeens, and silks was worth half a million dollars to him but he succeeded in ransoming it on the spot by counting out one hundred and eighty thousand Spanish milled dollars. No privateersman could resist such strategy as this. Alone in his old age, without a friend or relative to close his eyes in death, Stephen Girard, once a penniless, ignorant French cabin-boy, bequeathed his millions to philanthropy, and the Girard College for orphan boys, in Philadelphia, is his monument. The Treaty of Amiens brought a little respite to Europe and a peaceful interlude for American shipmasters, but France and England came to grips again in 1803. For two years thereafter the United States was almost the only important neutral nation not involved in the welter of conflict on land and sea, and trade everywhere sought the protection of the Stars and Stripes. England had swept her own rivals, men-of-war and merchantmen, from the face of the waters. France and Holland ceased to carry cargoes beneath their own ensigns. Spain was afraid to send her galleons to Mexico and Peru. All the Continental ports were begging for American ships to transport their merchandise. It was a maritime harvest unique and unexpected. Yankee skippers were dominating the sugar trade of Cuba and were rolling across the Atlantic with the coffee, hides, and indigo of Venezuela and Brazil. Their fleets crowded the roadsteads of Manila and Batavia and packed the warehouses of Antwerp, Lisbon, and Hamburg. It was a situation which England could not tolerate without attempting to thwart an immense traffic which she construed as giving aid and comfort to her enemies. Under cover of the so-called Rule of 1756 British admiralty courts began to condemn American vessels carrying products from enemies' colonies to Europe, even when the voyage was broken by first entering an American port. It was on record in September, 1805, that fifty American ships had been condemned in England and as many more in the British West Indies. This was a trifling disaster, however, compared with the huge calamity which befell when Napoleon entered Berlin as a conqueror and proclaimed his paper blockade of the British Isles. There was no French navy to enforce it, but American vessels dared not sail for England lest they be snapped up by French privateers. The British Government savagely retaliated with further prohibitions, and Napoleon countered in like manner until no sea was safe for a neutral ship and the United States was powerless to assert its rights. Thomas Jefferson as President used as a weapon the Embargo of 1807, which was, at first, a popular measure, and which he justified in these pregnant sentences: "The whole world is thus laid under interdict by these two nations, and our own vessels, their cargoes, and crews, are to be taken by the one or the other for whatever place they may be destined out of our limits. If, therefore, on leaving our harbors we are certainly to lose them, is it not better as to vessels, cargoes, and seamen, to keep them at home?" A people proud, independent, and pugnacious, could not long submit to a measure of defense which was, in the final sense, an abject surrender to brute force. New England, which bore the brunt of the embargo, was first to rebel against it. Sailors marched through the streets clamoring for bread or loaded their vessels and fought their way to sea. In New York the streets of the waterside were deserted, ships dismantled, countinghouses unoccupied, and warehouses empty. In one year foreign commerce decreased in value from $108,000,000 to $22,000,000. After fifteen months Congress repealed the law, substituting a Non-Intercourse Act which suspended trade with Great Britain and France until their offending orders were repealed. All such measures were doomed to be futile. Words and documents, threats and arguments could not intimidate adversaries who paid heed to nothing else than broadsides from line-of-battle ships or the charge of battalions. With other countries trade could now be opened. Hopefully the hundreds of American ships long pent-up in harbor winged it deep-laden for the Baltic, the North Sea, and the Mediterranean. But few of them ever returned. Like a brigand, Napoleon lured them into a trap and closed it, advising the Prussian Government, which was under his heel: "Let the American ships enter your ports. Seize them afterward. You shall deliver the cargoes to me and I will take them in part payment of the Prussian war debt." Similar orders were executed wherever his mailed fist reached, the pretext being reprisal for the Non-Intercourse Act. More than two hundred American vessels were lost to their owners, a ten-million-dollar robbery for which France paid an indemnity of five millions after twenty years. It was the grand climax of the exploitation which American commerce had been compelled to endure through two centuries of tumult and bloodshed afloat. There lingers today in many a coastwise town an inherited dislike for France. It is a legacy of that far-off catastrophe which beggared many a household and filled the streets with haggard, broken shipmasters. It was said of this virile merchant marine that it throve under pillage and challenged confiscation. Statistics confirm this brave paradox. In 1810, while Napoleon was doing his worst, the deep-sea tonnage amounted to 981,019; and it is a singular fact that in proportion to population this was to stand as the high tide of American foreign shipping until thirty-seven years later. It ebbed during the War of 1812 but rose again with peace and a real and lasting freedom of the seas. This second war with England was fought in behalf of merchant seamen and they played a nobly active part in it. The ruthless impressment of seamen was the most conspicuous provocation, but it was only one of many. Two years before hostilities were openly declared, British frigates were virtually blockading the port of New York, halting and searching ships as they pleased, making prizes of those with French destinations, stealing sailors to fill their crews, waging war in everything but name, and enjoying the sport of it. A midshipman of one of them merrily related: "Every morning at daybreak we set about arresting the progress of all the vessels we saw, firing off guns to the right and left to make every ship that was running in heave to or wait until we had leisure to send a boat on board to see, in our lingo, what she was made of. I have frequently known a dozen and sometimes a couple of dozen ships lying a league or two off the port, losing their fair wind, their tide, and worse than all, their market for many hours, sometimes the whole day, before our search was completed." The right of a belligerent to search neutral vessels for contraband of war or evidence of a forbidden destination was not the issue at stake. This was a usage sanctioned by such international law as then existed. It was the alleged right to search for English seamen in neutral vessels that Great Britain exercised, not only on the high seas but even in territorial waters, which the American Government refused to recognize. In vain the Government had endeavored to protect its sailors from impressment by means of certificates of birth and citizenship. These documents were jeered at by the English naval lieutenant and his boarding gang, who kidnapped from the forecastle such stalwart tars as pleased their fancy. The victim who sought to inform an American consul of his plight was lashed to the rigging and flogged by a boatswain's mate. The files of the State Department, in 1807, had contained the names of six thousand American sailors who were as much slaves and prisoners aboard British men-of-war as if they had been made captives by the Dey of Algiers. One of these incidents, occurring on the ship Betsy, Captain Nathaniel Silsbee, while at Madras in 1795, will serve to show how this brutal business was done. "I received a note early one morning from my chief mate that one of my sailors, Edward Hulen, a fellow townsman whom I had known from boyhood, had been impressed and taken on board of a British frigate then being in port.... I immediately went on board my ship and having there learned all the facts in the case, proceeded to the frigate, where I found Hulen and in his presence was informed by the first lieutenant of the frigate that he had taken Hulen from my ship under a peremptory order from his commander to visit every American ship in port and take from each of them one or more of their seamen.... I then called upon Captain Cook, who commanded the frigate, and sought first by all the persuasive means that I was capable of using and ultimately by threats to appeal to the Government of the place to obtain Hulen's release, but in vain.... It remained for me only to recommend Hulen to that protection of the lieutenant which a good seaman deserves, and to submit to the high-handed insult thus offered to the flag of my country which I had no means either of preventing or resisting." After several years' detention in the British Navy, Hulen returned to Salem and lived to serve on board privateers in the second war with England. Several years' detention! This was what it meant to be a pressed man, perhaps with wife and children at home who had no news of him nor any wages to support them. At the time of the Nore Mutiny in 1797, there were ships in the British fleet whose men had not been paid off for eight, ten, twelve, and in one instance fifteen years. These wooden walls of England were floating hells, and a seaman was far better off in jail. He was flogged if he sulked and again if he smiled flogged until the blood ran for a hundred offenses as trivial as these. His food was unspeakably bad and often years passed before he was allowed to set foot ashore. Decent men refused to volunteer and the ships were filled with the human scum and refuse caught in the nets of the press-gangs of Liverpool, London, and Bristol. It is largely forgotten or unknown that this system of recruiting was as intolerable in England as it was in the United States and as fiercely resented. Oppressive and unjust, it was nevertheless endured as the bulwark of England's defense against her foes. It ground under its heel the very people it protected and made them serfs in order to keep them free. No man of the common people who lived near the coast of England was safe from the ruffianly press-gangs nor any merchant ship that entered her ports. It was the most cruel form of conscription ever devised. Mob violence opposed it again and again, and British East Indiamen fought the King's tenders sooner than be stripped of their crews and left helpless. Feeling in America against impressment was never more highly inflamed, even on the brink of the War of 1812, than it had long been in England itself, although the latter country was unable to rise and throw it off. Here are the words, not of an angry American patriot but of a modern English historian writing of his own nation: * "To the people the impress was an axe laid at the foot of the tree. There was here no question, as with trade, of the mere loss of hands who could be replaced. Attacking the family in the person of its natural supporter and protector, the octopus system of which the gangs were the tentacles, struck at the very foundations of domestic life and brought to thousands of households a poverty as bitter and a grief as poignant as death. ... The mutiny at the Nore brought the people face to face with the appalling risks attendant on wholesale pressing while the war with America, incurred for the sole purpose of upholding the right to press, taught them the lengths to which their rulers were still prepared to go in order to enslave them." * * The Press Gang Afloat and Ashore, by J. R. Hutchinson. CHAPTER VII. THE BRILLIANT ERA OF 1812 American privateering in 1812 was even bolder and more successful than during the Revolution. It was the work of a race of merchant seamen who had found themselves, who were in the forefront of the world's trade and commerce, and who were equipped to challenge the enemy's pretensions to supremacy afloat. Once more there was a mere shadow of a navy to protect them, but they had learned to trust their own resources. They would send to sea fewer of the small craft, slow and poorly armed, and likely to meet disaster. They were capable of manning what was, in fact, a private navy comprised of fast and formidable cruisers. The intervening generation had advanced the art of building and handling ships beyond all rivalry, and England grudgingly acknowledged their ability. The year of 1812 was indeed but a little distance from the resplendent modern era of the Atlantic packet and the Cape Horn clipper. Already these Yankee deep-water ships could be recognized afar by their lofty spars and snowy clouds of cotton duck beneath which the slender hull was a thin black line. Far up to the gleaming royals they carried sail in winds so strong that the lumbering English East Indiamen were hove to or snugged down to reefed topsails. It was not recklessness but better seamanship. The deeds of the Yankee privateers of 1812 prove this assertion to the hilt. Their total booty amounted to thirteen hundred prizes taken over all the Seven Seas, with a loss to England of forty million dollars in ships and cargoes. There were, all told, more than five hundred of them in commission, but New England no longer monopolized this dashing trade. Instead of Salem it was Baltimore that furnished the largest fleet--fifty-eight vessels, many of them the fast ships and schooners which were to make the port famous as the home of the Baltimore clipper model. All down the coast, out of Norfolk, Wilmington, Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans, sallied the privateers to show that theirs was, in truth, a seafaring nation ardently united in a common cause. Again and more vehemently the people of England raised their voices in protest and lament, for these saucy sea-raiders fairly romped to and fro in the Channel, careless of pursuit, conducting a blockade of their own until London was paying the famine price of fifty-eight dollars a barrel for flour, and it was publicly declared mortifying and distressing that "a horde of American cruisers should be allowed, unresisted and unmolested, to take, burn, or sink our own vessels in our own inlets and almost in sight of our own harbors." It was Captain Thomas Boyle in the Chasseur of Baltimore who impudently sent ashore his proclamation of a blockade of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, which he requested should be posted in Lloyd's Coffee House. A wonderfully fine figure of a fighting seaman was this Captain Boyle, with an Irish sense of humor which led him to haunt the enemy's coast and to make sport of the frigates which tried to catch him. His Chasseur was considered one of the ablest privateers of the war and the most beautiful vessel ever seen in Baltimore. A fleet and graceful schooner with a magical turn for speed, she mounted sixteen long twelve-pounders and carried a hundred officers, seamen, and marines, and was never outsailed in fair winds or foul. "Out of sheer wantonness," said an admirer, "she sometimes affected to chase the enemy's men-of-war of far superior force." Once when surrounded by two frigates and two naval brigs, she slipped through and was gone like a phantom. During his first cruise in the Chasseur, Captain Boyle captured eighteen valuable merchantmen. It was such defiant rovers as he that provoked the "Morning Chronicle" of London to splutter "that the whole coast of Ireland from Wexford round by Cape Clear to Carrickfergus, should have been for above a month under the unresisted domination of a few petty fly-by-nights from the blockaded ports of the United States is a grievance equally intolerable and disgraceful." This was when the schooner Syren had captured His Majesty's cutter Landrail while crossing the Irish Sea with dispatches; when the Governor Tompkins burned fourteen English vessels in the English Channel in quick succession; when the Harpy of Baltimore cruised for three months off the Irish and English coasts and in the Bay of Biscay, and returned to Boston filled with spoils, including a half million dollars of money; when the Prince de Neuchatel hovered at her leisure in the Irish Channel and made coasting trade impossible; and when the Young Wasp of Philadelphia cruised for six months in those same waters. Two of the privateers mentioned were first-class fighting ships whose engagements were as notable, in their way, as those of the American frigates which made the war as illustrious by sea as it was ignominious by land. While off Havana in 1815, Captain Boyle met the schooner St. Lawrence of the British Navy, a fair match in men and guns. The Chasseur could easily have run away but stood up to it and shot the enemy to pieces in fifteen minutes. Brave and courteous were these two commanders, and Lieutenant Gordon of the St. Lawrence gave his captor a letter which read, in part: "In the event of Captain Boyle's becoming a prisoner of war to any British cruiser I consider it a tribute justly due to his humane and generous treatment of myself, the surviving officers, and crew of His Majesty's late schooner St. Lawrence, to state that his obliging attention and watchful solicitude to preserve our effects and render us comfortable during the short time we were in his possession were such as justly entitle him to the indulgence and respect of every British subject." The Prince de Neuchatel had the honor of beating off the attack of a forty-gun British frigate--an exploit second only to that of the General Armstrong in the harbor of Fayal. This privateer with a foreign name hailed from New York and was so fortunate as to capture for her owners three million dollars' worth of British merchandise. With Captain J. Ordronaux on the quarterdeck, she was near Nantucket Shoals at noon on October 11, 1814, when a strange sail was discovered. As this vessel promptly gave chase, Captain Ordronaux guessed-and as events proved correctly--that she must be a British frigate. She turned out to be the Endymion. The privateer had in tow a prize which she was anxious to get into port, but she was forced to cast off the hawser late in the afternoon and make every effort to escape. The breeze died with the sun and the vessels were close inshore. Becalmed, the privateer and the frigate anchored a quarter of a mile apart. Captain Ordronaux might have put his crew on the beach in boats and abandoned his ship. This was the reasonable course, for, as he had sent in several prize crews, he was short-handed and could muster no more than thirty-seven men and boys. The Endymion, on the other hand, had a complement of three hundred and fifty sailors and marines, and in size and fighting power she was in the class of the American frigates President and Constitution. Quite unreasonably, however, the master of the privateer decided to await events. The unexpected occurred shortly after dusk when several boats loaded to the gunwales with a boarding party crept away from the frigate. Five of them, with one hundred and twenty men, made a concerted attack at different points, alongside and under the bow and stern. Captain Ordronaux had told his crew that he would blow up the ship with all hands before striking his colors, and they believed him implicitly. This was the hero who was described as "a Jew by persuasion, a Frenchman by birth, an American for convenience, and so diminutive in stature as to make him appear ridiculous, in the eyes of others, even for him to enforce authority among a hardy, weatherbeaten crew should they do aught against his will." He was big enough, nevertheless, for this night's bloody work, and there was no doubt about his authority. While the British tried to climb over the bulwarks, his thirty-seven men and boys fought like raging devils, with knives, pistols, cutlases, with their bare fists and their teeth. A few of the enemy gained the deck, but the privateersmen turned and killed them. Others leaped aboard and were gradually driving the Americans back, when the skipper ran to the hatch above the powder magazine, waving a lighted match and swearing to drop it in if his crew retreated one step further. Either way the issue seemed desperate. But again they took their skipper's word for it and rallied for a bloody struggle which soon swept the decks. No more than twenty minutes had passed and the battle was won. The enemy was begging for quarter. One boat had been sunk, three had drifted away filled with dead and wounded, and the fifth was captured with thirty-six men in it of whom only eight were unhurt. The American loss was seven killed and twenty-four wounded, or thirty-one of her crew of thirty-seven. Yet they had not given up the ship. The frigate Endymion concluded that once was enough, and next morning the Prince de Neuchatel bore away for Boston with a freshening breeze. Those were merchant seamen also who held the General Armstrong against a British squadron through that moonlit night in Fayal Roads, inflicting heavier losses than were suffered in any naval action of the war. It is a story Homeric, almost incredible in its details and so often repeated that it can be only touched upon in this brief chronicle. The leader was a kindly featured man who wore a tall hat, side-whiskers, and a tail coat. His portrait might easily have served for that of a New England deacon of the old school. No trace of the swashbuckler in this Captain Samuel Reid, who had been a thrifty, respected merchant skipper until offered the command of a privateer. Touching at the Azores for water and provisions in September, 1814, he was trapped in port by the great seventy-four-gun ship of the line Plantagenet, the thirty-eight-gun frigate Rota, and the warbrig Carnation. Though he was in neutral water, they paid no heed to this but determined to destroy a Yankee schooner which had played havoc with their shipping. Four hundred men in twelve boats, with a howitzer in the bow of each boat, were sent against the General Armstrong in one flotilla. But not a man of the four hundred gained her deck. Said an eyewitness: "The Americans fought with great firmness but more like bloodthirsty savages than anything else. They rushed into the boats sword in hand and put every soul to death as far as came within their power. Some of the boats were left without a single man to row them, others with three or four. The most that any one returned with was about ten. Several boats floated ashore full of dead bodies.... For three days after the battle we were employed in burying the dead that washed on shore in the surf." This tragedy cost the British squadron one hundred and twenty men in killed and one hundred and thirty in wounded, while Captain Reid lost only two dead and had seven wounded. He was compelled to retreat ashore next day when the ships stood in to sink his schooner with their big guns, but the honors of war belonged to him and well-earned were the popular tributes when he saw home again, nor was there a word too much in the florid toast: "Captain Reid--his valor has shed a blaze of renown upon the character of our seamen, and won for himself a laurel of eternal bloom." It is not to glorify war nor to rekindle an ancient feud that such episodes as these are recalled to mind. These men, and others like them, did their duty as it came to them, and they were sailors of whom the whole Anglo-Saxon race might be proud. In the crisis they were Americans, not privateersmen in quest of plunder, and they would gladly die sooner than haul down the Stars and Stripes. The England against which they fought was not the England of today. Their honest grievances, inflicted by a Government too intent upon crushing Napoleon to be fair to neutrals, have long ago been obliterated. This War of 1812 cleared the vision of the Mother Country and forever taught her Government that the people of the Republic were, in truth, free and independent. This lesson was driven home not only by the guns of the Constitution and the United States, but also by the hundreds of privateers and the forty thousand able seamen who were eager to sail in them. They found no great place in naval history, but England knew their prowess and respected it. Every schoolboy is familiar with the duels of the Wasp and the Frolic, of the Enterprise and the Boxer; but how many people know what happened when the privateer Decatur met and whipped the Dominica of the British Navy to the southward of Bermuda? Captain Diron was the man who did it as he was cruising out of Charleston, South Carolina, in the summer of 1813. Sighting an armed schooner slightly heavier than his own vessel, he made for her and was unperturbed when the royal ensign streamed from her gaff. Clearing for action, he closed the hatches so that none of his men could hide below. The two schooners fought in the veiling smoke until the American could ram her bowsprit over the other's stern and pour her whole crew aboard. In the confined space of the deck, almost two hundred men and lads were slashing and stabbing and shooting amid yells and huzzas. Lieutenant Barrette, the English commander, only twenty-five years old, was mortally hurt and every other officer, excepting the surgeon and one midshipman, was killed or wounded. Two-thirds of the crew were down but still they refused to surrender, and Captain Diron had to pull down the colors with his own hands. Better discipline and marksmanship had won the day for him and his losses were comparatively small. Men of his description were apt to think first of glory and let the profits go hang, for there was no cargo to be looted in a King's ship. Other privateersmen, however, were not so valiant or quarrelsome, and there was many a one tied up in London River or the Mersey which had been captured without very savage resistance. Yet on the whole it is fair to say that the private armed ships outfought and outsailed the enemy as impressively as did the few frigates of the American Navy. There was a class of them which exemplified the rapid development of the merchant marine in a conspicuous manner--large commerce destroyers too swift to be caught, too powerful to fear the smaller cruisers. They were extremely profitable business ventures, entrusted to the command of the most audacious and skillful masters that could be engaged. Of this type was the ship America of Salem, owned by the Crowninshields, which made twenty-six prizes and brought safely into port property which realized more than a million dollars. Of this the owners and shareholders received six hundred thousand dollars as dividends. She was a stately vessel, built for the East India trade, and was generally conceded to be the fastest privateer afloat. For this service the upper deck was removed and the sides were filled in with stout oak timber as an armored protection, and longer yards and royal masts gave her a huge area of sail. Her crew of one hundred and fifty men had the exacting organization of a man-of-war, including, it is interesting to note, three lieutenants, three mates, a sailingmaster, surgeon, purser, captain of marines, gunners, seven prize masters, armorer, drummer, and a fifer. Discipline was severe, and flogging was the penalty for breaking the regulations. During her four cruises, the America swooped among the plodding merchantmen like a falcon on a dovecote, the sight of her frightening most of her prey into submission, with a brush now and then to exercise the crews of the twenty-two guns, and perhaps a man or two hit. Long after the war, Captain James Chever, again a peaceful merchant mariner, met at Valparaiso, Sir James Thompson, commander of the British frigate Dublin, which had been fitted out in 1813 for the special purpose of chasing the America. In the course of a cordial chat between the two captains the Briton remarked: "I was once almost within gun-shot of that infernal Yankee skimming-dish, just as night came on. By daylight she had outsailed the Dublin so devilish fast that she was no more than a speck on the horizon. By the way, I wonder if you happen to know the name of the beggar that was master of her." "I'm the beggar," chuckled Captain Chever, and they drank each other's health on the strength of it. Although the Treaty of Ghent omitted mention of the impressment of sailors, which had been the burning issue of the war, there were no more offenses of this kind. American seafarers were safe against kidnapping on their own decks, and they had won this security by virtue of their own double-shotted guns. At the same time England lifted the curse of the press-gang from her own people, who refused longer to endure it. There seemed no reason why the two nations, having finally fought their differences to a finish, should not share the high seas in peaceful rivalry; but the irritating problems of protection and reciprocity survived to plague and hamper commerce. It was difficult for England to overcome the habit of guarding her trade against foreign invasion. Agreeing with the United States to waive all discriminating duties between the ports of the two countries--this was as much as she was at that time willing to yield. She still insisted upon regulating the trade of her West Indies and Canada. American East Indiamen were to be limited to direct voyages and could not bring cargoes to Europe. Though this discrimination angered Congress, to which it appeared as lopsided reciprocity, the old duties were nevertheless repealed; and then, presto! the British colonial policy of exclusion was enforced and eighty thousand tons of American shipping became idle because the West India market was closed. There followed several years of unhappy wrangling, a revival of the old smuggling spirit, the risk of seizure and confiscations, and shipping merchants with long faces talking ruin. The theory of free trade versus protection was as debatable and opinions were as conflicting then as now. Some were for retaliation, others for conciliation; and meanwhile American shipmasters went about their business, with no room for theories in their honest heads, and secured more and more of the world's trade. Curiously enough, the cries of calamity in the United States were echoed across the water, where the "London Times" lugubriously exclaimed: "The shipping interest, the cradle of our navy, is half ruined. Our commercial monopoly exists no longer; and thousands of our manufacturers are starving or seeking redemption in distant lands. We have closed the Western Indies against America from feelings of commercial rivalry. Its active seamen have already engrossed an important branch of our carrying trade to the Eastern Indies. Her starred flag is now conspicuous on every sea and will soon defy our thunder." It was not until 1849 that Great Britain threw overboard her long catalogue of protective navigation laws which had been piling up since the time of Cromwell, and declared for free trade afloat. Meanwhile the United States had drifted in the same direction, barring foreign flags from its coastwise shipping but offering full exemption from all discriminating duties and tonnage duties to every maritime nation which should respond in like manner. This latter legislation was enacted in 1828 and definitely abandoned the doctrine of protection in so far as it applied to American ships and sailors. For a generation thereafter, during which ocean rivalry was a battle royal of industry, enterprise, and skill, the United States was paramount and her merchant marine attained its greatest successes. There is one school of modern economists who hold that the seeds of decay and downfall were planted by this adoption of free trade in 1828, while another faction of gentlemen quite as estimable and authoritative will quote facts and figures by the ream to prove that governmental policies had nothing whatever to do with the case. These adversaries have written and are still writing many volumes in which they almost invariably lose their tempers. Partisan politics befog the tariff issue afloat as well as ashore, and one's course is not easy to chart. It is indisputable, however, that so long as Yankee ships were better, faster, and more economically managed, they won a commanding share of the world's trade. When they ceased to enjoy these qualities of superiority, they lost the trade and suffered for lack of protection to overcome the handicap. The War of 1812 was the dividing line between two eras of salt water history. On the farther side lay the turbulent centuries of hazard and bloodshed and piracy, of little ships and indomitable seamen who pursued their voyages in the reek of gunpowder and of legalized pillage by the stronger, and of merchant adventurers who explored new markets wherever there was water enough to float their keels. They belonged to the rude and lusty youth of a world which lived by the sword and which gloried in action. Even into the early years of the nineteenth century these mariners still sailed--Elizabethan in deed and spirit. On the hither side of 1812 were seas unvexed by the privateer and the freebooter. The lateen-rigged corsairs had been banished from their lairs in the harbors of Algiers, and ships needed to show no broadsides of cannon in the Atlantic trade. For a time they carried the old armament among the lawless islands of the Orient and off Spanish-American coasts where the vocation of piracy made its last stand, but the great trade routes of the globe were peaceful highways for the white-winged fleets of all nations. The American seamen who had fought for the right to use the open sea were now to display their prowess in another way and in a romance of achievement that was no less large and thrilling. CHAPTER VIII. THE PACKET SHIPS OF THE "ROARING FORTIES" It was on the stormy Atlantic, called by sailormen the Western Ocean, that the packet ships won the first great contest for supremacy and knew no rivals until the coming of the age of steam made them obsolete. Their era antedated that of the clipper and was wholly distinct. The Atlantic packet was the earliest liner: she made regular sailings and carried freight and passengers instead of trading on her owners' account as was the ancient custom. Not for her the tranquillity of tropic seas and the breath of the Pacific trades, but an almost incessant battle with swinging surges and boisterous winds, for she was driven harder in all weathers and seasons than any other ships that sailed. In such battering service as this the lines of the clipper were too extremely fine, her spars too tall and slender. The packet was by no means slow and if the list of her record passages was superb, it was because they were accomplished by masters who would sooner let a sail blow away than take it in and who raced each other every inch of the way. They were small ships of three hundred to five hundred tons when the famous Black Ball Line was started in 1816. From the first they were the ablest vessels that could be built, full-bodied and stoutly rigged. They were the only regular means of communication between the United States and Europe and were entrusted with the mails, specie, government dispatches, and the lives of eminent personages. Blow high, blow low, one of the Black Ball packets sailed from New York for Liverpool on the first and sixteenth of every month. Other lines were soon competing--the Red Star and the Swallow Tail out of New York, and fine ships from Boston and Philadelphia. With the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 the commercial greatness of New York was assured, and her Atlantic packets increased in size and numbers, averaging a thousand tons each in the zenith of their glory. England, frankly confessing herself beaten and unable to compete with such ships as these, changed her attitude from hostility to open admiration. She surrendered the Atlantic packet trade to American enterprise, and British merchantmen sought their gains in other waters. The Navigation Laws still protected their commerce in the Far East and they were content to jog at a more sedate gait than these weltering packets whose skippers were striving for passages of a fortnight, with the forecastle doors nailed fast and the crew compelled to stay on deck from Sandy Hook to Fastnet Rock. No blustering, rum-drinking tarpaulin was the captain who sailed the Independence, the Ocean Queen, or the Dreadnought but a man very careful of his manners and his dress, who had been selected from the most highly educated merchant service in the world. He was attentive to the comfort of his passengers and was presumed to have no other duties on deck than to give the proper orders to his first officer and work out his daily reckoning. It was an exacting, nerve-racking ordeal, however, demanding a sleepless vigilance, courage, and cool judgment of the first order. The compensations were large. As a rule, he owned a share of the ship and received a percentage of the freights and passage money. His rank when ashore was more exalted than can be conveyed in mere words. Any normal New York boy would sooner have been captain of a Black Ball packet than President of the United States, and he knew by heart the roaring chantey It is of a flash packet, A packet of fame. She is bound to New York And the Dreadnought's her name. She is bound to the west'ard Where the stormy winds blow. Bound away to the west'ard, Good Lord, let her go. There were never more than fifty of these ships afloat, a trifling fraction of the American deep-water tonnage of that day, but the laurels they won were immortal. Not only did the English mariner doff his hat to them, but a Parliamentary committee reported in 1837 that "the American ships frequenting the ports of England are stated by several witnesses to be superior to those of a similar class among the ships of Great Britain, the commanders and officers being generally considered to be more competent as seamen and navigators and more uniformly persons of education than the commanders and officers of British ships of a similar size and class trading from England to America." It was no longer a rivalry with the flags of other nations but an unceasing series of contests among the packets of the several lines, and their records aroused far more popular excitement than when the great steamers of this century were chipping off the minutes, at an enormous coal consumption, toward a five-day passage. Theirs were tests of real seamanship, and there were few disasters. The packet captain scorned a towboat to haul him into the stream if the wind served fair to set all plain sail as his ship lay at her wharf. Driving her stern foremost, he braced his yards and swung her head to sea, clothing the masts with soaring canvas amid the farewell cheers of the crowds which lined the waterfront. A typical match race was sailed between the Black Ball liner Columbus, Captain De Peyster, and the Sheridan, Captain Russell, of the splendid Dramatic fleet, in 1837. The stake was $10,000 a side, put up by the owners and their friends. The crews were picked men who were promised a bonus of fifty dollars each for winning. The ships sailed side by side in February, facing the wild winter passage, and the Columbus reached Liverpool in the remarkable time of sixteen days, two days ahead of the Sheridan. The crack packets were never able to reel off more than twelve or fourteen knots under the most favorable conditions, but they were kept going night and day, and some of them maintained their schedules almost with the regularity of the early steamers. The Montezuma, the Patrick Henry, and the Southampton crossed from New York to Liverpool in fifteen days, and for years the Independence held the record of fourteen days and six hours. It remained for the Dreadnought, Captain Samuel Samuels, in 1859, to set the mark for packet ships to Liverpool at thirteen days and eight hours. Meanwhile the era of the matchless clipper had arrived and it was one of these ships which achieved the fastest Atlantic passage ever made by a vessel under sail. The James Baines was built for English owners to be used in the Australian trade. She was a full clipper of 2515 tons, twice the size of the ablest packets, and was praised as "the most perfect sailing ship that ever entered the river Mersey." Bound out from Boston to Liverpool, she anchored after twelve days and six hours at sea. There was no lucky chance in this extraordinary voyage, for this clipper was the work of the greatest American builder, Donald McKay, who at the same time designed the Lightning for the same owners. This clipper, sent across the Atlantic on her maiden trip, left in her foaming wake a twenty-four hour run which no steamer had even approached and which was not equaled by the fastest express steamers until twenty-five years later when the greyhound Arizona ran eighteen knots in one hour on her trial trip. This is a rather startling statement when one reflects that the Arizona of the Guion line seems to a generation still living a modern steamer and record-holder. It is even more impressive when coupled with the fact that, of the innumerable passenger steamers traversing the seas today, only a few are capable of a speed of more than eighteen knots. This clipper Lightning did her 436 sea miles in one day, or eighteen and a half knots, better than twenty land miles an hour, and this is how the surpassing feat was entered in her log, or official journal: "March 1. Wind south. Strong gales; bore away for the North Channel, carrying away the foretopsail and lost jib; hove the log several times and found the ship going through the water at the rate of 18 to 18 1/2 knots; lee rail under water and rigging slack. Distance run in twenty-four hours, 436 miles." The passage was remarkably fast, thirteen days and nineteen and a half hours from Boston Light, but the spectacular feature was this day's work. It is a fitting memorial of the Yankee clipper, and, save only a cathedral, the loveliest, noblest fabric ever wrought by man's handiwork. The clipper, however, was a stranger in the Atlantic and her chosen courses were elsewhere. The records made by the James Baines and the Lightning were no discredit to the stanch, unconquerable packet ships which, year in and year out, held their own with the steamer lines until just before the Civil War. It was the boast of Captain Samuels that on her first voyage in 1853 the Dreadnought reached Sandy Hook as the Cunarder Canada, which had left Liverpool a day ahead of her, was passing in by Boston Light. Twice she carried the latest news to Europe, and many seasoned travelers preferred her to the mail steamers. The masters and officers who handled these ships with such magnificent success were true-blue American seamen, inspired by the finest traditions, successors of the privateersmen of 1812. The forecastles, however, were filled with English, Irish, and Scandinavians. American lads shunned these ships and, in fact, the ambitious youngster of the coastwise towns began to cease following the sea almost a century ago. It is sometimes forgotten that the period during which the best American manhood sought a maritime career lay between the Revolution and the War of 1812. Thereafter the story became more and more one of American ships and less of American sailors, excepting on the quarter-deck. In later years the Yankee crews were to be found in the ports where the old customs survived, the long trading voyage, the community of interest in cabin and forecastle, all friends and neighbors together, with opportunities for profit and advancement. Such an instance was that of the Salem ship George, built at Salem in 1814 and owned by the great merchant, Joseph Peabody. For twenty-two years she sailed in the East India trade, making twenty-one round voyages, with an astonishing regularity which would be creditable for a modern cargo tramp. Her sailors were native-born, seldom more than twenty-one years old, and most of them were studying navigation. Forty-five of them became shipmasters, twenty of them chief mates, and six second mates. This reliable George was, in short, a nautical training-school of the best kind and any young seaman with the right stuff in him was sure of advancement. Seven thousand sailors signed articles in the counting-room of Joseph Peabody and went to sea in his eighty ships which flew the house-flag in Calcutta, Canton, Sumatra, and the ports of Europe until 1844. These were mostly New England boys who followed in the footsteps of their fathers because deep-water voyages were still "adventures" and a career was possible under a system which was both congenial and paternal. Brutal treatment was the rare exception. Flogging still survived in the merchant service and was defended by captains otherwise humane, but a skipper, no matter how short-tempered, would be unlikely to abuse a youth whose parents might live on the same street with him and attend the same church. The Atlantic packets brought a different order of things, which was to be continued through the clipper era. Yankee sailors showed no love for the cold and storms of the Western Ocean in these foaming packets which were remorselessly driven for speed. The masters therefore took what they could get. All the work of rigging, sail-making, scraping, painting, and keeping a ship in perfect repair was done in port instead of at sea, as was the habit in the China and California clippers, and the lore and training of the real deep-water sailor became superfluous. The crew of a packet made sail or took it in with the two-fisted mates to show them how. From these conditions was evolved the "Liverpool packet rat," hairy and wild and drunken, the prey of crimps and dive-keepers ashore, brave and toughened to every hardship afloat, climbing aloft in his red shirt, dungaree breeches, and sea-boots, with a snow-squall whistling, the rigging sheathed with ice, and the old ship burying her bows in the thundering combers. It was the doctrine of his officers that he could not be ruled by anything short of violence, and the man to tame and hammer him was the "bucko" second mate, the test of whose fitness was that he could whip his weight in wild cats. When he became unable to maintain discipline with fists and belaying-pins, he was deposed for a better man. Your seasoned packet rat sought the ship with a hard name by choice. His chief ambition was to kick in the ribs or pound senseless some invincible bucko mate. There was provocation enough on both sides. Officers had to take their ships to sea and strain every nerve to make a safe and rapid passage with crews which were drunk and useless when herded aboard, half of them greenhorns, perhaps, who could neither reef nor steer. Brutality was the one argument able to enforce instant obedience among men who respected nothing else. As a class the packet sailors became more and more degraded because their life was intolerable to decent men. It followed therefore that the quarterdeck employed increasing severity, and, as the officer's authority in this respect was unchecked and unlimited, it was easy to mistake the harshest tyranny for wholesome discipline. Reenforcing the bucko mate was the tradition that the sailor was a dog, a different human species from the landsman, without laws and usages to protect him. This was a tradition which, for centuries, had been fostered in the naval service, and it survived among merchant sailors as an unhappy anachronism even into the twentieth century, when an American Congress was reluctant to bestow upon a seaman the decencies of existence enjoyed by the poorest laborer ashore. It is in the nature of a paradox that the brilliant success of the packet ships in dominating the North Atlantic trade should have been a factor in the decline of the nation's maritime prestige and resources. Through a period of forty years the pride and confidence in these ships, their builders, and the men who sailed them, was intense and universal. They were a superlative product of the American genius, which still displayed the energies of a maritime race. On other oceans the situation was no less gratifying. American ships were the best and cheapest in the world. The business held the confidence of investors and commanded an abundance of capital. It was assumed, as late as 1840, that the wooden sailing ship would continue to be the supreme type of deep-water vessel because the United States possessed the greatest stores of timber, the most skillful builders and mechanics, and the ablest merchant navigators. No industry was ever more efficiently organized and conducted. American ships were most in demand and commanded the highest freights. The tonnage in foreign trade increased to a maximum of 904,476 in 1845. There was no doubt in the minds of the shrewdest merchants and owners and builders of the time that Great Britain would soon cease to be the mistress of the seas and must content herself with second place. It was not considered ominous when, in 1838, the Admiralty had requested proposals for a steam service to America. This demand was prompted by the voyages of the Sirius and Great Western, wooden-hulled sidewheelers which thrashed along at ten knots' speed and crossed the Atlantic in fourteen to seventeen days. This was a much faster rate than the average time of the Yankee packets, but America was unperturbed and showed no interest in steam. In 1839 the British Government awarded an Atlantic mail contract, with an annual subsidy of $425,000 to Samuel Cunard and his associates, and thereby created the most famous of the Atlantic steamship companies. Four of these liners began running in 1840--an event which foretold the doom of the packet fleets, though the warning was almost unheeded in New York and Boston. Four years later Enoch Train was establishing a new packet line to Liverpool with the largest, finest ships built up to that time, the Washington Irving, Anglo-American, Ocean Monarch, Anglo-Saxon, and Daniel Webster. Other prominent shipping houses were expanding their service and were launching noble packets until 1853. Meanwhile the Cunard steamers were increasing in size and speed, and the service was no longer an experiment. American capital now began to awaken from its dreams, and Edward K. Collins, managing owner of the Dramatic line of packets, determined to challenge the Cunarders at their own game. Aided by the Government to the extent of $385,000 a year as subsidy, he put afloat the four magnificent steamers, Atlantic, Pacific, Baltic, and Arctic, which were a day faster than the Cunarders in crossing, and reduced the voyage to nine and ten days. The Collins line, so auspiciously begun in 1850, and promising to give the United States the supremacy in steam which it had won under sail, was singularly unfortunate and short-lived. The Arctic and the Pacific were lost at sea, and Congress withdrew its financial support after five years. Deprived of this aid, Mr. Collins was unable to keep the enterprise afloat in competition with the subsidized Cunard fleet. In this manner and with little further effort by American interests to compete for the prize, the dominion of the Atlantic passed into British hands. The packet ships had held on too long. It had been a stirring episode for the passengers to cheer in mid-ocean when the lofty pyramids of canvas swept grandly by some wallowing steamer and left her far astern, but in the fifties this gallant picture became less frequent, and a sooty banner of smoke on the horizon proclaimed the new era and the obliteration of all the rushing life and beauty of the tall ship under sail. Slow to realize and acknowledge defeat, persisting after the steamers were capturing the cabin passenger and express freight traffic, the American ship-owners could not visualize this profound transformation. Their majestic clippers still surpassed all rivals in the East India and China trade and were racing around the Horn, making new records for speed and winning fresh nautical triumphs for the Stars and Stripes. This reluctance to change the industrial and commercial habits of generations of American shipowners was one of several causes for the decadence which was hastened by the Civil War. For once the astute American was caught napping by his British cousin, who was swayed by no sentimental values and showed greater adaptability in adopting the iron steamer with the screw propeller as the inevitable successor of the wooden ship with arching topsails. 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. When the Atlantic packet was compelled to abdicate, it was the beginning of the end. After all, her master was the fickle wind, for a slashing outward passage might be followed by weeks of beating home to the westward. Steadily forging ahead to the beat of her paddles or the thrash of her screw, the steamer even of that day was far more dependable than the sailing vessel. The Lightning clipper might run a hundred miles farther in twenty-four hours than ever a steamer had done, but she could not maintain this meteoric burst of speed. Upon the heaving surface of the Western Ocean there was enacted over again the fable of the hare and the tortoise. Most of the famous chanteys were born in the packet service and shouted as working choruses by the tars of this Western Ocean before the chanteyman perched upon a capstan and led the refrain in the clipper trade. You will find their origin unmistakable in such lines as these: As I was a-walking down Rotherhite Street, 'Way, ho, blow the man down; A pretty young creature I chanced for to meet, Give me some time to blow the man down. Soon we'll be in London City, Blow, boys, blow, And see the gals all dressed so pretty, Blow, my bully boys, blow. Haunting melodies, folk-song as truly as that of the plantation negro, they vanished from the sea with a breed of men who, for all their faults, possessed the valor of the Viking and the fortitude of the Spartan. Outcasts ashore--which meant to them only the dance halls of Cherry Street and the grog-shops of Ratcliffe Road--they had virtues that were as great as their failings. Across the intervening years, with a pathos indefinable, come the lovely strains of Shenandoah, I'll ne'er forget you, Away, ye rolling river, Till the day I die I'll love you ever, Ah, ha, we're bound away. CHAPTER IX. THE STATELY CLIPPER AND HER GLORY The American clipper ship was the result of an evolution which can be traced back to the swift privateers which were built during the War of 1812. In this type of vessel the shipyards of Chesapeake Bay excelled and their handiwork was known as the "Baltimore clipper," the name suggested by the old English verb which Dryden uses to describe the flight of the falcon that "clips it down the wind." The essential difference between the clipper ship and other kinds of merchant craft was that speed and not capacity became the chief consideration. This was a radical departure for large vessels, which in all maritime history had been designed with an eye to the number of tons they were able to carry. More finely molded lines had hitherto been found only in the much smaller French lugger, the Mediterranean galley, the American schooner. To borrow the lines of these fleet and graceful models and apply them to the design of a deepwater ship was a bold conception. It was first attempted by Isaac McKim, a Baltimore merchant, who ordered his builders in 1832 to reproduce as closely as possible the superior sailing qualities of the renowned clipper brigs and schooners of their own port. The result was the Ann McKim, of nearly five hundred tons, the first Yankee clipper ship, and distinguished as such by her long, easy water-lines, low free-board, and raking stem. She was built and finished without regard to cost, copper-sheathed, the decks gleaming with brasswork and mahogany fittings. But though she was a very fast and handsome ship and the pride of her owner, the Ann McKim could stow so little cargo that shipping men regarded her as unprofitable and swore by their full-bodied vessels a few years longer. That the Ann McKim, however, influenced the ideas of the most progressive builders is very probable, for she was later owned by the New York firm of Howland and Aspinwall, who placed an order for the first extremely sharp clipper ship of the era. This vessel, the Rainbow, was designed by John W. Griffeths, a marine architect, who was a pioneer in that he studied shipbuilding as a science instead of working by rule-of-thumb. The Rainbow, which created a sensation while on the stocks because of her concave or hollowed lines forward, which defied all tradition and practice, was launched in 1845. She was a more radical innovation than the Ann McKim but a successful one, for on her second voyage to China the Rainbow went out against the northeast monsoon in ninety-two days and came home in eighty-eight, a record which few ships were able to better. Her commander, Captain John Land, declared her to be the fastest ship in the world and there were none to dispute him. Even the Rainbow however, was eclipsed when not long afterward Howland and Aspinwall, now converted to the clipper, ordered the Sea Witch to be built for Captain Bob Waterman. Among all the splendid skippers of the time he was the most dashing figure. About his briny memory cluster a hundred yarns, some of them true, others legendary. It has been argued that the speed of the clippers was due more to the men who commanded them than to their hulls and rigging, and to support the theory the career of Captain Bob Waterman is quoted. He was first known to fame in the old Natchez, which was not a clipper at all and was even rated as slow while carrying cotton from New Orleans to New York. But Captain Bob took this full-pooped old packet ship around the Horn and employed her in the China tea trade. The voyages which he made in her were all fast, and he crowned them with the amazing run of seventy-eight days from Canton to New York, just one day behind the swiftest clipper passage ever sailed and which he himself performed in the Sea Witch. Incredulous mariners simply could not explain this feat of the Natchez and suggested that Bob Waterman must have brought the old hooker home by some new route of his own discovery. Captain Bob had won a reputation for discipline as the mate of a Black Ball liner, a rough school, and he was not a mild man. Ashore his personality was said to have been a most attractive one, but there is no doubt that afloat he worked the very souls out of his sailors. The rumors that he frightfully abused them were not current, however, until he took the Sea Witch and showed the world the fastest ship under canvas. Low in the water, with black hull and gilded figurehead, she seemed too small to support her prodigious cloud of sail. For her there were to be no leisurely voyages with Captain Bob Waterman on the quarter-deck. Home from Canton she sped in seventy-seven days and then in seventy-nine--records which were never surpassed. With what consummate skill and daring this master mariner drove his ship and how the race of hardy sailors to which he belonged compared with those of other nations may be descried in the log of another of them, Captain Philip Dumaresq, homeward bound from China in 1849 in the clipper Great Britain. Three weeks out from Java Head she had overtaken and passed seven ships heading the same way, and then she began to rush by them in one gale after another. Her log records her exploits in such entries as these: "Passed a ship under double reefs, we with our royals and studdingsails set.... Passed a ship laying-to under a close-reefed maintopsail.... Split all three topsails and had to heave to.... Seven vessels in sight and we outsail all of them.... Under double-reefed topsails passed several vessels hove-to." Much the same record might be read in the log of the medium clipper Florence--and it is the same story of carrying sail superbly on a ship which had been built to stand up under it: "Passed two barks under reefed courses and close-reefed topsails standing the same way, we with royals and topgallant studding-sails," or "Passed a ship under topsails, we with our royals set." For eleven weeks "the topsail halliards were started only once, to take in a single reef for a few hours." It is not surprising, therefore, to learn that, seventeen days out from Shanghai, the Florence exchanged signals with the English ship John Hagerman, which had sailed thirteen days before her. Two notable events in the history of the nineteenth century occurred within the same year, 1849, to open new fields of trade to the Yankee clipper. One of these was the repeal of the British Navigation Laws which had given English ships a monopoly of the trade between London and the British East Indies, and the other was the discovery of gold in California. After centuries of pomp and power, the great East India Company had been deprived of its last exclusive rights afloat in 1833. Its ponderous, frigate-built merchantmen ceased to dominate the British commerce with China and India and were sold or broken up. All British ships were now free to engage in this trade, but the spirit and customs of the old regime still strongly survived. Flying the house-flags of private owners, the East Indiamen and China tea ships were still built and manned like frigates, slow, comfortable, snugging down for the night under reduced sail. There was no competition to arouse them until the last barrier of the Navigation Laws was let down and they had to meet the Yankee clipper with the tea trade as the huge stake. Then at last it was farewell to the gallant old Indianian and her ornate, dignified prestige. With a sigh the London Times confessed: "We must run a race with our gigantic and unshackled rival. We must set our long-practised skill, our steady industry, and our dogged determination against his youth, ingenuity, and ardor. Let our shipbuilders and employers take warning in time. There will always be an abundant supply of vessels good enough and fast enough for short voyages. But we want fast vessels for the long voyages which otherwise will fall into American hands." Before English merchants could prepare themselves for these new conditions, the American clipper Oriental was loading in 1850 at Hong Kong with tea for the London market. Because of her reputation for speed, she received freightage of six pounds sterling per ton while British ships rode at anchor with empty holds or were glad to sail at three pounds ten per ton. Captain Theodore Palmer delivered his sixteen hundred tons of tea in the West India Docks, London, after a crack passage of ninety-one days which had never been equaled. His clipper earned $48,000, or two-thirds of what it had cost to build her. Her arrival in London created a profound impression. The port had seen nothing like her for power and speed; her skysail yards soared far above the other shipping; the cut of her snowy canvas was faultless; all clumsy, needless tophamper had been done away with; and she appeared to be the last word in design and construction, as lean and fine and spirited as a race-horse in training. This new competition dismayed British shipping until it could rally and fight with similar weapons The technical journal, Naval Science, acknowledged that the tea trade of the London markets had passed almost out of the hands of the English ship-owner, and that British vessels, well-manned and well-found, were known to lie for weeks in the harbor of Foo-chow, waiting for a cargo and seeing American clippers come in, load, and sail immediately with full cargoes at a higher freight than they could command. Even the Government viewed the loss of trade with concern and sent admiralty draftsmen to copy the lines of the Oriental and Challenge while they were in drydock. British clippers were soon afloat, somewhat different in model from the Yankee ships, but very fast and able, and racing them in the tea trade until the Civil War. With them it was often nip and tuck, as in the contest between the English Lord of the Isles and the American clipper bark Maury in 1856. The prize was a premium of one pound per ton for the first ship to reach London with tea of the new crop. The Lord of the Isles finished loading and sailed four days ahead of the Maury, and after thirteen thousand miles of ocean they passed Gravesend within ten minutes of each other. The British skipper, having the smartest tug and getting his ship first into dock, won the honors. In a similar race between the American Sea Serpent and the English Crest of the Wave, both ships arrived off the Isle of Wight on the same day. It was a notable fact that the Lord of the Isles was the first tea clipper built of iron at a date when the use of this stubborn material was not yet thought of by the men who constructed the splendid wooden ships of America. For the peculiar requirements of the tea trade, English maritime talent was quick to perfect a clipper type which, smaller than the great Yankee skysail-yarder, was nevertheless most admirable for its beauty and performance. On both sides of the Atlantic partizans hotly championed their respective fleets. In 1852 the American Navigation Club, organized by Boston merchants and owners, challenged the shipbuilders of Great Britain to race from a port in England to a port in China and return, for a stake of $50,000 a side, ships to be not under eight hundred nor over twelve hundred tons American register. The challenge was aimed at the Stornaway and the Chrysolite, the two clippers that were known to be the fastest ships under the British flag. Though this sporting defiance caused lively discussion, nothing came of it, and it was with a spirit even keener that Sampson and Tappan of Boston offered to match their Nightingale for the same amount against any clipper afloat, British or American. In spite of the fact that Yankee enterprise had set the pace in the tea trade, within a few years after 1850 England had so successfully mastered the art of building these smaller clippers that the honors were fairly divided. The American owners were diverting their energies to the more lucrative trade in larger ships sailing around the Horn to San Francisco, a long road which, as a coastwise voyage, was forbidden to foreign vessels under the navigation laws. After the Civil War the fastest tea clippers flew the British flag and into the seventies they survived the competition of steam, racing among themselves for the premiums awarded to the quickest dispatch. No more of these beautiful vessels were launched after 1869, and one by one they vanished into other trades, overtaken by the same fate which had befallen the Atlantic packet and conquered by the cargo steamers which filed through the Suez Canal. Until 1848 San Francisco had been a drowsy little Mexican trading-post, a huddle of adobe huts and sheds where American ships collected hides--vividly described in Two Years Before the Mast--or a whaler called for wood and water. During the year preceding the frenzied migration of the modern Argonauts, only two merchant ships, one bark and one brig, sailed in through the Golden Gate. In the twelve months following, 775 vessels cleared from Atlantic ports for San Francisco, besides the rush from other countries, and nearly fifty thousand passengers scrambled ashore to dig for gold. Crews deserted their ships, leaving them unable to go to sea again for lack of men, and in consequence a hundred of them were used as storehouses, hotels, and hospitals, or else rotted at their moorings. Sailors by hundreds jumped from the forecastle without waiting to stow the sails or receive their wages. Though offered as much as two hundred dollars a month to sign again, they jeered at the notion. Of this great fleet at San Francisco in 1849, it was a lucky ship that ever left the harbor again. It seemed as if the whole world were bound to California and almost overnight there was created the wildest, most extravagant demand for transportation known to history. A clipper costing $70,000 could pay for herself in one voyage, with freights at sixty dollars a ton. This gold stampede might last but a little while. To take instant advantage of it was the thing. The fastest ships, and as many of them as could be built, would skim the cream of it. This explains the brief and illustrious era of the California clipper, one hundred and sixty of which were launched from 1850 to 1854. The shipyards of New York and Boston were crowded with them, and they graced the keel blocks of the historic old ports of New England--Medford, Mystic, Newburyport, Portsmouth, Portland, Rockland, and Bath--wherever the timber and the shipwrights could be assembled. Until that time there had been few ships afloat as large as a thousand tons. These were of a new type, rapidly increased to fifteen hundred, two thousand tons, and over. They presented new and difficult problems in spars and rigging able to withstand the strain of immense areas of canvas which climbed two hundred feet to the skysail pole and which, with lower studdingsails set, spread one hundred and sixty feet from boom-end to boom-end. There had to be the strength to battle with the furious tempests of Cape Horn and at the same time the driving power to sweep before the sweet and steadfast tradewinds. Such a queenly clipper was the Flying Cloud, the achievement of that master builder, Donald McKay, which sailed from New York to San Francisco in eighty-nine days, with Captain Josiah Creesy in command. This record was never lowered and was equaled only twice--by the Flying Cloud herself and by the Andrew Jackson nine years later. It was during this memorable voyage that the Flying Cloud sailed 1256 miles in four days while steering to the northward under topgallantsails after rounding Cape Horn. This was a rate of speed which, if sustained, would have carried her from New York to Queenstown in eight days and seventeen hours. This speedy passage was made in 1851, and only two years earlier the record for the same voyage of fifteen thousand miles had been one hundred and twenty days, by the clipper Memnon. Donald McKay now resolved to build a ship larger and faster than the Flying Cloud, and his genius neared perfection in the Sovereign of the Seas, of 2421 tons register, which exceeded in size all merchant vessels afloat. This Titan of the clipper fleet was commanded by Donald's brother, Captain Lauchlan McKay, with a crew of one hundred and five men and boys. During her only voyage to San Francisco she was partly dismasted, but Lauchlan McKay rigged her anew at sea in fourteen days and still made port in one hundred and three days, a record for the season of the year. It was while running home from Honolulu in 1853 that the Sovereign of the Seas realized the hopes of her builder. In eleven days she sailed 3562 miles, with four days logged for a total of 1478 knots. Making allowance for the longitudes and difference in time, this was an average daily run of 378 sea miles or 435 land miles. Using the same comparison, the distance from Sandy Hook to Queenstown would have been covered in seven days and nine hours. Figures are arid reading, perhaps, but these are wet by the spray and swept by the salt winds of romance. During one of these four days the Sovereign of the Seas reeled off 424 nautical miles, during which her average speed was seventeen and two-thirds knots and at times reached nineteen and twenty. The only sailing ship which ever exceeded this day's work was the Lightning, built later by the same Donald McKay, which ran 436 knots in the Atlantic passage already referred to. The Sovereign of the Seas could also boast of a sensational feat upon the Western Ocean, for between New York and Liverpool she outsailed the Cunard liner Canada by 325 miles in five days. It is curiously interesting to notice that the California clipper era is almost generally ignored by the foremost English writers of maritime history. For one thing, it was a trade in which their own ships were not directly concerned, and partizan bias is apt to color the views of the best of us when national prestige is involved. American historians themselves have dispensed with many unpleasant facts when engaged with the War of 1812. With regard to the speed of clipper ships, however, involving a rivalry far more thrilling and important than all the races ever sailed for the America's cup, the evidence is available in concrete form. Lindsay's "History of Merchant Shipping" is the most elaborate English work of the kind. Heavily ballasted with facts and rather dull reading for the most part, it kindles with enthusiasm when eulogizing the Thermopylae and the Sir Launcelot, composite clippers of wood and iron, afloat in 1870, which it declares to be "the fastest sailing ships that ever traversed the ocean." This fairly presents the issue which a true-blooded Yankee has no right to evade. The greatest distance sailed by the Sir Launcelot in twenty-four hours between China and London was 354 knots, compared with the 424 miles of the Sovereign of the Seas and the 436 miles of the Lightning. Her best sustained run was one of seven days for an average of a trifle more than 300 miles a day. Against this is to be recorded the performance of the Sovereign of the Seas, 3562 miles in eleven days, at the rate of 324 miles every twenty-four hours, and her wonderful four-day run of 1478 miles, an average of 378 miles. The Thermopylae achieved her reputation in a passage of sixty-three days from London to Melbourne--a record which was never beaten. Her fastest day's sailing was 330 miles, or not quite sixteen knots an hour. In six days she traversed 1748 miles, an average of 291 miles a day. In this Australian trade the American clippers made little effort to compete. Those engaged in it were mostly built for English owners and sailed by British skippers, who could not reasonably be expected to get the most out of these loftily sparred Yankee ships, which were much larger than their own vessels of the same type. The Lightning showed what she could do from Melbourne to Liverpool by making the passage in sixty-three' days, with 3722 miles in ten consecutive days and one day's sprint of 412 miles. In the China tea trade the Thermopylae drove home from Foo-chow in ninety-one days, which was equaled by the Sir Launcelot. The American Witch of the Wave had a ninety-day voyage to her credit, and the Comet ran from Liverpool to Shanghai in eighty-four days. Luck was a larger factor on this route than in the California or Australian trade because of the fitful uncertainty of the monsoons, and as a test of speed it was rather unsatisfactory. In a very fair-minded and expert summary, Captain Arthur H. Clark, * in his youth an officer on Yankee clippers, has discussed this question of rival speed and power under sail--a question which still absorbs those who love the sea. His conclusion is that in ordinary weather at sea, when great power to carry sail was not required, the British tea clippers were extremely fast vessels, chiefly on account of their narrow beam. Under these conditions they were perhaps as fast as the American clippers of the same class, such as the Sea Witch, White Squall, Northern Light, and Sword-Fish. But if speed is to be reckoned by the maximum performance of a ship under the most favorable conditions, then the British tea clippers were certainly no match for the larger American ships such as the Flying Cloud, Sovereign of the Seas, Hurricane, Trade Wind, Typhoon, Flying Fish, Challenge, and Red Jacket. The greater breadth of the American ships in proportion to their length meant power to carry canvas and increased buoyancy which enabled them, with their sharper ends, to be driven in strong gales and heavy seas at much greater speed than the British clippers. The latter were seldom of more than one thousand tons' register and combined in a superlative degree the good qualities of merchant ships. * "The Clipper Ship Era." N.Y., 1910. It was the California trade, brief and crowded and fevered, which saw the roaring days of the Yankee clipper and which was familiar with racing surpassing in thrill and intensity that of the packet ships of the Western Ocean. In 1851, for instance, the Raven, Sea Witch, and Typhoon sailed for San Francisco within the same week. They crossed the Equator a day apart and stood away to the southward for three thousand miles of the southeast trades and the piping westerly winds which prevailed farther south. At fifty degrees south latitude the Raven and the Sea Witch were abeam of each other with the Typhoon only two days astern. Now they stripped for the tussle to windward around Cape Horn, sending down studdingsail booms and skysail yards, making all secure with extra lashings, plunging into the incessant head seas of the desolate ocean, fighting it out tack for tack, reefing topsails and shaking them out again, the vigilant commanders going below only to change their clothes, the exhausted seamen stubbornly, heroically handling with frozen, bleeding fingers the icy sheets and canvas. A fortnight of this inferno and the Sea Witch and the Raven gained the Pacific, still within sight of each other, and the Typhoon only one day behind. Then they swept northward, blown by the booming tradewinds, spreading studdingsails, skysails, and above them, like mere handkerchiefs, the water-sails and ring-tails. Again the three clippers crossed the Equator. Close-hauled on the starboard tack, their bowsprits were pointed for the last stage of the journey to the Golden Gate. The Typhoon now overhauled her rivals and was the first to signal her arrival, but the victory was earned by the Raven, which had set her departure from Boston Light while the others had sailed from New York. The Typhoon and the Raven were only a day apart, with the Sea Witch five days behind the leader. Clipper ship crews included men of many nations. In the average forecastle there would be two or three Americans, a majority of English and Norwegians, and perhaps a few Portuguese and Italians. The hardiest seamen, and the most unmanageable, were the Liverpool packet rats who were lured from their accustomed haunts to join the clippers by the magical call of the gold-diggings. There were not enough deep-water sailors to man half the ships that were built in these few years, and the crimps and boarding-house runners decoyed or flung aboard on sailing day as many men as were demanded, and any drunken, broken landlubber was good enough to be shipped as an able seaman. They were things of rags and tatters--their only luggage a bottle of whiskey. The mates were thankful if they could muster enough real sailors to work the ship to sea and then began the stern process of whipping the wastrels and incompetents into shape for the perils and emergencies of the long voyage. That these great clippers were brought safely to port is a shining tribute to the masterful skill of their officers. While many of them were humane and just, with all their severity, the stories of savage abuse which are told of some are shocking in the extreme. The defense was that it was either mutiny or club the men under. Better treatment might have persuaded better men to sail. Certain it is that life in the forecastle of a clipper was even more intolerable to the self-respecting American youth than it had previously been aboard the Atlantic packet. When Captain Bob Waterman arrived at San Francisco in the Challenge clipper in 1851, a mob tried very earnestly to find and hang him and his officers because of the harrowing stories told by his sailors. That he had shot several of them from the yards with his pistol to make the others move faster was one count in the indictment. For his part, Captain Waterman asserted that a more desperate crew of ruffians had never sailed out of New York and that only two of them were Americans. They were mutinous from the start, half of them blacklegs of the vilest type who swore to get the upper hand of him. His mates, boatswain, and carpenter had broken open their chests and boxes and had removed a collection of slung-shots, knuckle-dusters, bowie-knives, and pistols. Off Rio Janeiro they had tried to kill the chief mate, and Captain Waterman had been compelled to jump in and stretch two of them dead with an iron belaying-pin. Off Cape Horn three sailors fell from aloft and were lost. This accounted for the casualties. The truth of such episodes as these was difficult to fathom. Captain Waterman demanded a legal investigation, but nothing came of his request and he was commended by his owners for his skill and courage in bringing the ship to port without losing a spar or a sail. It was a skipper of this old school who blandly maintained the doctrine that if you wanted the men to love you, you must starve them and knock them down. The fact is proven by scores of cases that the discipline of the American clipper was both famously efficient and notoriously cruel. It was not until long after American sailors had ceased to exist that adequate legislation was enacted to provide that they should be treated as human beings afloat and ashore. Other days and other customs! It is perhaps unkind to judge these vanished master-mariners too harshly, for we cannot comprehend the crises which continually beset them in their command. No more extreme clipper ships were built after 1854. The California frenzy had subsided and speed in carrying merchandise was no longer so essential; besides, the passenger traffic was seeking the Isthmian route. What were called medium clippers enjoyed a profitable trade for many years later, and one of them, the Andrew Jackson, was never outsailed for the record from New York to San Francisco. This splendid type of ship was to be found on every sea, for the United States was still a commanding factor in the maritime activities of South America, India, China, Europe, and Australia. In 1851 its merchant tonnage rivaled that of England and was everywhere competing with it. The effects of the financial panic of 1857 and the aftermath of business depression were particularly disastrous to American ships. Freights were so low as to yield no profit, and the finest clippers went begging for charters. The yards ceased to launch new tonnage. British builders had made such rapid progress in design and construction that the days of Yankee preference in the China trade had passed. The Stars and Stripes floated over ships waiting idle in Manila Bay, at Shanghai, Hong-Kong, and Calcutta. The tide of commerce had slackened abroad as well as at home and the surplus of deep-water tonnage was world-wide. In earlier generations afloat, the American spirit had displayed amazing recuperative powers. The havoc of the Revolution had been unable to check it, and its vigor and aggressive enterprise had never been more notable than after the blows dealt by the Embargo, the French Spoliations, and the War of 1812. The conditions of trade and the temper of the people were now so changed that this mighty industry, aforetime so robust and resilient, was unable to recover from such shocks as the panic of 1857 and the Civil War. Yet it had previously survived and triumphed over calamities far more severe. The destruction wrought by Confederate cruisers was trifling compared with the work of the British and French privateers when the nation was very small and weak. The American spirit had ceased to concern itself with the sea as the vital and dominant element. The footsteps of the young men no longer turned toward the wharf and the waterside and the tiers of tall ships outward bound. They were aspiring to conquer an inland empire of prairie and mountain and desert, impelled by the same pioneering and adventurous ardor which had burned in their seafaring sires. Steam had vanquished sail--an epochal event in a thousand years of maritime history--but the nation did not care enough to accept this situation as a new challenge or to continue the ancient struggle for supremacy upon the sea. England did care, because it was life or death to the little, sea-girt island, but as soon as the United States ceased to be a strip of Atlantic seaboard and the panorama, of a continent was unrolled to settlement, it was foreordained that the maritime habit of thought and action should lose its virility in America. All great seafaring races, English, Norwegian, Portuguese, and Dutch, have taken to salt water because there was lack of space, food, or work ashore, and their strong young men craved opportunities. Like the Pilgrim Fathers and their fishing shallops they had nowhere else to go. When the Flying Cloud and the clippers of her kind--taut, serene, immaculate--were sailing through the lonely spaces of the South Atlantic and the Pacific, they sighted now and then the stumpy, slatternly rig and greasy hull of a New Bedford whaler, perhaps rolling to the weight of a huge carcass alongside. With a poor opinion of the seamanship of these wandering barks, the clipper crews rolled out, among their favorite chanteys: Oh, poor Reuben Ranzo, Ranzo, boys, O Ranzo, Oh, Ranzo was no sailor, So they shipped him aboard a whaler, Ranzo, boys, O Ranzo. This was crass, intolerant prejudice. The whaling ship was careless of appearances, it is true, and had the air of an ocean vagabond; but there were other duties more important than holystoning decks, scraping spars, and trimming the yards to a hair. On a voyage of two or three years, moreover, there was always plenty of time tomorrow. Brave and resourceful seamen were these New England adventurers and deep-sea hunters who made nautical history after their own fashion. They flourished coeval with the merchant marine in its prime, and they passed from the sea at about the same time and for similar reasons. Modernity dispensed with their services, and young men found elsewhere more profitable and easier employment. The great days of Nantucket as a whaling port were passed before the Revolution wiped out her ships and killed or scattered her sailors. It was later discovered that larger ships were more economical, and Nantucket harbor bar was too shoal to admit their passage. For this reason New Bedford became the scene of the foremost activity, and Nantucket thereafter played a minor part, although her barks went cruising on to the end of the chapter and her old whaling families were true to strain. As explorers the whalemen rambled into every nook and corner of the Pacific before merchant vessels had found their way thither. They discovered uncharted islands and cheerfully fought savages or suffered direful shipwreck. The chase led them into Arctic regions where their stout barks were nipped like eggshells among the grinding floes, or else far to the southward where they broiled in tropic calms. The New Bedford lad was as keen to go a-whaling as was his counterpart in Boston or New York to be the dandy mate of a California clipper, and true was the song: I asked a maiden by my side, Who sighed and looked to me forlorn, "Where is your heart?" She quick replied, "Round Cape Horn." Yankee whaling reached its high tide in 1857 when the New Bedford fleet alone numbered 329 sail and those owned in other ports of Buzzard's Bay swelled the total to 426 vessels, besides thirty more hailing from New London and Sag Harbor. In this year the value of the catch was more than ten million dollars. The old custom of sailing on shares or "lays" instead of wages was never changed. It was win or lose for all hands--now a handsome fortune or again an empty hold and pockets likewise. There was Captain W.T. Walker of New Bedford who, in 1847, bought for a song a ship so old that she was about to be broken up for junk and no insurance broker would look at her. In this rotten relic he shipped a crew and went sailing in the Pacific. Miraculously keeping afloat, this Envoy of his was filled to the hatches with oil and bones, twice running, before she returned to her home port; and she earned $138,450 on a total investment of eight thousand dollars. The ship Sarah of Nantucket, after a three years' cruise, brought back 3497 barrels of sperm oil which sold for $89,000, and the William Hamilton of New Bedford set another high mark by stowing 4181 barrels of a value of $109,269. The Pioneer of New London, Captain Ebenezer Morgan, was away only a year and stocked a cargo of oil and whalebone which sold for $150,060. Most of the profits of prosperous voyages were taken as the owners' share, and the incomes of the captain and crew were so niggardly as to make one wonder why they persisted in a calling so perilous, arduous, and poorly paid. During the best years of whaling, when the ships were averaging $16,000 for a voyage, the master received an eighteenth, or about nine hundred dollars a year. The highly skilled hands, such as the boat-steerers and harpooners, had a lay of only one seventy-fifth, or perhaps a little more than two hundred dollars cash as the reward of a voyage which netted the owner at least fifty per cent on his investment. Occasionally they fared better than this and sometimes worse. The answer to the riddle is that they liked the life and had always the gambling spirit which hopes for a lucky turn of the cards. The countless episodes of fragile boats smashed to kindling by fighting whales, of the attack renewed with harpoon and lance, of ships actually rammed and sunk, would fill a volume by themselves and have been stirringly narrated in many a one. Zanzibar and Kamchatka, Tasmania and the Seychelles knew the lean, sun-dried Yankee whaleman and his motto of a "dead whale or a stove boat." The Civil War did not drive him from the seas. The curious fact is that his products commanded higher prices in 1907 than fifty years before, but the number of his ships rapidly decreased. Whales were becoming scarce, and New England capital preferred other forms of investment. The leisurely old sailing craft was succeeded by the steam whaler, and the explosive bomb slew, instead of the harpoon and lance hurled by the sinewy right arm of a New Bedford man or Cape Verde islander. Roving whaler and armed East Indiaman, plunging packet ship and stately clipper, they served their appointed days and passed on their several courses to become mere memories, as shadowy and unsubstantial as the gleam of their own topsails when seen at twilight. The souls of their sailors have fled to Fiddler's Green, where all dead mariners go. They were of the old merchant marine which contributed something fine and imperishable to the story of the United States. Down the wind, vibrant and deep-throated, comes their own refrain for a requiem: We're outward bound this very day, Good-bye, fare you well, Good-bye, fare you well. We're outward bound this very day, Hurrah, my boys, we're outward bound. CHAPTER X. BOUND COASTWISE 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. It is a traffic which flourished from the beginning, ingeniously adapting itself to new conditions, unchecked by war, and surviving with splendid vigor, under steam and sail, in this modern era. The seafaring pioneers won their way from port to port of the tempestuous Atlantic coast in tiny ketches, sloops, and shallops when the voyage of five hundred miles from New England to Virginia was a prolonged and hazardous adventure. Fog and shoals and lee shores beset these coastwise sailors, and shipwrecks were pitifully frequent. In no Hall of Fame will you find the name of Captain Andrew Robinson of Gloucester, but he was nevertheless an illustrious benefactor and deserves a place among the most useful Americans. His invention was the Yankee schooner of fore-and-aft rig, and he gave to this type of vessel its name. * Seaworthy, fast, and easily handled, adapted for use in the early eighteenth century when inland transportation was almost impossible, the schooner carried on trade between the colonies and was an important factor in the growth of the fisheries. * It is said that as the odd two-master slid gracefully into the water, a spectator exclaimed: "See how she scoons!" "Aye," answered Captain Robinson, "a SCHOONER let her be!" This launching took place in 1718 or 1714. Before the Revolution the first New England schooners were beating up to the Grand Bank of Newfoundland after cod and halibut. They were of no more than fifty tons' burden, too small for their task but manned by fishermen of surpassing hardihood. Marblehead was then the foremost fishing port with two hundred brigs and schooners on the offshore banks. But to Gloucester belongs the glory of sending the first schooner to the Grand Bank. * From these two rock-bound harbors went thousands of trained seamen to man the privateers and the ships of the Continental navy, slinging their hammocks on the gun-decks beside the whalemen of Nantucket. These fishermen and coastwise sailors fought on the land as well and followed the drums of Washington's armies until the final scene at Yorktown. Gloucester and Marblehead were filled with widows and orphans, and half their men-folk were dead or missing. * Marvin's "American Merchant Marine," p. 287. The fishing-trade soon prospered again, and the men of the old ports tenaciously clung to the sea even when the great migration flowed westward to people the wilderness and found a new American empire. They were fishermen from father to son, bound together in an intimate community of interests, a race of pure native or English stock, deserving this tribute which was paid to them in Congress: "Every person on board our fishing vessels has an interest in common with his associates; their reward depends upon their industry and enterprise. Much caution is observed in the selection of the crews of our fishing vessels; it often happens that every individual is connected by blood and the strongest ties of friendship; our fishermen are remarkable for their sobriety and good conduct, and they rank with the most skillful navigators." Fishing and the coastwise merchant trade were closely linked. Schooners loaded dried cod as well as lumber for southern ports and carried back naval stores and other southern products. Well-to-do fishermen owned trading vessels and sent out their ventures, the sailors shifting from one forecastle to the other. With a taste for an easier life than the stormy, freezing Banks, the young Gloucesterman would sign on for a voyage to Pernambuco or Havana and so be fired with ambition to become a mate or master and take to deep water after a while. In this way was maintained a school of seamanship which furnished the most intelligent and efficient officers of the merchant marine. For generations they were mostly recruited from the old fishing and shipping ports of New England until the term "Yankee shipmaster" had a meaning peculiarly its own. Seafaring has undergone so many revolutionary changes and old days and ways are so nearly obliterated that it is singular to find the sailing vessel still employed in great numbers, even though the gasolene motor is being installed to kick her along in spells of calm weather. The Gloucester fishing schooner, perfect of her type, stanch, fleet, and powerful, still drives homeward from the Banks under a tall press of canvas, and her crew still divide the earnings, share and share, as did their forefathers a hundred and fifty years ago. But the old New England strain of blood no longer predominates, and Portuguese, Scandinavians, and Nova Scotia "Bluenoses" bunk with the lads of Gloucester stock. Yet they are alike for courage, hardihood, and mastery of the sea, and the traditions of the calling are undimmed. There was a time before the Civil War when Congress jealously protected the fisheries by means of a bounty system and legislation aimed against our Canadian neighbors. The fishing fleets were regarded as a source of national wealth and the nursery of prime seamen for the navy and merchant marine. In 1858 the bounty system was abandoned, however, and the fishermen were left to shift for themselves, earning small profits at peril of their lives and preferring to follow the sea because they knew no other profession. In spite of this loss of assistance from the Government, the tonnage engaged in deep-sea fisheries was never so great as in the second year of the Civil War. Four years later the industry had shrunk one-half; and it has never recovered its early importance * * In 1882, the tonnage amounted to 193,459; in 1866, to 89,336. The coastwise merchant trade, on the other hand, has been jealously guarded against competition and otherwise fostered ever since 1789, when the first discriminatory tonnage tax was enforced. The Embargo Act of 1808 prohibited domestic commerce to foreign flags, and this edict was renewed in the American Navigation Act of 1817. It remained a firmly established doctrine of maritime policy until the Great War compelled its suspension as an emergency measure. The theories of protection and free trade have been bitterly debated for generations, but in this instance the practice was eminently successful and the results were vastly impressive. Deepwater shipping dwindled and died, but the increase in coastwise sailing was consistent. It rose to five million tons early in this century and makes the United States still one of the foremost maritime powers in respect to saltwater activity. To speak of this deep-water shipping as trade coastwise is misleading, in a way. The words convey an impression of dodging from port to port for short distances, whereas many of the voyages are longer than those of the foreign routes in European waters. It is farther by sea from Boston to Philadelphia than from Plymouth, England, to Bordeaux. A schooner making the run from Portland to Savannah lays more knots over her stern than a tramp bound out from England to Lisbon. It is a shorter voyage from Cardiff to Algiers than an American skipper pricks off on his chart when he takes his steamer from New York to New Orleans or Galveston. This coastwise trade may lack the romance of the old school of the square-rigged ship in the Roaring Forties, but it has always been the more perilous and exacting. Its seamen suffer hardships unknown elsewhere, for they have to endure winters of intense cold and heavy gales and they are always in risk of stranding or being driven ashore. The story of these hardy men is interwoven, for the most part, with the development of the schooner in size and power. This graceful craft, so peculiar to its own coast and people, was built for utility and possessed a simple beauty of its own when under full sail. The schooners were at first very small because it was believed that large fore-and-aft sails could not be handled with safety. They were difficult to reef or lower in a blow until it was discovered that three masts instead of two made the task much easier. For many years the three-masted schooner was the most popular kind of American merchant vessel. They clustered in every Atlantic port and were built in the yards of New England, New York, New Jersey, and Virginia,--built by the mile, as the saying was, and sawed off in lengths to suit the owners' pleasure. They carried the coal, ice, lumber of the whole seaboard and were so economical of man-power that they earned dividends where steamers or square-rigged ships would not have paid for themselves. As soon as a small steam-engine was employed to hoist the sails, it became possible to launch much larger schooners and to operate them at a marvelously low cost. Rapidly the four-master gained favor, and then came the five- and six-masted vessels, gigantic ships of their kind. Instead of the hundred-ton schooner of a century ago, Hampton Roads and Boston Harbor saw these great cargo carriers which could stow under hatches four and five thousand tons of coal, and whose masts soared a hundred and fifty feet above the deck. Square-rigged ships of the same capacity would have required crews of a hundred men, but these schooners were comfortably handled by a company of fifteen all told, only ten of whom were in the forecastle. There was no need of sweating and hauling at braces and halliards. The steam-winch undertook all this toil. The tremendous sails, stretching a hundred feet from boom to gaff could not have been managed otherwise. Even for trimming sheets or setting topsails, it was necessary merely to take a turn or two around the drum of the winch engine and turn the steam valve. The big schooner was the last word in cheap, efficient transportation by water. In her own sphere of activity she was as notable an achievement as the Western Ocean packet or the Cape Horn clipper. The masters who sailed these extraordinary vessels also changed and had to learn a new kind of seamanship. They must be very competent men, for the tests of their skill and readiness were really greater than those demanded of the deepwater skipper. They drove these great schooners alongshore winter and summer; across Nantucket Shoals and around Cape Cod, and their salvation depended on shortening sail ahead of the gale. Let the wind once blow and the sea get up, and it was almost impossible to strip the canvas off an unwieldy six-master. The captain's chief fear was of being blown offshore, of having his vessel run away with him! Unlike the deep-water man, he preferred running in toward the beach and letting go his anchors. There he would ride out the storm and hoist sail when the weather moderated. These were American shipmasters of the old breed, raised in schooners as a rule, and adapting themselves to modern conditions. They sailed for nominal wages and primage, or five per cent of the gross freight paid the vessel. Before the Great War in Europe, freights were low and the schooner skippers earned scanty incomes. Then came a world shortage of tonnage and immediately coastwise freights soared skyward. The big schooners of the Palmer fleet began to reap fabulous dividends and their masters shared in the unexpected opulence. Besides their primage they owned shares in their vessels, a thirty-second or so, and presently their settlement at the end of a voyage coastwise amounted to an income of a thousand dollars a month. They earned this money, and the managing owners cheerfully paid them, for there had been lean years and uncomplaining service and the sailor had proved himself worthy of his hire. So tempting was the foreign war trade, that a fleet of them was sent across the Atlantic until the American Government barred them from the war zone as too easy a prey for submarine attack. They therefore returned to the old coastwise route or loaded for South American ports--singularly interesting ships because they were the last bold venture of the old American maritime spirit, a challenge to the Age of Steam. No more of these huge, towering schooners have been built in the last dozen years. Steam colliers and barges have won the fight because time is now more valuable than cheapness of transportation. The schooner might bowl down to Norfolk from Boston or Portland in four days and be threshing about for two weeks in head winds on the return voyage. The small schooner appeared to be doomed somewhat earlier. She had ceased to be profitable in competition with the larger, more modern fore-and-after, but these battered, veteran craft died hard. They harked back to a simpler age, to the era of the stage-coach and the spinning-wheel, to the little shipyards that were to be found on every bay and inlet of New England. They were still owned and sailed by men who ashore were friends and neighbors. Even now you may find during your summer wanderings some stumpy, weatherworn two-master running on for shelter overnight, which has plied up and down the coast for fifty or sixty years, now leaking like a basket and too frail for winter voyages. It was in a craft very much like this that your rude ancestors went privateering against the British. Indeed, the little schooner Polly, which fought briskly in the War of 1812, is still afloat and loading cargoes in New England ports. These little coasters, surviving long after the stately merchant marine had vanished from blue water, have enjoyed a slant of favoring fortune in recent years. They, too, have been in demand, and once again there is money to spare for paint and cordage and calking. They have been granted a new lease of life and may be found moored at the wharfs, beached on the marine railways, or anchored in the stream, eagerly awaiting their turn to refit. It is a matter of vital concern that the freight on spruce boards from Bangor to New York has increased to five dollars a thousand feet. Many of these craft belong to grandfatherly skippers who dared not venture past Cape Cod in December, lest the venerable Matilda Emerson or the valetudinarian Joshua R. Coggswell should open up and founder in a blow. During the winter storms these skippers used to hug the kitchen stove in bleak farmhouses until spring came and they could put to sea again. The rigor of circumstances, however, forced others to seek for trade the whole year through. In a recent winter fifty-seven schooners were lost on the New England coast, most of which were unfit for anything but summer breezes. As by a miracle, others have been able to renew their youth, to replace spongy planking and rotten stems, and to deck themselves out in white canvas and fresh paint! The captains of these craft foregather in the ship-chandler's shops, where the floor is strewn with sawdust, the armchairs are capacious, and the environment harmonizes with the tales that are told. It is an informal club of coastwise skippers and the old energy begins to show itself once more. They move with a brisker gait than when times were so hard and they went begging for charters at any terms. A sinewy patriarch stumps to a window, flourishes his arm at an ancient two-master, and booms out: "That vessel of mine is as sound as a nut, I tell ye. She ain't as big as some, but I'd like nothin' better than to fill her full of suthin' for the west coast of Africy, same as the Horace M. Bickford that cleared t'other day, stocked for SIXTY THOUSAND DOLLARS." "Huh, you'd get lost out o' sight of land, John," is the cruel retort, "and that old shoe-box of yours 'ud be scared to death without a harbor to run into every time the sun clouded over. Expect to navigate to Africy with an alarm-clock and a soundin'-lead, I presume." "Mebbe I'd better let well enough alone," replies the old man. "Africy don't seem as neighborly as Phippsburg and Machiasport. I'll chance it as far as Philadelphy next voyage and I guess the old woman can buy a new dress." The activity and the reawakening of the old shipyards, their slips all filled with the frames of wooden vessels for the foreign trade, is like a revival of the old merchant marine, a reincarnation of ghostly memories. In mellowed dignity the square white houses beneath the New England elms recall to mind the mariners who dwelt therein. It seems as if their shipyards also belonged to the past; but the summer visitor finds a fresh attraction in watching the new schooners rise from the stocks, and the gay pageant of launching them, every mast ablaze with bunting, draws crowds to the water-front. And as a business venture, with somewhat of the tang of old-fashioned romance, the casual stranger is now and then tempted to purchase a sixty-fourth "piece" of a splendid Yankee four-master and keep in touch with its roving fortunes. 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. BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE As a rule, American historians like McMaster, Adams, and Rhodes give too little space to the maritime achievements of the nation. The gap has been partially filled by the following special works: Winthrop L. Marvin, "The American Merchant Marine: Its History and Romance from 1620 to 1902" (1902). This is the most nearly complete volume of its kind by an author who knows the subject and handles it with accuracy. John R. Spears, "The Story of the American Merchant Marine" (1910), "The American Slave Trade" (1901), "The Story of the New England Whalers" (1908). Mr. Spears has sought original sources for much of his material and his books are worth reading, particularly his history of the slave-trade. Ralph D. Paine, "The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem: The Record of a Brilliant Era of American Achievement" (1912). A history of the most famous seaport of the Atlantic coast, drawn from log-books and other manuscript collections. "The Book of Buried Treasure: Being a True History of the Gold, Jewels, and Plate of Pirates, Galleons, etc." (1911). Several chapters have to do with certain picturesque pirates and seamen of the colonies. Edgar S. Maclay, "A History of American Privateers" (1899). The only book of its kind, and indispensable to those who wish to learn the story of Yankee ships and sailors. J. R. Hutchinson, "The Press Gang Afloat and Ashore" (1914). This recent volume, written from an English point of view, illuminates the system of conscription which caused the War of 1812. Nothing can take the place, however, of the narratives of those master mariners who made the old merchant marine famous: Richard Henry Dana, Jr., "Two Years Before the Mast" (1840). The latest edition, handsomely illustrated, (1915). The classic narrative of American forecastle life in the sailing-ship era. Captain Richard Cleveland, "Narrative of Voyages and Commercial Enterprises" (1842). This is one of the fascinating autobiographies of the old school of shipmasters who had the gift of writing. Captain Amasa Delano, "Narrative of Voyages and Travels" (1817). Another of the rare human documents of blue water. It describes the most adventurous period of activity, a century ago. Captain Arthur H. Clark, "The Clipper Ship Era" (1910). A thrilling, spray-swept, true story. Far and away the best account of the clipper, by a man who was an officer of one in his youth. Robert Bennet Forbes, "Notes on Ships of the Past" (1888). Random facts and memories of a famous Boston ship-owner. It is valuable for its records of noteworthy passages. Captain John D. Whidden, "Ocean Life in the Old Sailing Ship Days" (1908). The entertaining reminiscences of a veteran shipmaster. Captain A. W. Nelson, "Yankee Swanson: Chapters from a Life at Sea" (1913). Another of the true romances, recommended for a lively sense of humor and a faithful portrayal of life aboard a windjammer. There are many other personal narratives, some of them privately printed and very old, which may be found in the libraries. Typical of them is "A Journal of the Travels and Sufferings of Daniel Saunders" (1794), in which a young sailor relates his adventures after shipwreck on the coast of Arabia. Among general works the following are valuable: J. Grey Jewell, "Among Our Sailors" (1874). A plea for more humane treatment of American seamen, with many instances on shocking brutalities as reported to the author, who was a United States Consul. E. Keble Chatterton, "Sailing Ships: The Story of their Development" (1909). An elaborate history of the development of the sailing vessel from the earliest times to the modern steel clipper. W. S. Lindsay, "History of Merchant Shipping and Ancient Commerce," 4 vols. (1874-76). An English work, notably fair to the American marine, and considered authoritative. Douglas Owen, "Ocean Trade and Shipping" (1914). An English economist explains the machinery of maritime trade and commerce. William Wood, "All Afloat." In "The Chronicles of Canada Series." Glasgow, Brook and Co., Toronto, 1914. J. B. McMaster, "The Life and Times of Stephen Girard, Mariner and Merchant," 2 vols. (1918). The relation of governmental policy to the merchant marine is discussed by various writers: David A. Wells, "Our Merchant Marine: How It Rose, Increased, Became Great, Declined, and Decayed" (1882). A political treatise in defense of a protective policy. William A. Bates, "American Marine: The Shipping Question in History and Politics" (1892); "American Navigation: The Political History of Its Rise and Ruin" (1902). These works are statistical and highly technical, partly compiled from governmental reports, and are also frankly controversial. Henry Hall, "American Navigation, With Some Account of the Causes of Its Former Prosperity and Present Decline" (1878). Charles S. Hill, "History of American Shipping: Its Prestige, Decline, and Prospect" (1883). J. D. J. Kelley, "The Question of Ships: The Navy and the Merchant Marine" (1884). Arthur J. Maginnis, "The Atlantic Ferry: Its Ships, Men, and Working" (1900). A vast amount of information is to be found in the Congressional Report of the Merchant Marine Commission, published in three volumes (1905). 
31953	----	American Merchant Marine, from June 29, 1942-August 15, 1945. Merchantmen-at-Arms [Illustration: _Frontispiece_ MERCHANTMEN AT GUN PRACTICE] Merchantmen-at-Arms THE BRITISH MERCHANTS' SERVICE IN THE WAR BY DAVID W. BONE DRAWINGS BY MUIRHEAD BONE [Illustration] LONDON: CHATTO & WINDUS 1919 _All rights reserved_ TO ALGERNON C. F. HENDERSON AS REPRESENTING A SYMPATHETIC AND UNDERSTANDING GOVERNANCE IN AN IMPORTANT SECTION OF THE BRITISH MERCHANTS' SEA SERVICE CONTENTS PART I PAGE I THE MERCHANTS' SERVICE OUR FOUNDATION 3 THE STRUCTURE 14 II OUR RELATIONS WITH THE NAVY JOINING FORCES 21 AT SEA 26 OUR WAR STAFF 30 III THE LONGSHORE VIEW 44 IV CONNECTION WITH THE STATE TRINITY HOUSE, OUR ALMA MATER 53 THE BOARD OF TRADE 61 V MANNING 67 PART II VI THE COASTAL SERVICES THE HOME TRADE 77 PILOTS 87 LIGHTSHIPS 91 VII 'THE PRICE O' FISH' 97 VIII THE RATE OF EXCHANGE 103 IX INDEPENDENT SAILINGS 110 X BATTLEDORE AND SHUTTLECOCK 116 XI ON SIGNALS AND WIRELESS 120 XII TRANSPORT SERVICES 125 INTERLUDE 132 'THE MAN-O'-WAR'S 'ER 'USBAND' 134 XIII THE SALVAGE SECTION THE TIDEMASTERS 141 A DAY ON THE SHOALS 147 THE DRY DOCK 156 XIV ON CAMOUFLAGE--AND SHIPS' NAMES 163 XV FLAGS AND BROTHERHOOD OF THE SEA 169 PART III XVI THE CONVOY SYSTEM 177 XVII OUTWARD BOUND 184 XVIII RENDEZVOUS 190 XIX CONFERENCE 198 XX THE SAILING FOG, AND THE TURN OF THE TIDE 205 'IN EXECUTION OF PREVIOUS ORDERS' 212 XXI THE NORTH RIVER 217 XXII HOMEWARDS THE ARGONAUTS 224 ON OCEAN PASSAGE 230 'ONE LIGHT ON ALL FACES' 236 XXIII 'DELIVERING THE GOODS' 244 XXIV CONCLUSION: 'M N' 252 APPENDIX 255 INDEX 257 ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE MERCHANTMEN AT GUN PRACTICE _Frontispiece_ THE CLYDE FROM THE TOWER OF THE CLYDE TRUST BUILDINGS xi GRAVESEND: A MERCHANTMAN OUTWARD BOUND 3 THE BRIDGE OF A MERCHANTMAN 7 THE OLD AND THE NEW: THE _MARGARET_ OF DUBLIN AND R.M.S. _TUSCANIA_ 15 IN A MERCHANTMAN--BOMB-THROWER PRACTICE 21 A BRITISH SUBMARINE DETAILED FOR INSTRUCTION OF MERCHANT OFFICERS 31 THE D.A.M.S. GUNWHARF AT GLASGOW 33 INSTRUCTIONAL ANTI-SUBMARINE COURSE FOR MERCHANT OFFICERS AT GLASGOW 39 THE LOSS OF A LINER 44 THE MERSEY FROM THE LIVER BUILDINGS, LIVERPOOL 49 THE MASTER OF THE GULL LIGHTSHIP WRITING THE LOG 53 AT GRAVESEND: PILOTS AWAITING AN INWARD-BOUND CONVOY 59 TRANSPORTS LEAVING SOUTHAMPTON ON THE NIGHT PASSAGE TO FRANCE 67 LIVERPOOL: MERCHANTMEN SIGNING ON FOR OVERSEA VOYAGES 69 THE RULER OF PILOTS AT DEAL 77 A HEAVILY ARMED COASTING BARGE 83 THE LAMPMAN OF THE GULL LIGHTSHIP 93 MINESWEEPERS GOING OUT 97 SOUTHAMPTON WATER 103 'OUT-BOATS' IN A MERCHANTMAN 105 FIREMEN STANDING BY TO RELIEVE THE WATCH 111 QUEEN'S DOCK, GLASGOW 116 THE BRIDGE-BOY REPAIRING FLAGS 121 A TRANSPORT EMBARKING TROOPS FOR FRANCE 125 TRANSPORTS IN SOUTHAMPTON DOCKS 129 THE _LEVIATHAN_ DOCKING AT LIVERPOOL 135 SALVAGE VESSELS OFF YARMOUTH, ISLE OF WIGHT 141 IN A SALVAGE VESSEL: OVERHAULING THE INSULATION OF THE POWER LEADS 145 A TORPEDOED MERCHANTMAN ON THE SHOALS: SALVAGE OFFICERS MAKING A SURVEY 151 A TORPEDOED SHIP IN DRY DOCK 157 DAZZLE 163 AN APPRENTICE IN THE MERCHANTS' SERVICE 171 A STANDARD SHIP AT SEA 177 BUILDING A STANDARD SHIP 179 THE THAMES ESTUARY IN WAR-TIME 184 DROPPING THE PILOT 187 EXAMINATION SERVICE PATROL BOARDING AN INCOMING STEAMER 190 DAWN: CONVOY PREPARING TO PUT TO SEA 193 EVENING: PLYMOUTH HOE 198 A CONVOY CONFERENCE 201 THE OLD HARBOUR, PLYMOUTH 205 CONVOY SAILING FROM PLYMOUTH SOUND 207 INWARD BOUND 217 A TRANSPORT LOADING 219 A CONVOY IN THE ATLANTIC 224 THE BOWS OF THE _KASHMIR_ DAMAGED BY COLLISION 227 THE MAYFLOWER QUAY, THE BARBICAN, PLYMOUTH 233 EVENING: THE MERSEY FROM THE LANDING-STAGE 241 THE STEERSMAN 243 THE WORK OF A TORPEDO 244 TRANSPORTS DISCHARGING IN LIVERPOOL DOCKS 245 TROOP TRANSPORTS DISEMBARKING AT THE LANDING-STAGE, LIVERPOOL 249 'M N' 252 [Illustration: THE CLYDE FROM THE TOWER OF THE CLYDE TRUST BUILDINGS] INTRODUCTION WRITTEN largely between the shipping crisis of 1917 and the surrender of German undersea arms at Harwich on November 20, 1918, this book is an effort to record a seaman's impressions of the trial through which the Merchants' Service has come in the war. It is necessarily halting and incomplete. The extent of the subject is perhaps beyond the safe traverse of a mariner's dead reckoning. Policies of governmental control and of the economics of our management do not come within the scope of the book except as text to the diary of seafaring. Out at sea it is not easy to keep the right proportions in forming an opinion of measures devised on a grand scale, and of the operation of which we see only a small part. Our slender thread of communication with longshore happenings is often broken, and understanding is warped by conjecture. In pride of his ancient trade, the seaman may perceive an importance and vital instrumentality in the ships and their voyages that may not be so evident to the landsman. By this is the mariner constantly impressed: that, without the merchant's enterprise on the sea--the adventure of his finance, his ships, his gear, his men--the armed and enlisted resources of the State could not have prevailed in averting disaster and defeat. The unique experiences of individual seamen--the trials of seafaring under less favourable circumstances than was the writer's good fortune--the plaints and grievances of our internal affairs--are but lightly sketched. Many brother seamen may feel that the harassing and often despairing case of the average tramp steamer has not adequately been dealt with; that--in "Outward Bound," as an instance--the writer presents a tranquil and idyllic picture which cannot be accepted as typical. The bitter hardship of proceeding on a voyage under war conditions, with the same small crew that was found inadequate in peace-time, is hardly suggested; the extent of the work to be overtaken is perhaps camouflaged in that description of setting out. Reality would more frequently show a vessel being hurried out of dock on the top of the tide, putting to sea into heavy weather, with the hatchways open over hasty stowage, and all the litter of a week's harbour disroutine standing to be cleared by a raw and semi-mutinous crew. Criticism on these grounds is just: but it was ever the seaman's custom to dismiss heavy weather--when it was past and gone--and recall only the fine days of smooth sailing. If the hard times of our strain and labouring are not wholly over, at least we have fallen in with a more favouring wind from the land. Conditions in the Merchants' Service are vastly improved since Germany challenged our right to pass freely on our lawful occasions. Relations between the owner and the seamen are less strained. Remuneration for sea-service is now more adequate. The sullen atmosphere of harsh treatment on the one hand, and grudging service on the other, has been cleared away by the hurricane threat to our common interests. Throughout the book there are some few extracts--all indicated by quotation marks--from the works of modern authors. The writer wishes to acknowledge their use and to mention the following: "Trinity House," by Walter H. Mayo; "The Sea," by F. Whymper; "The Merchant Seamen in War," by L. Cope Cornford; "Fleets behind the Fleet," by W. Macneile Dixon; "North Sea Fishers and Fighters" and "Fishermen in Wartime," both by Walter Wood; the pages of the _Nautical Magazine_. The grateful thanks of writer and artist are tendered to Rear-Admiral Sir Douglas Brownrigg, Chief Naval Censor, and to Lord Beaverbrook and Mr. Arnold Bennett, of the Ministry of Information, for facilities and kindly assistance in preparation of the work. The writer's indebtedness to his Owners for encouragement and for generous leave of absence (without which the book could not have been written) is especially acknowledged. Mr. Muirhead Bone's drawings reproduced in this book were executed during the war for the Ministry of Information with the co-operation of the Admiralty. They are now in the possession of the Imperial War Museum. With the exception of the illustrations on pages 44, 224, and 252, these drawings were made on the spot. DAVID W. BONE PART I [Illustration: GRAVESEND: A MERCHANTMAN OUTWARD BOUND] I THE MERCHANTS' SERVICE OUR FOUNDATION ALTHOUGH sea-interest of to-day finds an expression somewhat trite and familiar, the spell of the ships and the romance of voyaging drew an instant and wondering recognition from the older chroniclers. With a sure sense of right emphasis, yet observing an austere simplicity, they preserved for us an eloquent and adequate impression of the vital power of the ships. One outstanding fact remains constantly impressed in their records--that our island gates are set fast on the limits of tide-mark, leaving no way out but by passage of the misty sea-line; there is no gangway to a foreign field other than the planking of our vessels. Grandeur of the fleets, the might of sea-ordnance, the intense dramatic decision of a landing, stand out in the great pieces the early writers and painters designed. Brave kingly figures wind in and out against the predominant background of rude hulls and rigging and weathered sails. The outline of the ships and the ungainly figures of the mariners are definitely placed to impel our thoughts to the distant sea-marches. Happily for us, the passengers of early days included clerks and learned men on their pilgrimages, else we had known but little of bygone ship life. With interest narrowed by bounds of the bulwarks, they noted and recorded a worthy description. In the mystery of unknown seas, as in detail of the sea-tackle and the forms and usages of the ship, they penned a perfect register: down to the tunnage of the butts, we know the ships--to the 'goun of faldying' and the extent of their lodemanage, we recognize the men. At later date we come on the seaman and his ships recorded and portrayed with a loving enthusiasm. Richard Hakluyt--"with great charges and infinite cares, after many watchings, toiles and travels, and wearying out" of his weak body--sets out for us a wonderful chronicle of the shipping to his day. He grew familiarly acquainted with the chiefest 'Captaines,' the greatest merchants, and the best mariners of our nation, and acquired at first hand somewhat more than common knowledge of the sea. He saw not only the waving banners of sea-warriors and the magnificence of their martial encounters, but lauded victory in far voyages, the opening to commerce of distant lands, the hardihood of the Merchant Venturers. He realized the value of the seaman to the nation, not alone to fight battles on the sea, but as skilful navigators to further trade and intercourse. He was not ignorant "that shippes are to litle purpose without skillfull Sea-men; and since Sea-men are not bred up to perfection of skill in much lesse time than in the time of two prentiships; and since no kinde of men of any profession in the commonwealth passe their yeres in so great and continuall hazard of life; and since of so many, so few grow to gray heires; how needful it is that . . . these ought to have a better education, than hitherto they have had." His matchless patience and care and exactitude were only equalled by his pride in the doings of the seamen and the merchants. With a joyful humility he exults in the hoisting of our banners in the Caspian Sea--not as robber marauders, but as peaceful traders under licence and ambassade--at the station of an English Ligier in the stately porch of the Grand Signior at Constantinople, at consulates at Tripolis and Aleppo, in Babylon and Balsara--"and which is more, at English Shippes coming to anker in the mighty river of Plate." In script and tabulation he glories in the tale of the ships, and sets out the names and stations of humble merchant supercargoes with the same meticulous care as the rank and titles of the Captain-General of the Armada. Alas! There was none to set a similarly gifted hand to the further course of his lone furrow. Purchas tried, but there was no great love of his subject-matter to spread a glamour on the pages. Perhaps the magnitude of the task, ever growing and gathering, and the minute and unwearying succession of Hakluyt's "Navigations and Traffiques," discouraged and deterred less ardent followers. Of voyages and expeditions and discoveries there are volumes enough, but few such intimate records as "the Oathe ministered to the servants of the Muscovie company," or the instructions given by the Merchant Adventurers unto Richard Gibbs, William Biggatt, and John Backhouse, masters of their ships, have been written since Hakluyt turned his last page. As outposts to our field, roving bands on a frontier that rises and falls with the tide, the seamen were ever the first to apprehend the mutterings of war. With but little needed to set spark to the torch, they came in to foreign seaport or littoral with a fine confidence in their ships and arms. Truculent perhaps, and overbearing in their pride of long voyaging over a mysterious and threatening sea, they were hardly the ambassadors to aid settlement of a dispute by frank goodwill and prudence. Sailing outwith the confines of ordered government, their lawless outlook and freebooting found a ready rejoinder in restraint of trade and arbitrary imprisonment. Long wars had their seed in tavern brawls, enforcement "to stoope gallant [lower topsail] and vaile their bonets" for a puissant king or queen, brought a reckoning of strife and bloodshed. Although military sea-captains, the glory of their victories, the worthiness of their ships and appurtenances, figure largely on the pages of subsequent sea-history, not a great deal has been written of the sailor captains and their mates and crews. Later chroniclers were concerned that their subjects should be grand and combatant: there was little room in their text for trading ventures, or for such humble recitals as the tale and values of hogshead or caisse or bale. A line of demarcation was slowly but inevitably ruling a division of our sea-forces. The service of the ships, devoted indifferently to sea-warfare or oversea trading--as the nation might be at war or peace--was in process of adjustment to meet the demands of a new sea-attack. The vessels were no longer merely floating platforms from which a military leader could direct a plan of rude assault and engage the arms of his soldiery, leaving to the masters and seamen the duty of handling the way of the ship. A new aristocracy had arisen from the decks who saw, in the pull of their sails, a weapon more powerful than shock ordnance, and resented the dictation of landsmen on their own sea-province. Sea-warfare had become a contest, more of seamanship and manoeuvre, less of stunning impact and a weight of military arms. In division of the ships and their service, it may quite properly be claimed that the Merchants' Service remained the parent trunk from which the new Navy--a gallant growing limb--drew sap and sustenance, perhaps, in turn, improving the growth of the grand old tree. Certainly their service was an offshoot, for, since Henry VIII ordered laying of the first especial war keel, the sea-battles to the present day have been largely joined by the ships and men and furniture of the merchants, carrying on in the historic traditional manner of a fight when there was fighting to be done, a return to trade and enterprise when the great sea-roads were cleared to commerce. Stout old Sir John Hawkins, Frobisher, Drake, Davis, Amadas, and Barlow were merchant masters, shrewd at a venture, in intervals of, and combination with, their deeds of arms. Only a small proportion of State ships were in issue with the merchants' men to scourge the great Armada from our shores. Perhaps the existence of such a vast reserve in ships and men delayed the progress of purely naval construction. Only with the coming of steam was the line drawn sharply and definitely--the branch outgrowing the interlock of the parent stem. With partial severance and division of the ships, the seamen--who had been for so long of one breed, laying down sail-needle and caulking-iron to serve ordnance and hand-cutlass or boarding-pike--had reached a parting of the ways, and become naval or mercantile as their habits lay. The State war vessels, built and manned and maintained for strictly military uses, increased in strength and numbers. Their officers and crews developed a new seamanship and discipline that had little counterpart on the commercial vessels. For a time the two services sailed, if not in company, within sight and hail of one another. On occasion they joined to effect glorious issues, but, with the last broadside of war, courses were set that quickly swerved the fleets apart. Longer terms of peace gave opportunity for development on lines that were as poles apart. The Naval Service perfected and exercised their engines of war, and drilled and seasoned their men to automaton-like subservience to their plans. A broadening to democratic freedom, quickened by familiar intercourse with other nationals, had effect with the merchantmen in rousing a reluctance to a resort to arms; they desired but a free continuance of trading relations. Although differing in their operations and ideals, both services were striving to enhance the sea-power of the nation. Thomas Cavendish, Middleton, Monson, Hudson, and Baffin--merchant masters--explored the unknown and extended a field for mercantile ventures, but that field could have been but indifferently maintained if naval power had not been advanced to protect the merchantmen in their voyaging. [Illustration: THE BRIDGE OF A MERCHANTMAN] As their separation developed, relations grew the more distant between the seamen. While certainly protecting the traders from any foreign interference, the new Navy did little to effect a community of interest with their sea-fellows. Prejudices and distrust grew up. State jealousies and trade monopolies formed a confusion of interests and made for strained relations between the merchants and the naval chancelleries on shore. At sea, the arbitrary exercise of authority by the King's officers was opposed by revolutionary instincts for a free sea on the part of the merchants' seamen. Forcible impressment to naval service was the worst that could befall the traders' men. For want of energy or ability to carry through the drudgery of early sea-training, the naval officers took toll of the practised commercial seamen as they came in from sea. Bitter hardship set wedge to the cleavage. After long and perilous voyaging, absent from a home port for perhaps two or three years, the homeward-bound sailor had little chance of being allowed a term of liberty on shore--a brief landward turn to dissolve the salt casing of his bones. Within sound of his own church bells, in sight of the windmills and the fields and the home dwelling he had longed for, he was haled to hard and rigorous sea-service on vessels of war. The records of the East India Company have frequent references to this cruel exercise of naval tyranny. "On Thursday morning the Directors received the agreeable news of the safe arrival of the _Devonshire_, Captain Prince, from Bengal. . . . Her men have all been impressed by the Men-of-War in the Downs, and other hands were put on board to bring her up to her moorings in the River." ". . . On Sunday morning the Purser of the _William_, Captain Petre, arrived in town, who brought advice of the said ship in the Downs, richly laden, on Account of the Turkey Company: the Ships of War in the Downs impressed all her men, and put others on board to bring her up." "Notwithstanding the Report spread about, fourteen days ago, that no more sailors would be impressed out of the homeward-bound ships, several ships that arrived last week had all their men taken from them in the Downs." Serving by turns, as his agility to dodge the gangs was rated, on King's ship for a turn, then hauling bowline on a free vessel; forced and hunted and impressed, the shipmen had perhaps sorry records to offer the historian, then busy with the enthralling chronicles of fleet engagements and veiling with glamour the toll of battles. Perhaps it was, after all, the better course to preserve a silence on the traders' doings and leave to romantic conjecture a continuance of Hakluyt's patient story. Since the date of naval offgrowth, the chronicles have not often turned on our commercial path. Lone voyages and encounters with the sea and storm are minor enterprises to the sack of cities and the clash of arms at sea. Unlike the Naval Service, we merchants' men hold few recorded titles to our keystone in the national fabric. The deeds and documents may exist, but they are lost to us and forgotten in the files of musty ledgers. The fruits of our efforts stand in the balances of commercial structure, and are perhaps more enduring than a roll of record. 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. Idlers and landsmen learned quickly and bitterly that their only claim to existence on a merchant's ship lay in a rapid acquisition of a skill in seamanship. The lessons and the threats and enforcements did not come wholly from their superiors, to whose tyranny they might expose a sullen obstinance, and gain, perhaps, a measure of sympathy from their rude sea-fellows. 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. Every man had quickly to prove his ability: the unrelenting sea gave time for few essays. Fertility of resource, dexterity to serve at all duties, skill at handling ship and canvas, were the results of sea-ship training. In the merchantmen great opportunities offered for advancement in all branches of the seaman's art. Long voyaging was better exercise for a progression in navigation than the daily pilotage of the war vessels. Blake, in his early days as a merchant supercargo, learnt his seafaring on rough trading voyages, and his training could not have been other than sound to persist, through twenty years shore-dwelling as a merchant at Bridgwater, until he was called from his counting-house to command our naval forces. Dampier was a tarry foremast hand in his day: whatever we may judge of his conduct, we can have nothing but admiration for his seamanship. Ill-equipped and short-handed, racked by sea-sores and scurvy, his expeditions were unparalleled as a triumph of merchant sea-skill. James Cook learned his trade on the grimy hull of an east-coast collier--to this day we are working on charts of his masterly surveys. In later years the merit of the trading vessels as sterling sea-schools was equally plain. During intervals of combatant service, or as prelude to a naval career, training on the merchants' ships was eagerly sought by ardent naval seamen who saw the value of its resource in practical seamanship, in navigation, and weather knowledge. Great captains did not disdain the measure of the instruction. They sent their heirs to sea in trading vessels to draw an essence in practice from their sea-cunning. Hardy, Foley, and Berry had borne a hand at the sheets and braces, and had steered a lading of goods abroad, before they came to high command of the King's ships. Who knows what actions in the victories of Copenhagen, the Nile, and Trafalgar (hinged on the cast of the winds) were governed by Nelson's early sea-lessons, under Master John Rathbone, on the decks of a West India merchantman? For long after, relations and interchange between the two Services were not so intimate. Until coming of the Great War, with a mutual appreciation, we had little in common. Our friend and peacemaker--the influence of seafaring under square sail--languished a while, then died. In steam-power, with its growth of development and intricacy of application, we found no worthy successor to present as good an office. In the long span of a hundred years of sea-peace we grew apart. The gulf between the two great Services widened to a breach that only the rigours of a world-conflict could reconcile. As though exhausted by the indefinite sea-campaign of 1812, the Royal Navy lay on their oars and saw their commercial sea-fellows forge ahead on a course that revolutionized sea-transport and sea-warfare alike. The Lords of the Admiralty would listen to no deprecation of their gallant old wooden walls: steam propulsion was laughed at. To the Merchants' Service they left the risk and the responsibility of venturing afar in the rude new ships. In this wise, to us fell the honour of leading the State service to a new order of seafaring. Iron hulls and steam propulsion came first under our hands. It was not long before our new command of the sea was noted. Somewhat grudgingly, the conservative sea-mandarins were brought to a knowledge that their torpor was fatal. The Navy stirred and lost little time in traversing the leeway. They progressed on a path of experiment and probation suited to their needs, striving to construct mightier vessels and to forge new and greater arms. Exploring every avenue in their quest for aid and material, every byway for furtherance of their aims, they drew strange road-fellows within their ranks, new workmen to the sea. The engines of their adoption called for crafty hands to serve and adjust them. Steam we knew in our time and could understand, but auxiliary mechanics outgrew the limits of our comprehension; naval practice became a science outwith the bounds of our sea-lore, a new trade, whose only likeness to ours lay in its service on the same wide sea. Parted from the need to draw arms, secure in the knowledge of adequate naval protection, the Merchants' Service developed their ships and tackle in the ways of a free world trade. By shrewd engagement and industry in the counting-house, diligence and forethought in the building-yards, keen sailing and efficiency on the sea, the structure of our maritime supremacy was built up and maintained. Monopolies and hindering trade reservations and restrictions barred the way, but yielded to the spirit of our progress. Vested interests in seas and continents had to be fought and conquered, and there was room and scope for lingering combative instincts in the keen competition that arose for the world's carrying trade. Other nations came on the free seas, secure in the peace our arms had wrought, and entered the lists against us. The challenge to our seafaring we met by skill and hardihood--keener and more polished arms than the weapons of our sea-fathers. The coming of competitors spurred us to sea-deeds in the handling of our ships and cargoes, dispatch in the ports, and activity in the yards, that brought acknowledged victory to our flag. Every sense and thought that was in us was used to further our supremacy. The craft and workmanship of the builders and enterprise of the merchants provided us with the most beautiful of man's creations on the sea--the square-rigged sailing ship of the nineteenth century. With pride we sailed her. We, too, brought science to our calling; rude, perhaps, and not readily defined save by a long, hard pupilage. Not less than the calibre of the new naval ordnance was the measure of our sail spread, not inferior to ironclad hulls the speed and beauty of our clippers--we paralleled the roads of their strategy by the masterly handling of a cloud in sail. With a regularity and precision as noted as our naval sea-brothers' advance in gunfire, we served the trade and the mails, and spread the flood of emigration to the rise and glory of the Empire. With the decline of square sail, a new way of seafaring opened to us. In the first of our steam pioneering, we took our yards and canvas with us, as good part of our sea-kit; a safe provision, as we thought, against the inevitable failure we looked for in the new navigation. We were conservatively jealous of our gallant top hamper, and scorned the promise of a power that only dimly as yet we understood. But--the promise held. In a few years we became converts to the new order, in which we found a greater security, a more definite reliance, than in the angles of our sail plane. There was no longer a need for our precious 'stand by,' and we unrigged the wind tackle and accepted our new shipmate, the marine engineer, as a worthy brother seaman. It was not only the spars and the cordage and the sails we put ashore. With all the gallant litter we unloaded, condemned to the junk-heap, went a part of our seamanship as closely woven to the canvas as the seams our hands had sewn. In steam practice, new problems required to be studied and resolved; challenges to our vaunted sea-lore came up that called for radical revision of older methods and ideas. Changes, as wide and drastic as the evolutions of a decade in sail, were presented in a swift succession of as many days. With eyes now turned from aloft to ahead, we retyped our seamanship to meet the altered conditions of the veer in our outlook. Unhelped, if unhindered, in our efforts, we adapted our calling to the sudden and revolutionary innovations in construction and power of the new ships. We grew sensible of gaps in our knowledge, of voids in education that our earlier handicraft had not revealed. Severed, by press of our sea-work, from the facilities for study that now offered advancement to the landsman, we sought in alert and constant practice a substitute for technical instruction. By step and stride and canter we jockeyed each new starter from the shipyards, and studied their paces and behaviour on the vexed testing courses of the open sea. If our methods were rude in trial, they settled to efficiency in service. We paced in step with the rapid developments of the shipwright's art, the not less active contrivance of the engineers. We kept no man waiting for a sea-controller to his new and untried machine: there was no whistling for a pilot on the grounds of our reaches. From oversea dredger and frail harbour tug to the magnitude of an _Aquitania_, we were ever ready to board her on the launching ways and steer her to the limits of her draught. A Hakluyt of the day would have a full measure for his enthusiasm in the shear of our keels on every sea, the flutter of our flags to all the winds. By virtue of worthy vessels and good seamanship, the Red Ensign was devoted to a world service; by good guardianship and commercial rectitude the Merchants' Service held charge of the world's wealth in transport--the burden of the ships. All nations put trust in us for sea-carriage. The Spanish onion-grower on the slopes of Valencia, the Java sugar merchants, the breeders of Plata, looked to their harbours for sight of our hulls to load their products. Greek boatmen took payment for their cases on a scrap of dingy paper; the tide-labourers of the world demanded no earnest of their fees ere setting to work--our flag was their guarantor. The incoming of our ships brought throng to the quay-sides of far seaports; the outgoing sent the prospering merchants to the bank counters, to draw value from our skill in navigation, our integrity, and sea-care. THE STRUCTURE THE avalanche of war found us, if unprepared, not unready. The Merchants' Service was in the most efficient state of all its long story. Bounteous harvests had set a tide of prosperity to all parts of the world. Trade had reached the summit of a register in volume and account. The transport of the world's goods was busied as never before. With every outward stern wash went a full lading of our manufactures--a bulk of coal, a mass of wrought steel; foam at the bows--returning, brought exchange in food and raw materials, grist to the mills of our toiling artisans--a further provision for continuation of our trading. There were no idle keels swinging the tides in harbour for want of profitable employment; no seamen lounging on the dockside streets awaiting a 'sight' to sign-on for a voyage. Bulk of cargoes exceeded the tonnage of the ships, and the riverside shipyards resounded to the busy clamour of new construction. Advanced systems of propulsion had emerged from tentative stages, were fully tried and proved, and owners were adding to their fleets the latest and largest vessels that art of shipwrights and skill of the engineers could supply. We were well built and well found and well employed in all respects, not unready for any part that called us to sea. On such a stage the gage was thrown. Right on the heels of the courier with challenge accepted, went the ships laden with a new and precious cargo--our gallant men-at-arms. Before a shot of ours was fired, the first blow in the conflict was swung by passage of the ships: throughout the length of it, only by the sea-lanes could the shock be maintained. Viewing the numbers and tonnage of the ships, the roll and character of the seamen, we were not uneasy for the sea-front. With the most powerful war fleet in the world boarding on the coasts of the enemy, we had little to fear. The transports and war-service vessels could be adequately safeguarded: the peaceful traders on their lawful occasions could trust in international law of the civilized seas, on which no destruction may be effected without cause, prefaced by examination. Of raiders and detached war units there might be some apprehension, but the White Ensign was abroad and watchful--it was impossible that the shafts of the enemy could reach us on the sea. For a time we set out on our voyages and returned without interference. [Illustration: THE OLD AND THE NEW THE _MARGARET_ OF DUBLIN AND R.M.S. _TUSCANIA_] Anon, an amazing circumstance shocked our blythe assurance. In a new warfare, by traverse of a route we thought was barred, the impossible became a stern reality! While able, by power of their ships and skill and gallantry of the men, to keep the surface naval forces of the enemy doomed to ignoble harbour watch, the mightiest war fleet the seas had ever carried was impotent wholly to protect us! Our Achilles heel was exposed to merciless under-water attack, to a new weapon, deadly in precision and difficult to counter or evade. Throwing to the winds all shreds of honour and conscionable restraint, all vestiges of a sea-respect for non-combatants and neutrals, the pacts and bounds of international law--the humane sea-usages that spared women and children and stricken wounded--the decivilized German set up the banners of a stark piracy, an ocean anarchy, to whose lieutenants the sea-wolves of an earlier age were but feeble enervated weaklings. Piracy, gloried in and undisguised, faced us. Well and definite! We had known piracy in the long years of our sea-history: we had dealt with their trade to a full settlement at yard-arm or gallows. The course of our seafaring was not to be arrested by even the deep roots and deadly poison of this not unknown sea-growth: we had scaled the foul barnacles and cut the rank weeds before in the course of sea-development. If our ways had become peaceful in the long years of unchallenged trading, our habits were never less than combatant throughout a life of struggle with storm and tide. Not while we had a ship and a man to the helm would we be driven from the sea; our hard-won heritage was not to be delivered under threat or operation of even the most surpassing frightfulness. Jealousy for our seafaring, for our name as sailors, forbade that we should skulk in harbour or linger behind the nets and booms. Our work, our livelihood, our proud sea-trade, our honour was on the open sea. Our pride was this--that, in our action, we would be followed by the seafarers of the world. It was for no idle vaunt we boasted our supremacy at sea. If we could take first place of the world's seamen in time of peace, our station was to lead in war. We put out to sea--the neutrals followed. Had we held to port, German orders would have halted the sea-traffic of the world. With no shield but our seamanship, no weapon but the keenness of our eyes, no power of defence or assault other than the swing of a ready helm, we met the pirates on the sea, with little pretension in victory and no whining in defeat. Challenged to stand and submit, the _Vosges_ answered with a cant of the helm and hoist of her flag, and stood on her way under a merciless hail of shot. Unarmed, outsped, there was little prospect of escape--only, in an obstinate sea-pride, lay acceptance of the challenge. With decks littered by wreckage and wounded, bridge swept by shrapnel, water making through her torn hull, there was no thought to lay-to and droop the flag in surrender. When, at length, the ensign was shot away, there were men enough to hoist another. In hours their agony was measured, until, in despair of completing his foul work, the enemy gave up the contest. Reeking of the combat, the _Vosges_ foundered under her wounds. The sea took her from her gallant crew, but they had not given up the ship--their flag still fluttered at the peak as she went down. _Anglo-Californian_ fought a grim, silent fight for four hours, matching the intensity of the German gunfire by the dogged quality of her mute defiance. _Palm Branch_ turned away from galling fire at short range, double-banked the press in the stokehold, and cut and turned on her course to confuse the ranges. Her stern was shattered by shell, the lifeboats blown away; the apprentice at the wheel stood to his job with blood running in his eyes. Fire broke out and added a new terror to the situation. There was no flinching. Through it all the engines turned steadily, driven to their utmost speed by the engineers and firemen. A one-sided affair--a floating hell for seamen to stand by, helpless, and take a frightful gruelling! But they stood to it, and came to port. If, under new and treacherous blows, our hearts beat the faster, there was little pause, no stoppage, in the steady coursing of our sea-arteries. We fought the menace with the same spirit our old sea-fathers knew. Undeterred by the ghastly handicap against us--the galling fetters of a policy that kept us unarmed, we pitted our brains and seamanship against the murderous mechanics of the enemy. To the new under-water attack there were few adequate counter-measures in the records of our old seafaring. We revised the standard manual, drew text from old games, shield from the cuttlefish, models for our sweeps from discarded sea-tackle. Special devices, new plans, stern services were called for; we devised, we specialized--our readiness was never more instant. Out of our strength we built up a new Service. Instruction and equipment came from the Royal Navy, but the men were ours. In the throes of our exertions the Merchants' Service repeated a tradition. The stout aged tree shot forth another worthy limb--a second Navy--not less ardent or resourceful than the first offshoot, now grown to be our guardian. Our branches twined and interlocked in service of a joint endeavour. Under the fierce blast of war we swayed and weighed together in shield of our ancient foundation. Within our ranks we had cunning fishers, keen, resolute sea-fighters of the banks, to whom the coming of a strange mechanical devil-fish offered a new zest to the chase, a famous netting. Enrolled to Special Service, they engaged the enemy at his doorstep and patrolled the areas of his outset. Undaunted by the odds, deterred by no risk or threat, they ranged and searched the sea-channels and cleared the lanes for our safe passage. To detect, to warn, to meet and counter-charge the submarine in his depths, to safeguard the narrow seas from hazard of the mines, was all in the day's work of the _Temporary_ R.N.R. Throughout all the enrolments, the divisions, the changes, and the training for new and special duties, there was no easing of the engines: we effected our adjustments and allotments under a full head of steam. All that the enemy could do could not prevent the steady reinforcement of our arms, the passage of our men, the transport of our trade. The long lines of our sea-communications remained unbroken, despite our losses and the grim spectre of the raft and the open boat. It could not be otherwise--and Britain stand. There could be no halt in the sea-traffic. Only from abroad could we draw supplies to raise the new leaguer of our island garrison; only by way of the sea could we retain and renew our strength. In time the intolerable shackles of inactive resistance were struck from our hands. Somewhat tardily we were supplied with weapons of defence and instructed in their use and maintainance. We went to school again, under tutelage of the Naval Service, and drew a helpful assistance from the tale of their courses since we had parted company. We were heartened by the new spirit of co-operation with the fighting service. Ungrudgingly they lent experts to direct our movement. They turned a stream of their inventive talent in the ways of gear and apparatus to protect our ships. They shipped our ordnance, and supplied skilled gunners to leaven our rude crews. More, they helped to strip the veneer of convention that hampered us--our devotion to standard practice in rules and lights and equipment. We learned our lessons. Even though the peaceful years had lessened our fighting spring, we had lost no aptitude for service of the guns in defence of our rights, nor for measure to deceive or evade. Armed and alert, we returned to the sea, confident in the discard of a weight in our handicap. We could strike back, and with no feeble blow--as the pirates soon learned. There were scores to settle. _Palm Branch_, belying her tranquil name, took a payment in full for her shattered stern and the blood running in the steersman's eyes. Keen eyes sighted a periscope in time. The helm was put over and the white track raced across the stern, missing by feet. Baffled in under-water attack, the enemy hove up from his depths to open surface fire. He never had opportunity. If look-out was good, gun action was as quick and ready in _Palm Branch_. Her first shot struck the conning-tower, the second drove home on the submarine, which sank. While all eyes were focused on the settling wash and spreading scum of oil, a new challenge came and was as speedily accepted. A shell, fired by a second submarine at long range, passed over the steamer. Slewing round to a new target, the gunners kept up a steady return, shot for shot. The submarine dropped farther astern, fearing the probe of a bracket: he angled his course to bring both his guns in action. Two pieces against the steamer's one! At that, he fared no better. Firing continuously, eighty rounds in less than an hour, he registered not one hit. At length _Palm Branch's_ steady, methodical search for the range had effect. Her gunners capped the day's fine shooting by a direct hit on the submarine's after-gun, shattering the piece. At evens again--the U-boat ceased fire and drew off, possibly under threat of British patrols approaching at full speed, more probably for the good and sufficient reason that he had had enough. Not all our contests were as happily decided. If--shirking the issue of the guns, with no zest for a square fight--the German went to his depths, he had still the deadly torpedo to enforce a toll. The toll we paid and are paying, but there is no stoppage in the round by which the nation is fed and her arms served. The burden is heavy and our losses great, but we have not failed. We dare not fail. [Illustration: IN A MERCHANTMAN--BOMB-THROWER PRACTICE] II OUR RELATIONS WITH THE NAVY JOINING FORCES AFTER an interval of a hundred years, we are come to work together again, banded, as in the days of the Armada, to keep the seas against a ruthless challenger. In view of a new blood-bond between us, it is difficult to write coldly of the causes that have kept us apart. Only by preface of an affirmation can it be made possible. Through all our differences, prejudices, envies--perhaps jealousies--there ran at least one clear unsullied thread--our admiration for the Navy, our glory in its strength and power, our belief in its matchless efficiency. We seamen, naval or mercantile, are a stout unmovable breed. Tenacity to our convictions is deeply rooted. The narrow trends of shipboard life give licence to a conservatism that out-Herods Herod in intensity, unreason--in utter sophistry. We extend this atmosphere to our relationships, to the associations with the beach, with other sea-services, with other ships--to the absurd pretensions of the other watch. "A sailorman afore a landsman, an' a shipmate afore all," may be a useful creed, but it engenders a contentious outlook, an intolerance difficult to reconcile. In the fo'c'sle, the upholding of a 'last ship' may lead to a broken nose; aft, the officers may quarrel, wordily, over the grades of their service; ashore, the captain may only reserve his confidences for a peer of his tonnage; over all, the distance between the Naval and Merchants' Services was immeasurable and complete. If it was so to this date, it was perhaps more intense in the old days when common seafaring had not set as broad a distinction, as widely divergent a sea-practice, as our modern services shew. That such a contentious atmosphere existed we have ample witness. After experience as a merchants' man, Nelson wrote of his re-entry. "I returned a practical seaman with a horror of the Royal Navy. . . . It was many weeks before I got the least reconciled to a man-o'-war, so deep was the prejudice rooted!" We have no such noted record of a merchant seaman re-entering from the Navy. Doubtless the laxity and indiscipline he might observe would produce a not dissimilar revulsion. In the years that have elapsed since Nelson wrote, we have had few opportunities to compose our differences, to get on better terms with one another. The course of naval development took the great war fleets hull down on our commercial horizon, beyond casual intercommunication. On rare and widely separated occasions we fell into an expedition together, but the unchallenged power of the naval forces only served to heighten the barriers that stood between us. At the Crimea, in India, on the Chinese and Egyptian expeditions, during the Boer War, we were important links in the venture, but no more important than the cargoes we ferried. There was no call for any service other than our usual sea-work. The Navy saw to it that our comings and goings were unmolested. We were sea-civilians, purely and simply; there was nothing more to be said about it. If little was said, it was with no good grace we took such a station. There were those who saw that seafaring could not thus arbitrarily be divided. Other nations were stirring and striving to a naval strength and power, drawing aid and personnel from their mercantile services. Sea-strength and paramountcy might not wholly come to be measured in terms of thickness of the armour-plating--in calibre of the great guns. Auxiliary services would be required. The Navy could no more work without us than the Army without a Service Corps. The Royal Naval Reserve came as a link to our intercourse. Certain of our shipmates left us for a period of naval training. They came back changed in many particulars. They had acquired a social polish, were perhaps less 'sailor-like' in their habits. As a rule they were discontented with the way of things in their old ships; the quiet rounds bored them after the crowded life in a warship. We were frequently reminded of how well and differently things were done in _the_ Service. Perhaps, in return, we took the wrong line. We made no effort to sift their experiences, to find out how we might improve our ways. Often our comrade's own particular shrewdness was cited as a reason for the better ways of naval practice. We were rather irritated by the note of superiority assumed, perhaps somewhat jealous. Had commissions been granted on a competitive basis, we might have accepted such a tone, but we had our own way of assessing sea-values, and saw no reason why we should stand for these new airs. What was in it, what had wrought the change, we were never at pains to investigate. It was enough for us to note that, though his watch-keeping was certainly improved, our re-entered shipmate did not seem to be as efficient as a navigator or cargo supervisor as once we had thought him. All his talk of drills and guns and station-keeping considered, he seemed to have quite forgotten that groundnuts are thirteen hundredweights to the space ton and ought not to be stowed near fine goods! On the other hand, he might reasonably be expected to see his old shipmates in a new light. Rude, perhaps. Of limited ideas. Tied to the old round of petty bickerings and small intrigues. He would note the want of trusty brotherhood. His sojourn among better-educated men may have roused his ideas to an appreciation of values that deep-sea life had obscured. The lack of the discipline to which he had become accustomed would appal and disquiet him. In time he would be worn to the rut again, but who can say the same rut? Unconsciously, we were influenced by his quieter manners. In self-study we saw faults that had been unnoticed before his return. Reviewing our hard sea-life, we recalled our exclusion from benefits of instruction that went a-begging on the beach. We stirred. There might yet be time to make up the leeway. The influence of naval training was never very pronounced among the seamen and firemen of the Merchants' Service who were attached to the R.N.R. Their periods of training were too short for them to be permanently influenced by the discipline of the Navy (or our indiscipline on their return to us may have blighted a promising growth!) On short-term training they were rarely allotted to important work. The governing attitude was rather that they should be used as auxiliaries, mercantile handymen, in a ship. If there was a stowage of stores, cleaning up of bilges, chipping and scaling of iron rust--well, here was mercantile Jack, who was used to that kind of work; who better for the job? Generally, he returned to his old ways rather tired of Navy 'fashion' and discipline, and one saw but little influence of his temporary service on a cruiser. Usually, he was a good hand, to begin with: he sought a post on good ships: with his papers in order we were very glad to have him back. In few other ways did we come in touch with the Navy. At times the misfortune of the sea brought us into a naval port for assistance in our distress. Certainly, assistance was readily forthcoming, a full measure, but in a somewhat cold and formal way that left a rankling impression that we were not--well, we were not perhaps desirable acquaintances. The naval manner was not unlike that of a courteous prescribing chemist over his counter. "Have you had the pain--long?" "Is there any--coughing?" We had always the feeling that they were bored by our custom, were anxious to get back to the mixing of new pills, to their experiments. We were not very sorry when our repairs were completed and we could sail for warmer climates. With the outbreak of war the R.N.R. was instantly mobilized. Their outgoing left a sensible gap in our ranks, a more considerable rift than we had looked for. Example drew others on their trodden path, our mercantile seamen were keen for fighting service; the unheralded torpedo had not yet struck home on their own ships. Commissions to a new entry of officers were still limited and capricious--the _Hochsee Flotte_ had not definitely retired behind the booms at Kiel and Wilhelmshaven, to weave a web of murder and assassination. For a short term we sailed on our voyages, on a steady round, differing but little from our normal peace-time trade. A short term. The enemy did not leave us long secure in our faith in civilized sea-usage. Our trust in International Law received a rude and shattering shock from deadly floating mine and racing torpedo. Paralysed and impotent to venture a fleet action, the German Navy was to be matched not only against the commercial fleets of Britain and her Allies, but against every merchant ship, belligerent or neutral. There was to be no gigantic clash of sea-arms; action was to be taken on the lines of Thuggery. The German chose his opponents as he chose his weapons. Assassins' weapons! The knife in the dark--no warning, no quarter, sink or swim! The 'sea-civilians' were to be driven from the sea by exercise of the most appalling frightfulness and savagery that the seas had ever known. Under such a threat our sea-services were brought together on a rapid sheer, a close boarding, in which there was a measure of confusion. It could not have been otherwise. The only provision for co-operation, the R.N.R. organization, was directed to augment the forces of the Navy: there was no anticipation of a circumstance that would sound a recall. Our machinery was built and constructed to revolve in one direction; it could not instantly be reversed. Into an ordered service, ruled by the most minute shades of seniority, the finest influences of precedence and tradition, there came a need to fit the mixed alloy of the Merchants' Service. Ready, eager, and willing, as both Services were, to devote their energies to a joint endeavour, it took time and no small patience to resolve the maze and puzzle of the jig-saw. Naval officers detailed for our liaison were of varied moulds. Not many of the Active List could be spared; our new administrators were mostly recalled from fishing and farming to take up special duties for which they had few qualifications other than the gold lace on their sleeves. Some were tactful and clever in appreciation of other values than a mere readiness to salute, and those drew our affection and a ready measure of confidence. Others set up plumed Gessler bonnets, to which we were in no mood to bow. Only our devotion to the emergency exacted a jerk of our heads. To them we were doubtless difficult and trying. Our free ways did not fit into their schemes of proper routine. Accustomed to the lines of their own formal service, to issuing orders only to their juniors, they had no guide to a commercial practice whereby there can be a concerted service without the usages of the guard-room. They made things difficult for us without easing their own arduous task. They objected to our manners, our appearance, to the clothes we wore. Our diffidence was deemed truculence: our reluctance to accept a high doctrine of subservience was measured as insubordination. The flames of war made short work of our moods and jealousies, prejudices, and dislikes. A new Service grew up, the _Temporary_ R.N.R., in which we were admitted to a share in our own governance and no small part in combatant operations at sea. The sea-going section found outlet for their energy and free scope for a traditional privateering in their individual ventures against the enemy. Patrolling and hunting gave high promise for their capacity to work on lines of individual control. Minesweeping offered a fair field for the peculiar gifts of seamanship that mercantile practice engenders. Commissioned to lone and perilous service, they kept the seas in fair weather or foul. Although stationed largely in the narrow seas, there were set no limits to the latitude and longitude of their employment. The ice of the Arctic knew them--riding out the bitter northern gales in their small seaworthy drifters, thrashing and pitching in the seaway, to hold a post in the chain of our sea-communications. In the Adriatic warmer tides lapped on their scarred hulls, but brought no relaxing variance to their keen look-out. For want of a match of their own size, they had the undying temerity to call three cheers and engage cruiser ordnance with their pipe-stems! A service indeed! If but _temporary_ in title, there is permanence in their record! Coincident with our actions on the sea--not alone those of our fighting cubs, but also those of our trading seamen--a better feeling came to cement our alliance. First in generous enthusiasm for our struggle against heavy odds, as they came to understand our difficulties, naval officers themselves set about to create a happier atmosphere. We were admitted to a voice in the league of our defence. Administration was adjusted to meet many of our grievances. Our capacity for controlling much of the machinery of our new movements was no longer denied. The shreds of old conservatism, the patches of contention and envy were scattered by a strong free breeze of reasoned service and joint effort. We meet the naval man on every turn of the shore-end of our seafaring. We have grown to admire him, to like him, to look forward to his coming and association in almost the same way that we are pleased at the boarding of our favoured pilots. He fits into our new scheme of things as readily as the Port Authorities and the Ship's Husband. The plumed bonnets are no longer set up to attract our awed regard: by a better way than caprice and petulant discourtesy, the naval officer has won a high place in our esteem. We have borrowed from his stock to improve our store; better methods to control our manning, a more dispassionate bearing, a ready subordinance to ensure service. His talk, too. We use his phrases. We 'carry on'; we ask the 'drill' for this or that; we speak of our sailing orders as 'pictures,' our port-holes are become 'scuttles.' The enemy is a 'Fritz,' a depth-charge a 'pill,' torpedoes are 'mouldies.' In speaking of our ships we now omit the definite article. We are getting on famously together. AT SEA ALTHOUGH our experience of their assured protection is clear and definite, our personal acquaintance with the larger vessels of the Navy is not intimate. Saving the colliers and the oilers and storeships that serve the Fleet, few of us have seen a 'first-rate' on open sea since the day the Grand Fleet steered north to battle stations. The strength and influence of the distant ships was plain to us in the first days of the war even if we had actually no sight of their grey hulls. While we were able to proceed on our lawful occasions with not even a warning of possible interference, the mercantile ships of the enemy--being abroad--had no course but to seek the protection of a neutral port, not again to put out to sea under their own colours. The operation of a threat to shipping--at three thousand miles distance--was dramatic in intensity under the light of acute contrast. Entering New York a few days after war had been declared, we berthed alongside a crack German liner. Her voyage had been abandoned: she lay at the pier awaiting events. At the first, we stared at one another curiously. Her silent winches and closed hatchways, deserted decks and passages, were markedly in contrast to the stir and animation with which we set about unloading and preparing for the return voyage. The few sullen seamen about her forecastle leant over the bulwarks and noted the familiar routine that was no longer theirs. Officers on the bridge-deck eyed our movements with interest, despite their apparent unconcern. We were respectfully hostile: submarine atrocities had not yet begun. The same newsboy served special editions to both ships. The German officers grouped together, reading of the fall of Liége. Doubtless they confided to one another that they would soon be at sea again. Five days we lay. At eight o'clock 'flags,' our bugle-call accompanied the raising of the ensign: the red, white, and black was hoisted defiantly at the same time. We unloaded, re-loaded, and embarked passengers, and backed out into the North River on our way to sea again. The _Fürst_ ranged to the wash of our sternway as we cleared the piers; her hawsers strained and creaked, then held her to the bollards of the quay. Time and again we returned on our regular schedule, to find the German berthed across the dock, lying as we had left her, with derricks down and her hatchways closed. . . . We noted the signs of neglect growing on her; guessed at the indiscipline aboard that inaction would produce. For a while her men were set to chipping and painting in the way of a good sea-custom, but the days passed with no release and they relaxed handwork. Her topsides grew rusty, her once trim and clean paintwork took on a grimy tint. Our doings were plain to her officers and crew: we were so near that they could read the tallies on the mailbags we handled: there were no mails from Germany. Loading operations, that included the embarkation of war material, went on by night and day: we were busied as never before. The narrow water space between her hull and ours was crowded by barges taking and delivering our cargo; the shriek of steam-tugs and clangour of their engine-bells advertised our stir and activity. On occasion, the regulations of the port obliged the _Fürst_ to haul astern, to allow working space for the Merritt-Chapman crane to swing a huge piece of ordnance to our decks. There were rumours of a concealed activity on the German. "She was coaling silently at night, in preparation for a dash to sea.". . . "German spies had their headquarters in her." The evening papers had a new story of her secret doings whenever copy ran short. All the while she lay quietly at the pier; we rated her by her draught marks that varied only with the galley coal she burnt. At regular periods her hopeless outlook was emphasized by our sailings. Officers and crew could not ignore the stir that attended our departure. They saw the 'blue peter' come fluttering from the masthead, and heard our syren roar a warning to the river craft as we backed out. We were laden to our marks and the decks were thronged with young Britons returning to serve their country. The Fatherland could have no such help: the _Fürst_ could handle no such cargo. For her there could be no movement, no canting on the tide and heading under steam for the open sea: the distant ships of the Grand Fleet held her in fetters at the pier. While the Battle Fleet opened the oceans to us, we were not wholly safe from enemy interference on the high seas in the early stages of the war. German commerce raiders were abroad; there was need for a more tangible protection to the merchants' ships on the oversea trade routes. The older cruisers were sent out on distant patrols. They were our first associates of the huge fleet subsequently detailed for our defence and assistance. We were somewhat in awe of the naval men at sea on our early introduction. The White Ensign was unfamiliar. Armed to the teeth, an officer from the cruiser would board us: the bluejackets of his boat's crew had each a rifle at hand. "Where were we from . . . where to . . . our cargo . . . our passengers?" The lieutenant was sternly courteous; he was engaged on important duties: there was no mood of relaxation. He returned to his boat and shoved off with not one reassuring grin for the passengers lining the rails interested in every row-stroke of his whaler. In time we both grew more cordial: we improved upon acquaintance. The drudgery and monotony of a lone patrol off a neutral coast soon brought about a less punctilious boarding. Our _procès-verbal_ had unofficial intervals. "How were things at home? . . . Are we getting the men trained quickly? . . . What about the Russians?" The boarding lieutenants discovered the key to our affections--the secret sign that overloaded their sea-boat with newspapers and fresh mess. "A fine ship you've got here, Captain!" We parted company at ease and with goodwill. The boat would cast off to the cheers of our passengers. The great cruiser, cleared for action with her guns trained outboard, would cant in to close her whaler. Often her band assembled on the upper deck: the favourite selections were 'Auld Lang Syne' and 'Will ye no' come back again'--as she swung off on her weary patrol. Submarine activities put an end to these meetings on the sea. Except while under ocean escort of a cruiser--when our relations by flag signal are studied and impersonal--we have now little acquaintance with vessels of that class. Counter-measures of the new warfare demand the service of smaller vessels. Destroyers and sloops are now our protectors and co-workers. With them, we are drawn to a familiar intimacy; we are, perhaps, more at ease in their company, dreading no formal routine. Admirals are, to us, awesome beings who seclude themselves behind gold-corded secretaries: commodores (except those who control our convoys) are rarely sea-going, and we come to regard them as schoolmasters, tutors who may not be argued with; post-captains in command of the larger escorts have the brusque assumption of a super-seamanship that takes no note of a limit in manning. The commanders and lieutenants of the destroyers and sloops that work with us are different; they are more to our mind--we look upon them as brother seamen. Like ourselves, they are 'single-ship' men. They are neither concerned with serious plans of naval strategy nor overbalanced by the forms and usages of great ship routine. While 'the bridge' of a cruiser may be mildly scornful upon receipt of an objection to her signalled noon position, the destroyer captain is less assured: he is more likely to request our estimate of the course and speed. His seamanship is comparable to our own. The relatively small crew he musters has taught him to be tolerant of an apparent delay in carrying out certain operations. In harbour he is frequently berthed among the merchantmen, and has opportunity to visit the ships and acquire more than a casual knowledge of our gear and appliances. He is ever a welcome visitor, frank and manly and candid. Even if there is a dispute as to why we turned north instead of south-east 'when that Fritz came up,' and we blanked the destroyer's range, there is not the air of superior reproof that rankles. In all our relations with the Navy at sea there was ever little, if any, friction. We saw no empty plumed bonnet in the White Ensign. We were proud of the companionship and protection of the King's ships. Our ready service was never grudged or stinted to the men behind the grey guns; succour in our distress was their return. Incidents of our co-operation varied, but an unchanging sea-brotherhood was the constant light that shone out in small occurrences and deathly events. Dawn in the Channel, a high south gale and a bitter confused sea. Even with us, in a powerful deep-sea transport, the measure of the weather was menacing; green seas shattered on board and wrecked our fittings, half of the weather boats were gone, others were stove and useless. A bitter gale! Under our lee the destroyer of our escort staggered through the hurtling masses that burst and curled and swept her fore and aft. Her mast and one funnel were gone, the bridge wrecked; a few dangling planks at her davits were all that was left of her service boats. She lurched and faltered pitifully, as though she had loose water below, making through the baulks and canvas that formed a makeshift shield over her smashed skylights. In the grey of the murky dawn there was yet darkness to flash a message: "_In view of weather probably worse as wind has backed, suggest you run for Waterford while chance, leaving us to carry on at full speed._" An answer was ready and immediate: "_Reply. Thanks. I am instructed escort you to port._" The Mediterranean. A bright sea and sky disfigured by a ring of curling black smoke--a death-screen for the last agonies of a torpedoed troopship. Amid her littering entrails she settles swiftly, the stern high upreared, the bows deepening in a wash of wreckage. Boats, charged to inches of freeboard, lie off, the rowers and their freight still and open-mouthed awaiting her final plunge. On rafts and spars, the upturned strakes of a lifeboat, remnants of her manning and company grip safeguard, but turn eyes on the wreck of their parent hull. Into the ring, recking nothing of entangling gear or risk of suction, taking the chances of a standing shot from the lurking submarine, a destroyer thunders up alongside, brings up, and backs at speed on the sinking transport. Already her decks are jammed to a limit, by press of a khaki-clad cargo she was never built to carry. This is final, the last turn of her engagement. The foundering vessel slips quickly and deeper. "Come along, Skipper! You've got 'em all off! You can do no more! _Jump!_" OUR WAR STAFF SOME years before the war we were lying at an East Indian port, employed in our regular trade. The military students of the Quetta Staff College were in the district, engaged in practical exercise of their staff lessons. On a Sunday (our loading being suspended) they boarded us to work out in detail a question of troop transport. It was assumed that our ship was requisitioned in an emergency, and their problem was to estimate the number of men we could carry and to plan arrangement of the troop decks. Their inspection was to be minute; down to the sufficiency of our pots and pans they were required to investigate and figure out the resources of our vessel. The officer students were thirty-four in number; at least we counted thirty-four who came to us for clue to the mysteries of gross and register and dead-weight tonnage. In parties they explored our holds and accommodation, measured in paces for a rough survey, and prepared their plans. Their Commandant (a very famous soldier to-day) permitted us to be present when the officers were assembled and their papers read out and discussed. In general it was estimated that the work of alteration and fitting the ship for troops would occupy from eight to ten working days. Our quota--of all ranks--averaged about eleven hundred men. [Illustration: A BRITISH SUBMARINE DETAILED FOR INSTRUCTION OF MERCHANT OFFICERS] The work was sound and no small ingenuity was advanced in planning adaptations, but the spirit of emergency did not show an evidence in their careful papers. The proposed voyage was distinctly stated to be from Newhaven to Dieppe, and it seemed to us that the elaborate accommodation for a prison, a guard-room, a hospital, were somewhat ambitious for a six-hour sea-passage. In conversation with the Commandant, we were of opinion that, to a degree, their work and pains were rather needless. Carrying passengers (troops and others) was our business; a trade in which we had been occupied for some few years. He agreed. He regarded their particular exercise in the same light as the 'herring-and-a-half' problem of the schoolroom: it was good for the young braves to learn something of their only gangway to a foreign field. "Of course," he said, "if war comes it will be duty for the Navy to supervise our sea-transport." We understood that their duty would be to safeguard our passage, but we had not thought of supervision in outfit. The Commandant was incredulous when we remarked that we had never met a naval transport officer, that we knew of no plans to meet such an emergency as that submitted to his officers. It was evident that his trained soldierly intendance could not contemplate a situation in which the seamen of the country had no foreknowledge of a war service; it was amazing to him that we were not already drilled for duties that might, at any moment, be thrust upon us. Pointing across the dock to where two vessels of the Bremen Hansa Line were working in haste to catch the tide, he affirmed that they would be better prepared: _their_ place in mobilization would be detailed, their duties and services made clear. We knew of no plans for our employment in war service; we had no position allotted to us in measures for emergency. We were sufficiently proud of our seafaring to understand a certain merit in this apparent lack of prevision: we took it as in compliment to the efficiency and resource with which our sea-trade was credited. Was it not on our records that the Isle of Man steamers transported 58,000 people in the daylight hours of an August Bank Holiday. A seventy-mile passage. Trippers. Less amenable to ordered direction than disciplined troops. A day's work, indeed. Unequalled, unbeaten by any record to date in the amazing statistics of the war. There was no need for supervision and direction: we knew our business, we could pick up the tune as we marched. We did. On the outbreak of war we fell into our places in transport of troops and military material with little more ado than in handling our peace-time cargoes. The ship on which the Staff students worked their problems set out on almost the very route they had planned for her, but with no prison or guard-room or hospital, and sixteen hundred troops instead of eleven: the time taken to fit her (including discharge of a cargo) occupied exactly four days. We saw but little of the naval authority. [Illustration: THE D.A.M.S. GUNWHARF AT GLASGOW] Later, in our war work, we made the acquaintance of the naval transport officer. Generally, he was not intimate with the working of merchant ships. His duties were largely those of interpretation. Through him Admiralty passed their orders: it devolved on the mercantile shore staff of the shipping companies to carry these orders into execution. If, in transport services, our marine superintendents and ships' husbands did not share in the honours, it was not for want of merit. They could not complain of lack of work in the early days of the war when the transport officer was serving his apprenticeship to the trade. The absence of a keen knowledge and interest in commercial ship-practice at the transport office made for complex situations; hesitancies and conflicting orders added to the arduous business. Under feverish pressure a ship would be unloaded on to quay space already congested, ballast be contracted for--and delivered; a swarm of carpenters, working day and night, would fit her for carriage of troops. At the eleventh hour some one idly fingering a tide-table would discover that the vessel drew too much water to cross the bar of her intended port of discharge. (The marine superintendent was frequently kept in ignorance of the vessel's intended destination.) Telegraph and telephone are handy--"Requisition cancelled" is easily passed over the wires! _As you were_ is a simple order in official control, but it creates an atmosphere of misdirection almost as deadly as German gas. Only our tremendous resources, the sound ability of our mercantile superintendents, the industry of the contractors and quay staffs, brought order out of chaos and placed the vessels in condition for service at disposal of the Admiralty. Despite all blunders and vacillations our expedition was not unworthy of the emergency. How much better we could have done had there been a considered scheme of competent control must ever remain a conjecture. Four years of war practice have improved on the hasty measures with which we met the first immediate call. Sea-transport of troops and munitions of war has become a highly specialized business for naval directorate and mercantile executant alike. Ripe experience in the thundering years has sweetened our relations. The naval transport officer has learnt his trade. He is better served. He has now an adequate executant staff, recruited largely from the Merchants' Service. With liberal assistance he relies less on telegraph and telephone to advance his work: our atmosphere is no longer polluted by the miasma of indecision, and by the chill airs of the barracks. Of our Naval War Staff, the transport officer was the first on the field, but his duties were only concerned with ships requisitioned for semi-naval service. For long we had no national assistance in our purely commercial seafaring. Our sea-rulers (if they existed) were unconcerned with the judicious employment of mercantile tonnage: some of our finest liners were swinging the tides in harbour, rusting at their cables--serving as prison hulks for interned enemies. Our service on the sea was as lightly held. We made our voyages as in peace-time. We had no means of communication with the naval ships at sea other than the universally understood International Code of Signals. Any measures we took to keep out of the way of enemy war vessels, then abroad, were our own. We had no Intelligence Service to advise us in our choice of sea-routes, and act as distributors of confidential information. We were far too 'jack-easy' in our seafaring: we estimated the enemy's sea-power over-lightly. In time we learned our lesson. Tentative measures were advanced. Admiralty, through the Trade Division, took an interest in our employment. Orders and advices took long to reach us. These were first communicated to the War Risks Associations, who sent them to our owners. We received them as part of our sailing orders, rather late to allow of considered efforts on our part to conform with their tenor. There was no channel of direct communication. When on point of sailing, we projected our own routes, recorded them in a sealed memorandum which we left with our owners. If we fell overdue Admiralty could only learn of our route by application to the holders of the memorandum. A short trial proved the need for a better system. Shipping Intelligence Officers were appointed at the principal seaports. At this date some small echo of our demand for a part in our governance had reached the Admiralty. In selecting officers for these posts an effort was made to give us men with some understanding of mercantile practice; a number of those appointed to our new staff were senior officers of the R.N.R. who were conversant with our way of business. (If they did, on occasion, project a route for us clean through the Atlantic ice-field in May, they were open to accept a criticism and reconsider the voyage.) With them were officers of the Royal Navy who had specialized in navigation, a branch of our trade that does not differ greatly from naval practice. They joined with us in discussion of the common link that held few opportunities for strained association. Certainly we took kindly to our new directors from the first; we worked in an atmosphere of confidence. The earliest officer appointed to the West Coast would blush to know the high esteem in which he is held, a regard that (perhaps by virtue of his tact and courtesy) was in course extended to his colleagues of a later date. The work of the S.I.O. is varied and extensive. His principal duty is to plan and set out our oversea route, having regard to his accurate information of enemy activities. All Admiralty instructions as to our sea-conduct pass through his hands. He issues our confidential papers and is, in general, the channel of our communication with the Naval Service. He may be likened to our signal and interlocking expert. On receipt of certain advices he orders the arm of the semaphore to be thrown up against us. The port is closed to the outward-bound. His offices are quickly crowded by masters seeking information for their sailings: with post and telephone barred to us in this connection, we must make an appearance in person to receive our orders. A tide or two may come and go while we wait for passage. We have opportunity, in the waiting-room, to meet and become intimate with our fellow-seafarers. It is good for the captain of a liner to learn how the captain of a North Wales schooner makes his bread, the difficulties of getting decent yeast at the salt-ports; how the schooner's boy won't learn ("indeed to goodness") the proper way his captain shows him to mix the dough! On telegraphic advice the arm of the semaphore rattles down. The port is open to traffic again. The waiting-room is emptied and we are off to the sea, perhaps fortified by the S.I.O.'s confidence that the cause of the stoppage has been violently removed from the sea-lines. Under the pressure of ruthless submarine warfare we were armed for defence. Gunnery experts were added to our war complement. A division for organization of our ordnance was formed, the Defensively Armed Merchant Ships Department of the Admiralty. We do not care for long titles; we know this division as the "Dam Ships." Most of the officers appointed to this Service are R.N.R. They are perhaps the most familiar of the war staff detailed to assist us. Their duties bring them frequently on board our ships, where (on our own ground) relations grow quickly most intimate and cordial. The many and varied patterns of guns supplied for our defence made a considerable shore establishment necessary, not alone for the guns and mountings, but for ammunition of as many marks as a Geelong wool-bale. In the first stages of our war-harnessing, the supply of guns was limited to what could be spared from battlefield and naval armament. The range of patterns varied from pipe-stems to what was at one time major armament for cruisers; we had odd weapons--_soixante-quinze_ and Japanese pieces; even captured German field-guns were adapted to our needs in the efforts of the D.A.M.S. to arm us. Standardization in mounting and equipment was for long impossible. Our outcry for guns was cleverly met by the department. We could not wait for weapons to be forged: by working 'double tides' they ensured a twenty-four-hour day of service for the guns in issue, by a system that our ordnance should not remain idle during our stay in port. Incoming ships were boarded in the river, their guns and ammunition dismounted and removed to serve the needs of a vessel bound out on the same tide. The problem of fitting a 12-pounder on a 4.7 emplacement taxed the department's ingenuity and resource, but few ships were held in port for failure of their prompt action. With the near approach to standardization in equipment (a state that came with increased production of merchant-ship arms) the division was able to reorganize on more settled lines. New types of armament were issued to them and there was less adaptation for emplacements to be considered. With every ship fitted, the pressure on their resource was eased, the new ships being constructed to carry guns as a regular part of their equipment. While their activities are now less confused by the new methods, there is no reduction in their employment. Other defensive apparatus has been placed in their hands for issue and control, and their principal port establishments have grown from small temporary offices to large well-manned depots. To the surface guns have been added howitzers, bomb-throwers, and depth-charges for under-water action: smoke-screen fittings and chemicals form a part of their stock in trade: they issue mine-sinking rifles, and even control the supply of our zigzag clocks. The range of their work is constantly being extended. Their duties include inspection to ensure that darkening ship regulations may not fail for want of preparation in port. Makeshift screening at sea is dangerous. Their establishments are at the principal seaports, with branch connections and transport facilities for reaching the smaller harbours. The gun-wharves may not present as splendid a spectacle as the huge store-sheds of our naval bases, but they have at least the busy air of being well occupied, a brisk appearance of having few 'slow-dealing lines' on the shelves. Their permanent staff of armourers and constructional experts are able to undertake all but very major repairs to the ordnance that comes under their charge. By express delivery--heavy motor haulage--they can equip a ship on instant requisition with all that is scheduled for her armament: down to the waste-box and the gun-layer's sea-boots, they can put a complete defensive outfit on the road almost before the clamour of a requesting telephone is stilled. Another of our staff is the officer in charge of our 'Otter' installation, an ingenious contrivance to protect us against the menace of moored mines. For deadly spheres floating on the surface we have a certain measure of defence in exercise of a keen look-out, but our eyes avail us not at all in detecting mines under water moored at the level of our draught. Our 'Otters' may be likened to blind sea-dolphins, trained to protect our flanks, to run silently aside, fend the explosive charges from our course, bite the moorings asunder, and throw the bobbing spheres to the surface. The 'Otter' expert is invariably an enthusiast. He claims for his pets every virtue. They run true, they bite surely: they can speak, indeed, in the complaint of their guide-wires when they are not sympathetically governed. While it is true that we curse the awkward 'gadgets' in their multitude of tricks, denounce the insistence with which they dive for a snug and immovable berth under our bilge keels--those of us who have come through a hidden minefield share the expert's affection for the shiny fish-like monsters. We cannot see their operation: we have no knowledge of our danger till it is past and over, a dark shape with ugly outpointing horns, turning and spinning in the seawash of our wake. [Illustration: INSTRUCTIONAL ANTI-SUBMARINE COURSE FOR MERCHANT OFFICERS AT GLASGOW] Adoption of the convoy system has brought a host to our gangways. Our war staff was more than doubled in the few weeks that followed the sinister April of 1917. If, at an earlier date, we had reasonable ground for complaint that our expert knowledge of our business was studiously ignored by the Admiralty, apparently they did not rate our ability so lightly when this old form of ship protection was revived. The additions to our staff included a large proportion of our own officers, withdrawn from posts where their knowledge of merchant-ship practice was not of great value. In convoy, measures were called for that our ordinary routine had not contemplated. The shore division of our new staff aid us in adapting our commercial sea-gear to the more instant demands of war service. They 'clear our hawse' from turns and twists in the chain of our landward connections. Repairs and adjustments, crew troubles, stores--that on a strict ruling may be deemed private matters--became public and important when considered as vital to the sailing of a convoy. In overseeing the ships at the starting-line, indexing and listing the varying classes and powers of the vessels, the convoy section have no light task. To the longshore division, who compose and arrange the integrals of our convoys, we have added a sea-staff of commodores, R.N. and R.N.R., who go to sea with us and control the manoeuvres and operations of our ships in station. For this, not only a knowledge of squadron movements is required: the ruling of a convoy of merchantmen is complicated as much by the range of character of individual masters as by the diverse capabilities of the ships. It was not until the spring of 1917 that Admiralty instituted a scheme of instruction in anti-submarine measures for officers of the Merchants' Service. We were finding the defensive tune difficult to pick up as we marched. The German submarine had grown to be a more complete and deadly warship. Sinkings had reached an alarming height: a spirit almost of fatalism was permeating the sea-actions of some of our Service. Our guns were of little avail against under-water attack. Notwithstanding the tricks of our zigzag, the torpedoes struck home on our hulls. If our luck was 'in,' we came through: if we had bad fortune, well, our luck was 'out'! A considerable school--the bold 'make-a-dash-for-it-and-chance-the-ducks' section of our fellows--did not wholly conform to naval instructions. In many cases zigzag was but cursorily maintained; in darkening ship, measures were makeshift and inadequate. Schools for our instruction were set up at various centres, in convenient seaport districts. At the first, attendance was voluntary, but it was quickly evident to the Admiralty that certain classes of owners would give few facilities to their officers to attend, when they might be more profitably employed in keeping gangway or in supervising cargo stowage. (The fatalistic spirit was not confined to the seagoers among us.) Attendance at the classes of instruction was made compulsory; it became part of our qualification for office that we should have completed the course. Although our new schooling occupies but five days, it is intensive in its scope and application. The cold print of our official instructions has its limitations, and Admiralty circulars are not perhaps famous for lucidity. More can be done by a skilled interpreter with a blackboard in a few minutes than could be gathered in half an hour's reading. At first assembly there is perhaps an atmosphere of boredom. Routine details and a programme of operations are hardly welcome to masters accustomed to command. In a way, we have condescended to come among our juniors, to listen with the mates and second mates to what may be said: we assume, perhaps, a detached air of constraint. It is no small tribute to the lecturer that this feeling rarely persists beyond the opening periods. Only the most perversely immovable can resist the interest of a practical demonstration. The classes are under charge of an officer, R.N., who has had deep-sea experience of enemy submarine activities. Often he is of the 'Q-ship' branch, and can enliven his lectures with incidents that show us a side of the sea-contest with which not many are familiar. If we are informed of the deadly advantage of the submarine, we are equally enlightened as to its limitations. In a few minutes, by virtue of a plot on the blackboard, the vantage of a proper zigzag is made clear and convincing. Points of view--in a literal sense--are expounded, and not a few of us recall our placing of look-outs and register a better plan. Following the officer in charge, a lieutenant of the Submarine Service dissects his vessel on the blackboard, carefully detailing the action in states of weather and circumstance. The under-water manoeuvres of an attack are plotted out and explained in a practical way that no handbook could rival. The personal magnetism of the expert rivets our attention; the routine of under-seafaring gives us a good inkling of the manner of man we have to meet and fight at sea; we are given an insight to the mind-working of our unseen opponent--the brain below the periscope is probed and examined for our education. Nothing could be better illustrative of the wide character of our seafaring than the range of our muster in the lecture-hall. Every type of our trade appears in the class that assembles weekly to attend the instructional course. We have no grades of seniority or precedence. We are sea-republicans when we come to sit together in class. Hardy coasting masters, commanders of Royal Mail Packets, collier mates, freighter captains, cross-Channel skippers, we are at ease together in a common cause; on one bench in the classroom may be seafarers returned from foreign ports as widely distant as Shanghai and Valparaiso. For instruction in gunnery and the use of special apparatus we come under tuition of a type of seaman whom we had not met before. If the backbone of the Army is the non-commissioned man, the petty officer of the Royal Navy is no less the marrow of his Service. Unfortunately, we have no one like him in the Merchants' Service. As Scots is the language of marine engines, the South of England accent may be that of the guns. That liquid ü! "Metal adapters, genelmen, lük. Metal adapters is made o' alüminium bronze. They are bored hoüt t' take a tübe, an' threaded on th' hoütside t' screw into th' base o' th' cartridge case--like this 'ere. Genelmen, lük. . . ." His intelligent demonstration of the gear and working of the types of our armament possesses a peculiar quality, as though he is trying hard to reduce his exposition to our level. (As a matter of plain fact, he is.) The instructional course closes on a note of confidence. We learn that even 'inexorable circumstance' has an opening to skilled evasion. We go afloat for a day and put into practice some measure of our schooling. At fire-control, with the guns, we exercise in an atmosphere of din and burnt cardboard, aiming at a hit with the fifth shot in sequence of our bracket. (An earlier bull's-eye would be bad application of our lectures.) A smoke-screen is set up for our benefit, and we turn and twist in the artificially produced fumes and vapours in a practical demonstration of defence. A sea-going submarine is in attendance and is open to our inspection. Her officers augment the class instruction by actual showing. Every point in the maze of an under-water attack is emphasized by them in an effort to impress us with the virtue of the counter-measures advised. It must be hard indeed for the submarine enthusiast (and they are all enthusiasts) to lay bare the 'weaknesses' of his loved machine. We feel for them almost as if we heard a man, under pressure, admit that his last ship was unseaworthy. [Illustration: THE LOSS OF A LINER] III THE LONGSHORE VIEW EARLY in November 1914, on return from the sea, I was invited to join His Majesty's Forces. ". . . An' I can tell you this, mister," said the sergeant . . . "it ain't everybody as I asks t' join our corps. . . . Adjutant, 'e ses t' me this mornin', 'Looka here, Bates,' 'e ses, 'don't you go for to bring none o' them scallywags 'ere! We don't want 'em! We won't 'ave 'em at any price,' 'e ses! . . . 'Wot we wants is proper men--men with chests,' 'e ses!" I felt somewhat commended; I trimmed more upright in carriage; he was certainly a clever recruiter. I told him I had rather important work to do. He said, with emphasis, that it must be more than important to keep a MAN out of the Army--these days! In sound of shrieking newsboys--"_Ant--werp fallen! British falling back!_"--I agreed. I asked him what he did with the men recruited. He was somewhat surprised at my question, but told me that, when trained, they were sent across to the Front--he was hoping to _return_ himself in the next draft. He thought all this talk was needless, and grew impatient. I mentioned that the men couldn't very well swim over there. He glared scornfully. "Swim? . . . Swim! . . . 'Ere! Wot th' hell ye gettin' at? You gotta hellova lot t' say about it, anyway!" I explained that my business was that of putting the troops and the guns and the gear o' war across; that the drafts couldn't get very far on the way without our assistance. He glanced at my soft felt hat, at my rainproof coat, my umbrella, my handbag--said, "_Huh_" and went off in search of a more promising recruit. His broad back, as he strode off swinging his cane, expressed an entire disapproval of my appearance and my alleged business. Good honest sergeant! His course was a clear and straight one. He would hold no more truck with one who wouldn't take up a man's job. His "Huh" and the swing of his arm said plainly to me, "Takin' th' boys across, eh? A ---- fine excuse, . . . a rare ---- trick! Where's yer uniform? Why ain't ye in uniform, eh? You can't do me with that story, mister! I'm an old Service man, I am. I been out t' India. I been on a troopship. I seen all them gold-lace blokes a-pokin' their noses about an' growsin' at th' way th' decks wos kep! _Huh!_ A damn slacker, mister! That's wot I think o' you!" * * * * * The sergeant's attitude was not unreasonable. Where was our uniform? Where was any evidence of our calling by which one could recognize a seaman on shore? A sea-gait, perhaps! But the deep-sea roll has gone out since bilge-keels came to steady our vessels! Tattoo marks? These cunning personal adornments are now reserved to the Royal Artillery and officers of the Indian Army! Tarry hands? Tar is as scarce on a modern steamer as strawberries in December! Sea-togs? If there be a preference, we have a fondness for blue serge, but blue serges have quite a vogue among bankers and merchants and other men of substance! Away from our ships and the dockside waterfront, we are not readily recognizable; we join the masses of other workers, we become members of the general public. As such, we may lay claim to a common liberty, and look at our seafaring selves from an average point of longshore view. . . . The sea? Oh, we know a lot about it! It is in us. We pride ourselves, an island race, we have the sea in our blood, we are born to it. Circumstances may have brought us to counting-house and ledger, but our heart is with the sea. We use, unwittingly, many nautical terms in our everyday life. We had been to sea at times, on a business voyage or for health or pleasure. We knew the captain and the mates and the engineers. The chief steward was a friend, the bos'n or quartermaster had shown us the trick of a sheepshank or a reef-knot or a short splice. Their ways of it! Port and starboard for left and right, knots for miles, eight bells, the watches, and all that! We returned from our sea-trip, parted with our good friends, feeling hearty and refreshed. We hummed, perhaps, a scrap of a sea-song at the ledgers. We regretted that our sea-day had come so quickly to an end. Anyway, we felt that we had got to know the sea-people intimately. But that was on their ground, on the sea and the ship, where they fitted to the scheme of things and were as readily understood and appreciated as the little round port-holes, the narrow bunks, the cunning tip-up washstands, the rails for hand-grip in a storm. Their atmosphere, their stories, their habits, were all part of our sea-piece. Taken from their heaving decks and the round of a blue horizon, they seemed to go out of our reckoning. On shore? Of course they must at times come on shore, but somehow one doesn't know much about them there. There are our neighbours. . . . Yes! Gudgeon's eldest boy, he is at sea--a mate or a purser. He has given over wearing his brass buttons and a badge cap now: we see him at long intervals, when he comes home to prepare for examinations. A hefty sort of lad--shouldn't think he would do much in the way of study; a bit wild perhaps. Then Mrs. Smith's husband. Isn't he at sea, a captain or a chief engineer, or something? He comes among us occasionally; travels to town, now and then, in our carriage. A hearty man--uses rather strong language, though! Has not a great deal to say of things--no interest in politics, in the market, in the games. Never made very much of him. Don't see him at the clubs. Seems to spend all his time at home. At home! Oh yes; wasn't it only the other day his small daughter told ours her daddy was _going_ home again on Saturday! In war, we are learning. There are no more games; contentious politics are not for these days; the markets and business are difficult and wayward. We are come to see our dependence on the successful voyages of Mrs. Smith's husband. His coming among us, from time to time, is proof that our links with the world overseas are yet unbroken, that there may still be business to transact when we turn up at the office. Strangely, in the new clarity of a war vision, we see his broad back in our harvest-fields, as we had never noticed it before. He is almost one of our staff. He handles our goods, our letters, our gold, our securities, our daily bread. His business is now so near to us that---- But no! It cannot properly be done. We recall that there _is_ one way for our ready recognition when we come on shore these days. We cannot appropriate a longshore point of view, we cannot conceal our seafaring and merge into the crowd. There _is_ a mark--our tired eyes, as we come off the sea! True, there are now, sadly, many tired eyes on the beach, but few carry the distant focus, the peculiar intentness brought about by absence of perspective at sea. We cannot adopt a public outlook owing to this obliquity in our vision, we are barred by the persistence of that vexed perspective in our views on shore. 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. He is the sailor; Mercantile Jack has lost his tradition in attire and individuality, he has vanished from the herd with his high-heeled shoes, coloured silk neckerchief, and sweet-tobacco hat. In the round of shore communications there is exercise for assessing a measure of the other man's work: a large proportion of success hinges on easy fellowship, on an understanding and acquaintance not only with the technics of another's trade, but with his habits and his pursuits. All trades, all businesses, all professions have relations, near or distant, with the sea, but to them our grades and descriptions are dubious and uncertain. For this we are to blame. We are bad advertisers. We are content to leave our fraternization with the beach to the far distant day when we shall retire from the sea-service, 'swallow the anchor,' and settle down to longshore life. We cannot join and rejoin the guilderies on shore in the intervals of our voyaging. We preserve a grudging silence on our seafaring, perhaps tint what pictures we do present in other lights than verity. The necessary aloofness of our calling makes for a seclusion in our affairs: we make few efforts to remedy an estrangement; in a way, we adopt the disciplinary scourge of the flagellants, we glory in our isolation. If we share few of the institutions that exist for fellowship ashore, we have made no bid for admittance: if the tide of intercourse leaves us stranded, we have put out no steering oar on the drift of the flood. We are somewhat diffident. Perhaps we are influenced by a certain reputation that is still attached to us. Are we the prodigals not yet in the mood to turn unto our fathers? Stout old Doctor Johnson enlarged on the sea-life--of his day--with a determination and no small measure of accuracy. "Sir," he said, "a ship is worse than a gaol. There is in a gaol better air, better company, better conveniency of every kind; and a ship has the additional disadvantage of being in danger. When men come to like a sea-life they are not fit to live on land. . . . Men go to the sea before they know the unhappiness of that way of life; and when they have come to know it, they cannot escape from it, because it is then too late to choose another profession." At least he admitted the possibility of some of us coming to _like_ a sea-life, though his postulate conveyed no high opinion of our intelligence in such a preference. We have travelled far since the worthy Doctor's day. Not all his dicta may stand. There is still, perhaps, greater danger in a ship than in gaol, but Johnson himself admitted that "the profession of sailors has the dignity of danger"! For the rest, our air has become so good that invalids are ordered to sea; our conveniences are notably improved, our ships the last word in strength and comfort. Our company? Our company fits to the heave of our sea. If we have middling men for the trough, we have bold gallants for the crest. We draw a wide range to our service. The sea can offer a good career to a prizeman: we can still do moderately well with the wayward boy, the parents' 'heart-break,' the lad with whom nothing can be done on shore. Steam has certainly given a new gentility to our seafaring, but it cannot wholly smooth out the uneven sea-road. If we lose an amount of polish, of distinguished association, of education in our recruitment, we may gain just that essence that fits a man for our calling. Our company is, at any rate, stout and resolute, and, without that, we had long since been under German bondage. [Illustration: THE MERSEY FROM THE LIVER BUILDINGS, LIVERPOOL] The war has brought a new prominence to our sea-trade. The public has become interested not alone in our sea-ventures, but in our landward doings. The astonishing fact of our civilian combatance has drawn a recognition that no years of peace could have uncovered. Not least of the revelations that the world conflict has imposed is the vital importance of the ships. Our naval fleets were ever talked of, read of, gloried in, as the spring of our national power, but not many saw the core of our sea-strength in the stained hulls of the merchants' ships. They were accepted without enthusiasm as an existing trade channel; they were there on a round of business and trade, not dissimilar to other transport services--the railways, road-carriage, the inland canals, the moving-van, the messengers. They were ready to hand for service; so near that their vital proportions were not readily apparent. Perhaps the greatest compliment the public has paid to the Merchants' Service lay in this abstract view. One saw an appreciation, perhaps unspoken, in the consternation that greeted the first irregularity in delivery of the oversea mails. Then, indeed, the importance of the ships was brought sharply home. It was incredible: it was unheard of. Mercantile practice and correspondence had outgrown all duplications and weatherly precautions; the service was so sure and uninterrupted that no need existed for a second string to the bow. Bills of exchange, indents, invoices, the mail-letter, had long been confided to sea-carriage on one bottom. Pages could be written of the tangled skeins, the complex situations, the confusion and congestion that were all brought about by extra mileage of an ocean voyage. Fortunes, not alone in hulls and cargo, lie with our wreckage on the floor of the channels. The sea-front suddenly assumed an importance in the general view, as the drain on our tonnage left vacant shelves in the bakehouse. Commodities that, so common and plentiful, had been lightly valued, were out of stock--the ships had not come in! Long queues formed at the shop doors, seeking and questioning--their topic, the fortunes of the ships! The table was rearranged in keeping with a depleted larder. Anxious eyes turned first in the morning to the list of our sea-casualties; the ships, what of the ships? The valiant deeds of our armies, the tide and toll of battles, could wait a second glance. Not all the gallantry of our arms could bring victory if our sea-communications were imperilled or restrained; on the due arrival of the ships centred the pivot of our operations. Joined to the fortune of the ships, interest was drawn to the seamen. A new concern arose. Who were the mariners who had to face these deadly perils to keep our sea-lines unbroken? Were they trained to arms? How could they stand to the menace that had so shocked our naval forces? Daily the toll rose. Savagery, undreamt of, succeeded mere shipwreck: murder, assassination, mutilation became commonplace on the sea. Who were the mercantile seamen; of what stock, what generation? To a degree we were embarrassed at such new attention. The mystery of sea-life, we felt, had unbalanced the public view. Our stock, our generation, was the same as that of the tailors and the candlestick-makers who were standing the enemy on his head on the Flanders fields; we differed not greatly from the haberdasher and the baby-linen man who drove the Prussian Guard, the proudest soldier in Europe, from the reeking shambles of Contalmaison. Indeed, we had advantage in our education for a fight. Our training, if not military, was at least directed to mass operations in contest with power of the elements: torpedo and mine were but additions to the perils of our regular trade. If the clerk and the grocer could rise from ordered peaceful ways and set the world ringing with his gallantry and heroism, we were poltroons indeed to flinch and falter at the familiar conduct of our seafaring. We felt that our share in warfare was as nothing to the blaze of fury on the battle-fronts, our sea-life was comparative comfort in contrast to the grisly horrors of the trenches. With universal service, opportunity for acquaintance with our life and our work was extended beyond the numbers of chance passengers. The exodus oversea of the nation's manhood brought the landsman and the seaman together as no casual meeting on the streets could have done. Millions of our country-men, who had never dreamed of outlook on blue water bounded by line of an unbroken horizon, have found themselves brought into close contact with us, living our life, assisting in many of our duties, facing the same dangers. In such a firm fellowship and communion of interest there cannot but be a bond between us that shall survive the passage of high-water mark. [Illustration: THE MASTER OF THE GULL LIGHTSHIP WRITING THE LOG] IV CONNECTION WITH THE STATE TRINITY HOUSE, OUR ALMA MATER OF all trades, seafaring ever required a special governance, a unique Code of Laws, suited to the seaman's isolation from tribunal and land court, to the circumstance of his constant voyaging. On sea, the severance from ordered government, from reward as from penalty, was irremediable and complete. No common law or enactment could be enforced on the wandering sea-tribesmen who owned no settled domicile, who responded only to the weight of a stronger arm than their own, who had an impenetrable cloak to their doings in the mystery of distant seas. The spirit and high heart that had called them to the dangers and vicissitudes of a sea-life would not brook tamely the dominance and injunction of a power whose authority was, at sea, invisible--and even under the land, could carry but little distance beyond high-water mark. To the bold self-enterprise of the early sea-venturers, the unconfined ocean offered a free field for a standard of strength, for a law of might alone. Kings and Princes might rule the boundaries of the land, but the sea was for those who could maintain a holding on the troubled waters. Were the 'Rectores' not Kings on their own heaving decks, their province the round of the horizon, their subjects the vulgar 'shippe-men,' their slaves the unfortunate weaker seafarers, whom chance or the fickle winds had brought within reach of their sea-arms? The sea-rovers were difficult to bridle or restrain. _Spurlos versenkt_ might well have been their motto--as that of later pirates. No trace! The sea would tell no tales. They were alone on the breadth of the ocean, no ordered protection was within hail, the land lay distant under rim of the sea-line. Blue water would wash over the face of robbery and crime: the hazards of the sea could well account for a missing ship! Reverse the setting and the same uncharity could similarly be masked. In turn, the humanity the seamen contemned was denied to them. Driven on shore, wrecked or foundered on coast or shoal, the laws they scorned were powerless to shield or salve the wreckage of their vessels, to save their weary sea-scarred bodies. 'No trace' was equally a motto for the dwellers on the coast: blue water would wash as freely over their bloody evidence, the miserable castaways could be as readily returned to the pitiless sea: an equal hazard of the deep could as surely account for missing men! Only special measures could control a situation of such a desperate nature, no ordinary governance could effect a settlement; no one but a powerful and kingly seafarer could frame an adjustment and post wardens to enforce a law for the sea. When Richard Coeur de Lion established our first Maritime Code, he had his own rude sea-experience to guide him. On perilous voyaging to the Holy Land, he must have given more than passing thought to the trials and dangers of his rough mariners. Sharing their sea-life and its hardships, he noted the ship-measures and rude sea-justice with a discerning and humane appreciation. In all the records of our law-making there are few such intimate revelations of a minute understanding as his Rôles d'Oléron. The practice of to-day reflects no small measure of his wisdom; in their basic principles, his charges still tincture the complex fabric of our modern Sea Codes. Bottomry--the pledging of ship and tackle to procure funds for provision or repair; salvage--a just and reasonable apportionment; jettison--the sharing of another's loss for a common good; damage to ship or cargo--the account of liability: many of his ordinances stand unaltered in substance, if varied and amplified in detail. The spirit of these mediæval Shipping Acts was devoted as well to restrain the lawless doings of the seamen as to check the inhuman plunderings of the coast dwellers. The rights and duties of master and man were clearly defined: in the schedule of penalties, the master's forfeit was enhanced, as his was assumed to be the better intelligence. For barratry and major sea-crimes, the penalty was death and dismemberment. All pilots who wrecked their charges for benefit of the lords of the sea-coast were to be hung on a gibbet, and so exhibited to all men, near the spot where the vessels they had misdirected were come on shore. The lord of the foreshore who connived at their acts was to suffer a dire fate. He was to be burned on a stake at his own hearthstone, the walls of his mansion to be razed, and the standing turned to a market-place for barter of swine! Drastic punishment! Doubtless kingly Richard drew abhorrence for the wrecker from his own bitter experience on the inhospitable rocky coast of Istria! Little detail has come down to us of the means adopted to enforce these just acts. Of the difficulties of their enforcement we may judge a little from the character of the seamen as presented by contemporary chronicles. . . . "_Full many a draught of wyn had he drawe From Burdeux-ward, whil that the chapman sleep. Of nyce conscience took he no keep. If that he foughte, and hadde the heigher hand, By water he sent hem hoom to every land._" . . . Thus Chaucer; but Chaucer was a Collector of Customs, and would possibly assess the stolen draught of Bordeaux as a greater crime than throwing prisoners overboard! From evidence of the date, Richard's shipping laws seem to have been but lightly regarded by the lords of the foreshore. In the reign of King John, wrecking had become a practice so common that prescriptive rights to the litter of the beaches was included in manorial charters, despite the Rôle that . . . "the pieces of the ship still to belong to the original owners, notwithstanding any custom to the contrary . . . and any participators of the said wrecks, whether they be bishops, prelates, or clerks, shall be deposed and deprived of their benefices, and if lay people they are to incur the penalties previously recited." It was surely by more than mere chance the churchmen were thus specially indicted! Perhaps it was by a temporal as well as a spiritual measure that Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury, strove to remove a reproach to the Church. He founded a Guild of sea-samaritans, a Corporation "of godly disposed men, who, for the actual suppression of evil disposed persons bringing ships to destruction by the shewing forth of false beacons, do bind themselves together in the Love of our Lord Christ, in the name of the Masters and Fellows of Trinity Guild to succour from the dangers of the sea all who are beset upon the coasts of England, to feed them when ahungered and athirst, to bind up their wounds, and to build and light proper beacons for the guidance of mariners." An earnest and compassionate Charter: a merciful and honourable Commission. In this wise was formed our Alma Mater, the ancient guild of shipmen and mariners of England. Subsequent charters advanced their titles as they enlarged their duties and charges. In 1514, Henry VIII confirmed their foundation under style of . . . "Master, Wardens, and Accistants of the Guild or Fraternity of the Most Glorious and Undivided Trinity, and of St. Clement, in the Parish of Deptford Strond, in the County of Kent." Some years later, the 'accistants' were subdivided as Elder and Younger Brethren, the Foundation being familiarly referred to as the Corporation of Trinity House. In early days, their efforts were directed in charity to stricken seafarers, in humane dispensation, in erection and maintenance of sea-marks, in training and provision of competent sea and coast pilots--a line of endeavour directed by the Godly Primate, in his Commission. Beacons were built on dangerous points of the coast, keepers appointed to serve them, watchers detailed to observe the vessels as they passed and restrain the activities of the wrecker. The magnitude of the task, the difficulties of their office, the powerful counter-influences arrayed against their beneficent rôle, may be judged by an incident that occurred as late as little over a hundred and twenty years ago. . . . "When Ramsgate Harbour, as a port of refuge from storm and stress, was intended, and the business was before Parliament, a petition from the Lord of the Manor tended to accelerate matters. He represented to the House, while the Bill was depending, that, _as the wrecks on the coast belonged to him and formed a considerable part of his property, he prayed that the Bill would not pass_!" Established in charity for the guardianship of the coasts, the Brethren of Trinity passed to a supervision of the ships and the seamen. Although a closely guarded Corporation, qualifications for entry were simply those of sea-knowledge. The business of shipping, if more hazardous and difficult on the sea, was less complicated in its landward connections than is its modern conduct. The merchants were well content to be guided in their affairs by their sea-partners, the men who actually commanded and sailed the ships. The voyages, ship construction, refitment and victualling were matters that could only be advised by the skilled seamen. Jealous for professional advancement, the Brethren of Trinity held their ranks open only to skilled master seamen and to kindred sea-tradesmen--the shipwrights and rope-makers. While attracting leaders and statesmen to the higher and more ornamental offices, control was largely vested in the Elder and Younger Brethren--technical advisers, competent to understand sea-matters. In no small measure, the rise and supremacy of our shipping is due to their wise direction and control. They were the sole machinery of the State for control of the ships and the seaman. Survey and inspection of sea-stores, planning and supervision of ship construction, registry and measurement of vessels, had their beginning in the orderly efforts of the Brethren. Examination of the competence of masters was part of their duties--as was their arbitration in crew disputes. They licensed and supplied seafarers of all classes to the 'King's Ships,' tested their ordnance and examined the ammunition. Their reading of the ancient charter of their foundation was wide and liberal in its scope--"_to build, and light proper beacons for the guidance of mariners_" was their understanding. In construction and equipment and maintenance of sea-marks, in licence and efficient service of their coastal pilots, they carried out to the letter the text of their covenant; in spirit, they understood a guidance that was less material if equally important. Their beacons were not alone standing structures of stone and lime, but world-marks in precept and ordinance, in study and research. They held bright cressets aloft to illuminate the difficult seaways in the paths of navigation and science of the seafarer. They placed facilities for the study of seamanship before the mariners and sought to advance the science of navigation in line with the efforts of our sea-competitors. The charts and maps of the day--most of them being rude Dutch draft sheets--were improved and corrected, and new surveys of the coastal waters were undertaken at charge and patronage of the Brethren. Captain Greenville Collins, Hydrographer to Charles II, bears witness to their high ideals in presenting to the Corporation the fruits of his seven years' labour in survey and charting of the coast. The preface to his work is made noteworthy by his reference to the practice of the day--the haphazard alterations on the charts that brought many a fine ship to grief. ". . . I then, as in Duty bound (being a Younger Brother) did acquaint you with it, and most humbly laid the Proposals before you; whereupon you were pleased not only to approve of them, but did most bountifully advance towards the charge of the work. . . . I could heartily wish that it might be so ordered by your Corporation, that all Masters of Ships, both using Foreign and Home Voyages, might be encouraged to bring you in their Journals, and a Person appointed to inspect them; which would be a great Improvement of Navigation, by imparting their Observations and Discoveries of the true Form and Prospect of the Sea Coast . . . and other dangerous Places. . . . And that those Persons who make and sell Sea Charts and Maps, were not allowed to alter them upon the single Report of Mariners, but with your approbation; by which means our Sea Charts would be more correct and the common Scandal of their Badness removed." In all her enactments and activities, our Alma Mater ever preserved a worthy pride in her sons. Enthusiasm for a gallant profession, patronage for advancement in sea-skill and learning, a keen and studied interest in whatever tended to elevate and ennoble the calling of the sea, were her inspiring sentiment. Even in wise reproof and cautionary advice, her words were tempered by a brave note of pride--as though, under so many difficulties and serious dangers, she gloried in our work being worthily undertaken. In charge to the seaman, Captain Collins continues his kindly preface: "It sometimes happens, and that too frequently, that when Ships which have made long and dangerous Voyages, and are come Home richly laden, have been shipwrecked on their native Coast, whereby both Merchants, Owners, and Mariners have been impoverished. All our neighbours will acknowledge, that no Nation abounds more with skilful and experienced Seamen than our own; none meeting a Danger with more Courage and Bravery . . . so a Master of a ship has a very great Charge, and ought to be a sober Man, as well as a skilful Mariner: All Helps of Art, Care, and Circumspection are to be used by him, that the Lives of Mariners (the most useful of their Majesties' Subjects at this juncture) and the Fortunes of honest Merchants under his Care may be preserved." [Illustration: AT GRAVESEND: PILOTS AWAITING AN INWARD-BOUND CONVOY] For over three hundred years, our Alma Mater flourished as the spring of our seafaring--a noble and venerable Corporation, concerned solely and alone with the sea and the ships and the seamen. The Brethren saw only one aim for their endeavours--the supremacy of the sea-trade, the business by which the nation stood or fell. Nor was theirs an inactive part in all the long sea-wars and crises that reacted on our commerce. Before a navy existed, the stout old master-seamen of Deptford Strond were charged with the sea-defences of the capital. The new naval forces came under their control at a later date, and we have the record of an efficiency in administration that showed prevision and thought well in advance of that of their landward contemporaries. Piracy, privateering, the restraints of rulers and princes, were dealt with in their day. At critical turns in the courses of our naval conduct, it was to the steersmen of Trinity that the Ministers of the State relied for prompt and seamanlike action. The 'sea to the seamen' was the rule. Adapting their resources to the needs of the day, the Brethren were held fast by no conventional restraint. They assisted peaceful developments in trade in the quieter years, but could as readily mobilize for war service under threat of invasion, or turn their skilled activities to removal of the sea-marks to prevent the sailing of a mutinous fleet. In the long and stormy history of Trinity House there were many precedents to guide the action of the Brethren on the outbreak of war. As guardians of the sea-channels and the approaches to our coasts, they manned these misty sea-trenches on the outbreak of war in 1914. Weaponless, by exercise of a skill in pilotage and a resolution worthy of great traditions, the Trinity men have held that menaced line intact. That little has been said about their great work is perhaps a tradition of their service. We are parted now. The Merchants' Service is no longer a studied and valued interest of the ancient corporation. In an assured position as arbiters between the State and the shipping industry, the Trinity Brethren could combine a just regard for the merchants' interest with a generous and understanding appreciation of the seamen's trials and difficulties. If for no other reason than the record of past endeavours, they should still control the personnel of the Merchants' Service, in regulating the scheme of our education, the scope of our qualification for office, the grades of our service, the essence of our sea-conduct. But in the fickle doldrums of the period when steam superseded sail as our motive power, we drifted apart. Shipping interests have become complicated with land ventures, as widely different from them as the marine engine is from our former sail plan. In 1850 the Merchants' Service was placed under control of the Board of Trade; we were handed over to a Board that is no Board--a department of the State with little, if any, sea-sentiment, and that is sternly resolved to repress all our efforts to regain a voice in the control of our own affairs. THE BOARD OF TRADE IF we may claim the ancient Corporation of Trinity House as the Alma Mater of the Merchants' Service, we may liken our comparatively new directorate, the Board of Trade, to our Alma step-Mater--an austere, bureaucratic dame, hard-working and earnest, perhaps, but lacking the kindly spirit of a sea-tradition. She is utterly out of touch and sympathy with a sea-sense--her arms, overstrained perhaps by the tremendous burden of charge upon charge that comes to her for settlement, are never open to the seamen. Sullenly, we resent her dictation as that of a usurper--a lay impropriator of our professional heritage. Under her coldly formal direction, we may attend our affairs in diligence and prudence, but for us there is no motherly licence; she has no pride in our doings (if one counts not the vicious insistence of her statistics)--we are only the stepchildren of her adoption, odd men of the huge and hybrid family over whom she has been set to cast a suspicious, if guardian, eye. While Trinity House was concerned alone with the conduct of shipping and sea-affairs, our new controllers of the Board of Trade have interests in charge as widely apart as the feeding of draught-horses and the examination of a bankrupt cheesemonger. We are but a Department. The sea-service of the nation, the key industry of our island commerce, is governed by a subdivision in a Ministry that has long outgrown the limits of a central and answerable control. Instead of settlement by a contained and competent Ministry of Marine, our highly technical sea-conduct is ruled for us in queue with longshore affairs, sandwiched, perhaps, between horse-racing and the period of the dinner table. "_The President of the Board of Trade has intimated to the Stewards of the National Hunt Committee that . . . it is not possible to sanction a list of fixtures for the season._" "Mr. Peto asked the President of the Board of Trade whether his attention has been called to the decision of Mr. Justice Rowlatt . . . in which judgment was given for the plaintiff company, owners of the steamship X----, sunk in collision, due to steaming without lights." "_The President of the Board of Trade announces modifications of the Lighting Order during the present week, one effect being that the prohibition of the serving of meals in hotels after 9.30 p.m. is temporarily suspended._" Perhaps we were rather spoilt by the pride that was in us when our seafaring was ruled by the appreciative Brethren of Trinity, and it may be as a repressive measure of discipline the Board of Trade extends no particular favour to our sea-trade, and has indeed gone further in being at pains to belittle our sea-deeds, and disparage a recognition of our status. Our controllers are anxious that their ruling of award and reward should suffer no comparison. For gallantry at sea, the grades of their recognition may vary from the Silver Medal (delivered, perhaps, as in a recent case, with the morning's milk) to a sextant or a pair of binoculars. In 1905 a very gallant rescue was effected by the men of the Liverpool steamer _Augustine_. The crew of a Greek vessel were taken from their foundering ship in mid-Atlantic under circumstances of great peril. Not only was boat service performed in tempestuous weather, but the officers of _Augustine_ themselves jumped overboard to try to save the Greek seamen, who were too far exhausted to hold on to the life-lines and buoys thrown to them. The King of Greece, in recognition of the gallantry and humanity displayed, signed a decree conferring on the British master and his officers the Gold Decoration of the Redeemer. A general view would be that this was an award quite appropriate to the services rendered, an expression by the Greek Government that they wished to place the names of the gallant savers of their seamen on the Roll of their Honour. Our Board of Trade objected. Through the Foreign Office, they appear to have informed the Greek Government that such distinguished awards were unusual and might prove a source of dissatisfaction in future cases. Possibly they viewed the appearance of a ribbon on the breast of a merchant seaman as an encroachment on the rights of their own permanent officials. The awards were not made; silver medals were substituted, which Captain Forbes and his officers, learning of the Board's action, did not accept. On a later occasion the same unsympathetic influence was exercised; the Russian Order of St. Stanislaus was withdrawn and replaced by a gold watch and chain! In supervision of our qualifications as masters and mates, the Board of Trade has followed the lines of least resistance. It is true that they have established certain standards in navigation and seamanship that we must attain in order to hold certificates, but the training to these standards has never been an interest of their Department. While our shipmate, the marine engineer, has opportunity in his apprenticeship on shore to complete his education, we are debarred from the same facility. Apprenticed to the sea at from fourteen to sixteen years of age, our youth bid good-bye to their school books and enter on a life of freedom from scholarly restraint--a 'kindergarten' in which their toys are hand-implements of the sea. There is no need to worry; there is no study required for four years; a week or two at the crammer's will suffice to satisfy the Board of Trade when apprenticeship days were over. And the fault does not lie with the 'crammer.' Scholarly and able and competent, as most of them are, to impart a better and more thorough instruction, the system of leaving all to the voyage's end offers to them no alternative but to present the candidate for examination as rapidly as possible. Sea-apprentices of late years did not often share in a scheme of instruction afloat. Rarely were they carried as complements to a full crew; for the most part they were workmen in a scant manning--'greenhorns'--drudges to the whim of any grown man. In a rough measure, the standard of such seamanship as they _gathered_ was good--else we had been in ill case to-day--but it was without method or apprehension--a smattering--the only saving grace of which lay in the ready resource that only seafaring engenders. The exactions of a busy working sea-life left little leisure for self-advancement in study; the short, and ever shortening, intervals of a stay in port provided small opportunity for exercise of a helping hand from the shore. By deceptive short cuts that gave small enlightenment, by rules--largely mnemonic--we passed our tests and obtained our certificates. On shore, the landward youth fared better. The spirit of the times provided a free and growing opportunity for the study of technics and advance of scientific craftsmanship. The Navy took full advantage of this tide. The Board of Admiralty saw the futility of the old system of sea-training, having regard to the complete alteration of the methods in seamanship and navigation. Naval education could no longer be compensated by a schedule of bugle-calls and the exactitude of a hammock-lashing. Concurrent with a sound sea-training, general education was insisted upon. Zealously Admiralty guided their youth on a path that led to a culture and appreciation of values, wide in scope, to serve their profession. If it was essential, in the national interest, that the general education and sea-training of naval officers should be so closely supervised, it was surely little less important that that of the merchants' officers should receive some measure of attention. But for the private efforts of some few shipowners, nothing on the lines of a considered scheme was done. No assistance or advice or grant in aid was made by the Board of Trade. While drawing to their coffers huge sums, accumulations of fines and forfeitures, deserters' wages, fees, the unclaimed earnings of deceased seamen, they could afford no assistance to guide the youthful seaman through a course of right instruction to a better sea-knowledge; they made no advances to place our education on a less haphazard basis. It may be cited as an evidence of _their_ indifference that a large proportion of unsuccessful candidates for the junior certificates fail in a test of _dictation_. With our entry to the war at sea in 1914, the same indifference was manifest. There was no mobilization or registration of merchant seamen to aid a scheme of manning and to control the chaos that was very soon evident. Despite their intimate knowledge of the gap in our ranks made by the calling-up of the Naval Reserve--accentuated by the enlistment of merchant seamen in the Navy--the Board of Trade could see no menace to the sea-transport service in the military recruitment of our men. It was apparently no concern of theirs that we sailed on our difficult voyages short-handed, or with weak crews of inefficient landsmen, while so many of our skilled seamen and numbers of our sea-officers were marking time in the ranks of the infantry. Under pressure of events, it was not until November 1915 they took a somewhat hesitating step. This was their proclamation; it may be contrasted with Captain Greenville Collins's preface. "MAINTENANCE OF BRITISH SHIPPING "At the present time the efficient maintenance of our Mercantile Marine is of vital national interest, and captains, officers, engineers, and their crews will be doing as good service for their country by continuing to man British ships as by joining the army. "THE PRESIDENT OF THE BOARD OF TRADE." "AT the present time"! Possibly our Board was writing in anticipation of the completion of the Channel tunnel, or of a date when our men-at-arms and their colossal equipment, the food and furnishings of the nation, the material aid to our Allies, could be transported by air. "As good service"! An equality! An option! Was it a matter of simple balance that a seaman on military service was using his hardily acquired sea-experience as wisely as in the conduct of his own skilled trade, as efficiently as in maintaining the lines of our oversea communications? Events at this date were proving that we had no need to go ashore for fighting service. In the first violence of unrestricted submarine warfare, the Board advanced little, if any, assistance to the victims of German savagery. Their machinery existed only to repatriate torpedoed crews under warrant as "distressed British seamen"; they were content to leave destitution, hunger--the rags and tatters of a body covering--to be relieved and refitted by the charitable efforts of philanthropic Seamen's Societies. To them--to the kindly souls who met us at the tide-mark--we give all honour and gratitude, but it was surely a shirking of responsibility on part of our Board that placed the burden of our maintenance on the committee of a Seaman's Bethel. As a tentative measure, our controllers advanced a scheme of insurance of effects--a business proposition, of which many took advantage. Later, this was altered to a gratuitous compensation. Cases occurred in which distressed seamen had a claim under both schemes: their foresight was not accounted to them. Although proof might be forthcoming of the loss of an outfit that the small compensation could not cover, they could claim only on one or the other, the insurance or the gratuitous compensation. It was evident that the Board derived some measure of assistance from the examiners in bankruptcy on their staff. In certain seaports--notably at Southampton--Sailors' Homes (built and endowed for the comfort and accommodation of the merchant seamen) were permitted, without protest, to be requisitioned by Admiralty for the sole use of their naval ratings. The merchantmen, on service of equal importance and equal danger, were turned out to the streets, and our Board took no action, registered no complaint. To await popular clamour was evidently a guiding principle with our controllers. Their view was probably that we were private employees in trading ventures, that their concern was only to see the sea-law carried out. Sea-law, however, was not in question in the case of the master and officers of _Augustine_, and, if they could assume the right to interfere in that personal matter, they accepted a position as curators of the personnel of the Merchants' Service. They cannot complain if our understanding of their duties does not agree with theirs. Deliberately, they have asserted that our sea-conduct is within their province. An extraordinary matter is the character and calibre of the Board's marine officials. Unquestionably able and personally sympathetic as they are, it remains the more incomprehensible that our governance is so stupidly controlled. Perhaps their submissions fail of acceptance in the councils of a higher control--that has also to decide on horse-racing and bankruptcy. Under a less heavily encumbered Ministry, our affairs should receive the consideration that is their due. It required but little experience of the new sea-warfare to establish our claim to be considered a national service with a mission and employment no less vital and combatant than that of the enlisted arms. Master and man, we have earned the right to no small voice in the control of our own affairs. Our sea-interests are large enough to require a separate Department of the State, a Ministry of Marine, in which we should have a part. The Board of Trade has failed us, they have proved unworthy of our confidence. Quite lately they began to mobilize and register the mercantile seamen of the country. _Three years and nine months after the outbreak of war, they sounded the 'assembly' of the Merchants' Service._ Let that be their epitaph! [Illustration: TRANSPORTS LEAVING SOUTHAMPTON ON THE NIGHT PASSAGE TO FRANCE] V MANNING SEA-LABOUR cannot be likened to employment on shore. Once signed and boarded and to sea, there can be no dismissal and replacement of the men such as may be seen any morning at the street gates of a workshop or shipyard. Good or bad, we are bound as shipmates for a voyage. Ordinary laws and regulations cannot reach us in our sailing; we are given the Merchant Shipping Act for our guidance, the longest and wordiest Act on the Statute Book, a measure that presupposes a discipline that no longer exists. Our ships, in size and power--our complement, in number and character--have altered greatly beyond the views of the Act. That statute, that in its day may have sufficed to set a standard of law and order to the moderate crews of our sailing ships, is utterly inadequate to control effectively the large ship's company of our modern steam vessels. The men, too, are changed--the sailormen, perhaps, not greatly--but, with the thundering evolution of steam-power, we have drawn grown men to the fires, ready-made men, uninfluenced by traditions of sea-service. We had no hand in their making--in the early years when discipline may be inculcated and character be formed. The drudgery and uninterest of their heavy work makes for a certain reaction that frequently finds its expression in violence and criminal disorder. The short voyage system and the grossly inadequate provisions of the Act afford no opportunity to guide the reaction in a less vicious direction. We hailed as a benefactor to the sea the inventor of single topsails; the statistics of our sea-fatalities give a definite date to their introduction. Daily we pray for an inventor to emancipate our stokehold gangs. It would be idle to pretend that, as master-seamen, we were not disquieted by our manning problem, following upon the outbreak of war. While mobilization of the Army Reserve drew men from all industries in a proportion that did not affect seriously any one employment, the calling-up of the Royal Naval Reserve strained our resources in men to the utmost. Seamen, naval or mercantile, are of one great trade: the balance of our activities being thrown suddenly and violently to one side of our engagement could not fail in disorganizing the other. Added to the outgoing of the retained Reserve seamen, recruitment of a new Reserve to man Auxiliaries and Special Service vessels was almost instantly begun. There were many applicants; the choice naturally fell upon our best men remaining. In and after August 1914, we were short-handed in the Merchants' Service. We were, indeed more than short-handed, for the loss of our steadiest men had effect in removing a certain check upon indiscipline. We missed just that influence upon which, for want of adequate authoritative powers, we counted to preserve some measure of subordinance in our ranks. Large vessels were most seriously affected. The service of troop transport suffered and was delayed. On occasion, there was the amazing instance of some 1500 trained and disciplined troops standing by to await the sobering-up and return to duty of a body of seamen and firemen. Drunkenness is not yet accounted a crime, but the holding up of vital reinforcements was no petty fault. Under the Act we were empowered to inflict a fine of exactly five shillings on each offender. The offence that held 1500 soldiers in check was met by a mulct of two half-crowns. [Illustration: LIVERPOOL: MERCHANTMEN SIGNING ON FOR OVERSEA VOYAGES] The Army and the Naval Authorities were startled, as at a situation they had not contemplated. Masters and officers, if not actually challenged, were deemed to be responsible for such a state of insubordination among their crews. While such an assumption was, to a degree, unjust, it is true that we were not wholly blameless. For the sake of a quiet commercial life, we had accepted the difficulties of our manning without protest. In this we erred. Had we been an independent and economically fearless body, we would, in the days before the war, have refused to proceed to sea with any less than the summary powers held by a magistrate on shore to enforce law and order in his district. It is true that no magisterial powers will prevent drunkenness, but that condition on the ships was due directly to the general indiscipline that we were unable wholly to control. The state of affairs called for more than a merely temporary measure, but our controllers advanced no settlement--only they devised an expedient. The situation was met, not by a firm action that would affect all merchant ships and seamen alike, but by a Defence of the Realm regulation that operated only when ships were chartered directly by Government. The opportunity to make the merchantmen's forecastle a place for decent men to earn a living was passed by. While admitting, by their concern, that the matter called for redress, Government could only take action in cases where their bureaucratic interests were threatened. Vessels on purely commercial voyages, including carriage of the mails and millions in the nation's securities, were left without the regulation: we had to carry on as best we could. It entailed hardship on the better-disposed members of our ships' companies: in whatever fashion, the work had to be carried on: we taxed our steady men to the limit. The effect upon them may be judged when they realized that the delinquency of their shipmates, whose duty they had undertaken, was assessed at the price of a pound of 'Fair Maid' tobacco. While the quality of our men was thus affected, we suffered in their diminished numbers. Without a protest from our governing body, the Board of Trade, the army took a toll of our seamen. Thus early, it was not realized that we merchantmen would have to fight for our ships and our lives at sea. The drums of field-war set up a note that was heard outside of six fathoms of blue water; large numbers of our seamen and many ships' officers joined up for military service. There was a certain measure of compensation afforded by the industrial situation ashore. As the magnitude of the world conflict was realized, nervous employers of labour reduced their staffs. All workmen suffered, the building trades being perhaps most affected. As needs must, we were open to recruit able-bodied men: we had to make seamen, and that quickly. Masons, brick-layers, tilers, slaters--they reached tide-mark in their quest for employment. We were glad enough to sign them on to make up our complements. At the first they were not of great value. Unused to the sea and ship-life, they had to be nursed through stormy weather: a source of anxiety to the watch-keeper when the seas were up. In time they became moderately efficient. As good tradesmen, they had a self-respect that could be encouraged: they were not difficult to control. Of these, perhaps 50 per cent. made a second voyage, but not more than 10 per cent. remained at sea permanently. Their reasons for returning to the beach were always the same. Not the hard work or the seas appalled them, but the class of men with whom they had to live and work. Some of our recruits had other objects in view than a desire for a sea-life. At ports abroad, notably in the United States, they deserted. Strict as the Federal machinery is for regulating immigration into the United States, there appeared to be no keen desire on the part of the authorities to embarrass the improper entry of our men. It was not difficult to assign a cause for their laxity. Technically, the men were seamen. Our Uncle Sam was stirring towards true sea-power--the acquisition of large mercantile fleets. The native American could see no prosperous commercial career in the forecastle: only from abroad might labour be obtained for operation of the ships. We had done the same in our time. Desertions were not confined to the landsmen of our crews. A situation arose quickly, in which it became profitable for our men to desert abroad and re-sign on another ship at an enhanced pay. As though to facilitate their breach of agreement, it was not long before the United States Seamen's Act came into force. By some international process that we seamen are not yet able to understand, this Act became operative on every vessel entering an American port. It establishes, for all seamen, the 'right to quit.' Strangely, our men did not all abandon ship. Some stirring of the patriotism that, later, became pronounced among them must have had effect in restraining wholesale disembarkation. Short-handed by perhaps an eighth of a full crew, we made our return voyages. By shift and expedient, we kept a modest head of steam. The loss was almost wholly at the fires. Stewards were set to deck duties and the look-out, the released sailormen went below to the stokehold--on occasion, passengers were recruited on board to bear a hand. Perhaps the public grumbled at receiving their letters an hour or two behind time. It is not easy to advance reasons for the new and better spirit that came to us coincident with the appearance of German savagery at sea. Restrictions of the supply of drink had effect in enabling us to commence a voyage under good conditions, without brawling and bloodshed in the forecastle. An atmosphere of determination was, perhaps, introduced by the tales of undying heroism in the trenches that reached us. The losses in ships served partially to supplement the numbers of men available: a choice could be made in engagement of a crew. Over all, there was the menace to our seafaring--the threat and challenge to our sea-pride, as compelling and remedial as the draught of a free breeze. In his action, the enemy made many miscalculations; not the least was when he roused a spirit of readiness to service in our merchantmen; he blew more than the acrid fumes into us with the shattering explosion of his torpedoes. If we may claim a patriotic influence acting upon our white seamen as reason for good service in the war, how shall we assess the lascar's quiet employment in a conflict that, perhaps, only dimly he understood? Of its operation he could have no ignorance. _Schrecklichkeit_ was particularly to be employed against the native seaman. Shell and torpedo took toll of his numbers, but there was little hesitancy when he was invited to sign for further voyages. It was ever a point of prophecy with his detractors in the days of peace that he would be found wanting under stress. Not boldly or magnificently or in a spirit of vainglory, but in a manner that is not the less impressive because few have spoken of it, he has given them the lie. The attitude of the naval authorities in regard to our manning is peculiar. They seem to be unable to think of ships' crews in any other terms than that of their own large complements. There is one part in the lectures of our instructional course that never fails to arouse rude merriment among the master-seamen attending--as it produces a shamefaced attitude on part of the naval lecturer (now intimate with our difficulties). In instructions for detailing our men to 'action stations' the phrases occur: "a party to be detached for attention to wounded," "a party to serve hoses at fire stations," "an ammunition supply party," "party to put the provisions and blankets in the boats." In practice, we are also working the guns, attending the navigation, spotting the fall of shot, keeping post at wheel and look-out. The average cargo vessel rarely carries more than eight men on deck: we cannot afford to have many wounded! PART II [Illustration: THE RULER OF PILOTS AT DEAL] VI THE COASTAL SERVICES THE HOME TRADE "_We're a North-country ship, an' a deep-water crew. A--way, i-oh! Ye can stick t' th' coast, but we're damned if we do. An' we're bound t' Rio Grande!_" SO we sang--sounding a bravery at the capstan as we hove around and raised anchor to begin a voyage. We had our ideas. We were foreign-going sailors, putting out on a far venture. In pride of our seafaring--of rounding the Horn, of crossing Equator, perhaps of a circumnavigation--we looked down upon the coaster. He was a hoveller, a tidesman, a mud-raker--his anchors could shew no coral on the flukes as they came awash. We carried these ideas to the beach. Deliberately, we produced an atmosphere that is unjust to the cross-channel man. The oversea voyage possesses a greater appeal to the imagination. Long distances, variation of the climes, storm and high ocean seas--a burthen of goods brought from a far country, all contribute to make an impression that the tale of a coasting voyage could not produce. Familiarity, perhaps, has robbed the short-carriers' sea-trip of what shreds of romance existed. In tide and out, the smaller vessels have grown to the sight as almost part of the familiar quays and wharves they frequent. A voyage from Tyne to the Thames or from Glasgow to Liverpool is so common and everyday that little remark is excited. We are unconcerned at its incident; the gale that wrecked a collier on the Black Middens may have blown a tile or two from our roof; the fog that bound the Antwerp boat for a tide is, perhaps, the same that held us in the City for an hour over time. We may entertain our friends with recital of a sea-voyage, but we have not a great deal to say of a Channel passage. At war, this focus of the public outlook has persisted. The threat to our sea-communications, to the source by which the nation gains its daily bread, has drawn an intense interest to the fortunes of the ships, but that interest has rarely been extended to the coasting vessels and the seamen who man them; there is little said of the work of the coastal pilots, on whose skill and local knowledge so much depends. We are concerned for our _Britannics_ and _Justitias_, but the fate of the _Sarah Pritchard_ of Beaumaris, or the escape of _Boy Jacob_ are small events in relation to the toll of our tonnage. Their utility has not been brought before us in the same way as the direct service of the great ocean carriers. It is not difficult to understand that a breakdown of that source of supply would mean starvation and disaster. Our dependence on the coasting vessels is not so apparent. The vital needs served by them are, in part, obscured. We are, perhaps, satisfied that alternative channels exist for passage of the tonnage they transport: road and rail are open for inland carriage. The situation is not quite so clear. Pressure at the rail-heads, at the collieries, at the steelworks and the manufactories, has thrown a burden on our island railways that they are unable to bear. But for the service of the coasters and the resolution of the home-trade seamen, the block to our traffic could not have been other than fatal. By relieving the congestion on the lines, they made possible the expansion of our output of munitions. Millions of tons that would otherwise have been put upon land transport (and have lain to swell the accumulations), are brought to tide-mark to be handled and cleared and ferried between home ports and across the channels by the coasting vessels. The Fleet is coaled and stored almost entirely by sea. Our men in France and Flanders are carried and fed and refitted by light-draught steamers. Power is transmitted to our Allies from British coalfields by our grimy colliers. Constant voyaging, dispatch at the ports of lading and discharge, seagoing through all weathers, make huge the total of their tonnage, but their individual cargoes rank small against the mammoth burdens of the oversea merchantmen. The sea-ants (however busily they throng the ports) are seldom remarked; their work is carried on in the shadow of more spectacular and lengthy voyaging. On occasion, a stray beam of popular recognition is turned on the smaller craft--as when _Wandle_ steams up Thames after her gallant fight, or when _Thordis_ (Bell, master) rams and sinks a U-boat--but the light is quickly slewed again to illuminate the seafaring of the oversea vessels. Similarly--with the men--interest has centred on the deep-water mariner; the coasting masters and their crews, together with the pilots, are little heard of. Their navigations, steering by the land on a short passage of a tide or two, have not the compelling emphasis of long voyaging on distant seas. Chroniclers of our deeds and fates have set out the drawn agony of the raft and the open boat in mid-Atlantic; they are less insistent on the tragedies (as bitter and prolonged) of inshore waters. Perhaps they are influenced by a common misconception that succour is ever ready at hand in the narrow sea. There are the lifeboats on the coast, patrols on keen look-out in the channels, vessels are ever passing up and down the fairways; the land, in any case, is not far distant. Such assurance has but slender warrant. Gallant, unselfish, and thorough as are the services of the lifeboatmen, their operations in the main are intended to serve known wrecks and strandings. A flare in the darkness or a flash of gunfire in the channels is now no special signal; the new sea-casualty gives little time or warning for a muster of resources. The ready succour of the patrols is, perhaps, more instant and alert, but the channel seaways cover an area that no system could place under a quartered post or guard. No vigilance could prevent the capture of _Brussels_ and the martyrdom of Captain Fryatt; the crew of the _Nelson_ smack were for over thirty hours adrift in the narrow seas ere they were sighted and rescued. In the busy waters of the Irish Sea, three men of the ketch _Lady of the Lake_ made ten miles in eight hours under oars, after their vessel had been sunk by gunfire. A weary progress, with ships passing near and far, but none daring too close the boat that might, for all they know, be trap for an enemy mine or torpedo. It is time we ceased to sing that Rio Grande chanty: an _amende_ is overdue. While we, the foreign-going men, have our 'ins and outs' of the most dangerous seas--serving our turn in the front-line sea-trenches, then retiring to a rest in safer and more distant waters--the coastal seaman has no such relief. His daily duty lies in the storm-centre, in the very midst of the sea-war. From harbour mouth to the booms of his port of entry, no course can be steered that does not drive his keel through minable areas and across the ranges of lurking submarines. The new sea-warfare has developed a scheme of offence that renders our inshore waters peculiarly fraught with peril to navigators. The coast-line is no longer a defence and protection; rather, by limiting sea-room in manoeuvre, the shoals and rock-bound beach have turned ally to the enemy. Sea-mark and headland provide a guide in estimating the run of a torpedo; note of a point definite, on which sea-routes converge, is of value to a submarine commander. Even in the shallower waters--depths in which a torpedo attack would be difficult--an equally deadly offence may be maintained. The run of the sea-bottom in the channels offering a good hold to slipped mine-moorings, it was not long before the enemy had adapted submarines to continue the minelaying that our command of the surface had stopped. While new and larger U-boats are sent abroad on the trade routes, special submarines, less encumbered by the stores and equipment that longer passages would demand, make frequent visits to the fairways to sow a freight of mines. No section of the channels holds sanctuary for the coaster. Close inshore, as in the offing, is all a danger area, open to the stealthy visits of the submarine minelayers. Right on the Mersey Bar, the Liverpool pilot steamer went up with a loss of forty lives; remote West Highland bays have echoed to the crash of mines exploded; seaward of the Irish banks, the deeps are alike dangerous. Counter-measures there are (services as efficient and resourceful in life-saving as those of the enemy are cunning and viciously ingenious in murder), but even the gallantry and skill and untiring efforts of our minesweepers cannot wholly clear the immense water-spaces. Mechanical contrivances--the Otters--are valuable, and aid in fending the mines, but (the sea-bottom being foul with wreckage) they are often a danger to their carriers. There is ever the harassing uncertainty which no vigilance may allay. The sheer relief of passing over the hundred-fathom line to the comparative safety of the deeps of ocean is never experienced by the cross-channel captain. Favoured by their light draught and smaller proportions, the coasters are perhaps less exposed to successful torpedo attack than their larger and deeper ocean sisters. In the early days of submarine activity, the enemy was loath to use his deadlier and more expensive weapon on the small craft. He relied on gunfire to produce effects. The channel seas were not then as well patrolled as now by armed auxiliaries: he could have a leisurely exercise in frightfulness at little risk to himself--there was no return to his fire--it was an easy target practice. _Cottingham_ was shelled at short ranges when off the Bristol Channel. Unarmed and outdistanced, the master stopped his engines, lowered the two boats, and abandoned ship. The shelling continued, but was directed on the sinking ship; the submarine commander evidently thought the bitter wintry weather would accomplish a more refined _Schrecklichkeit_ than the summary execution of his shell-bursts. In the heavy battery of a sou'west gale, the boats drove apart. The master's boat was sighted by a patrol, and the crew of six rescued after some hours' exposure. The mate's boat came ashore at Portliskey in Wales, bottom up and shattered; of the seven men who had manned her there was no trace. Six of _Cottingham's_ crew survived the bitter weather--six hardy seamen were spared to return to service afloat. The German became dissatisfied with a frightfulness that murdered only half a merchant ship's crew when it was possible to murder all. It was not enough to destroy the ships and leave the seamen to the wind and sea and bitter weather. If they were not to be driven from their calling by fear, there were other measures--sure, definite, final. There was to be no weakness among the apostles of the new creed, no shrinking, no humanity--British seamen were to follow their shattered ships to the litter of the channel bottom. The _Kölnische Zeitung_ set forth that "in future, our German submarines and aircraft would wage war against British mercantile vessels without troubling themselves in any way about the fate of the crews." The _Kölnische Zeitung_ could not have been well informed. Their submarine commanders troubled themselves greatly about the fate of our crews. They shelled the boats in many subsequent attacks. They expended ammunition in efforts to secure that no further seafaring would be possible to their victims. Sheer individual murder took the place of an illegal act of war. ". . . We were unarmed, a slow ship. The submarine hit us with a shot on the bow and then ran up the signal to take to the lifeboats. We did so, and several shots were fired at the _Palermo_. They did not take effect, however, and a torpedo was sent into her side. She sank within a few minutes. Whether the fact that he had to use a torpedo to send our vessel to the bottom angered the commander I do not know, but the submarine came directly alongside of our lifeboats. The commander was on the deck, and yelled, 'Where is the captain of that ship?' The captain stood up and made his way to the side where the German was standing. The German held his revolver close to our captain's head. 'You will never bring _another ship across this ocean_,' he said, using several oaths, then he pulled the trigger. Our captain fell dead, and we were permitted to continue." The new campaign was directed particularly against the coasters and fishermen. The procedure was simple. No great speed or gun-range was required. There was no risk, if a good look-out was kept for patrols and war craft. The helpless, unarmed vessel, outsped and hulled, was brought-to within easy range, and shelling could be continued to augment the confusion of boat-lowering in a seaway. If by resolution and fine seamanship the boats were got away, there was further target practice with shrapnel or machine-gun. The schooner _Jane Williamson_ of Arklow was attacked without warning. The first shot smashed one of her boats, the second killed one of the crew. At shouting distance--a hundred yards range--point-blank under the submarine's gun--there could be no question of defence or escape. The remaining five hands put over the second boat, tumbled into her and shoved clear. To hit the boat the submarine's gun must have been slewed deliberately from the larger target: bad shooting could not have occurred. Afloat and helpless, a shell struck her, killing one man outright, mortally wounding the master and another, and damaging the frail row-boat. The Germans beckoned the boat to them, but it was only to laugh at the throes of the dying men. The U-boat submerged, leaving the three survivors to ship oars and face the long weary pull towards the distant land. The _William_ was sunk by gunfire; the gun's crew of the U-boat then loaded shrapnel and turned the gun on the open boat, wounding a man of the crew. _Redcap_ was hauling her trawl when without any warning shrapnel burst on board. There was no challenge, the fishermen had made no attempt to get under way and escape. Busied with the gear, all hands were grouped together, when the shell exploded among them. One hand was killed instantly, the mate's leg was blown off, two seamen were wounded. Under fire, the survivors put the boat over and removed the wounded; the Germans gave no thought to their distress, but centred rapid fire on the trawler, sunk her, and disappeared. [Illustration: A HEAVILY ARMED COASTING BARGE] When guns were served to merchant ships, the coasters shared in their issue. Encounters with enemy submarines were no longer one-sided and hopeless. Effects could not be secured by the Germans at so small a cost. Frequently the effects were those that the submarine commander was most anxious to avoid. _Atalanta_ picked up the crew of _Maréchal de Villars_, then fought off the U-boat that had sunk that vessel. Watchers on the coastal headlands saw many a running fight between handy little home-traders and the under-sea pirates. Nor were the fishermen slow in action. Once armed for defence, they proved that they could use their weapons with skill and precision. Off Aberdeen in stormy weather, a German submarine hove up from his depths for practice on a fleet of trawlers. It was to be a _Redcap_ diversion: rapid fire, shrapnel, boats thrown out hastily, common shell on the hulls of the trawlers--wholesale destruction. But there was a mistake. A 'watch-dog' was among the fleet--_Commissioner_, armed and alert. At an opportune moment she cut her gear adrift, canted under speed and helm, returned the U-boat's fire and sank her in five rounds. Submarine commanders soon realized that 'diversions' were risky, the target could now hit back. It was safer to submerge when within range of anything larger than a row-boat. Even the sailing barges acquired a sting. In proportion to her tonnage, _Drei Geschwister_--a captured German, refitted to our coastal service--is probably the heaviest armed vessel afloat. In channel waters, look-outs must not be confined to the round of the sea. To the U-boat's gunfire and torpedo, to the menace of moored and drifting mines, is added a danger that rarely threatens the oversea trader--an attack from the air. Striking distance from enemy bases has given opportunity for exercise of aircraft. Zeppelin and seaplane have their turns of activity in the North Sea and the Straits. Steering a careful course in a sea 'foul with floating mines,' the Cork steamship _Avocet_ was attacked by three aeroplanes. The action lasted for over half an hour. Bombs exploded alongside, the bridge and upper decks were scarred and pitted by a hail of machine-gun bullets. The master and mate kept the aircraft at a respectful height by using their rifles--the only arms carried. By skilful handling, Captain Brennell saved his ship. He is probably the only seaman who has steered a deliberate course between a 'fall' of bombs; swinging on starboard helm, 'three bombs missed the starboard bow and three the port quarter by at most seven feet.' The _Birchgrove_ was attacked by two seaplanes carrying torpedoes--a novel adaptation. Again the use of ready helm proved a moving ship a difficult target. Both torpedoes missed. Less fortunate was the _Franz Fischer_, an ex-German collier. Anchored off the Kentish Knock, the night black dark, the thunder of a Zeppelin's engines was heard overhead. Before there was time to extinguish all lights, the huge airship was able to take up a position for attack. One heavy bomb sufficed. _Franz Fischer_ reeled to a tremendous explosion, heeled over, and sank. Only three survived of her crew of sixteen. Constant sea-perils are enhanced by war measures in the channels. On open sea there is less confusion; the issue is narrowed to contest between ship and submarine and the hazard of a derelict or floating mine--there is ample sea-room in which to 'back and fill.' The coaster has a harder task. His navigational problem is complicated by the eight hundred odd pages of 'Notices to Mariners'--the amends and addends and cancellations of Admiralty instructions relating to the seafaring of the coast. Inner channels are confused by 'friendly' minefields or by alteration of the buoyage; aids to navigation are suspended or rearranged on scant notice; coastwise lights are put out or have their powers reduced to small efficiency in the mists and grey weather. Unmarked wrecks, growing daily in numbers, litter the sea-bottom; areas are to be avoided to leave a fair field for the hunters; zigzag courses in close proximity to the land sustain a constant anxiety. Above all, navigation without lights increases the danger to all merchantmen and to the patrols and naval craft that crowd the seaways of the coast. Through all that the enemy can set against them, the home-trade vessels proceed on their voyages. Their losses are heavy in numbers (if the sum of their tonnage be not great), but the press of short sea-carriers that passes up Channel or down shews no evidence that frightfulness achieves an effect in holding them, loath, at their moorings. There is freight enough for all. Every vessel that has a sound keel and a helm to steer her is actively employed. Old craft and odd are come on the sea to serve turn in our emergency. Barges and inland watermen, Hudson Bay sloops, whilom pleasure craft, mud-hoppers reshelled, hulks even, are used; if they can neither sail nor steam, the ropemakers can supply a hawser--there is trade and bargain for a tow. After peace-years of grinding competition with the freight-grabbing steam coasters, the sailing craft of the smaller ports have found a new prosperity, from which no risks can daunt them. Sailmakers and rigging-cutters, the block and spar makers, have taken up their old tools again, and the gallant little topsail schooners, brigantines, cutters, and ketches are out under canvas. The German boast that he can achieve victory by submarine policy could be nowhere more plainly refuted than in the War Channel that extends from the Thames to the Tyne. The evidence is there for all to judge. The seaway is foul with wrecks, foundered on beach and sandbar--the tide vexed by under-water obstructions. Topmast spars with whitened cordage whipping in the wind stand out above the swirl of the tides; a shattered bow-section or gaunt listed shell of a wrecked vessel sets the turn to a new shoal drift; crazy funnels, twisted and arake by the broken hulls below, stud the angles of the buoyage that marks the fairway. Disaster to our shipping is plainly shewn, grouped in a way that no figures or statistics could rival. But there is other evidence. Daybreak in the Channel gives light to a progress of seaworthy craft that seems in no way diminished by the worst that the enemy can do. He has failed, despite the sinister sea-marks that litter the fairway. Down the river estuaries and out from the sea-harbour and roadstead, the coasters still join in company through the channels. An unending procession; the grey seascape is never free of their whirling smoke-wreaths. Passing and turning in the deeps, they steam close to the red-rusted, shattered hulls of their sister ships. The gaunt masses of tortured steel stand out as monuments to an indomitable spirit--or to an influence that calls their sea-mates out to steer by the loom of their wreckage. PILOTS IF we may count antiquity and precedence a claim, the pilot is the real senior of our trade. Before the ship and her tackling--the rude coracle, setting across the river bars or steering on a short passage by sea-marks on the coast, before the oversea venturer with his guide in sun and star--the lodesman, who marked the deeps and the shallows. The pilot's departure and boarding are definite and well-marked incidents in the course of a voyage, and have a significance and interest few other ship-happenings claim. He is our last and first connection with the shore. His leaving is attended by a sober emotion, a compound of regret and impatience; regret that his sure support is withdrawn--impatience to go ahead to open sea. He backs over the rail and lurches down the swaying side-ladder to his dinghy to an accompaniment of cordial good-byes. Passengers crowd the bulwarks to watch his small boat go a-bobbing in the stern-wash as we gather way. It hardly occurs to them that their farewell letters, now in his weather-stained bag, may be for days or weeks unposted; to them he is the last post--the link is snapped, the voyage now really begun. There may be masters who affect a fine aloofness when the pilot boards them on incoming, others who preserve a detached air--but there are few who do not feel relief in answering the cheerful hail--'All well aboard, Captain?'--as the pilot puts a cautious testing foot on the side-ladder. Here is the voyage practically at an end with the coming of an expert in local navigation. The anxiety of a landfall is over. The channel buoys, port hand and starboard, stretch out ahead to mark definite limits to shoal and sandbank; familiar landmarks loom up through the drift of distant city haze; the outer lightship curtsies in the swell, beckoning us into port to resume the brief round of longshore life. After a lengthy period of silence and detachment, we are again in touch with the affairs of the beach; the news of the day and of weeks past is told to us in intervals of steering orders--sailor news, edited by a competent understanding of our professional interests. The tension of the voyage is unconsciously relaxed. We are in good hands. The engines turn steadily and we come in from sea. If the pilot was ever a welcome attendant in the peaceful days, his services in the war earn for him an even warmer appreciation. War measures in their operation have rendered our seaports difficult of entry. The buoyage has, perhaps, been reset in the interval of a voyage's absence. Boom defences and examination areas exist, channels are closed or obstructed; certain of the lightships or floating marks may be withdrawn on short warning. Amid all our doubts and uncertainties, we look for the one assured sea-mark on the unfamiliar bars--the red-and-white emblem of a pilot vessel on her boarding station. Undeterred by the risk of mine or torpedo while marking time on their cruising ground, the pilots are constantly on the alert to board the incoming vessels as they approach from seaward. No state of the weather drives the cutter from her station to seek shelter in safer waters. If the seas are too high for boatwork, she steams ahead and offers a lead to a quieter section of the fairway where boarding may be attempted. Turn and turn of the pilots in service can no longer be effected. The even balances of their roster (that worked so well in peace-time) have been rudely disturbed by war. The steady round of duty, in which every man knew the date of his relief, has given place to a state of 'feast and famine'; all hands are frequently mustered to meet the sudden and unheralded demands of an inward-bound convoy, or the limited accommodation of the cutter is taxed and overloaded by the release of pilots from an outward mass sailing. There are grades of pilotage--from that of the rivers and protected waters to the more hazardous voyages between coastal ports. It is, perhaps, to the sea-pilots of Trinity we are most intimately drawn. While the river pilot is with us for the short term of the tide, the Trinity man is of our ship's company for a day or days. His valued local knowledge is at our service to set and steer fair courses in the perplexing tangents of unfamiliar tideways; operations of the minesweepers and patrols--that alter and multiply beyond counting in the course of a voyage abroad--are a plain book to him. If we meet disaster in the channels, we have a prompter at our elbow to advise a favourable beaching. We have a peer to confide in throughout our difficulties. After days of anxious watchkeeping on the bridge we are well served by a competent relief. Ship movements in the western waters are controlled by the naval authorities in a manner that allows of independent sailings, but the Trinity pilots' duties lie in the Channel and the North Sea, where a more exacting regime is in force. From the Downs to the north, measures adopted for protection of the ships call for a time-table of sailings and arrivals that can only be adhered to by the pilot's aid. A 'War Channel' is established, a sea-lane of some two hundred and eighty miles that has constantly to be swept and cleared in advance of the traffic. Navigation in the channel obstructs an efficient search for mines; sweeping operations interfere with the passage of the ships. No small amount of control and management is necessary to reconcile conflicting actions and expedite the safe conduct of the shipping. Latterly, sailings were restricted to the hours of daylight; a system of sectional passages is enforced, by which all vessels are scheduled to make a protected anchorage before nightfall. An effect of this is to group the vessels in large scattered convoys, forming a pageant of shipping that even the busiest days of peace-time could not rival. In all the story of the Downs, the great roadstead can rarely have presented such a scene as when, on a chill winter morning, we lay at anchor awaiting passage. Overnight, we had come in under convoy from the westward, eighteen large ships, to swell the tonnage that had gathered from the Channel ports. From Kingsdown to the Gull, there was hardly water-space to turn a wherry. Even in the doubtful holding ground of Trinity Bay some large ships were anchored, and the fairway through the Roads was encroached upon by more than one of us--despite the summary signals from the Guardship. All types were represented in our assembly; we boasted a combination in dazzle paint to set us out, and our signal flags carried colour to the mastheads to complete the variegations of our camouflage. Troop transports from the States, standard cargo ships, munition carriers come over in the night from the French ports, high-sided empty colliers returning to the north for further loads, deep-laden freighters for London, ammunition and store ships for the Fleet, coasters and barges, made up the mercantile shipping riding at anchor, while naval patrols and harbour craft under way gave movement to the spectacle. Snow had fallen, and the uplands above Deal and Walmer had white drifts in the quartered fields. To seaward, we could see twin wreaths of smoke blowing low on the water, marking the progress of a flotilla of minesweepers, on whose operations we waited. A brisk north wind held out our signal flags, shewing our ports of destination, and the pilot cutter, busily serving men on the inward bound, took note of our demands. In time, the punt delivered our pilot, and we hove short, awaiting a signal from the Guardship that would release the traffic. The teeth of the Goodwins had bared to a snarl of broken water that shewed the young flood making when movement began among the ships. Long experience had accustomed the pilots to the ways of the minesweepers, and when the clearing signal 'Vessels may proceed' was hoisted at the yard-arm of the Guardship, there were few anchors still to be raised. Crowding out towards the northern gateway, we found ourselves in close formation. Variations of speeds rendered the apparent confusion difficult to steer through, but the action of a kindred masonry among the pilots seemed to clear the narrow sea-lane. There was little easing of speed; with only a few hours of winter daylight to work in, shipping was being driven at its utmost power to make the most of the precious time. 'All out,' stoking up and setting a stiff smoke-screen over the seascape, we thinned out to a more comfortable formation, while the smaller craft, taking advantage of the rising tide, cut the inner angles of the channel to keep apace. With flood tide to help us, we made good progress. The press of shipping gradually dropped astern till only the troop transport, our sea-neighbours of the convoy, kept company with us. Satisfied with the speed made, the pilot reckoned up the mileage and the tide. We were for Hull and, with luck, he expected to make Yarmouth Roads before darkness and the Admiralty regulations obliged us to bring up. Like all who serve the tide, he was prepared for an upset to his plans. "Not much use figuring things out in these days, Capt'n," he said. "A lot o' happenings come our way. In spite o' these fellows out there"--he pointed to a group of destroyers lining out on our seaward beam--"the U-boat minelayers get in on the channels to lay 'eggs'; as fast as we can sweep them up, sometimes. But"--cheerfully--"they don't always get back for another load: saw the bits o' one being towed into Harwich last week." Happenings came our way. At the Edinburgh Channel, where the troop transports parted company and turned away for London, we were halted by an urgent signal from a spurring torpedo-boat. 'Ships bound north to anchor instantly,' was the reading of her flags; we rounded to and obeyed. In groups and straggling units, we were joined by the larger number of the fleet that had left the Downs with us. Some few were for the Thames and steamed ahead in wake of the troop-ships, but the most were bound for east-coast ports and anchored near the Channel Lightship. Two hours of precious daylight were lost to us as we rode out the last of the flood. High water came and we swung around on the cant of the wind. The pilot grew visibly impatient. The traverse of his reckoning lessened in mileage with every hasty step or two up and down the bridge. Yarmouth Roads receded into the morrow; Lowestoft (if the chief could crack her up to thirteen) was possible, but unlikely. Time passed, with no clearing signal--we were to be 'nipped' on the long stretch with no prospect but to dodge into Hollesay Bay before black night came. By some mysterious agency, the coasters developed a foreknowledge of permission to proceed. Feathers of white steam curled from their windlasses, and their anchors were awash before the block was signalled clear. They had start of us. Less handily, we got under way and stood on into the Black Deep, where the smaller craft were throwing green smoke in their efforts to get ahead. The tide had now turned ebb to set us on our way. As we surged past the channel buoys the pilot was reassured. The prospect of windy Lowestoft Roads beckoned him on with every coaster we overhauled and passed; the outlook improved as we timed our passage between the sea-marks. Off the Sunk, we came on the cause of our stoppage. The pilot noted a new wreck on the sands, one that had not been there when last he steered over this route. Beached at high water, he said. She had not been long on. The wreck lay listed on a spit of the sandbank. Her bows were blown open, exposing the interior of forecastle and forehold. Neutral colours were painted on her topside; the boats were gone and dangling boat-falls streamed alongside in the tideway. There was no sign of life on her, but a patrol drifter was standing by with a crowd of men on her decks. Out to seaward a flotilla of minesweepers was busily at work. Turning no more than a curious eye on the mined neutral, the pilot paid attention to the steering. That we were over a mined area had no grave concern for him. Relying on the minesweepers, he kept course and speed--the channel was reported clear. LIGHTSHIPS DEVOTED to the service of humanity, in a bond that linked all seafarers, lightships and isolated sea-beacons were regarded as exempted from the operation of warlike acts. The claim of the 'beacons established for the guidance of mariners' rested upon a high conception of world-wide service to mankind. Their duties were not directed to military uses or to favouring alone the nation who manned them. Their upkeep was met by a universal levy. Their warning beams were not withdrawn from foreign vessels; no effort was made to establish the nationality of a ship in distress ere setting portfire to the signal-gun to call out the lifeboat. On rare occasions sea-rovers interfered with the operation of the guide-marks. Retribution overtook them; they were outlawed by even the loose opinion of the period. There is surely more than legend in the ballad of Sir Ralph the Rover; if death by shipwreck was not actually his fate, it is at least the penalty adjudged to him by popular acclaim. Smeaton, in his Folio, records an instance of reparation for a similar 'diversion.' "Lewis the Fourteenth being at war with England during the proceeding with this building, a French privateer took the men at work upon the Eddystone Rock, together with their tools, and carried them to France, and the Captain was in expectation of a reward for the achievement. While the captives lay in prison, the transaction reached the ears of that monarch. He immediately ordered them to be released and the captors to be put in their place: declaring that though he was at war with England, he was not at war with mankind. He therefore directed the men to be sent back to their work with presents, observing that the Eddystone Lighthouse was so situated as to be of equal service to all nations having occasion to navigate the Channel." A lightship is as peaceful and immobile as the granite blockstones of a lighthouse. She requires an even greater protection, exposed as she is to dangers on the sea that do not threaten the landward structure. She is incapable of offence or defence. Unarmed, save for the signal-gun that is only used to warn a vessel from the sands or to summon assistance to a ship in distress, she can offer no resistance to a show of force. She is moored to withstand the strongest gales, and cannot readily disengage her heavy ground-tackle. She has no efficient means of propulsion; parted from her stout anchors, she would drive helplessly on to the very shoals she had been set to guard. To all seafarers, in war as in peace, she should appeal as a sea-mark to be spared and protected; in the service of humanity, she is exposed to danger enough--to the furious gales from which she may not run. Unlike the Grand Monarch, the Germans are bitterly at war with mankind. As one of their first war acts at sea, they shelled the Ostend Lightship. Like the Lamb, she was using the water; the Wolf would suffer no protestation of her innocency. Was she not floating placidly on the same tides that served the German coast? In view of his subsequent atrocities in torpedoing hospital ships and shelling rafts and open boats, it is probable that our light-vessels would have been similarly destroyed by the enemy, but that his submarine commanders found under-water navigation required as accurate a check as in coasting on the surface. The fury of the Wolf was, in his own interest, tardily suppressed. He recognized that the value of the lightships in establishing a definite position was an asset to him. Withal--his 'fix' decided--he had no qualms in sowing mines in the area of these signposts; nor did he stay his hand in the case of a sea-mark that was not vital to his plans. Two lightships on the east coast were blown up by mines; one, off the coast of Ireland, was deliberately torpedoed. [Illustration: THE LAMPMAN OF THE GULL LIGHTSHIP] The menace of the German sea-mine remains the greatest war danger to which the lightships are exposed. Zeppelin and seaplane pay visits to the coastal waters, but the sea is wide for a chance missile from the air, and no great success has attended their bombing efforts. But the enemy mine has no instant aim. Full-charged and deadly, its activity is not confined--as the British mine is--to the area of the mooring. Their minelayers, creeping in to the fairways in cloak of the darkness, are anxious to settle their cargo of high explosive as quickly as possible. Not all of the mines they sow hold to the hastily slipped 'sinkers' till disaster to our shipping or the untiring search of the minesweepers reveals their presence. Many break adrift and surge in the tideways, moving as the set of the current takes them. Vessels under way, by keen look-out and ready helm, can sight and avoid the drifting spheres, but the lightships have no power to steer clear. Moored on the offset of a shoal or sandbank (their position, indeed, a guide to the minelayer), their broad bows offer contact to all flotsam that comes down on swirl of the tide. The authorities were unwilling to expose their men to a danger that could not be evaded, however gallant the shipmen or skilled their seamanship. It was not a seagoing risk that could be met; no adequate protection consistent with the lightship's mission could be devised. As the submarine war became intensified, the more distant vessels were withdrawn; new routes were set to divert shipping from the outer passages; only those floating sea-marks are now maintained whose removal would entail disaster to the traffic that passes by night and day. Holding station in waters that are patrolled and, in part, protected, the Trinity men who form the crews of the lightships have readjusted their manning. A large proportion of the able-bodied men have joined the naval forces, leaving the older hands (and some few who have a physical disability) to tend the lights. War risks still remain, for the German minelayers have followed the shipping to the inner channels, but the greybeards have grown stolid and immovable in a service that was never at any time a safe and equable calling. They have become sadly familiar with the new sea-warfare--with disaster to the shipping in the channels. While they have incident enough, in the movement and activity of patrols and war craft, in the ceaseless sweeping of the channels, to judge our sea-power and take pride in its strength, they have all too frequent experience of the murderous under-water mechanics of the enemy. Living in the midst of sea-alarms, the old placid tedium of their 'sixty days' has given place to an excitement that even the monotonous rounds of their small ship-life cannot suppress. The men on the 'Royal Sovereign' were observers of the terrific power of the sea-mine; three ships in sight being blown to small wreckage within an hour. 'Shambles' jarred to distant torpedoings off the Bill. The 'South Goodwin' saw _Maloja_ brought up in her stately progress by a thundering explosion, then watched her list and settle in the stormy seaway; a second crash and upheaval drew the eyes of the watch on deck to the fate of the _Empress of Fort William_ as she was hastening to succour the people of the doomed liner. Up Channel and down, the lightshipmen were observers of the toll exacted by the enemy--the price we paid for the freedom of the seas. But not all their observations of sea-casualties brought gloom to the dog-watch reckoning. If there remained no doubt of the intensity and power of German submarine activity, they were equally assured of the efficiency of our surface offence, and the deadly precision of our own under-water counter-measures. On occasion, there were other sea-dramas enacted under the eyes of the lightshipmen--short, swift engagements that set an oily scum welling over the clean sea-space of the channel, or an affair of rapid gunfire that cleared a pest from the narrow waters. There is at least one instance of a lightship having a commanding, if uncomfortable, station in an action between our drifters and a large enemy submarine. The lampman of the 'Gull' had a front view. . . . "Misty weather, it was. Day was just breakin', about seven o' th' mornin' when I see him. I see him just over there--a little t' th' nor'ard o' that wreckage on th' Sands. A big fella, about th' size o' them oil-barges as passes hereabouts. I didn't make him out at first--account o' th' mornin' haze, but there was somethin' over there where no ship didn't oughta be. I calls down th' companion--'Master,' I says, 'there's somethin' on th' north end o' th' Sands.' He comes up an' has a look. Then we made 'im out what he was, a big German sub.--but he hadn't no flag flyin'. Jest then we hears firin', an' th' shells goes over us an' lands nigh him. They was three drifters jes' come out o' th' Downs t' start sweepin' an', all three, they goes for him like billy-o--firin' as they comes. We was right atween them an' th' shots passes over th' lightship. One as was short just pitches clear an 'undred yards ahead o' us. Two guns he had--th' sub.--an' they didn't half make a din as they goes at it--_bang-bang-bang!_ Th' drifters passes us, goin' a full clip. The first one, she got hit a-top th' wheelhouse, but they didn't stop for nothin'. The' keeps bangin' away with th' gun. . . . Yes. Some shots landed hereabouts, but we was busy watchin' th' drifters. . . . I see their shots hittin', too. I see one blaze up on th' submarine's deck, an' one o' his guns didn't talk back no more. Th' drifters was steerin' straight for him. I dunno how one o' them didn't go ashore herself--near it, she was. The sub. was hard on by this time, an' he stands high--with a list, too, but fightin' away like he was afloat. "Two more drifters come up an' they joins in, an' th' shells goes _who-o-o-o!_ overhead again. Then a destroyer, he comes tearin' along at full speed, an' he puts th' finishin' touch to him. There was an explosion on th' submarine, an' th' nex' we see--we see his men tumblin' out o' him overside t' th' Sands. . . . Them up t' their middles in th' water an' holdin' their hands up." The lampman was, of his service, a trained observer. He said nothing of the scene on the deck of the lightship--the watch tumbling up from below, their clothing hastily thrown on--the questioning, the alarmed cries. His concern was directed to the happenings on spit of the Sands. "Some shots landed hereabouts," he said; but his interest was on the Goodwins. [Illustration: MINESWEEPERS GOING OUT] VII 'THE PRICE O' FISH' THE inshore patrol hailed us and reported the channel clear as far as the Nore, and we stood on at full speed, making the most of the short winter daylight. Past the Elbow buoy, we met the minesweepers returning from a sweep of their section. They were steaming in two columns, line ahead, and we sheered a little to give them room; within the reading of our Admiralty instructions, they were a 'squadron in formation,' to whose movements we were advised to give way. They passed close. The leader of the port column was _Present Help_; we read the name on a gilt scroll that ornamented her wheelhouse. For the rest, she was trim in a coat of iron-grey, with her port and number painted over. A small gun--a six-pounder, perhaps--was mounted on her bows, and she carried a weather-stained White Ensign aloft. She scurried past us, pitching to our bow wash in an easy sidling motion that set her wheelhouse glasses flashing a cheery message. The skipper leaned from an open doorway, in an attitude of ease that, somehow, assured us of his day's work being well done--with no untoward happenings. He waved his cap to our greeting. _Present Help_ and her sisters went by, and we returned to our course in the fairway. "These lads," said the pilot, waving his arm towards the fast-receding flotilla. "If it wasn't for these lads, Capt'n, you and I wouldn't feel exactly comfortable on the bridge in channel waters. Two went up this week, and one a little while agone." He turned his palms upward and raised both arms in an expressive gesture. . . . "Three gone, one with all hands, but only one merchant ship done in by mines hereabouts in the last month. (_Starboard, a little, quartermaster!_) . . . I dunno how we could carry on without them. Out there in all weathers, clearing the fairways and--Gad!--it takes some doing. . . . I was talking to one of the skippers in Ramsgate the other day. Saying what I'm saying--(_Steady, now, steady's you go!_)--what I'm saying now, and all he said was--'Right, pilot,' he says. 'If you feels that way, remember it when we gets back to th' fishin' in peace-time, an'--for th' Lord's sake--keep clear o' our gear when th' nets is down! I lost a tidy lot o' gear,' he says, 'with tramps an' that bargin' about on th' fishin' grounds.'. . . He didn't think nothing of this minesweeping. His mind was bent on his nets and the fish again." A pause, while he conned the ship on a steady course, then, reflectively, "An' there's some folks--there's folks ashore growling about the price o' fish!" Of courage in the war, on land as on sea, there are few records comparable to the silent devotion of the fishermen. The heat of attack and fury of battle may call out a reckless heroism that has no bounds to individual gallantry, but the sustained courage required for a lone action under heavy odds--every turn of the engagement being assessed and understood--is of a rarer quality; mere physical health and high spirit cannot generate it; tradition of a sea-inherence and long self-training alone can bring it forth. That the fishermen (inured to a life of bold hazard and hardship) would offer valuable service in emergency was never doubted, but that the level of their gallantry should reach such heights, even those who knew them were hardly prepared to assume. And we were weak in our judgment, for their records held ample evidence by which we should have been able to predict a bravery in war action no less notable than their courage in the equally perilous ways of their trade. For a lifetime at war with the sea, wresting a precarious living from the grudging depths, their skill and resolution required no stimulus under the added stress of sea-warfare. In the fury of the channel gales, shipwreck and disaster called forth the same spirit of dogged endurance and elevating humanity that marks their new seafaring under arms. The countless instances of their service to vessels in distress, to torpedoed merchantmen and warships, in the records of strife, are but repetitions of their sea-conduct throughout the years of their trading. When Rozhdestvensky's panic-stricken gunlayers opened fire on the 'Gamecock' fleet on the Dogger, the story of that outrage was distinguished by the same heroism of the trawlermen that ennobles their diary to-day. When the _Crane_ was sinking, the crew of _Gull_, themselves suffering under fire, boarded her to rescue the survivors. . . . "When they got on board the _Crane_ they found the living members of the crew lying about injured. The vessel was in total darkness, and it was known that at any moment she might founder; yet Costello (the _Gull's_ boatswain) went below to the horrible little forecastle to bring up Leggatt's dead body. Smith (the second hand), who took charge of the _Crane_ when the skipper was killed, refused to leave her till every man had been taken off. Rea (the engineer) showed unyielding courage when, in spite of the fact that the little ship was actually foundering, he groped back to the engine-room, which was in total darkness, to reach the valves. The stokehold was flooded with water, and Rea could do nothing. He went on deck, where the skipper was lying dead, and all the survivors, except the boy, were wounded." In all its bearings, the comradely action of the _Gull_ was but a foreshadowing of _Gowan Lea's_ assistance to _Floandi_ in the raid by Austrian cruisers on the drifter line in the Adriatic. The circumstances were curiously alike--the actual occurrence, the individual deeds. We have Skipper Nichols refusing to leave until his wounded were embarked, and Engineman Mobbs groping (as Rea did) through the scalding steam of _Floandi's_ wrecked engine-room to reach the stokehold and draw the fires. Then, as in the Russians' sea-panic of October 1904, the fishermen (fighting seamen now) came under a sudden and murderous gunfire at close range. Overpowered by heavy armament, there was no flinching, no surrender. _Gowan Lea_ headed for the enemy with her one six-pounder spitting viciously. The issue was not considered--though Skipper Joseph Watt must have had no doubt that he was steering his drifter towards certain destruction. Her gun was quickly put out of action. Her funnel and wheelhouse were riddled and shot to pieces. Water made on her through shot-holes in the hull. On the gun-platform, her gunlayer struggled to repair the mechanism of the breech--his leg dangling and shattered. Shell-torn and incapable of further attack, she drifted out of the line of fire. Bad as was her own condition, there were others in worse plight. _Floandi_ had come under direct point-blank fire, and her decks were a shambles. Out of control--her main steam-pipe being shot through--seven dead or badly wounded, and only three remaining to work her, she was in dire need of assistance. Skipper Watt observed the distress of his sea-mate and steered _Gowan Lea_ down to her to offer the same brotherhood as of the _Gull_ to _Crane_. The analogy is peculiarly complete: the boarding, the succour to the wounded, the reverent handling of the dead. Not as a new spirit born of the stress of war, but as the outcome of an age-old tradition, Gowan Lea stood by. After four years of warfare at sea, serving under naval direction and discipline, one would have expected the fisherman sailing under the White Ensign to lose at least a certain measure of his former character--to have become a naval seaman in his habits of thought, in his actions, his outlook. Four years of constant service! A long term! He has come under a control that differs as poles apart from the free days of 'fleeting' and 'single boating.' He is set to service in unfamiliar waters and abnormal climates, but the habits of the old trade still cling to him. New gear comes to his hands--sweeps, depth-keepers, explosive nets, hydrophones, and paravanes--but he regards them all as adaptations to his fishing service. He is unchanged. He is still fishing; that his 'catch' may be a huge explosive monster capable of destroying a Dreadnought does not seem to have imposed a new turn to his thoughts. He is apart from the regular naval service. The influence of his familiar little ship, the association of his kindred shipmates, the technics of a common and unforgettable trade, have proved stronger than the prestige of a naval uniform. In his terms and way of speech, he draws no new farrago from his brassbound shipmate. Did not the skipper of the duty patrol hail _Aquitania_ on her approach to the Clyde booms and advise the captain? . . . 'Tak' yeer _bit boatie_ up atween thae twa trawlers!' The devotion and gallantry and humanity of the fishermen is not confined to the enlisted section who man the patrol craft and minesweepers. The regular trade, the old trade, works under the same difficulties and dangers that ever menaced the ingathering of the sea-fishery. Serving on the sea in certain areas, the older men and the very young still contrive to shoot the nets and down the trawls. Their contribution to the diminished food-supply of the country is not gained without loss; 'the price o' fish' is too often death or mutilation or suffering under bitter exposure in an open boat. The efforts of the enemy to stop our food-supply are directed with savage insistence towards reducing the rations drawn from the deeps of the sea; brutality and vengeful fury increase in intensity as the days pass and the indomitable fishermen return and return to their grounds. In August 1914, fast German cruisers and torpedo-boats raided our fleets on the Dogger Bank. Twenty fishing vessels were sunk, their crews captured. There was no killing. ". . . The sailors [of the torpedo-boat] gave us something to eat and drink, and we could talk and were pretty free," said the skipper of _Lobelia_. Later, on being taken ashore ". . . with German soldiers on each side of us, and the women and boys and girls shouting at us and running after us and pelting us, we were marched through the streets of Wilhelmshaven to a prison." Hardship, abuse! Now ridicule! ". . . The Germans stripped us of everything we had. . . . But they were not content with that--they disfigured us by cutting one half of the hair of our heads off and one half of the moustache, cropping close and leaving the other half on, making you as ugly as they could. . . . It was a nasty thing to do; but we made the best of it, and laughed at one another." Hardship, abuse, ridicule! The fishermen still served their trade at sea. Now, brutality! The third hand of _Boy Ernie_ details the callous precision of German methods in September 1915. The smack was unarmed. ". . . It was very heavy and deliberate fire. [There were two enemy submarines.] The shots . . . were coming on deck and going through the sails. We threw the boat overboard and tumbled into her. . . . I started sculling the boat away from the smack, all the time under fire; but the Germans were not content with firing shells at a helpless craft--they now turned a machine-gun on to defenceless fishermen in a boat on the open sea. . . . The boat was getting actually riddled by the machine-gun fire, and before I knew what was happening, I was struck by a bullet on the right thigh, and began to bleed dreadfully. . . . The smack was blown to pieces and went down. This was the work of one of the submarines--while she was sinking the smack the other was firing on us." Throughout all the malevolent and calculated campaign of destruction, the fishermen remain steadfast to their old traditions of humanity. When _Vanilla_ is torpedoed without warning and vanishes in a welter of broken gear, her sea-mate, _Fermo_, dodging a second torpedo, steams to the wreckage to rescue the survivors--but finds none. In a heavy gale, _Provident_ of Brixham risks her mast and gear, gybing to close the sinking pinnace of the torpedoed _Formidable_, and rescue the exhausted seventy-one men who crowded her. The instances of fisher help to merchantmen in peril are uncounted and uncountable. In the distant days when the Sea Services were classed apart, each in its own trade and section--working by a rule that admitted no co-partnery--we foreign traders had little to do with those whom (in our arrogance) we deemed the 'humble' fishermen. In the mists of the channel waters, we came upon them at their trawls or nets. Their floats and buoys obstructed our course; the small craft, heading up on all angles, confused the operation of a 'Rule of the Road.' Impatient of an alteration that took us miles from a direct course, we felt somewhat resentful of their presence on the sea-route. That they were gathering and loading a cargo under stress and difficulty that contrasted with _our_ easy stowage in the shelter of a dock or harbour, did not occur to us; they were obstructionists, blocking our speedy passage with their warps and nets and gear. Although most masters grudgingly steered clear, there were those in our ranks who elected to hold on through the fleets, unconcerned by the confusion and risk to the fishermen's gear that their passage would occasion. There were angry shouts and protests; the gear and nets were often the sole property of the fishermen; serious losses were sustained. At war, we have incurred debts. When peace comes and the seas are free again, we shall have memories of what we owe to the fishermen in all the varied services they have paid to us. The minesweepers toiling in the channels, that we may not meet sudden death; patrols riding out bitter weather in the open to warn us from danger, to succour and assist the remnants of our manning when a blow goes home. War has purged us of many old arrogant ways. When next we meet the fishing fleet at peaceful work in the channels, we shall recall the emotion and relief with which we sighted their friendly little hulls bearing down to protect us in a menaced seaway. We shall 'keep clear o' th' gear when th' nets is down.' [Illustration: SOUTHAMPTON WATER] VIII THE RATE OF EXCHANGE THE Bank of England official, who had been a close attendant on the bridge during the early part of the voyage, seems now to be reassured. We are nearing land again. Another day should see us safely berthed at New York, where--his trust discharged--a pleasant interval should open to him ere returning to England. The gold and securities on board are reason for his passage; he is with us as our official witness, should the activity of an enemy raider compel us to throw the millions overboard. Nothing has happened. The 'danger zone' has been passed without event. Stormy weather on the Grand Banks has given way to light airs and a smooth sea as we steer in to make our landfall. Together on the navigation bridge, we are discussing the shipment. ". . . It is the exchange, Captain," he says. "The exchange is against us. These huge war purchases in the States cannot be balanced by the moderate exports we are able to send over. When we left Liverpool the sovereign was worth four dollars, seventy-one cents in America. I don't know where it is going to end. We can't make securities. There must be a lim----" Drumming of the wireless telephone cuts in on his words. "Operator wishes to know if he can leave the 'phones, sir? Says he has to see you." The bridge messenger turns aside inquiringly, holding out the receiver of the telephone as a context to his words. The request, that would have aroused an instant disquiet six days ago, now appears trivial and normal. There may be receipts to be signed. Approaching port the operator will be completing his accounts. We are unconcerned and resume our conversation until he arrives. He is insistent that it cannot be due to atmospherics. "A queer business, sir. Thought it best to report instead of telephoning. Some station addressing a message to ABMV [all British merchant vessels], and another trying to jam it out. Can't get more than the prefix, when jamming begins. No, not atmospherics. I've taken ABMV, though distant, twice in this watch, and, looking up the junior's jottings for the last watch, I see he had traces. Whatever is jamming the message out is closer to us than the sender. I dunno what to make of it!" "You mean that a message from a land station to us is being interfered with, deliberately, from somewhere near at hand?" He produces the slip of his junior's scribbles. Among the jumble of noughts and crosses, there is certainly a hastily scrawled ABMV, then x's and x's. "What else, sir? At first I thought it was atmospherics--x's were fierce last watch--but x's can't happen that way twice running!" "All right! Carry on again. Let me know at once if anything further. Gear to be manned continuously from now on. Keep your junior at hand." [Illustration: 'OUT-BOATS' IN A MERCHANTMAN] A queer business! We trim the possibilities in our mind. It is now nearly dark. As we go, we should make Nantucket Lightship at daybreak; our usual landfall on the voyage. There is not much to work on. 'A message being sent, and some one making unusual efforts to prevent receipt.' A raider? It is now some months since _Kronprinz Wilhelm_ was driven into Norfolk; she cannot surely, have escaped internment. _Karlsruhe?_ Nothing has been heard of her for a long term. A submarine? Perhaps _Deutschland_, with his torpedo-tubes refitted and a gun mounted? He knows the way; he could carry oil enough to reach the coast, do a strafe, and sneak into a port for internment. . . . Figuring on the chart, measuring distance and course and speed, it comes to us that enemy action would best succeed off Nantucket or the Virginia Capes. We resolve to cut in between the two, to make the land below Atlantic City, and take advantage of territorial waters. If there is no serious intention behind the jamming of the wireless, there will be no great harm done--we shall only lose ten hours on the passage; if a raider is out, we shall, at least, be well off the expected route. We pass the orders. A quiet night. We are steering into the afterglow of a brilliant sunset. The mast and rigging stand out in clear black outline against lingering daylight as we swing south four points. The look-out aloft turns from his post and scans the wake curving to our sheer; anon, he wonders at the coming of a mate to share his watch. Passengers, on a stroll, note unusual movement about the boat-deck, where the hands are swinging out lifeboats and clearing the gear. As the carpenter and his mates go the rounds, screwing blinds to the ports and darkening ship, other passengers hurry up from below and join the groups on deck; an excitement is quickly evident. They had thought all danger over when, in thirty degrees west, we allowed them to discard the cumbersome life-jackets that they had worn since leaving the Mersey. And now--almost on the threshold of security and firm land--again the enervating restrictions and routine, the sinister preparations, the atmosphere of sudden danger. Rumours and alarms fly from lip to lip; we deem it best to publish that the wireless has heard the twitter of a strange bird. Before midnight, the bird is identified. Our theories and conjectures are set at rest. The operator, changing his wave-length suddenly from 600 to 300 metres, succeeds in taking a message. '_From Bermuda_'--of all places--'_to ABMV German armed submarine left Newport eighth stop take all precautions ends_.' A submarine! And we had thought the limits of their activity stopped at thirty degrees west. Even the Atlantic is not now broad enough! The definite message serves to clear our doubts. A submarine from Newport will certainly go down off Nantucket. Our course should now take us ninety miles south of that. There remains the measure of his activity. A fighting submarine that can navigate such a distance is new to us. His speed and armament are unknown. We can hardly gauge his movements by standards of the types we know. We are unarmed; our seventeen knots top speed may not be fast enough for an unknown super-submarine. Crowded as we are by civilian passengers, we cannot stand to gunfire. A hit will be sheer murder. It is a problem! We return to the deck and make three figures of that ninety miles. The pulse of the ship beats high in the thrust and tremor of the engines, now opened out to their utmost speed; the clean-cut bow wave breaks well aft, shewing level and unhindered progress. In the calm weather, the whirl of our black smoke hangs low astern, joining the sea and sky in a dense curtain; we are prompted by it to a wish for misty weather when day breaks--to make a good screen to our progress. Though dark, the night is clear. A weak moon stands in the east, shedding sufficient light to brighten the lift. We overhaul some west-bound vessels in our passage and warn them by signal. Two have already taken Bermuda's message and are alert, but one has no wireless, and is heading up across our course. We speak her; her lights go out quickly, and she turns south after us. Daybreak comes with the thin vapours of settled weather that may turn to a helpful haze under the warm sun. We zigzag in a wide S from the first grey half-light, for we are now due south of the Lightship. In the smooth glassy surface of the sea we have an aid to our best defence--the measure of our eyes. We note a novel vigilance in the watchkeepers, a suppressed anxiety that was not ours in the infinitely more dangerous waters of the channels. The unusual circumstance of zigzagging and straining look-out for a periscope almost in American waters has gripped us. Every speck of flotsam is scanned in apprehension. The far-thrown curl of our displacement spitting on the eddy of the zigzag, throws up a feather that calls for frequent scrutiny. We have no lack of unofficial assistance in our look-out. From early morning, the passengers are astir--each one entrammelled in a life-jacket that reminds them continually of danger. For the children, it is a new game--a source of merriment--but their elders are gravely concerned. Gazing constantly outboard and around, they add eyes to our muster. Every hour that passes without event seems to increase the tension; the size and numbers of enemy vessels grow with the day. A telegraph-cable ship at work is hailed as 'a raider in sight'--a Boston sea-tug, towing barges south, is taken for a supply-ship with submarines in tow. The wireless operator reports from time to time. The 'humming bird' (whoever he is) has ceased jamming. The air is full of call and counter-call. Halifax is working with an unknown sea-station--long messages in code. Coastal stations are joined in the 'mix-up.' Cape Cod is offering normal 'traffic' to the American steamer _St. Paul_, as though there was no word of anything happening within reach of the radio. It is all very perplexing. Perhaps the Bermuda message was a hoax; some 'neutral' youth on the coast may have been working an unofficial outfit, as had been done before. Anon, an intercepted message comes through. A Hollands steamer sends out '_S.O.S._ . . . _S.O.S._. . .' but gives no name or position. Then there is silence; nothing working, but distant mutterings from Arlington. Throughout the day we swing through calm seas, shying at each crazy angle of the zigzag in a turn that slows the measured beat of the engines. Night coming and the haze growing in intensity, we use the lead--sounding at frequent intervals--and note the lessening depth that leads us in to the land. At eight, we reach six fathoms--the limit of American territorial waters. It is with no disguised relief we turn north and steer a straight course. Although now less concerned with the possibility of enemy interference, we have anxiety enough in the navigation of a coastal area in hazy weather. We reduce speed. The mist has deepened to a vapour that hangs low in the direction of the shore. House lights glimmer here and there, but only by the lead are we able to keep our distance. A glow of light over Atlantic City shews itself mistily through a rift in the haze and gives an approximation of our latitude, but it is Barnegat's quick-flashing lighthouse beam that establishes our confidence and enables us to proceed at better speed. We shew no lights. For all we are in American waters, we have not forgotten _Gulflight_ and _Nebraskan_ and other international 'situations'; we look for no consideration from the enemy and preserve a keen look-out. Vessels pass us in the night bound south with their deck lights ablaze, but we stand on up the coast with not a glimmer to show our presence. Turning wide out to the shoal-water off Navesink, we sight the pilot steamer lying to. We switch on all lights and steer towards her. It is not often one finds the New York pilots unready, but our sudden arrival has taken them aback. We have to wait. Daybreak is creeping in when the yawl comes alongside with our man. He is an old Swedish-American whom we had long suspected of pro-German leanings, but the relief and enthusiasm on his honest old face is undisguised. "Gott! I am glat to see yo, Cabtin," he calls. "Dere vas a rumour dat yo vas down too! Yoost now, ven yo signal de name of de ship, I vas glat--glat!" He is full of his news; there are rumours and rumours. 'The White Star mailboat is down,' 'a Prince liner is overdue,' 'there are fears for a Lamport and Holt boat.' In view of our safe arrival, he is prepared to discount the rumours. What is certain is that U 53 has arrived in these waters, and has already sunk six large ships off Nantucket. * * * * * A day later we turn to the commercial pages of the _New York Herald_. Our arrival is reported, and it seems that the sovereign is now worth $4.72 1/16! IX INDEPENDENT SAILINGS UNTIL nearly three years of war had gone on, we sailed independently as 'single' ships, setting our speeds and courses and conforming only to the general route instructions of the Admiralty. The submarine menace did not come upon us in a sudden intensity. Its operation was gradually unfolded and counter-measures were as methodically advanced to meet it. The earliest precaution took the form of a wide separation of the ships, branching the sea-routes apart on the sound theory that submarines would have voyaging to do to reach their victims. While this was a plan of value on the high seas, it could not be pursued in the narrower waters of the channels. Destroyers in sufficient numbers not being available to patrol these waters, fishing craft--trawlers and drifters--were commissioned to that service. Being of moderate speed, their activities were not devoted to a mass operation, by which they could group the merchantmen together for protection. The custom was still to separate them as widely as possible, each zigzagging on her own plan. Until the convoy system was established, measures for our protection did not take the form of naval escorts sailing in our company: such vessels were only provided for transports or for ships on military service: vessels on commercial voyages were largely left to their own resources when clear of harbour limits. [Illustration: FIREMEN STANDING BY TO RELIEVE THE WATCH] That all sea-going vessels should carry a wireless installation was one of the first measures enforced by Admiralty. The magnificent resources of the Marconi Company, though strained, were equal to the task. There was a life-labour alone in the technical education of their operators, but they drilled the essentials of their practice into landward youths in a few months--blessed them with a probationer's licence--and sent them to sea. It is idle to speculate on what we could have done without this communication with the beach: it is inconceivable that we could have served the sea as we have done. Throughout the length of channel waters, we were constantly in visual touch with the patrols, but in the more open seas we relied on the wireless to keep us informed of enemy activities. At first, we were lavish in its use. The air was scored by messages--'back chat' was indulged in by the operators. An _S.O.S._ (and they were frequent) was instant signal for a confusion of inquiries--a battery of call and counter call--that often prevented the ready succour of a vessel in distress. We grew wiser. We put a seal on the switch. Regulations came into force to restrain unnecessary 'sparking'; we sat in to listen and record, and only to speak when we were spoken to. Codes were issued by the Admiralty for use at sea. Their early cryptogram was easily decoded by friend and enemy alike. Knowing that certain words would assuredly be embodied in the text of a message (words such as, _from_--_latitude_--_report_--_submarine_--_master_), it was not difficult to decipher a code of alphabetical sequence. There were famous stories of traitors and spies, but our authoritative simplicity was responsible for the occasional leakage of information. At this date, 1915-16, wireless position-detectors came into use by the enemy. A spark-group, repeated after an interval, could give a fair approximation of distance and course and speed. More than ever it was necessary to maintain silence when at sea. Withal, the air was still in strong voice. At regular periods the great longshore radios threw out war warnings to guide us in a choice of routes and warn us away from mined areas. Patrols and war craft kept up an incessant, linking report. Distress signals hissed into the atmosphere in urgent sibilance, then faltered and died away. On occasion, the high note of a _Telefunken_ set invited a revealing confidence that would lead us, 'chicky-chicky,' to the block. We were well served by Marconi. Extension of the power of enemy submarines brought new practice to our seafaring. We had made the most of a passage by the land, steering so close that the workers in the fields paused in their toil and waved us on; but the new under-water craft crept in as close, and mined the fairways. We were ordered to open sea again, to steer the shortest course by which we could reach a depth of water that could not be mined. Zigzag progress now assumed the importance that was ever its right. It had been but cursorily maintained. The 'shortest distance between two points' had, for so long, been our rule that many masters were unwilling to steer in tangents. On passage in the more open sea, they were soon converted to a belief in the efficacy of a crazy course. Statistics of our losses proved the virtue of the tangent: of a group of six vessels sunk in a certain area only one--a very slow vessel--was torpedoed while maintaining a zigzag. Extracts from the diary of a captured submarine commander were circulated among us, giving ground for our confidence, in the frequent admissions of failure--"owing to a sudden and unexpected alteration of course." Still, we were unarmed. If, by zigzag and a keen look-out, we were fortunate in evading torpedo attack, the submarine had by now mounted a surface armament, and we were exposed to another equally deadly offence. For our protection, Admiralty placed a new type of warship on the routes approaching the channels. Built originally for duty as minesweepers, the sloops were faster and more heavily armed than the drifters. They patrolled in a chain of five or six over the routes that we were instructed to use. During the daylight hours we were rarely out of sight of one or other of the vessels forming the chain. Our route orders were framed towards a definite point of departure into the high seas when darkness came. There, the patrol of the sloops ended: we had the hours of the night to make our offing and, by daybreak again, were assumed to be clear of the 'danger zone.' But the 'danger zone' was being extended swiftly; it was not always possible to traverse the area in the dark hours of a night: only the fast liners could stretch out a speed that would serve. Profiting by experience that was constantly growing, the _Reichsmarineamt_ constructed larger submarines capable of remaining long at sea, and of operating in ocean areas that could not adequately be patrolled. Twelve, fifteen--then twenty degrees of longitude marked their activity advancing to the westward: they went south to thirty-five: in time the Mediterranean became a field for their efforts. Gunfire being the least expensive, they relied on their deck armament to destroy unarmed shipping. The patrols were but rarely in sight; the submarine became a surface destroyer. There was no necessity for submergence on the ocean routes: under-water tactics were held in reserve for use against fast ships--the slower merchantmen were brought-to in a contest that was wholly in favour of the U-boat. In a heavy Atlantic gale, _Cabotia_ was sunk by gunfire, 120 miles from land. She had not the speed to escape. Despite the heavy seas that swept over the submarine and all but washed the gunner from the deck, the enemy was able to keep up a galling fire that ultimately forced the master to abandon his ship. _Virginia_ was fired upon at midnight when steering for the Cerigo Channel. Notwithstanding the courage of Captain Coverley, who remained on board to the last, there could be but one end to the contest. _Virginia_ was sunk. A strong ship; the enemy had to expend two of his torpedoes to destroy her. Against such attacks only one measure could be advocated--the measure we had for so long been demanding. It was impossible to patrol adequately all the areas of our voyaging. Guns were served to us and we derived a confidence that the enemy quickly appreciated. We did not expect wholly to reduce his surface action, but we could and did expose him to the risk he had come so far out to sea to avoid. On countless occasions our new armament had effect in keeping him to his depths, with the consequent waste of his mobile battery power. Even in gun action he could no longer impose his own speed power on a slow ship. Under conditions that he judged favourable to his gunnery, the submarine commander still exercised his ordnance--usually after a torpedo had failed to reach its mark. Many of the hazards were against us, but our weapons brought the contest to a less unequal balance. If we did present the larger target, we had--in our steady emplacement--a better platform from which to direct our fire. From the first it was a competition of range and calibre. Six-pounders led to twelves; these in turn gave way to 4.7's. Anon, the enemy mounted a heavier weapon, to which we replied by a new type of 4-inch, sighted to 13,000 yards. Thus armed and equipped, we were in better condition to meet the enemy in our independent sailings. He was again obliged largely to return to the use of his torpedoes, with all the maze of under-water approach that that form of attack involved. If outranged in a surface action, we had our smoke-producing apparatus to set up a screen to his shell-fire, and that form of defence had the added value of forcing him to proceed at a high and uneconomical speed to press an attack. Some of our gun actions resulted in destruction of a sea-pest, but all--however unsuccessful--contributed to lessen his power of offence. Every torpedo fired, every hour of submergence, every knot of speed expended in a chase, was so far a victory for us as to hasten the date when he would be obliged to head back to his base. His chances of survival in that passage through the patrols and the nets and mines could not be considered as good. [Illustration: QUEEN'S DOCK, GLASGOW] X BATTLEDORE AND SHUTTLECOCK "_All vessels are prohibited from approaching within four miles of Rathlin Island between sunset and sunrise_" IN view of Admiralty instructions, we are 'proceeding as requisite'--turning circles, dodging between Tor Point and Garron Head--and awaiting daybreak to make a passage through Rathlin Sound. Steering south from the Clyde, we had reached Skullmartin when the wireless halted us. Enemy activity off the south coast of Ireland had become intensified, and all traffic from west-coast ports was ordered to proceed through the North Channel. In groups and singles, the ships from Liverpool and the Bristol Channel join us, and we make a busy channel-way of the usually deserted coastal waters. We show no lights, but the moon-ray reveals us, sharply defined, as we pass and repass on the lines of our courses. We keep well within the curve of the coast until the light grows in the east, then turn finally to the north. The sun comes up as we reach Fair Head, and we stand on towards the entrance of the Sound. In the first hour of official clearance, the North Channel is busy with the traffic. Outside as well as within, ships have been gathering in anticipation of Admiralty sunrise. The seaway over by the mainland shore is scored and lined by passage of the inward-bound vessels, all pressing on at their best speed to make their ports before nightfall. A strong ebb tide runs through, favouring our company of outward-bounders. We swing past Rue Point in a rip and whirl that gives the helmsman cause for concern, cross the bight of the Bay at a speed our builders never contemplated, and round the west end of the Island before the sun has risen high. It is fine weather in the Atlantic. Only the slight heave of an under-running swell, and the rips and overfalls of the tide, mark the smooth surface of the sea: the light north airs that come and go have no strength to ruffle the glassy patches. Everything promises well for speedy progress. The engines are opened out to their utmost capacity. Already we have drawn ahead of the press of shipping that marked time with us on the other side of the channel. Our only peer, a large Leyland liner, has opened out abeam of us and the whirl of black smoke at his funnel-tip shows that he is prepared to make and keep the pace. 'To proceed at such a time as to reach 56° 40' North, 11° West, by nightfall'--is the reading of our new route orders. We shall have need of the favour of the elements if we are to reel off 200 miles between now and 10 p.m. Anon, we pass Oversay and the Rhynns of Islay and head for a horizon that has no blue mountain-line to break the level thread of it. Our sea-mates of the morning are hull down behind us--the slower vessels already turning west on the inner arms of the fan formation that is devised to keep us widely separated in the 'danger area.' Only the Leyland boat remains with us. We steer on a similar mean course, but the angles of our independent zigzags make our progress irregular in company. At times we sheer a mile or more apart, then close perceptibly to crossing courses. She has perhaps the better speed, but her stoking is irregular. Drawing ahead for a term, she shows us her broad sternwash in a flurry of disturbed water; then comes the cleaning of the fires--we pull up and regain a station on her beam. So, till afternoon, we keep in company--pressing through the calm seas at a speed that augurs well for our timely arrival in 11° West. We sight few vessels. A lone drifter on patrol speaks us and reports no enemy sighted in the area: an auxiliary cruiser with a destroyer escorting her passes south on the rim of the landward horizon. A drift of smoke astern of us hangs in the clear air, then resolves to a fast Cunarder that speedily overhauls and passes us. As though impressed by the mail-boat's progress, our sea-mate puts a spurt on and maintains a better speed than any she has shown since morning. She draws ahead and we are left with clear water to exercise the cantrips of our zigzag. An _allo_ is intercepted by the wireless in the dog-watch. (We have coined a new word to report an enemy submarine in sight, a word that cannot offer a key to our codes.) It comes from the Cunarder, now out of sight ahead. We figure the radius on the chart, and bear off six points on a new course to keep well clear of the area. The Leyland liner is by now well ahead and we note she has turned to steer west. There is a slight difference in our courses and we draw together again as we steam on. The wireless operator now reports that a vessel near at hand has acknowledged the Cunarder's _allo_. Shortly a man-o'-war sloop appears in sight and passes north at high speed, steering towards the position we are avoiding. The second officer keeps a keen look-out. He has had bitter experience of the power of an enemy submarine and is anxiously desirous that it should not be repeated. A 'check' on the distant sea-line (that we had taken for the peak of a drifter's mizen) draws his eye. He reports a submarine in sight--broad on the port bow. The circle of our telescope shows the clean-cut horizon ruling a thread on the monotint of sea and sky. Sweeping the round, a grey pinnacle leaps into the field of view. It is over-distant for ready recognition. Only by close scrutiny, observing a hair-line that rises and falls on either side of the grey upstanding point, are we able to recognize our enemy. He is pressing on at full speed, trusting to our casual look-out, that he may secure a favourable position to submerge and attack. Our fine confidence with which we have anticipated such a meeting gives place to a more sober mood. Though not yet in actual danger, there is the former _allo_ to be thought of--the possibilities of a combination. Quick on recognition, we alter course, steering to the north again. The gun, already manned, is brought to the 'ready,' and the intermittent crackle of the wireless sends out an urgent warning. The Leyland steamer starts away at first sight of our signals: ahead, grey smoke on the horizon marks where the patrol sloop has gone hull-down. A spurt of flame throws out from the distant submarine. He has noted our sudden alteration of course and knows that he has now no prospect of reaching torpedo range unobserved. His shell falls short by about a thousand yards. We reply immediately at our extreme elevation, but cannot reach him. The next exchange is closer--he is evidently overhauling us at speed. Mindful of our limited fifty rounds, we telephone to the gun-layer to reserve his fire until he has better prospect of a hit. Two shots to our one; the enemy persists though he does not now seem to be closing the range. Our seventh shot pitches close to him, and ricochets. There is a burst of flame on his deck--whether from his gun or the impact of our shell we shall never know; when the spume and spray fall away he has dived. Suddenly, it is recalled to us that we have been, for over half an hour, steering into the radius of the Cunarder's _allo_. The patrol sloop has turned to close us and is rapidly approaching. A decision has quickly to be made. If we stand on to keep outside torpedo range of our late antagonist, we may blunder into the sights of number two. North and east and west are equally dangerous: we may turn south-east, but our course is for the open sea. The sloop sheers round our stern and thunders up alongside. Receiving our information, her helm goes over and she swings out to investigate the area we have come from. We decide to steer to the north-west as the shortest way to the open sea. We have the luck of the cast. As we ease helm to our new course, the ship jars and vibrates--a thundering explosive report comes to our ears. The Leyland liner close on our starboard quarter has taken a torpedo and lies over under a cloud of spume and debris. XI ON SIGNALS AND WIRELESS FOR war conditions our methods and practice of signalling were woefully deficient. In sailing-ship days the code was good enough; we had no need for Morse and semaphore. We had time to pick and choose our signals and send them to the masthead in a gaudy show of reds and blues and yellows. Our communications, in the main, were brief and stereotyped. "What ship? Where from? How many days out? Where bound? Good-bye--a pleasant passage!" Occasionally there was a reference to a coil of rope or a tierce of beef, but these were garrulous fellows. The ensign was dipped. We had 'spoken'; we would be reported 'all well!' Good enough! There were winches to clean and paint, bulwarks to be chipped and scaled, that new poop 'dodger' to be cut and sewn. "Hurry up, there, you sodgerin' young idlers! Put the damned flags in the locker, and get on with the _work_!" With steam and speed and dispatch increasing, we found need for a quicker and more instant form of signal correspondence. New queries and subjects for report grew on us, and we had to clip and abbreviate and shorthand our methods to meet the lessening flag-sight of a passing ship. We altered the Code of Signals, adding vowels to our flag alphabet. We cut out phrases like 'topgallant studding sail boom' and 'main spencer sheet blocks,' and introduced 'fiddley gratings' and 'foo-foo valve.' Even with all our trimming, the book was tiresome and inadequate. We began to fumble with Morse and semaphore, with flashlights and wig-wags and hand-flags. We did it without a proper system. As a titbit to our other 'snippings,' medicine, the Prayer Book, the law, ship's business, the breeches buoy, ship-cookery! Fooling about with flags and tappers and that, was all very well for the watch below, but there was _work_ to be done--the binnacles to be polished, the sacred _suji-mudji_ to be slapped on and washed off! Hesitating and slipshod and inexact as we were, at least we made, of our own volition, a start; a start that might, under proper and specialized direction, have made an efficient and accurate addition to the sum of our sea-lore. But we were wedded to titbits. Late on the tide, as usual, the Board of Trade woke up to what was going on. They added a 'piece' to our lessons, without thought or worry as to the provision of facilities for right instruction. We crammed hard for a few days, fired our shot at the right moment, and forgot all about it. [Illustration: THE BRIDGE-BOY REPAIRING FLAGS] Withal, in our own amending way, we were enthusiastic. We learned the trick of _Ak_ and _Beer_ and _Tok_ and _Pip_. We slapped messages at one another (in the dog-watches), in many of which a guess was as good a translation as any. Our efforts received tolerating and amused recognition from naval officers (secure in possession of scores of highly trained signal ratings). If we came, by chance, across an affable British warship, she would perhaps masthead an E (exercise), to show that there was no ill-feeling. Then was the time to turn out our star man, usually the junior-est officer, and set him up to show that we were not such duffers, after all! Alas! The handicaps that came against us! The muddled backgrounds (camouflage, as ever was!), the fatal backthought to a guess at the last word! The call and interfering counter-call from reader to writer, and writer to reader, and, finally, the sad admission--an inevitable _Eye_, _emmer_, _eye_ (I.M.I.--please repeat), when our scrawl and jumble of conjectural letters would not make sense! We have yet a mortifying memory of such an incident, in which a distant signalman spelt out to us, clearly and distinctly, "_Do you speak English?_" Under the stress of war we have improved. Fear for the loss of important information has spurred us to keener appreciation. If you promise not to flirt the flags backhanded (a most damnably annoying habit of superior, _flic-flac_ Navy men) we can read you in at ten or twelve words a minute. For single-ship work, that was good enough; if we had a press of signalling to attend, we could make up for our busy time in leisurely intervals. But convoy altered that. In the Naval Service a signalman has nothing whatever to do in the wide world but attend to signals. It is his only job: a highly trained speciality. With us the demands of ship work on our bare minimum crews do not allow of a duty signaller; he must bear a hand with the rest to straighten out the day's work. In convoy, with signals flying around like crows at the harvest, we found our way of it unworkable. It resolved itself to what used to be called a 'grand rally' in pantomime--all hands on the job, and the officer of the watch neglecting a keen look-out to see that note of the message was kept properly. The naval authorities took counsel. The experiment had been a 'try on,' in which they (with their large staff of special signalmen) had assessed our ability as greater than their own! It was decided to train signalmen--R.N.V.R.--for our service. Pending their formation and development, we were given skilled assistance from the crews of our ocean escorts. But for our gun ratings, and they mostly R.N.R., we had no experience of the regular Navy man in our muster. He spun a bit, trimming the grass, before he found rest and a level. With us only for a voyage, we did not get to know him very well, but in all he was competent enough. One we had, from H.M.S. _Ber--Sharpset_, Private Henry Artful, R.M.L.I. Drouthy, perhaps, but a good hand. At the end of sailing day, when the flags were made up and stowed, he came on the bridge. "Fine night, sir!" We assented, curiously; democratic and all as we are, it is rather unusual for our men to be so--so sociable. "Larst capt'in I wos with, sir, 'e allus gimme a drink after th' flag wos stowed." We stared, incredulous. "What! Do you say the captain of _Sharpset_ gave you a drink when your work was done?" He started in affright. "Not the capt'in o' _Sharpset_, sir! Oh no, sir!--Gawd!--No! Th' capt'in o' th' larst merchant ship wot I wos signallin' in!" His horror, genuine and unconcealed, at our suggestion of such an unheard-of transaction, gave illustration alike of the discipline in His Majesty's ships and, sadly, the lack of it in ours. In time our quickly trained R.N.V.R.'s joined. They came from Crystal Palace, these new shipmates. Clean fellows--smart. Bacon-curers, Cambridge men, lawyers, shopmen, clerks, haberdashers--trimmed and able and willing to carry on, and lacking only a little ship practice, and a turn of sea-legs, to fit them for a gallant part in delivering the goods. With their coming we are introduced to a line of longshore life that had escaped us. There is talk and ado of metropolitan habits and styles, of 'Maudlen' and high life, of music scores, the latest revue, the quips of the music-halls. ("When Pa--says--_turn_" is now the correct aside, when Commodore gives executive for a new angle on the zigzag!) At the first we were somewhat concerned at the apparent 'idleness' of our signalman. He was on our books for but one employment--the business of flags and signals. In intervals of his special duties he made an odd picture on the bridge of a merchant ship--a man without a 'job.' The firemen, on deck to trim ventilators, would take a peep at him as at some strange alien; seamen, passing fore and aft on their reliefs, would nod confidently. "Still diggin' wet sand, mate? . . . Wish I 'ad your job!" There were days when he was busy enough--'windmilling' with the hand-flags, or passing hours in hoist and rehoist when Commodore was sharpening the convoy to a precision in manoeuvre, but on open sea his day was not unduly crowded. There were odd hours of 'stand-by' under screen of the weather-cloth, intervals of leisure which he might use as he liked, provided he kept a ready ear for the watch officer's call. Reading was usual. In this his taste was catholic. _Tit-Bits_ and _My Dream Novelettes_ found favour; one had back numbers of the _Surveyor and Municipal and County Engineer_, old volumes of _Good Words_ from the Bethel box found a way to the bridge; we saw a pocket volume of Greek verse that belonged to the bold lad who altered our signalled 'will' to 'shall'! For all his leisured occupation he was quick enough when the call of "_Signals_" brought him to business. His concentration on the speciality of the flags brought an accuracy to our somewhat haphazard system of signalling. We benefited in more than his immediate work by promoting his instruction of our young seamen. Spurred, perhaps, by the knowledge of our quondam haberdasher's efficiency, the boys improved rapidly under his tuition. We paid a modest bonus on results. We are looking forward. We shall not have our duty signalman with us when there is 'peace bacon' to be cured. Another new shipmate who has signed with us is the wireless operator, the lieutenant of Signor Marconi, our gallant _salvator_ in the war at sea. If we may claim for our sea-service a foremost place in national defence, it is only by grace of our wireless we register a demand. Without it, we were undone. No other system of communication would have served us in combat with the submarine; _spurlos versenkt_, without possibility of discovery, would have been the triumph of the enemy. If to one man we seamen owe a debt unpayable, Marconi holds the bond. Unthinking, we did not accept our new shipmate with enthusiasm. Before the war he could be found on the lordly liners, tapping out all sorts of messages, from the picture-post-card-like greetings of extravagant passengers to the deathless story of _Titanic_ and _Volturno_. We looked upon him as a luxury, only suited to the large passenger vessels. We could see no important work for him in the cargo-carriers; we could get on very well without a telegraph to the beach. A week of war was sufficient to alter our views; we were anxious to have him sign with us. Although he is now an important member of the crew, his reception at first was none too cordial. The apparent ease and comfort of his office rankled in contrast to the rigours of the bridge and the hardships of the engine-room. His duties--specialized to one operation--we deemed unfairly light in comparison with our jack-of-all-trades routine. In port, he was a lordling--no man his master--able to come and go as the mood took him. Frankly, we were jealous. Who was this to come among us with the airs of a full-blown officer, and yet not a dog-watch at sea? Messed in the cabin too, and strutted about the decks with his hands in his pockets, as bold and unconcerned as any first-class passenger! We were puzzled to place him. He talked airily of ohms and static leaks, ampere-hours and anchor-gaps, and yet, in an unguarded moment, had he not told us of his experiences in a Manchester broker's office, that could have been no more than six months ago? The airs of him! Absurd assumption of an official confidence between the Old Man and himself, as if _he_ had the weight of the ship's safety on his narrow shoulders! As for his baby-brother assistant--that kid with the rosy cheeks--everybody knows that all he does is to screw up his 'jimmy fixin's' and sit down good and comfortable to read "The Rosary," with his dam mufflers on his ears! _Huh!_ But we are wiser now! Here is a text for our conversion. It is a record of a wireless conversation between a merchantman attacked and a British destroyer steaming to her assistance from somewhere out of sight. "Are you torpedoed?" "Not yet. . . . Shots in plenty hitting. Several wounded. Shrapnel, I believe. Broken glass all round me." "Keep men below. Stick it, old man!" "Yes, you bet. Say, the place stinks of gunpowder. Am lying on the floor. . . . I have had to leave 'phones. My gear beginning to fly around with concussion. . . . Captain is dead. . . ."--an interval--"Submarine has dived! Submarine has dived!" Yes, we are wiser now! We admit him to full fellowship at sea. And on land, too! We admit him the right to trip it in Kingsway or the Strand, with his kid gloves, and his notebook, and his neat uniform, for his record has shown that it does not require a four-years' apprenticeship to build up a stout heart; that on his 'jimmy fixin's' and their proper working depends a large measure of our safety; and if the crack does come and the air is thick with hurtling debris, broken water and acrid smoke, our first look will be aloft to see if his aerial still stands. We do him and baby brother the honour that we shall not concern ourselves to wonder whether they be ready at their posts! [Illustration: A TRANSPORT EMBARKING TROOPS FOR FRANCE] XII TRANSPORT SERVICES THE first State control of the merchants' ships began with the transports employed to convey the Expeditionary Force to France in the early days of August 1914. Vessels of all sizes and classes were commandeered at the dockside to serve in the emergency. The comparatively short distance across the channels did not call for elaborate preparation and refitment: the times would admit of no delay. Ships on the point of sailing on their trading voyages were held in dock, their cargo discharged in quantity to make space for troops and their equipment. Lining-up on the quays and in the littered dock-sheds, troops awaited the stoppage of unloading operations. With the last sling of the 'tween-deck lading passed to the shore, they marched on board. As the tide served, the vessels steamed out of dock and turned, away from their normal routes, towards the coast of France. To serve as ballast weight, the stowage of cargo in the lower holds was frequently left in place for the term of the vessel's troop service. Months, perhaps a year later, the merchandise arrived at its destination. Consignees would wonder at its tardy delivery--they could see no record of its itinerary as shewn by the bills of lading, unless they read into the fine prefix--'War: the King's Enemies: restraints of Rulers and Princes'--the romance of its voyaging with the heroes of Mons. To transport the overseas troops from India and Canada and Australia, different measures were necessary. The ships requisitioned for this service had to be specially fitted for the longer voyage. The State was lavish and extravagant under the sudden pressure of events. The many-handed control at the ports made for an upheaval and dislocation of shipyard labour that did not hasten the urgent dispatch of the vessels. The hysteria of the times gave excuse for a squandering of valuable ship-tonnage that was without parallel. Large liners, already fitted for carriage of passengers, were employed as prison and internment ships. Curious situations arose in the disposal of others. At the north end, a large vessel might suddenly be requisitioned and taken from her trade--with all the consequent confusion and relay; by day and night the work of fitting her would go on. South, a vessel of similar size and build might be found, having her troop-fittings removed, in preparation for an ordinary trading voyage. Still, if the end justifies the means, the ultimate results were not without credit. The garrison troops from Malta and Egypt and Gibraltar and South Africa were moved with a celerity that is unexampled; a huge contingent from India was placed on the field in record time. A convoy of thirty-one merchantmen brought Canadian arms to our assistance: Australians, in thirty-six ships, crossed the Indian Ocean to take up station in Egypt. The unsubsidized and singular enterprise of the merchants was proving its worth: as vital to the success of our cause as the great war fleet, the merchants' ships aided to stem the onrush in France and Flanders. Considerations of economy followed upon the excited measures with which the first transport of available troops was effected. In the period of training and preparation for the long offensive, the Transport Department had opportunity to organize their work on less stressful lines. It was well that there was breathing-space at this juncture. Enemy interference, that had so far been almost wholly a surface threat to our communications, grew rapidly to a serious menace from under water. The engagement and organization of naval protection underwent an immediate revisal. Heavily armed cruisers and battleships could afford little protection against the activity of the German submarines, now at large in waters that we had thought were overdistant for their peculiar manoeuvres. Destroyers and swift light craft were needed to sail with the transports. The landing at Gallipoli, under the guns of the enemy, was a triumph for the Transport Service. In the organization and disposal of the ships, the control and undertaking that placed them in sufficient numbers in condition for their desperate venture, the Department redeemed any earlier miscalculations. The efficient service of the merchant masters and seamen was equally notable. Under heavy fire from the batteries on shore they carried out the instructions given to them in a manner that was "astonishingly accurate" and impressed even the firebrands of the naval service. Strange duties fell to the merchant seamen on that day. Compelled by the heavy draught of their ships to remain passive spectators of the deeds of heroism on the beach, they saw ". . . whole groups swept down like corn before a reaper, and to realize that among these groups were men who only a short time before had bid us good-bye with a smile on their lips, was a bitter experience. "Our vessel was used to re-embark the wounded, and we stood close inshore to make the work of boating them off less hazardous. We had three doctors on board, but no nurses or orderlies, and the wounded were being brought on board in hundreds, so it was a relief to us to doff our coats and lend a hand. We had to bury the dead in batches; officers and men were consigned to the deep together. On one occasion the number was exceptional, and the captain broke down while reading the service. . . ." It was surely a bond of real brotherhood that brought the shattered remnants of the complement she had landed earlier in the day to meet their last discharge at the hands of the troopship's seamen--their committal to the deep at the broken words of the vessel's master. While the transport of troops in the Channel and the narrow seas was not, at any time, seriously interfered with, the movements of the larger ocean transports were not conducted without loss. _Royal Edward_ was the first transport to be torpedoed. She went down with the sacrifice of over a thousand lives. The power of the submarine had been over-lightly estimated by the authorities: measures of protection were inadequate. Improved U-boats were, by now, operating in the Mediterranean, and their commanders had quickly acquired a confidence in their power. More destroyers were required to escort the troopships. By a rearrangement of forces a more efficient measure of naval protection was assured. Although the provision of a swift escort did not always prevent the destruction of ships, the loss of life on the occasion of the sinking of a transport was sensibly reduced by the presence of accompanying destroyers. The skill and high gallantry of their commanders was largely instrumental in averting complete and terrible disaster. As the numbers of ships were reduced by enemy action there came the need to pack the remaining vessels to a point of overloading. Boat equipment on the ships could not be other than inadequate when the certified complement of passengers was exceeded by 100 per cent. In any case, the havoc of a torpedo left little time to put the huge numbers of men afloat. With no thought of their own hazard--bringing up alongside a torpedoed vessel and abandoning the safeguard of their speed and manoeuvring power--the destroyer men accepted all risks in an effort to bring at least the manning of their charge to port. Every casualty added grim experience to the sum of our resources in avoiding a great death-roll. Life-belts that we had thought efficient were proved faulty of adjustment and were condemned: methods of boat-lowering were altered to meet the danger of a sudden list: the run of gangway and passage to the life-apparatus was cleared of impediment. When on a passage every precaution that could be taken towards a ready alert was insisted upon. Despite the manly grumbling of the very young military officers on board, certain irksome regulations were enforced. Life-belts had to be worn continuously; troops were only allowed below decks at stated hours; systems of drill, constantly carried through, left little leisure for the officers and men. Although no formal drill can wholly meet the abnormal circumstances of the new sea-casualty, we left nothing undone to prepare for eventualities. That our efforts were not useless was evident from the comparatively small loss of life that has resulted from late transport disasters. The system of escort varies largely in the different seas. Homeward from Canada and, latterly, from the United States the troopships are formed in large convoys under the ocean escort of a cruiser. On arrival at a position in the Atlantic within working distance of the destroyers' range of steaming, the convoy is met by a flotilla of fast destroyers who escort the ships to port. For transport work in the Mediterranean no such arrangement could be operated. Every sea-mile of the great expanse is equally a danger zone. Usually, vessels of moderate speed are accompanied by sloops or armed drifters, but the fast troopships require destroyers for their protection. The long courses call for relays, as the destroyers cannot carry sufficient fuel. Marseilles to Malta, Malta to Suda Bay, Suda Bay to Salonika--a familiar voyage of three stages--required the services of no less than five destroyers. The numbers of our escorting craft were limited: it called for keen foresight on the part of the Naval Staff and unwearying sea-service on that of the war craft to fit their resources to our demands. [Illustration: TRANSPORTS IN SOUTHAMPTON DOCKS] In the narrow seas, with the patrols more numerous and closely linked, the short-voyage transports proceed on a time-table of sailings that keeps them constantly in touch with armed assistance. The vessels are mostly of light draught and high speed. Whilom railway and pleasure craft, they make their voyages with the exactitude of the rail-connections they served in the peaceful days. Although many of them are built and maintained (and certificated by the Board of Trade) for smooth-water limits only, the emergency of the times has given opportunity of proof that their seaworthy qualities are underestimated by the authorities. The high gales and dangerous short seas of the Channel are no deterrent to their voyages; under the pressure of the continual call for reinforcements on the Western Front, and serving the line of route from England to the Continent, to Marseilles and beyond, they stand no hindrance. They are specially the objects of enemy attention. Their high speed and rapid turning power enables them to run moderately free of torpedo attack--though the attempts to sink them by this weapon are frequent enough--but in the German sea-mines they have a menace that cannot so readily be evaded. Many have fallen victims to this danger, but the ready succour of the patrols has prevented heavy loss of life. Though armed for defence, they have not had many opportunities for gun action. Their keen stems are weapon enough, as Captain Keith considered when he drove _Queen Alexandra_ at full speed into an enemy submarine, sinking him, and nipping a piece of his shorn hull for trophy. Southampton is the principal base for the smaller transports. Large vessels--the _Olympic_ and her sisters--come and go from the port, but it is by the quick turns of the smaller vessels that the huge traffic of the base is cleared. Tramping through the streets of the ancient town to turn in at the dock gates, company after company of troops file down the quayside to embark on the great adventure. The small craft are berthed at the seaward end of the docks, and the drifting white feathers at their funnel-tips marks steam up in readiness for departure. The drab-grey of their hulls and decks is quickly lined by ochre tint of khaki uniforms. There is no halt to the long lines of marching men, save on the turn of the stream to another gangway. By long practice, the Naval Transport Staff and the embarkation officers have brought their duties to a finished routine. There is not here the muster, the enumeration, the interminable long-drawn march and counter-march on the wharf-side, that is the case with the larger ocean transports. Crossing the gangway, carrying pack and equipment, the troops settle down on the decks in a closely packed mass. Anon, with no undue advertisement, the transports unmoor from the quay and steam down Southampton Water. Off St. Helens, the night covers them and they steal out swiftly on the Channel crossing. INTERLUDE BUT for the flat-topped dwellings, the domes and minarets, of the town that stands in the alluvial valley, Suda Bay is not unlike a Highland loch in its loneliness and rugged grandeur. The high surrounding mountains, the lofty snow-capped summit of Psiloriti standing up in the east, the bare hill-side sloping to the water with no wooded country to break the expanse of rock and heath, the lone roadway by the fringe of the sea that leads to the wilds, are all in likeness to the prospect of a remote Sutherland landscape. The darkling shadows on the water, the play of sun and cloud on the distant uplands, completes the picture; sheep on the hill-side set up plaintive calls that echo over the Bay. The heavy westerly gale that was reason for our being signalled in from sea has blown itself out, and the water of the Bay stands still and placid. All that is left of the furious squalls of yesterday has not strength to keep us wind-rode in the anchorage, and we cast about to the vagaries of the drift. We were bound down from Salonika to Marseilles when ordered in. We had expected to meet the relieving escort of destroyers at the Cerigo Channel, but the bad weather had prevented them from proceeding at any but a slow speed, and there was no prospect of their arrival at the rendezvous. So we turned south to seek protection behind the booms at Suda Bay. We are a packed ship. The shortage of transports has had effect in crowding the vessels in service to a point far beyond the limits of their accommodation. We have had to institute a watch-and-watch system among our huge complement. While a proportion are seeking rest below, others crowd the upper decks, passing the time as best they may until their turn of the hammocks comes round. The fine weather after the late gale has brought every one on deck. The doings of the ships in the anchorage have interest for the landsmen. Naval cutters and whalers are out under oars for exercise, and thrash up and down the Bay with the long steady sweep of practised rowers. Our escort of two destroyers arrives--their funnels white-crusted from the heavy weather they have experienced on passage from Malta. They engage the flagship with signals, then steam alongside an oiler to take fuel for the return voyage. A message from the senior officer is signalled to us to have steam raised, to proceed to sea at midnight. Standing in from the Gateway, a British submarine comes up the Bay. She moves slowly, as though looking for the least uncomfortable berth in the anchorage. The oil-ship, having already the two destroyers alongside, cannot offer her a place: she will have to lie off and await her turn. We put a signal on her, inviting her people to tie up alongside and come stretch their legs on our broad decks. Instant compliance. She turns on a long curve, rounds our stern, and her wires are passed on board. The commander of the submarine gazes about curiously as he comes on board. He confesses that he has had no intimate acquaintance with merchants' ships. The huge number of our passengers impresses him, accustomed as he is to the small manning of his own vessel. Standing on the navigation bridge, we look out over the decks below at the khaki-clad assembly. The ship seems brimming over with life and animation. There is no corner but has its group of soldiers. They are everywhere; in the rigging, astride the derricks, over the top of boats and rafts they are stretched out to the sun. Mess-cooks with their gear push their way through the crowds; there is constant movement--the men from aft barging forward, the fore-end troops blocking the gangways as they saunter aft. Noisy! Snatches of song, hails, and shouts--the interminable games of 'ouse with '_Clikety-clik_ and _blind-forty_' resounding in the many local dialects of the varied troops. High in spirit! We are the leave-ship, and they are bound home for a long-desired furlough after the deadly monotony of trench-keeping on the Doiran Front. "Gad! What a crowd," he says. "I had no idea you carried so many. They look so big--and so awkward in a ship. Of course, on a battleship we muster a lot o' men, twelve hundred in the big 'uns, but--somehow--one never sees them about the decks unless at divisions or that. Perhaps it's khaki does it; one gets accustomed to blue in a ship." A 'diversion' has been arranged for the afternoon. Dinner over, all troops are mustered to a boat drill that includes the lowering of the boats. Since leaving Salonika there has been no such opportunity as now offers. Despite foreknowledge of the time of assembly it is a long proceeding. Our complement is made up of small details--a handful of men from every battalion on the Front. Officers set to their control are drawn from as many varied branches of the service. The valued personal 'grip' of non-commissioned officers is not at our disposal. There is no such order and discipline as would be the case if we were manned by complete battalions. The routine of military movements seems dull and lifeless at sea, however efficient it may prove on land. We are long on the job. By dint of check and repetition the grouping of the men at their boat stations is brought to a moderate proficiency. The seamen at the boats swing out and lower, and we set the boats afloat, each with a full complement of troops. Embarked, and left to their own resources--with only one ship's rating to steer--the men make a better show. The division of the mass into smaller bodies induces a rivalry and spirit of competition: they swing the oars sturdily and make progress to and fro on the calm water of the Bay. With the boats away full-loaded, we take stock of the numbers still mustered on the deck. Considerably reduced, they are still a host. The boat deck, the forecastle head, the poop--are all lined over by the waiting men: the empty boat-chocks and the dangling falls inspire a mood of disquiet. Standing at ease, they seem to be facing towards the bridge. Doubtless they are wondering what we think of it all. The submarine's commander has been with us at our station during the muster. We look at one another--thoughtfully. 'THE MAN-O'-WAR 'S 'ER 'USBAND' A SENSE of security is difficult of definition. Largely, it is founded upon habit and association. It is induced and maintained by familiar surroundings. On board ship, in a small world of our own, we seem to be contained by the boundaries of the bulwarks, to be sailing beyond the influences of the land and of other ships. The sea is the same we have known for so long. Every item of our ship fitment--the trim arrangement of the decks, the set and rake of mast and funnel, even the furnishings of our cabins--has the power of impressing a stable feeling of custom, normal ship life, safety. It requires an effort of thought to recall that in their homely presence we are endangered. Relating his experiences after having been mined and his ship sunk, a master confided that the point that impressed him most deeply was when he went to his room for the confidential papers and saw the cabin exactly in everyday aspect--his longshore clothes suspended from the hooks, his umbrella standing in a corner as he had placed it on coming aboard. Soldiers on service are denied this aid to assurance. Unlike us, they cannot carry their home with them to the battlefield. All their scenes and surroundings are novel; they may only draw a reliance and comfort from the familiar presence of their comrades. At sea in a ship there is a yet greater incitement to their disquiet. The movement, the limitless sea, the distance from the land, cannot be ignored. The atmosphere that is so familiar and comforting to us, is to many of them an environment of dread possibilities. [Illustration: THE _LEVIATHAN_ DOCKING AT LIVERPOOL] It is with some small measure of this sense of security--tempered by our knowledge of enemy activity in these waters--we pace the bridge. Anxiety is not wholly absent. Some hours past, we saw small flotsam that may have come from the decks of a French mail steamer, torpedoed three days ago. The passing of the derelict fittings aroused some disquiet, but the steady routine of our progress and the constant friendly presence of familiar surroundings has effect in allaying immediate fears. The rounds of the bridge go on--the writing of the log, the tapping of the glass, the small measures that mark the passing of our sea-hours. Two days out from Marseilles--and all well! In another two days we should be approaching the Canal, and then--to be clear of 'submarine waters' for a term. Fine weather! A light wind and sea accompany us for the present, but the filmy glare of the sun, now low, and a backward movement of the glass foretells a break ere long. We are steaming at high speed to make the most of the smooth sea. Ahead, on each bow, our two escorting destroyers conform to the angles of our zigzag--spurring out and swerving with the peculiar 'thrown-around' movement of their class. Look-out is alert and in numbers. Added to the watch of the ship's crew, military signallers are posted; the boats swung outboard have each a party of troops on guard. An alarmed cry from aloft--a half-uttered order to the steersman--an explosion, low down in the bowels of the ship, that sets her reeling in her stride! The upthrow comes swiftly on the moment of impact. Hatches, coal, shattered debris, a huge column of solid water go skyward in a hurtling mass to fall in torrent on the bridge. Part of a human body strikes the awning spars and hangs--watch-keepers are borne to the deck by the weight of water--the steersman falls limply over the wheel with blood pouring from a gash on his forehead. . . . Then silence for a stunned half-minute, with only the thrust of the engines marking the heart-beats of the stricken ship. Uproar! Most of our men are young recruits: they have been but two days on the sea. The torpedo has gone hard home at the very weakest hour of our calculated drill. The troops are at their evening meal when the blow comes, the explosion killing many outright. We had counted on a proportion of the troops being on the deck, a steadying number to balance the sudden rush from below that we foresaw in emergency. Hurrying from the mess-decks as enjoined, the quick movement gathers way and intensity: the decks become jammed by the pressure, the gangways and passages are blocked in the struggle. There is the making of a panic--tuned by their outcry, "_God!_ _O God!_ _O Christ!_" The swelling murmur is neither excited nor agonized--rather the dull, hopeless expression of despair. The officer commanding troops has come on the bridge at the first alarm. His juniors have opportunity to take their stations before the struggling mass reaches to the boats. The impossibility of getting among the men on the lower decks makes the military officers' efforts to restore confidence difficult. They are aided from an unexpected quarter. The bridge-boy makes unofficial use of our megaphone. "Hey! Steady up you men doon therr," he shouts. "Ye'll no' dae ony guid fur yersels croodin' th' ledders!" We could not have done it as well. The lad is plainly in sight to the crowd on the decks. A small boy, undersized. "Steady up doon therr!" The effect is instant. Noise there still is, but the movement is arrested. The engines are stopped--we are now beyond range of a second torpedo--and steam thunders in exhaust, making our efforts to control movements by voice impossible. At the moment of the impact the destroyers have swung round and are casting here and there like hounds on the scent: the dull explosion of a depth-charge--then another, rouses a fierce hope that we are not unavenged. The force of the explosion has broken connections to the wireless room, but the aerial still holds and, when a measure of order on the boat-deck allows, we send a message of our peril broadcast. There is no doubt in our mind of the outcome. Our bows, drooping visibly, tell that we shall not float long. We have nearly three thousand on board. There are boats for sixteen hundred--then rafts. Boats--rafts--and the glass is falling at a rate that shows bad weather over the western horizon! Our drill, that provided for lowering the boats with only half-complements in them, will not serve. We pass orders to lower away in any condition, however overcrowded. The way is off the ship, and it is with some apprehension we watch the packed boats that drop away from the davit heads. The shrill ring of the block-sheaves indicates a tension that is not far from breaking-point. Many of the life-boats reach the water safely with their heavy burdens, but the strain on the tackles--far beyond their working load--is too great for all to stand to it. Two boats go down by the run. The men in them are thrown violently to the water, where they float in the wash and shattered planking. A third dangles from the after fall, having shot her manning out at parting of the forward tackle. Lowered by the stern, she rights, disengages, and drifts aft with the men clinging to the life-lines. We can make no attempt to reach the men in the water. Their life-belts are sufficient to keep them afloat: the ship is going down rapidly by the head, and there remains the second line of boats to be hoisted and swung over. The chief officer, pausing in his quick work, looks to the bridge inquiringly, as though to ask, "How long?" The fingers of two hands suffice to mark our estimate. The decks are now angled to the deepening pitch of the bows. Pumps are utterly inadequate to make impression on the swift inflow. The chief engineer comes to the bridge with a hopeless report. It is only a question of time. How long? Already the water is lapping at a level of the foredeck. Troops massed there and on the forecastle-head are apprehensive: it is indeed a wonder that their officers have held them for so long. The commanding officer sets example by a cool nonchalance that we envy. Posted with us on the bridge, his quick eyes note the flood surging in the pent 'tween-decks below, from which his men have removed the few wounded. The dead are left to the sea. Help comes as we had expected it would. Leaving _Nemesis_ to steam fast circles round the sinking ship, _Rifleman_ swings in and brings up alongside at the forward end. Even in our fear and anxiety and distress, we cannot but admire the precision of the destroyer captain's manoeuvre--the skilful avoidance of our crowded life-boats and the men in the water--the sudden stoppage of her way and the cant that brings her to a standstill at the lip of our brimming decks. The troops who have stood so well to orders have their reward in an easy leap to safety. Quickly the foredeck is cleared. _Rifleman_ spurts ahead in a rush that sets the surrounding life-boats to eddy in her wash. She takes up the circling high-speed patrol and allows her sister ship to swing in and embark a number of our men. It is when the most of the life-boats are gone we realize fully the gallant service of the destroyers. There remain the rafts, but many of these have been launched over to aid the struggling men in the water. Half an hour has passed since we were struck--thirty minutes of frantic endeavour to debark our men--yet still the decks are thronged by a packed mass that seems but little reduced. The coming of the destroyers alters the outlook. _Rifleman's_ action has taken over six hundred. A sensible clearance! _Nemesis_ swings in with the precision of an express, and the thud and clatter of the troops jumping to her deck sets up a continuous drumming note of deliverance. Alert and confident, the naval men accept the great risks of their position. The ship's bows are entered to the water at a steep incline. Every minute the balance is weighing, casting her stern high in the air. The bulkheads are by now taking place of keel and bearing the huge weight of her on the water. At any moment she may go without a warning, to crash into the light hull of the destroyer and bear her down. For all the circling watch of her sister ship, the submarine--if still he lives--may get in a shot at the standing target. It is with a deep relief we signal the captain to bear off. Her decks are jammed to the limit. She can carry no more. _Nemesis_ lists heavily under her burdened decks as she goes ahead and clears. Forty minutes! The zigzag clock in the wheelhouse goes on ringing the angles of time and course as though we were yet under helm and speed. For a short term we have noted that the ship appears to have reached a point of arrest in her foundering droop. She remains upright as she has been since righting herself after the first inrush of water. Like the lady she always was, she has added no fearsome list to the sum of our distress. The familiar bridge, on which so many of our safe sea-days have been spent, is canted at an angle that makes foothold uneasy. She cannot remain for long afloat. The end will come swiftly, without warning--a sudden rupture of the bulkhead that is sustaining her weight. We are not now many left on board. Striving and wrenching to man-handle the only remaining boat--rendered idle for want of the tackles that have parted on service of its twin--we succeed in pointing her outboard, and await a further deepening of the bows ere launching her. Of the military, the officer commanding, some few of his juniors, a group of other ranks, stand by. The senior officers of the ship, a muster of seamen, a few stewards, are banded with us at the last. We expect no further service of the destroyers. The position of the ship is over-menacing to any approach. They have all they can carry. Steaming at a short distance they have the appearance of being heavily overloaded; each has a staggering list and lies low in the water under their deck encumbrance. We have only the hazard of a quick out-throw of the remaining boat and the chances of a grip on floating wreckage to count upon. On a sudden swift sheer, _Rifleman_ takes the risk. Unheeding our warning hail, she steams across the bows and backs at a high speed: her rounded stern jars on our hull plates, a whaler and the davits catch on a projection and give with the ring of buckling steel--she turns on the throw of the propellors and closes aboard with a resounding impact that sets her living deck-load to stagger. We lose no time. Scrambling down the life-ropes, our small company endeavours to get foothold on her decks. The destroyer widens off at the rebound, but by clutch of friendly hands the men are dragged aboard. One fails to reach safety. A soldier loses grip and goes to the water. The chief officer follows him. Tired and unstrung as he must be by the devoted labours of the last half-hour, he is in no condition to effect a rescue. A sudden deep rumble from within the sinking ship warns the destroyer captain to go ahead. We are given no chance to aid our shipmates: the propellors tear the water in a furious race that sweeps them away, and we draw off swiftly from the side of the ship. We are little more than clear of the settling fore-end when the last buoyant breath of _Cameronia_ is overcome. Nobly she has held afloat to the debarking of the last man. There is no further life in her. Evenly, steadily, as we had seen her leave the launching ways at Meadowside, she goes down. [Illustration: SALVAGE VESSELS OFF YARMOUTH, ISLE OF WIGHT] XIII THE SALVAGE SECTION THE TIDEMASTERS IF Royal Canute, King of England and Denmark, with his train of servile earls and thanes, could revisit the scene of his famous object-lesson, he would learn a new value in the tide. Suitably, he might improve his homily by presentation of the salvage tidemasters, harnessing the rise and fall of the stubborn element to serve their needs and heave a foundered vessel to sight and service. He would note the cunning guidance of strain and effort, their exact timing of the ruled and ordered habits of the sea. As a moral, he could quote that, if tide may not be ordered to command, it can at least be governed and impressed to performance of a mighty service. Recovery of ships, their gear and cargo, is no longer wholly an application of practised seamanship. The task is burdened and complicated by powers and conditions that call for auxiliary arts. It is true that the salvage officer's ground, his main asset, is the knowledge and ability to do a seamanlike 'job o' work' when the time and tide are opportune; he must have a seaman's training in the ways of the wind and the sea and be able properly to assess the weather conditions under which alone his precarious work is possible. A scientist of a liberal and versatile type (not perhaps exhaustive in his scope and range), he is able to draw the quantum of his needs from a wide and varied summary. Together with his medical exemplar, he has developed a technique from crude remedies and imperfect diagnoses to application of fine science. He must have a sure knowledge of the anatomy of his great steel patients, be versed in the infinite variety and intricacy of ship construction, and the valves and arteries of their power; be able to pen and plan his formulæ for weight-lifting--the stress and strain of it, down to the calibre of the weakest link. A super-tidesman, he must know to an inch the run of bottom, the swirl and eddy, the value of flood and ebb and springs, for the tide--Canute's immutable recalcitrant--is his greatest assistant, a familiar _Genius maris_ whom he conjures from the deeps of ocean to do his bidding. Shrewd! He is a keen student of the psychology of the distressed mariner; again, like the medical man, he must set himself to extract truth from the tale that is told. His treatment must be prescribed, not to meet a case as presented, but as his skilled knowledge of the probabilities warrants. Tactful, if he is to meet with assistance in his difficult work, he must assume the sympathy of one seaman to another in distress. What, after all, does it matter if he agree heartily that "the touch was very light, we were going dead slow," when, from his divers' reports, he knows that the whole bottom is 'up'? In the handling of his own men there must be a combination of rigour and reason. Salvage crews are a hardy, tempestuous race who have no ordinary regard for the niceties of law and order; their work is no scheduled and defined occupation with states and margins; they are servants to tide and weather alone; they are embarked on a venture, on a hazard, a lottery. To such men, administering, under his direction, the heroic but destructive remedies of high explosive and compressed air, there cannot be a normal allowance for the economic use of gear and material. He must know the right and judicial discount to be made that will meet the conflicting demands of the expenses department and the results committee. Above all, he must be of an infinite patience, of the mettle that is not readily discouraged. In the great game of seafaring his hand holds the king of disappointment and the knaves of frustration and discouragement. But he has other cards; he holds an ace in stability and determination. Calm days and smooth seas may lure him to surpassing effort, to work through the tides in feverish energy, making the most of favoured opportunity. The scattered and interrupted work of months has perhaps been geared and bound, the tackle rigged and set for a final dead lift. Buoyancy is figured out and assured; the pumps are in place, throbbing and droning out, throwing steady streams from the weight of water that so long has held the foundered wreck in depth. The work has been long and trying, but an end to difficulty is in sight. Given a day or two of continued fine weather, the sea and the rocks will have to surrender their prisoner. Comes a darkling to windward and the sea stirs uneasily; jets and spurts of broken water appear over the teeth and spit of rocky ledges. The salvors look around with calculating eyes and note the signs of a weather break. Still, there is no slackening of effort; there may be time to complete the work before the sea rises to interfere; if anything, the omens only call for another spur to the flank, a new sting to the lash. Beaten to the knees, the gear and tackle swaying perilously in breaking seas, the lifting-barges thundering at their curbs, the pumps groaning and protesting their inability to overcome the lap of blue water, there is no alternative but to abandon the work and return to harbour. From the beach the salvage officer may watch his labour of weeks--or months--savagely undone in an hour or two of storm and fury of the sea! It is a great catalogue, that schedule of virtues and accomplishments. To it must be added, as a supplement, that he must be a 'made' man--made in a long hard pupilage in a stern school that appraises strictly on results. It is of little use to show that, in theory, a certain course was right and proper, when the broad but damning fact remains that the property is still in Davy Jones his locker, and likely--there to remain. Many are called, but few are chosen. The salvage service has no room for the merely mediocre officer: the right man goes inevitably to his proper place, the wrong one goes back to a junior, and less responsible, post at sea. It is doubtful if the Naval Service could produce the type required. Their candidate would be, to a degree, inelastic. He would be an excellent theorist, a sound executant, a strict disciplinarian; but his training and ideas would fit ill to the wide range of conflicting interests, and the shutting out of all manoeuvre, however skilled and stimulating--but that of securing a maximum of result by a minimum of effort. Perhaps it was for these reasons our salvage services before the war were almost wholly mercantile and commercial. Certainly, most Admiralty efforts in this direction were confined to ports and harbours where method could be ordered and controlled by routine; their more arduous and unmanageable cases on the littoral were frequently handed over to the merchantmen--not seldom after naval efforts had been unavailing. Among the protestations of our good faith to the world in time of peace, it may be cited that we made no serious provision for a succession of maritime casualties; there was no specially organized and equipped Naval Salvage Service. True, there were the harbour gear, divers, a pump or two, and appliances and craft for attending submarine accidents, but their energies were bent largely to humane purposes--to marine first aid. Of major gear and a trained personnel to control equipment and operation there was not even a nucleus. Salvage was valued at a modest section of the "Manual on Seamanship" (written by a mercantile expert), and a very occasional lecture at the Naval College. At war, and the toll of maritime disaster rising, the need grew quickly for expert and special service. There was no longer a relative and profitable balance to be struck between value of sea-property and cost of salvage operations. A ship had become beyond mere money valuation; as well assess the air we breathe in terms of finance. No cost was high if a keel could be added to our mercantile fleets in one minute less than the time the builders would take to construct a new vessel. The call was for competent ship-surgeons who could front-rank our maritime C Threes. By whatever skill and daring and exercise of seamanship, the wrecks must be returned to service. Happily, there was no necessity to go far afield; the merchants' salvage enterprise, like the merchants' ships and the merchants' men, was ready at hand for adoption. [Illustration: IN A SALVAGE VESSEL: OVERHAULING THE INSULATION OF THE POWER LEADS] The Salvage Section, Admiralty, is a dignified caption and has an almost imperial address, but, camouflages and all, it is not difficult to see the hem of old sea-worn garments of our mercantile companies peeping out below the gold braid. If in peace-time they did wonders, war has made their greatest and most successful efforts seem but minor actions compared to their present-day victories. The practice and experience gained in quick succession of 'cases' has tuned up their operations to the highest pitch of efficiency. New and more powerful appliances have come to their hands; a skilled and technical directorate has liberated initiative. Strandings, torpedo or mine damage, fire, collisions--frequently a compound of two or three--or all five--provide them with occasion for every shift of ingenuity, every turn of resource. There is no stint to the gear, and no limits to invention, or device, if there is a possibility of a damaged ship being brought to the dry docks. Is it not on record that an obstinate, stranded ship, driven high on the beach, was finally relaunched on the crest of an artificially created 'spring' tide, the wash and suction of a high-speed destroyer, plying and circling in the shallows? Many new perils are added to the risks and hazards of their normally dangerous work. Casualties that call for their service are rarely located in safe and protected waters; open coast and main channels are the marches of the Salvage Section, where the enemy has a keen and ready eye for a 'potting' shot by which he may prevent succour of a previous victim. The menace of sea-mines is particularly theirs; the run and swirl of Channel tides has strength to weigh a stealthy mooring and carry a power of destruction up stream and down. They have a new and deadly danger to be guarded against in the ammunition and armament of their stricken wards. Many have gone down at 'action stations,' and carry 'hair-sprung' explosive charges, the exact condition and activity of which are usually a matter for conjecture. It calls for a courage of no ordinary measure to grope and stumble under water amid shattered wreckage for the safety-clutch of the charges, or grapple in the mud and litter for torpedo firing-levers. This the pioneer of the divers must do, as the first and most important of his duties. With skill enhanced by constant and encouraged practice, they set out to bind the wounds and raise our damaged ships to a further lease of sea-activity. So definite and sure are their methods, so skilled and rapid their execution, they steam ahead of reconstruction and crowd the waiting-room at the dry-dock gates. Lined up at the anchorage awaiting their turn, the recovered vessels may be crippled and bent, and showing torsion and distress in the list, and staggering trim with which they swing flood and ebb. They may rest, halting, on the inshore shallow flats, but, laid by for a term of repair, their day is to come again. The Salvage Section has reclaimed their rent and stranded hulls from the misty sea-Front; the Repair Section, working day and night, will hammer and bind and reframe the gaps of their steel; the Sea Section will take them out on the old stormy road, sound and seaworthy, with the flag at the peak once more. A DAY ON THE SHOALS THE rigger was engaged at second tucks of a five-inch wire-splicing job, and hardly looked in the direction we indicated. "Them," he said. "Them's crocks wot we don't want nothin' more t' do with! Two on 'em's got frozen mutton. High? Excelsi-bloody-or! . . . an' that feller as is down by th' 'ead--Gawd! 'e don't 'arf smell 'orrible!" A pause, while he hammered down the strands and found fault with his assistant, gave us time to disentangle the negatives of his opening. "Grain, she 'as--an' of all th' ruddy messes wot I ever see--she gets it! We 'ad four days at 'er--out there 'n th' Padrig Flats, an' she sickened nigh all 'ands! . . . Now we're well quit o' 'er, an' th' longshore gangs is unloadin' th' bulk, in nosebags an' gas 'elmets, t' get 'er a-trim for th' dry dock!" As we passed alee of the grain-carrier there was no doubt of the truth of the rigger's assurance. Steam-pumps on her fore-deck were forcing a sickly mixture of liquid batter through hoses to a barge alongside, and the overpowering stench of the mess blew down to us and set eyes and noses quickening with instant nausea. The men on the barges were garbed in odd headgear, high cowls with staring circular eyepieces, and each carried a knapsack cylinder on his back. Clouds of high-pressure steam from the winches and pumps threw out in exhaust, and the hooded, ghost-like figures of the labourers passed and repassed in drifts of white vapour. To the hiss and rumble of machines, clamour of block-sheaves and chain and piston joined action to make a setting of _Inferno_, the scene might well be imagery for a stage of unholy rites. Past her, we turned to the clean salt breeze again and stood on to the open sea. The salvage officer, a Commander, R.N.R., joined us at the rail. "What about that now? Sa--lubrious?" he said. We wondered how men could be got to work in such an atmosphere, how it was possible to handle such foul-smelling litter in the confined holds. "Oh! We go through that all right. A bit inconvenient and troublesome, perhaps, working in a restricting gas-rig; but now, the chemists have come to our assistance and we can sweeten things up by a dose of anti-stink. . . . But you won't see that to-day. Our 'bird' has got no cargo, only clean stone ballast--a soft job." The 'soft job' had had a rough time, a combination and chapter of sea and war hazard. Inward bound from the United States with a big cargo, a German torpedo had found a mark on her. She settled quickly by the stern, but the undamaged engines worked her gallantly into a small seaport where she brought up with her main deck awash. There she was lightened of her precious load, temporary baulks and patches were clamped and bolted to her riven shell-plate, and she set off again on a short coastwise voyage to the nearest port where definite and satisfactory repair could be effected. Off the Heads, the enemy again got sights on her. Crippled, and steaming at slow speed to ease strain on the bulkheads, she made a 'sitting' target for a second torpedo, that shattered rudder and stern-post and sheared the propellor from the shaft. "We came on her just before dark," said the commander. . . . "Some of the crew were in the boats, close by, but the captain and a Trinity pilot and others were still aboard. She was down astern to the counter and up forward like a ruddy unicorn. We got fast and started to tow. Tow?--Might as well have taken on the Tower Bridge. There was no way of steering her, and a strong breeze from the south'ard blew her head down against all we could do. . . . Anyway, we hung on, and at daylight in the morning the wind let up on us a bit, and we guided her drift--that's about all we could do--inshore, till she took the bottom on good ground a little north of the Westmark Shoal. We filled her up forrard as the weather was looking bad--a good weight of water to steady her through a gale. She's lain out there for two months now. We've had a turn or two at her occasionally--shoring up the after bulkheads and that, while we had weather chances. _Titan_ has been out at her since yesterday morning. . . . It looks good and healthy now." He cast an eye around appreciatively at the calm sea and quiet sky, the gorse-banked cliffs dimmed by a promising summer haze, at seagulls lazily drifting on the tide or becking and bowing in the glassy ripples of our wash. "Good and healthy; I like to see these old 'shellbacks' sitting low and not shrilling overhead with all sail set. . . . If this weather holds I shouldn't wonder if we get the old bus afloat on high tide to-day!" Clear of harbour limits and heading out to the shoals, a brisk rigging of gear and tackle brings action to the decks of the salvage steamer. Already we had thought the narrow confines from bulwark to bulwark congested by the bulk of appliances, but, from hole and corner and cunning stowage, further coils and shoots and lengths of flexible, armoured hose are dragged and placed in readiness for operations. Derricks are topped up and purchases rove for handling the heavy twelve-inch motor-pumps. Hawsers are uncovered and coiled clear, stout fenders thrown over in preparation for a grind alongside the wreck. Mindful of possibilities, the engineer-lieutenant and his artificers go over the insulation of their power leads in minute search for a leak in the cables that may occasion a short circuit later on. The terminals and couplings are buffed and polished with what seems exaggerated and needless precision--but this is salvage, where sustained effort is only possible in the rare and all-too-brief union of favourable tide and weather conditions. A cessation of the steady throw of the pumps, however instant and skilful the adjustment, may mean the loss of just that finite measure in buoyancy that could spring the weight of thousands in tons. Second chances are rarely given by a grudging and jealous sea; there must be no hitch in the gear, no halt in weighing the mass. A drift of lazy smoke on the sea-rim ahead marks our rendezvous, where _Titan_ and a sisterly tug-boat are already at work on the wreck. A screen of motor-patrols are rounding and lining out in the offing, with a thrust of white foam astern that shows their speed. Coastwise, a convoy of merchant ships zigzag in confusing angles on their way to sea, guarded by spurring destroyers and trawler escort. Seaplanes are out, hawking with swoop and wheel for sight of strange fish. The seascape is busy with a shipping that must remind the coastguard and lightkeepers of old and palmy days when square sail was standard at sea. The Westmark Shoal lies some distance from the normal peace-time track of direct steaming courses. It lies in the bight of a bay, where rarely steamers closed the land. Sailing ships, close-hauled and working a tack inshore, or fisher craft on their grounds, had long been the only keels to sheer water in the deeps, but war practice has renewed our acquaintance with many old sea-routes and by-paths, and we are back now to charts and courses that have long been out of our reckoning. The tide is at low-water slack, and whirls and eddies mark the run over shallows. At easy speed and handing the lead, we approach the wreck. Her weathered hull, gilt and red-rusted by exposure to sun and wind and sea, stands high and bold against the deep blue of a summer sky. Masts and rigging and cordage are bleached white, like tracery of a phantom ship. The green sea-growth on her underbody fans and waves in the tide, showing long voyaging in the crust and stage of it. She lies well and steadily, with only a slight list to seaward that marks the gradient on which she rests. Through fracture on the stern and counter, the twisted and shattered frames and beams and angles can be seen plainly. Sunlight, in slanting rays, shines through the rents and fissures of the upper deck, and plays on the free flood that washes in and out of the exposed after hold; seaweed and flotsam surges on the tide, clinging to the jagged, shattered edges of the plating, and breaking away to lap in the dark recesses. To eyes that only know the lines and mould of sightly, seaworthy vessels, she seems a hopeless and distorted mass of standing iron--a sheer hulk, indeed, fit only for a lone sea-perch to gull and gannet and cormorant. It appears idle for the salvors to plan and strive and wrestle for such a prize, but their keen eyes are focused to values not readily apparent. "A fine ship," says the commander, now happily assured that his 'soft job' has suffered no worse than a weathering on the ledge that his skill has secured her. "A job o' work for the repairers, certainly . . . but they will set her up as good as new in a third of the time it would take to build a substitute!" [Illustration: A TORPEDOED MERCHANTMAN ON THE SHOALS: SALVAGE OFFICERS MAKING A SURVEY] We anchor at a length or two to seaward. There is not yet water alongside for our draught, but _Titan_, drawing less, is berthed at her stern and their men are taking advantage of low water to pin and tomp and strengthen the rearmost bulkhead that must now do duty for the demolished stern section. A boat from _Titan_ brings the officer in charge, and he greets his senior with no disguised relief. A serious leak has developed in one of the compartments that they had counted on for buoyancy. . . . "Right under the bilge, and ungetatable, with all that rubble in th' holds. A good job you brought out these extra pumps. We should manage now, all right!" Technical measures are discussed and a plan of operations agreed. At half-flood there will be water for us alongside, and a 'lift' can be tried. Number one hold is good and tight, but still has a bulk of water to steady her on the ledge; number two is clear and buoyant; three has the obstinate leak; the engine-room is undamaged, but water makes through in moderate quantity. Number four--"the bulkhead is bulged in like the bilge of a cask, but that cement we put down last week has set pretty well, and the struts and braces should hold." Number five? There is no number five, most of it lies on deep bottom off the Heads, some miles away! With his colleague, the commander puts off to the wreck, to assess the prospects, and we have opportunity to note the inboard trim of her derelict posts and quarters. Davits, swung outboard as when the last of her crew left her, stand up in unfamiliar dejection, the frayed ends and bights of the boat-falls dangling overside and thrumming on the rusty hull. The boat-deck shows haste and urgency in the litter of spars and tackle thrown violently aside: a seaman's bag with sodden pitiful rags of apparel lies awry on the skids, marking some cool and forethinking mariner denied a passage for his goods. Living-rooms and crew quarters show the indications of sudden call, in open desks--a book or two cast side, quick-thrown bedspreads, an array of clothing on a line; the range-guards in the cook's galley have caught the tilt of pots and mess-kits as they slid alee in the grounding. The bridge, with chart and wheelhouse open to the wind and spray, and sea-gear adrift and disordered, strikes the most desolating note in the abandon of it all. Tenantless and quiet, the same scene would be commonplace and understood in dock or harbour, with neighbourly shore structures to point a reason for absence of ship-life, but out here--the clear horizon of an open sea in view around, with vessels passing on their courses, the desertion of the main post seems final and complete, with no navigator at the guides and no hand at the wheel. The flood tide making over the shoals sets in with a _thrussh_ of broken water alee of the wreck. The salvors' cutter, from which the mate is sounding and marking bottom, spins in widening circles in the eddies and shows the strength of early springs. As yet the stream binds the wreck hard to the bank, setting broad on from seaward, but relief will come when the spent water turns east on the last of the flood. Survey completed, the salvage officers clamber to the deck again. The leak in number three is their only concern; if that can be overcome, there seems no bar to a successful programme. The commander questions the mate as to the depth of water alongside, is assured of draught, and signals his vessel to heave up and come on. The strength and onrush of the tidal race makes the manoeuvre difficult, and it is on second attempt, with a wide sweep and backing on plane of the current, she drives unhandily to position. The impact of her boarding, for all the guardian fenders, jars and stirs the wreck, but brings a confident look to the salvors' faces; as readily shaken as that, they assure themselves the responding hull will come off with 'a bit of a pinch' on the angle of withdrawal that they have planned on the tidal chart. With hawsers and warps barely fast, the great pumps are hove up in air and swung over the hatchway of the doubtful hold. But for the general order to carry on, there are few directions and little admonition. Every man of the busy group of mechanics and riggers has 'a brick for the wall,' and the wriggling lengths of armoured hose are coupled and launched over the coamings as quickly as the massive motors are lowered. Foundering with splash and gurgle, like uncouth sea-monsters in their appanage of tortuous rubber tentacles, the sheen of their polished bulk looms through the green translucent flood of solid seawater, the grave and surely augmented tide that they are trimmed to master. Again, the seeming hopelessness of the task, the handicap of man against element, presents a doubt to one's mind. Two shell-like casings of steel, a line of piping and cab-tyre coils for power leads--to compete with the infiltration of an ocean; there are even small fish darting in the flood of it, a radiating Medusa floats in and out the weltering 'tween-decks, waving loathsome feelers as though in mockery of human efforts! Like a war-whoop to the onslaught the dynamos of the salvage vessel start motion, and hum in _crescendo_ to a high tenor tone; the vibrations of their speed and cycle are joined in conduct to the empty hull of the wreck, and she quickens with a throb and stir as of her arteries coursing. There is no preparatory trickle at outboard end of the hose ejections; with a rush and roar, a clean, solid flood pours over, an uninterrupted cascade at seven tons from each per minute! The carpenter sounds the depth with rod and chalked lanyard, then lowers a tethered float to water-level of the flooded compartment. In this way he sets a starting mark for the competition, a gauge for the throw of the pumps. In interest with the issue, the salvage men gather round the hatchway, and all eyes are turned to the bobbing cork disc to note the progress of the contest. Stirring and drifting to slack of the line, the float seems serenely indifferent to its important motion; wayward and buoyant, it trims, this way and that, then steadies suddenly on a taut restraint; slowly it seems to rise in the water as though drawn by an invisible hand. It spins a little to lay of the cord, then hangs, moisture dropping and forming rings on the glassy surface of the well! By no seeming effort but the pulse-like quiver of the hose, the level falls away. A bolt-head on the plating shows under water, then tips an upper edge above; a minute later the round is exposed and drying in a slant of the sun. The tense regard with which we have scanned the guide-mark gives way to jest and relief when it is seen that drainage is assured; a facetious mechanic at the hose-end makes motions as of pulling a bar handle to draw a foaming glass. "Sop it up, old sport!" says the rigger, patting the pipes. "Sop it up an' spit! Ol' Neptune ain't arf thusty!" During our engagement, _Titan_ has not been idle. There remains only an hour or two of flood tide and much has to be done. Leaving steam-pumps to cope with the more moderate leakage at the after section, she has hauled forward on the rising tide on the shoal side of the wreck. At the bows she has applied suction to the prisoned water in the fore holds, and a new stream pours overside in foaming ejection. The roar and throb of her power motors adds further volume and vibration to the rousing treatment by which the nerves of the stranded hulk seem braced. Stirred by the new life on her, the old ship may well forget she has no stern and only part a bottom. Already the decks, gaunt and red-rusted as they are, take on a cheering look of service and animation. The seamen in the rigging and workmen crowded round the hatchways might be the dockers boarded for a day's work on the loading, and only the thunder of the motors and crash of the sluicing torrent remain foreign to a normal ship-day. The sun has gone west when the tidal current surging past shows a change in direction. We throw sightly flotsam overboard and note the drift that takes the refuse astern. No longer the green slimy plates of the hull show above water, the tide has lapped their sea-growth and ripples high on a cleaner surface. With high water approaching we draw near the point of balance in buoyancy, and the salving tenders tighten up headfasts and stern ropes in readiness for a slip or drag. The sea-tug that has till now been a quiet partner in operations, smokes up and backs in astern to pass a hawser to the wreck. She drops away with a good scope, and lies handy to tow at orders. Tirelessly, droning and throbbing with insistent monotony, the pumps continue their labour and draw the weight of water that holds the wreck down. At number three hold the flood below is no longer a still and placid well. The penned and mastered water seethes and whirls in impotent fury at the suction that draws and churns only to expel. Some solid matter, seaweed perhaps, has drifted to the leak and stems a volume of the incoming water; there seems a prospect that a single pump may keep the level. In somewhat tense expectancy, we await a crisis in the operations. There is a feeling that all these masterly movements should lead to a spectacular resurrection--a stir and tremor in the frame of her, reviving sea-throes, a lurch, a list, a mighty heave, and a staggering relaunch to the deeps. Precise and businesslike, modern salvage avoids such a flourishing end to their labours. As skilful surgeons, they object strongly to excitement. Their frail and tortured sea-patients can rarely stand more than gentle suasion. As surely as the tide they work by, the factors of weight and displacement and trim have been figured and calculated. . . . The commander draws our attention to a quiet and steady rise in the bows, the knightheads perceptibly edging nearer to a wisp of standing cloud. Without a jar or surge the wreck becomes a floating ship; she lists a little, as the towing hawser creaks and strains, and we draw off gently to seaward. THE DRY DOCK A DOWNPOUR of steady, insistent rain makes quagmire of the paths on the dockside, and the half-light of a cheerless early morning gives little guidance to progress among the raffle of discarded ship-gear that lies about the yard. Stumbling over shores and stagings, skirting gaunt mounds of damaged plates and angles, we reach the sea-gate where the ship victims of mine and torpedo are moored in readiness for treatment in the great sea-hospital. In the uncertain light and under wet lowering skies, they make a dismal picture. The symmetry of conventional docking--ships moored in line and heading in the same direction--that is an orderly feature of the harbours, is not possible in the overcrowded basin. There is need to pack the vessels closely. They lie at awkward angles, the stern of one overhanging the bows of another. Masts and funnels and deck erections, upstanding at varied rakes, emphasize the confused berthing and draw the eye to the condition of the mass of damaged shipping. Not all of the vessels are shattered hulks. A number are here for hull-cleaning or overhaul, but their high sides with the rust and barnacles and weedy green scum, make as drab a feature in the combination as the listed hulls of the cripples. [Illustration: A TORPEDOED SHIP IN DRY DOCK] Though nominally daylight, the arc-lamps of the pier-head still splutter in wet contacts and spread a sickly glow over the oilskin-clad group of dockmen and officials gathered to enter the ships. A chill breeze from the sea blows in and carries reek and cinder of north-country coal to thicken the lash of the rain. The waft comes from heeling dock tugs that strain at their hawsers, spurring the muddy tide to froth in their task of moving the helpless vessels in the basin. The long expanse of flooded dock, brimming to the uppermost ledge, lies open for their entry; the bruised and shattered stern of a large ship is pointed over the sill at an awkward angle that marks an absence of steam-power aboard to control her wayward sheer. The dockmaster, in ill mood with her cantrips, roars admonition and appeal to the smoking tugs to "lie over t' s'uth'ard and right her!" By check, and the powerful heave of a shore capstan, she warps in and straightens to the line of the docks. As she draws on to her berth the high bows of a second cripple swing over from the tiers, and the tugs back out to fasten on and drag her to the gate. With entry of the ships, the glistening pier-head becomes thronged by tidesmen and their gear; like a drill-yard, with the lusty stamp of the marching lines of dockmen trailing heavy hawsers and handing check and hauling ropes. In an hour or so the gangs of the ship-repair section will be ready to 'turn to' at the new jobs, and the ships must be settled and ready against the wail of the starting 'buzzer.' Shrill whistle signals, orders and hails add to the stir of the labourers, and clatter of the warping capstan joins in with ready chorus. Not least of the medley is the bull roar of the harassed dockmaster, who finds a need in the press for more than one pair of hands at the reins to guide and halt his tandem charges. The ships are marked in company, to settle bow to stern, with no room to spare, in the length of the dock. Conduct must be ruled in duplicate to exact the full measure of utility from every foot of space. On the last tide a pair of sound ships were floated out to service, braced and bound and refitted for further duty as stout obverse to the 'Sure Shield.' Keel-blocks and beds for the new patients have been set up and rearranged in the brief interval of occupancy, and now, quick on the wash of the outgoers, are new cases for the shearing plate-cutters and the swing of hammers. Mindful to conserve their precious dry-dock space to the limit of good service, the repair section select the vessels with rare judgment. It is no haphazard turn of the wheel that brings an American freighter, shattered in stern section, to the same operating-table as an east-coast tramp (having her engines in scrap, boilers fractured, and the frames of her midships blown to sea-bottom). The combined measure of their length and the similarity of extent in hull damage has brought them to the one line of blocks. Odd cases, and regular ship-cleaning and minor repairs may be allotted to single-ship dry docks, but here, in sea-hospital with a twin-berth, there is a need for parallel treatment. The two ships must be considered as one, and all efforts be promoted towards refloating them, when hull repairs are completed, on one opening of the sea-gate. In this, strangely, they are assisted by the enemy. True, his accommodation could well be spared, but it does have an influence on repair procedure. The exact and uniformly graded proportions of the enemy explosive reproduces a correspondingly like extent and nature in ship damage. Location and sea-trim may vary the fractures in proportion to resistance but, with the vessels on the blocks together, working time may be adjusted to these conditions and a balance be struck that will further a simultaneous completion. So the dockmaster ranges his pair on the centre line of the keel-blocks, sets tight the hawsers that hold them in position, and bars the sea-entry with a massive caisson. Presently he passes an order to the pumpman, and the power-house echoes to the easy thrust of his giant engine. The keel-blocks have been set to meet the general lines of the vessels, with only a marginal allowance for the contour of damaged plating. To remedy any error divers, with their gear and escort, are ready on the dockside, and they go below with first fall in the water-level. The carpenters straggle out from sheltered corners and bear a hand. Riggers and dockmen have placed the ships, and it remains for the 'tradesmen' to bed them down and prop against a list by shores and blocks. They are ill content with the vile weather and their job in the open, where the rain lashes down pitilessly, soaking their working clothes. Doubtless they envy the dry divers their suits of proofed rubber, when they are called on to manhandle the heavy timber shores from the mud and litter of the dockside and launch them out towards the steel sides of the settling vessels. There the tide-workers on deck secure them by lanyards, and the spars hang in even order, sighted on doublings of the plates, ready to pin the ships on a steady keel when the water drains away. With the timbers held in place, the carpenters split up to small parties and stand by to set a further locking strain by prise of block and wedge. The dockmaster blows a whistle signal at the far end of the basin, and casts up his hand as though arresting movement; the thrust of the main pump stills, and he swings his arm. At the sign, the carpenters ram home . . . the thunder of their forehammers on the hardwood wedges rings out in chorus that draws a quavering echo from the empty, hard-pressed hulls. Settled and bedded and pinned, the ships are left till the water drains away and to await the coming of the shipwrights and repairing gangs. The carpenters shoulder their long-handled top-mauls and scatter to a shelter from the steady, continuous downpour. Up from the floors with their work completed, the divers doff their heavy head-gear and sit a while, _resting_ comfortably under the thrash of the same persistent rain. Anon, their awkward garb discarded, they walk off, striding with a crook at the knees, like farmer folk on ploughed land. The great pumps now pulsate at full speed, drawing water to their sluices in an eddying current that spins the flotsam and bares ledge after ledge of the solid dock masonry. From gaping wounds of the crippled vessels a full tide of seawater gushes and spurts to join the troubled wash below. The beams and side-planking, and temporary measures of the salvage section, uncover and come to sight, showing with what patience and laborious care the divers have striven to stem an inrush. On the second ship the receding water-line exposes the damage to her engine- and boiler-rooms. A litter of coal and oily scum showers from angles of the wrecked bunker and stokehold to the floor of the dock, and leaves the fractured beams and tubes to stand out in gaunt twist and deformity. Through the breaches the shattered cylinders and broken columns of the engines lie distorted in a piled raffle of wrenched pipe sections, valves and levers, footplates, skeleton ladders, and shafting. The mass of distorted metal has still a shine and token of polish, and these signs of late care and attention only serve to make the ruin seem the more complete and irremediable. An hour later a strident power syren sounds out from roof of the repair 'shops.' The workmen, hurrying to 'check in' at the gates, scarcely glance at their new jobs on the blocks of the dry-dock. To them it seems quite a commonplace that the round of their industry should suffer no halt, that the two seaworthy ships they completed yesterday should be so quickly replaced by the same type of casualty for their attention. The magnitude of the task--the vast extent of plating to be sheared and rebuilt, the beams to be withdrawn or straightened in place, the litter to be cleared--holds no misgivings. Short on the stroke of 'turn to' they straggle down the dockside to start the round anew. With critical eye, foremen and surveyors chalk off the cypher of their verdicts on the rusted displaced remnants; the gangs apportion and assemble with tools and gear; the huge travelling cranes rumble along on their railways, and lower slings and hooks in readiness for a load of damaged steel. With the men lined out to the gangways and filing down the dock steps, chain linking in trial over the crane sheaves, and the bustle of preparation on ship and shore, everything seems set for an instant beginning--but no hammer falls as yet. There is, first, a sad freight to be discharged; not all the crew of the ship with the wrecked engines have gone to the pay-table. Three sombre closed wagons are waiting by the dockside, and towards them down the long gangways from the ship, the bodies of an engineer and some of the stokehold crew are being carried. The weltering flood that held them has drained to the dock, and busy hands have searched in the wreckage where they died at their post. We have no flags to honour, no processional march to accompany our dead. Their poor bodies, dripping and fouled, are draped in a simple coarse shroud that hardly conceals the line of their mangled limbs. Awkwardly the carriers stumble on the sodden planking and rest arms and knees on the guiding hand-lines. The workmen pause on the ship and gangways and look respectfully, if curiously, at the limp burdens as they are carried by. Here and there a man speaks of the dead, but the most are silent, with lowering looks, set teeth--a sharp intake of the breath. . . . Who knows? Perhaps the spirits of the murdered seamen may come by a payment at the hands of the shipwright gangs. The best monument to their memory will stand as another keel on the deep--a quick ripost to the enemy, in his victim repaired and strengthened and returned to sea. Lowering looks, set teeth, a hissing intake of the breath are the right accompaniment to a blow struck hard home; the thunder of hammers and drills, the hiss and sparkle of shearing cutters, that breaks out when the wagons have gone, marks a start to their monument! [Illustration: DAZZLE] XIV ON CAMOUFLAGE--AND SHIPS' NAMES EARLY in the war the rappel of 'Business as usual' was as deadly at sea as elsewhere. Arrogant and super-confident in our pride of sea-place, we made little effort to trim and adapt our practice to rapidly altering conditions; there were few visible signs to disquiet us, we hardly deviated from our peaceful sea-path, and had no concern for interference. We carried our lights ablaze, advertised our doings in plain wireless, announced our sailings and arrivals, and even devoted more than usual attention to keeping our ships as span in brave new paint and glistening varnish as the hearts of impressionable passengers could desire. We had difficulties with our manning. The seamen were off, at first tuck of drum, to what they reckoned a more active part in the great game of war--the strictly Naval Service--and we were left with weak crews of new and raw hands to carry on the sea-trade. So, from the very first of it, we engaged in a moral camouflage in our efforts to keep up appearances, and show the neutrals with whom we did business that such a thing as war could hardly disturb the smooth running of our master machine--the Merchants' Service! Some there were among us who saw the peril in such prominence, and took modest (and somewhat hesitating) steps to keep out of the limelight, by setting lonely courses on the sea, restraining the comradely gossip of wireless operators, and toning down appearances from brilliant polish to the more sombre part suiting a sea in war-time. Deck lights were painted over and obscured, funnel and masts were allowed to grey to neutral tints, the brown ash that discomposes fine paint at sea was looked upon with a new and friendly eye. The bias of chief mates (in a service where promotion is the due for a clean and tidy ship) was, with difficulty, overcome, and a new era of keen look-out and sea-trim started. There was but moderate support for these bold iconoclasts who dared thus to affront our high fetish. Ship painting and decoration and upkeep were sacrosanct rites that even masters must conform to; the enactments of the Medes and Persians were but idle rules, mere by-laws, compared to the formulæ and prescriptions that governed the tone of our pantry cupboards and the shades of cunning grain-work. We were peaceful merchantmen; what was the use of our dressing up like a parish-rigged man-o'-war? As to the lights--darkening ship would upset the passengers; there would be rumours and apprehension. They would travel in less 'nervous' vessels! The mine that shattered _Manchester Commerce_ stirred the base of our happy conventions; the cruise of the _Emden_ set it swaying perilously; the torpedoes that sank _Falaba_ and _Lusitania_ blew the whole sham edifice to the winds, and we began to think of our ships in other terms than those of freight and passenger rates. Our conceptions of peaceful merchantmen were not the enemy's! We set about to make our vessels less conspicuous. Grey! We painted our hulls and funnels grey. In many colours of grey. The nuances of our coatings were accidental. Poor quality paint and variable untimely mixings contributed, but it was mainly by crew troubles (deficiency and incapacity) that we came by our first camouflage. As needs must, we painted sections at a time--a patch here, a plate or two there--laid on in the way that real sailors would call 'inside-out'! We sported suits of many colours, an infinite variety of shades. Quite suddenly we realized that grey, in such an ample range--red-greys, blue-greys, brown-greys, green-greys--intermixed on our hulls, gave an excellent low-visibility colour that blended into the misty northern landscape. Bolshevik now in our methods, we worked on other schemes to trick the murderer's eye. Convention again beset our path. The great god Symmetry--whom we had worshipped to our undoing--was torn from his high place. The glamour of Balances, that we had thought so fine and shipshape, fell from our eyes, and we saw treachery in every regular disposition. Pairs--in masts, ventilators, rails and stanchions, boat-groupings, samson posts, even in the shrouds and rigging--were spies to the enemy, and we rearranged and screened and altered as best we could, in every way that would serve to give a false indication of our course and speed. Freighters and colliers (that we had scorned because of ugly forward rake of mast and funnel) became the leaders of our fashion. We wedged our masts forward (where we could) and slung a gaff on the fore side of the foremast; we planked the funnel to look more or less upright; we painted a curling bow wash over the propellor and a black elaborate stern on the bows. We trimmed our ships by the head, and flattered ourselves that, Janus-like, we were heading all ways! Few, including the enemy, were greatly deceived. At that point where alterations of apparent course were important--to put the putting Fritz off his stroke--the deck-houses and erections with their beamwise fronts or ends would be plainly noted, and a true line of course be readily deduced. With all our new zeal, we stopped short of altering standing structures, but we could paint, and we made efforts to shield our weakness by varied applications. Our device was old enough, a return to the chequer of ancient sea-forts and the line of painted gun-ports with which we used to decorate our clipper sailing ships. (That also was a camouflage of its day--an effort to overawe Chinese and Malay pirates by the painted resemblance to the gun-deck of a frigate.) We saw the eye-disturbing value of a bold criss-cross, and those of us who had paint to spare made a 'Hobson-jobson' of awning spars and transverse bulkheads. These were our sea-efforts--rude trials effected with great difficulty in the stress of the new sea-warfare. We could only see ourselves from a surface point of view, and, in our empirics, we had no official assistance. During our brief stay in port it was impossible to procure day-labouring gangs--even the 'gulls' of the dockside were busy at sea. On a voyage, gun crews and extra look-outs left few hands of the watch available for experiments; in any case, our rationed paint covered little more than would keep the rust in check. We were relieved when new stars of marine coloration arose, competent shore concerns that, on Government instruction, arrayed us in a novel war paint. Our rough and amateurish tricks gave way to the ordered schemes of the dockyard; our ships were armed for us in a protective coat of many colours. Upon us like an avalanche came this real camouflage. Somewhere behind it all a genius of pantomimic transformation blazed his rainbow wand and fixed us. As we came in from sea, dazzle-painters swarmed on us, bespattered creatures with no bowels of compassion, who painted over our cherished glass and teakwood and brass port-rims--the last lingering evidences of our gentility. Hourly we watched our trim ships take on the hues of a swingman's roundabouts. We learned of fancy colours known only in high art--alizarin and grey-pink, purple-lake and Hooker's green. The designs of our mantling held us in a maze of expectation. Bends and ecartelés, indents and rayons, gyrony and counter-flory, appeared on our topsides; curves and arrow-heads were figured on boats and davits and deck fittings; apparently senseless dabs and patches were measured and imprinted on funnel curve and rounding of the ventilators; inboard and outboard we were streaked and crossed and curved. With our arming of guns there was need for instruction in their service and maintenance; artificial smoke-screens required that we should be efficient in their use; our Otters called for some measure of seamanship in adjustment and control. So far all governmental appliances for our defence relied on our understanding and operation, but this new protective coloration, held aloof from our confidence, it was quite self-contained, there was no rule to be learnt; we were to be shipmates with a new contrivance, to the operation of which we had no control. For want of point in discussion, we criticized freely. We surpassed ourselves in adjectival review; we stared in horror and amazement as each newly bedizened vessel passed down the river. In comparison and simile we racked memory for text to the gaudy creations. "Water running under a bridge.". . . "Forced draught on a woolly sheep's back.". . . "Mural decoration in a busy butcher's shop.". . . "Strike _me_ a rosy bloody pink!" said one of the hands, "if this 'ere don't remind me o' jaundice an' malaria an' a touch o' th' sun, an' me in a perishin' dago 'orspittel!" While naming the new riot of colour grotesque--a monstrosity, an outrage, myopic madness--we were ready enough to grasp at anything that might help us in the fight at sea. We scanned our ships from all points and angles to unveil the hidden imposition. Fervently we hoped that there would be more in it than met our eye--that our preposterous livery was not only an effort to make Gargantuan faces at the Boche! Only the most splendid results could justify our bewilderment. Out on the sea we came to a better estimate of the value of our novel war-paint. In certain lights and positions we seemed to be steering odd courses--it was very difficult to tell accurately the line of a vessel's progress. The low visibility that we seamen had sought was sacrificed to enhance a bold disruption of perspective. While our efforts at deception, based more or less on a one-colour scheme of greys, may have rendered our ships less visible against certain favouring backgrounds of sea and sky, there were other weather conditions in which we would stand out sharply revealed. Abandoning the effort to cloak a stealthy sea-passage, our newly constituted Department of Marine Camouflage decked us out in a bold pattern, skilfully arranged to disrupt our perspective, and give a false impression of our line of course. With a torpedo travelling to the limit of its run--striking anything that may lie in its course, range is of little account. Deflection, on the other hand, is everything in the torpedo-man's problem--the correct estimation of a point of contact of two rapidly moving bodies. He relies for a solution on an accurate judgment of his target's course; it became the business of the dazzle-painters to complicate his working by a feint in colour and design. The new camouflage has so distorted our sheer and disrupted the colour in the mass as to make our vessels less easy to hit. If not invisible against average backgrounds, the dazzlers have done their work so well that we are at least partially lost in every elongation. The mystery withheld from us--the system of our decoration--has done much to ease the rigours of our war-time sea-life. In argument and discussion on its origin and purpose we have found a topic, almost as unfailing in its interest as the record day's run of the old sailing ships. We are agreed that it is a brave martial coat we wear, but are divided in our theories of production. How is it done? By what shrewd system are we controlled that no two ships are quite alike in their splendour? We know that instructions come from a department of the Admiralty to the dockyard painters, in many cases by telegraph. Is there a system of abbreviations, a colourist's shorthand, or are there maritime Heralds in Whitehall who blazon our arms for the guidance of the rude dockside painters? It can be worked out in fine and sonorous proportions: For s.s. CORNCRIX _Party per pale, a pale; first, gules, a fesse dancette, sable; second, vert, bendy, lozengy, purpure cottised with nodules of the first; third, sable, three billets bendwise in fesse, or: sur tout de tout, a barber's pole cockbilled on a sinking gasometer, all proper._ For motto: "_Doing them in the eye._" One wonders if our old conservatism, our clinging to the past, shall persist long after the time of strife has gone; if, in the years when war is a memory and the time comes to deck our ships in pre-war symmetry and grace of black hulls and white-painted deck-work and red funnels and all the gallant show of it, some old masters among us may object to the change. "Well, have it as you like," they may say. "I was brought up in the good old-fashioned cubist system o' ship painting--fine patterns o' reds an' greens an' Ricketts' blue, an' brandy-ball stripes an' that! None o' your damned newfangled ideas of one-colour sections for me! . . . _Huh!_. . . And black hulls, too! . . . Black! A funeral outfit! . . . No, sir! I may be wrong, but anyway, I'm too old now to chop and change about!" If we have become reconciled to the weird patterns of our war-paint, every instinct of seafaring that is in us rebels against the new naming of our ships. Is it but another form of camouflage--like the loving Indian mother abusing her dear children for deception of a malicious listening Djinn? _War Cowslip_, _War Dance_, _War Dreamer!_ War Hell! Are our new standard ships being thus badly named, that the enemy may look upon them as pariahs, unworthy of shell or torpedo? Perhaps, as a thoughtful war measure, it may be chargeful of pregnant meaning; our new war names for the ships may be germane to some distant world movement, the first tender shoot of which we cannot yet recognize! More than likely, it is the result of the fine war-time frolic of fitting the cubest of square pegs in the roundest of holes. How is it done? Is there, in the hutments of St. James's Park, an otherwise estimable and blameless greengrocer, officially charged with the task of finding names for vessels, 015537-68 inclusive, presently on the Controller's lists and due to be launched? We sailors are jealous for our vessels. Abuse us if you will, but have a care for what you may say of our ships. We alone are entitled to call them bitches, wet brutes, stubborn craft, but we will stand for no such liberties from the beach; strikes have occurred on very much less sufficient ground. Ridicule in the naming of our ships is intolerable. If _War_ is to be the prefix, why cannot our greengrocer find suitable words in the chronicles of strife? Can there be anything less martial than the _War Rambler_, _War Linnet_, _War Titmouse_, _War Gossamer_? Why not the _War Teashop_, the _War Picture House_, the--the--the _War Lollipop_? Are we rationed in ships' names? Is there a Controller of Marine Nomenclature? The thing is absurd! If our controllers had sense they would see the danger in thus flouting our sentiment; they would value the recruiting agency of a good name; they would recognize that the naming of a ship should be done with as great care as that of an heir to an earldom. Is the torpedoed bos'n of the _Eumaeus_ going to boast of a new post on the _War Bandbox_? What are the feelings of the captain of a _Ruritania_ when he goes to the yards to take over a _War Whistler_? Why _War_? If sober, businesslike argument be needed, it is confusing; it introduces a repetition of initial syllable that makes for dangerous tangles in the scheme of direction and control. It is all quite unnecessary. There are names and enough. Fine names! Seamanlike names! Good names! Names that any sailor would be proud to have on his worsted jersey! Names that he would shout out in the market-place! Names that the enemy would read as monuments to his infamy! Names of ships that we knew and loved and stood by to the bitter end. XV FLAGS AND BROTHERHOOD OF THE SEA UNLIKE the marches of the land, with guard and counterguard, we had no frontiers on the sea. There were no bounds to the nations and their continents outside of seven or ten fathoms of blue water. We all travelled on the one highway that had few by-paths on which trespassers might be prosecuted. And our highway was no primrose path, swept and garnished and safeguarded; it had perils enough in gale and tempest, fog, ice, blinding snow, dark moonless nights, rock and shoal and sandbar. Remote from ordered assistance in our necessity, we relied on favour of a chance passer-by, on a fallible sea-wanderer like ourselves. So, for our needs, we formed a sea-bond, an International Alliance against our common hazards of wind and sea and fire, an assurance of succour and support in emergency and distress. Out of our hunger for sea-companionship grew a union that had few rules or written compacts, and no bounds to action other than the simply humane traditions and customs of the sea. There were no statutory penalties for infringement of the rules unwritten; we could not, as true seamen, conceive so black a case. We had no Articles of our Association, no charters, no covenants; our only documents were the International Code of Signals and the Rule of the Road at Sea. With these we were content; we understood faith and a blood-bond as brother seamen, and we put out on our adventures, stoutly warranted against what might come. In the Code of Signals we had a language of our own, more immediate and attractive than Volapük or Esperanto. The dire fate of the builders of the Tower held no terror for us, for our intercourse was that of sight and recognition, not of speech. Our code was one of bright colours and bold striking design--flags and pendants fluttering pleasantly in the wind or, in calmer weather, drooping at the halyards with a lift for closer recognition. The symbol of our masonry was a bold red pendant with two vertical bars of white upon it. We had fine hoists for hail and farewell; tragic turn of the colours for a serious emergency, hurried two-flag sets for urgent calls, leisurely symbols of three for finished periods. '_Can you_' required three flags to itself; _me_ or _I_ or _it_ came all within our range. We told our names and those of our ports by a long charge of four; we could cross our _t's_ and dot our _i's_ by beckon of a single square. We lowered slowly and rehoisted ('knuckles to the staff, you young fool!') our National Ensign, as we would raise our hat ashore. It was all an easy, courteous and graceful mode of converse, linguistically and grammatically correct, for we had no concern with accent or composition, taking our polished phrases from the book. It suited well the great family of the sea, for, were we a Turk of Galatz and you an Iceland brigantine, we could pass the time of day or tell one another, simply and intelligibly, the details of our ports and ladings. Distance, within broad limits, was small hindrance to our gossip; there were few eyes on the round of the sea, to read into our confidences. We could put a hail ashore, too. Passing within sight of San Miguel, we could have a message on the home doorsteps on the morrow, by hoisting our 'numbers'; the naked lightkeeper on the Dædalus could tell us of the northern winds by a string of colours thrown out from the upper gallery. Good news, bad news, reports, ice, weather, our food-supply, the wages of our seamen, the whereabouts of pirates and cannibals, the bank rate, high politics (we had S.L.R. for Nuncio)--we had them all grouped and classed and ready for instant reference. Medicine, stocks, the law (G.F.H., King's Bench; these sharps who never will take a plain seaman's clear word on salvage or the weather, or the way the fog-whistle was duly and properly sounded!) Figures! We could measure and weigh and divide and subtract; we could turn your Greek _Daktylas_ into a Japanese _Cho_ or _Tcho_, or Turkish _Parmaks_ into the _Draas_ of Tripoli! Some few world measures had to be appendixed; a _Doppelzentner_ was Z.N.L. What is a _Doppelzentner_? As evidence of our brotherly regard, our peaceful intent, we had few warlike phrases. True, we had hoists to warn of pirates, and we could beg a loan, by signal, of powder and cannon-balls--to supplement our four rusty Snyders, with which we could defend our property, but there was no group in our international vocabulary that could read, "I am torpedoing you without warning!" Seamanlike and simple, we saw only one form of warfare at sea, and based our signals on that. "Keep courage! I am coming to your assistance at utmost speed!". . . "I shall stand by during the night!". . . "Water is gaining on me! I am sinking!" . . . "Boat is approaching your quarter!" These, and others alike, were our war signals, framed to meet our ideas of the greatest peril we might encounter in our conflict with the elements. [Illustration: AN APPRENTICE IN THE MERCHANTS' SERVICE] Of all this we write in a sad past tense. Our sea-bond is shattered. There is no longer a brotherhood on the sea. The latest of our recruits has betrayed us. The old book is useless, for it contains no reading of the German's avowal, "Come on the deck of my submarine. I am about to submerge!" . . . "Stand by, you helpless swine in the boats, while I shell you and scatter your silly blood and brains!" No longer will the receipt of a call of distress be the instant signal (whatever the weather or your own plight) for putting the helm over. We have shut the book! We are grown hardened and distrustful. S.O.S. may be the fiend who has just torpedoed a crowded Red Cross, and endeavours by his lying wireless to lure a Samaritan to the net. A heaving boat, or a lone raft with a staff and a scrap, may only be closed with fearful caution; they may be magnets for a minefield. ". . . still he called aloud, for he was in the track of steamers. And presently he saw a steamer. She carried no lights, but he described her form, a darker shape upon the sea and sky, and saw the sparks volley from her funnel. "He shrieked till his voice broke, but the steamer went on and vanished. The Irishman was furiously enraged, but it was of no use to be angry. He went on calling. So did the other four castaways, but their cries were growing fainter and less frequent. "Then there loomed another steamer, and she, too, went on. By this time, perhaps, an hour had gone by, and the Arab firemen had fallen silent. The Irishman could see them no longer. He never saw them again. A third steamer hove in sight, and she, too, went on. The Irishman cursed her with the passionate intensity peculiar to the seaman, and went on calling. It was a desperate business. . . ." The shame of it! _Lusitania_, _Coquet_, _Serapis_, _Thracia_, _Mariston_, _The Belgian Prince_, _Umaria_ . . . ". . . The commanding officer of the submarine, leaning on the rail of the conning-tower, looked down upon his victims. "Crouched upon the thwarts in the sunlight, up to their knees in water, which, stained crimson, was flowing through the shell-holes in the planking, soaked with blood, holding their wounds, staring with hunted eyes, was the heap of stricken men. "The German ordered the boat away. The shore was fifteen miles distant. . . ." He ordered the boat away! The shame of it! The abasing, dishonouring shame of it! Bitterly, tarnished--we realize our portion in the guilt, our share in this black infamy--that seamen should do this thing! What of the future? What will be the position of the German on the sea when peace returns, let the settlement by catholic conclave be what it may? Sailorfolk have long memories! Living a life apart from their land-fellows, they have but scant regard for the round of events that, on the shore, would be canvassed and discussed, consented--and forgotten. There is no busy competing commercial intrigue, no fickle market, no grudging dalliance on the sea. We stand fast to our own old sea-justice; we have no shades of mercy or condonation, no degrees of tolerance for this bastard betrayer of our unwritten sea-laws. No brotherhood of the sea can be conceived to which he may be re-admitted. Not even the dethronement of the Hohenzollern can purge the deeds of his marine Satraps, for their crimes are individual and personal and professional. In the League of Nations a purged and democratic Germany may have a station, but there is no redemption for a Judas on the sea. There, by every nation, every seafarer, he will remain a shunned and abhorred Ishmael for all time. PART III [Illustration: A STANDARD SHIP AT SEA] XVI THE CONVOY SYSTEM EARLY in 1917 the losses of the merchants' ships and men had assumed a proportion that called for a radical revision of the systems of naval protection. Concentrating their energies on but one specific form of sea offence, the enemy had developed their submarine arm to a high point of efficiency. Speed and power and lengthy sea-keeping qualities were attained. To all intents and purposes the U-boats had become surface destroyers with the added conveniency of being able to disappear at sight. They conducted their operations at long distance from the land and from their bases. The immense areas of the high seas offered a peculiar facility for 'cut-and-run' tactics: the system of independent sailings of the merchantmen provided them with a succession of victims, timed in a progression that allowed of solitary disposal. Notwithstanding the matured experience of submarine methods gained by masters, the rapid evolution of counter-measures by the Royal Navy, the courage and determination of all classes of seafarers, our shipping and that of our Allies and the neutral nations was being destroyed at a rate that foreshadowed disaster. Schemes of rapid ship construction were advanced, lavish expenditure incurred, plans and occupation designed--all to ensure a replacement of tonnage at a future date. More material in point of prompt effect were the efforts of the newly formed Ministry of Shipping to conserve existing tonnage by judicious and closely controlled employment. All but sternly necessary sea-traffic was eliminated: harbour work in loading and unloading was expedited: the virtues of a single control enhanced the active agency of the merchants' ships--now devoted wholly to State service. Joined to the provisional and economic measures of the bureaux, Admiralty reorganized their methods of patrol and sea-supervision of the ships. The entry of the United States into the world war provided a considerable increase of naval strength to the Allied fleets. Convoy measures, that before had been deemed impracticable, were now possible. Destroyers and sloops could be released from fleet duties and were available as escorts. American flotillas crossed the Atlantic to protect the sea-routes: Japanese war craft assisted us in the Mediterranean. In the adoption of the convoy system the Royal Navy was embarking on no new venture. Modern ships and weapons may have brought a novel complication to this old form of sea-guardianship, but there is little in seafaring for which the traditions of the Naval Service cannot offer text and precedent. The constant of protection by convoy has remained unaltered by the advance of armament and the evolution of strange war craft: the high spirit of self-sacrifice is unchanged. When, in October 1917, the destroyers _Strongbow_ and _Mary Rose_ accepted action and faced three German cruisers, their commanders--undismayed by the tremendous odds--reacted the parts of the common sea-dramas of the Napoleonic wars. The same obstinate courage and unconquerable sea-pride forbade them to desert their convoy of merchantmen and seek the safety that their speed could offer. H.M.S. _Calgarian_, torpedoed and sinking, had yet thought for the convoy she escorted. Her last official signal directed the ships to turn away from the danger. [Illustration: BUILDING A STANDARD SHIP] The convoy system did not spring fully served and equipped from the earlier and less exacting control. Tentative measures had to be devised and approved, a large staff to be recruited and trained. The clerical work of administration was not confined to the home ports; similar adjustment and preparation had to be conducted in friendly ports abroad. As naval services were adapted to the new control, the system was extended. The comparatively simple procedure of sending destroyer escorts to meet homeward-bound convoys became involved with the timing and dispatch of a mercantile fleet sailing from a home port. The escorts were ordered out on a time-table that admitted of little derangement. Sailing from a British port with a convoy of outward-bound vessels, the destroyers accompanied that fleet to a point in the Atlantic. There the convoy was dispersed, and the destroyers swung off to rendezvous with a similar convoy of inward-bound vessels. While the outgoing merchantmen were allowed to proceed independently after passing through the most dangerous area, the homeward-bound vessels were grouped to sail in company from their port abroad. An ocean escort was provided--usually a cruiser of the older class--and there was opportunity in the longer voyage for the senior officer to drill the convoy to some unity and precision in manoeuvre. The commander of the ocean escort had no easy task in keeping his charges together. The age-old difficulty of grouping the ships in the order of their sailing (now steaming) powers has not diminished since Lord Cochrane, in command of H.M.S. _Speedy_, complained of the 'fourteen sail of merchantmen' he convoyed from Cagliari to Leghorn. In the first enthusiasm of a new routine, masters were over-sanguine in estimation of the speed of their ships. The average of former passages offered a misleading guide. While it was possible to average ten and a half knots on a voyage from Cardiff to the Plate, proceeding at a speed that varied with the weather (and the coal), station could not easily be kept in a ten-knot convoy when--at the cleaning of the fires--the steam went 'back.' Swinging to the other extreme (after experience of the guide-ship's angry signals), we erred in reserving a margin that retarded the full efficiency of a convoy. Our commodores had no small difficulty in conforming to the date of their convoy's arrival at a rendezvous. The 'cruising speed' of ten knots, that we had so blithely taken up when sailing from an oversea port, frequently toned down to an average of eight--with all the consequent derangement of the destroyers' programme at the home end; a declared nine-knot convoy would romp home at ten, to find no escort at the rendezvous. In time, we adjusted our estimate to meet the new demands. Efforts of the Ministry of Shipping to evolve an order in our voyaging that would reduce irregularities had good results. The skilfully thought-out appointment of the ships to suitable routes and trades had effect in producing a homogeneity that furthered the employment of our resources to the full. The whole conduct of our seafaring speedily came within the range of governmental control, as affecting the timely dispatch and arrival of the convoys. The quality of our fuel, the state of the hull, competence of seamen, formed subject for close investigation. The rate of loading or discharge, the urgency of repairs and refitment, were no longer judged on the note of our single needs; like the states of the weather and the tide, they were weighed and assessed in the formula that governed our new fleet movements. The system of convoy protection had instant effect in curbing the activities of the U-boats. They could no longer work at sea on the lines that had proved so safe for them and disastrous for us. To get at the ships they had now to come within range of the destroyers' armament. Hydrophones and depth-charges reduced their vantage of submersion. The risks of sudden rupture of their plating by the swiftly moving keel of an escorting vessel did not tend to facilitate the working of their torpedo problem. In the coastal areas aircraft patrolled overhead the convoys, to add their hawk-sight to the ready swerve of the destroyers. The chances of successful attack diminished as the hazard of discovery and destruction increased. Still, they were no fainthearts. The German submarine commanders, brutal and hell-nurtured, are no cowards. The temptation of a massed target attracted them, and they sought, in the confusion of the startled ships, a means of escape from the destroyers when their shot into the 'brown' had run true. Convoy has added many new duties to the sum of our activities when at sea. Signals have assumed an importance in the navigation. The flutter of a single flag may set us off on a new course at any minute of the day. Failure to read a hoist correctly may result in instant collision with a sister ship. We have need of all eyes on the bridge to keep apace with the orders of the commodore. In station-keeping we are brought to the practice of a branch of seamanship with which not many of us were familiar. Steaming independently, we had only one order for the engineer when we had dropped the pilot. 'Full speed ahead,' we said, and rang a triple jangle of the telegraph to let the engineer on watch know that there would be no more 'backing and filling'--and that he could now nip into the stokehold to see to the state of the fires. Gone--our easy ways! We have now to keep close watch on the guide-ship and fret the engineer to adjustments of the speed that keep him permanently at the levers. The fires may clag and grey down through unskilful stoking--the steam go 'back' without warning: ever and on, he has to jump to the gaping mouth of the voice-tube: "Whit? Two revolutions? Ach! Ah cannae gi' her ony mair!"--but he does. Slowly perhaps, but surely, as he coaxes steam from the errant stokers, we draw ahead and regain our place in the line. No small measure of the success of convoy is built up in the engine-rooms of our mercantile fleets. Steaming in formation at night without lights adds to our 'grey heires.' The menace of collision is ever present. Frequently, in the darkness, we have no guide-ship in plain sight to regulate our progress. The adjustments of speed, that in the daytime kept us moderately well in station, cannot be made. It is best to turn steadily to the average revolutions of a former period, and keep a good look-out for the broken water of a sister ship. On occasion there is the exciting medley of encountering a convoy bound the opposite way. In the confusion of wide dispersal and independent alterations of course to avert collision, there is latitude for the most extraordinary situations. An incident in the Mediterranean deserves imperishable record: "We left Malta, going east, and that night it was inky dark and we ran clean through a west-bound convoy. How there wasn't an accident, God only knows. We had to go full astern to clear one ship. She afterwards sidled up alongside of us and steamed east for an hour and a half. Then she hailed us through a megaphone: 'Steamer ahoy! Hallo! Where are you bound to?' 'Salonika,' we said. 'God Almighty,' he says. 'I'm bound to Gibraltar. Where the hell's _my_ convoy?'" [Illustration: THE THAMES ESTUARY IN WAR-TIME] XVII OUTWARD BOUND CUSTOMS clerks--may their name be blessed--are worth much more than their mere weight in gold. We do not mean the civil servants at the Custom House, who listen somewhat boredly to our solemn Oath and Compearance. Doubtless they, too, are of value, but our concern is with the owner's shipping clerk who attends our hesitating footsteps in the walk of ships' business when we come on shore. He greets us on arrival from overseas, bearing our precious letters and the news of the firm: he has the devious paths of our entry-day's course mapped out, down to the train we may catch for home. As an oracle of the port, there is nothing he does not know: the trains, the week's bill at the 'Olympeambra,' the quickest and cheapest way to send packages to Backanford, suitable lodging in an outport, the standing of the ship laundries, the merits of the hotels--he has information about them all. During our stay in port he attends to our legal business. He speeds us off to the sea again, with all our many folios in order. In peace, we had a settled round that embraced the Custom House for entry, the Board of Trade for crew affairs, the Notary for 'Protest.' (". . . and experienced the usual heavy weather!") War has added to our visiting-list. We must make acquaintance with the many naval authorities who control our movements; the Consuls of the countries we propose to visit must see us in person; it would be discourteous to set sail without a p.p.c. on the Dam-ship and Otter officers. Ever and on, a new bureau is licensed to put a finger in our pie: we spend the hours of sailing-day in a round of call and counter-call. The Consul wishes to _visé_ our Articles--the Articles may not be handed over till we produce a slip from the Consul, the Consul will grant no slip till we have seen the S.I.O. "Have we identity papers for every member of the crew, with photograph duly authenticated?"--"We are instructed not to grant passports!" Back and forward we trudge while the customs clerk at our side tells cheerfully of the very much more trying time that fell to Captain Blank. By wile and industry and pertinacity he unwinds the tangle of our longshore connections. He reconciles the enmity of the bureaux, pleads for us, apologizes for us, fights for us, engages for us. All we have to do is to sign, and look as though the commercial world stood still, awaiting the grant of that particular certificate. Undoubtedly the customs clerk is worth his weight in red, red gold! On a bright summer afternoon we emerge from the Custom House. We have completed the round. In the case which the clerk carries we have authority to proceed on our lawful occasions. Customs have granted clearance; our manifests are stamped and ordered; the Articles of Agreement and the ship's Register are in our hands. The health of our port of departure is guaranteed by an imposing document. Undocking permit, vouchers for pilotage and light dues, discharge books, sea-brief, passports, and store-sheets, are all there for lawful scrutiny. In personal safe-keeping, we have our sea-route ordered and planned. The hard work is done. There is no more _business_--nothing to do but to go on board and await the rise of tide that shall float us through the river channels to sea. Cargo is stowed and completed; the stevedores are unrigging their gear when we reach the ship. Our coming is noted, and the hatch foremen (in anticipation of a 'blessing') rouse the dockside echoes with carefully phrased orders to their gangs: "T' hell wit' yes, now! Didn't Oi tell ye, Danny Kilgallen, that _th' Cyaptin_ wants thim tarpolyan sames turned fore an' aff!" (A shilling or two for him!)--"Beggin' yer pardon, sir--I don't see th' mate about--will we put them fenders below _for ye_ before we close th' hatch?" (Another _pourboire_!)--Number three has finished his hatchway, but his smiling regard calls for suitable acknowledgment. (After all, we shall have no use for British small coinage out West!) The head foreman, dear old John, is less ambitious. All he wants is our understanding that he has stowed her tight--and a shake of the hand for good luck. Firmly we believe in the good luck that lies in the hand of an old friend. "'Bye, John!" In groups, as their work is finished, the dockers go on shore, and leave to the crew the nowise easy task of clearing up the raffle, lashing down, and getting the lumbered decks in something approaching sea-trim. Fortunately, there is time for preparation. Usually, we are dragged to the dock gates with the hatches uncovered, the derricks aloft, and the stowers still busy blocking off the last slings of the cargo. This time there will be no hurried (and improper) finish--the stevedores hurling their gear ashore at the last minute, slipping down the fender lanyards, scurrying to a 'pier-head jump,' with the ship moving through the lock! Some happy chance has brought completion within an hour or two of tide-time. The mate has opportunity to clear ship effectively, and we have leisure to plot and plan our sea-route (in anticipation of hasty chart glances when we get outside) before the pier-master hails us--"Coom along wi' t' _Massilia_!" Tugs drag us through the inner gates, pinch and angle our heavy hull in the basin, and enter us into the locks. The massive gates are swung across, the sluices at the river-end eased to an outflow and, slowly, the great lock drains to the river level. The wires of our quay-fasts tauten and ring out to the tension of the outdraft, as we surge in the pent water-space and drop with the falling level. Our high bridge view over the docks and the river is pared in inches by our gradual descent; the deck falls away under cope of the rough masonry; our outlook is turned upwards to where the dockmaster signals his orders. The ship seems suddenly to assume the proportions of a canal-boat in her contrast with the sea-scarred granite walls and the bulk of the towering gates. At level with the flood, the piermen heave the outer lock-gates open for our passage. We back out into the river, bring up, then come ahead, canting to a rudder pressure that sheers us into the fairway. The river is thronged by vessels at anchor or under way, docking and undocking on the top of the tide, and their manoeuvres make work for our pilot. At easy speed we work a traverse through the press at the dock entrances and head out to seaward. [Illustration: DROPPING THE PILOT] Evening is drawing on as we enter the sea-channels--a quiet close to a fine summer day. Out on the estuary it is hard to think of war at sea. Shrimpers are drifting up on the tide, the vivid glow of their tanned canvas standing over a mirrored reflection in the flood. The deep of the fairway is scored by passage of coasting steamers, an unending procession that joins lightship to lightship in a chain of transport. The sea-reaches look in no way different from the peaceful channels we have known so long, the buoys and the beacons we pass in our courses seem absurdly tranquil, as though lacking any knowledge that they are signposts to a newly treacherous sea. Only from the land may one draw a note of warning--on shore there are visible signs of warfare. The searchlights of the forts, wheeling over the surface of the channels, turn on us and steady for a time in inspection. Farther inland, ghostly shafts and lances are sweeping overhead, in ceaseless scrutiny of the quiet sky. At a bend in the fairway we close and speak the channel patrol steamer and draw no disquieting impression from her answer to our hail. The port is still open and we may proceed on our passage to join convoy at ----. An escort will meet us in 1235 and conduct us to 5678. 'Carry on!' It is quite dark when we round the outer buoy and reduce speed to drop our pilot. The night is windless and a calm sea gives promise of a good passage. We bring up close to the cutter, and, shortly, with a stout 'Good-bye,' the pilot swings overside and clambers down the long side-ladder to his boat. We shut off all lights and steer into the protecting gloom of the night. [Illustration: EXAMINATION SERVICE PATROL BOARDING AN INCOMING STEAMER] XVIII RENDEZVOUS ALMOST hourly they round the Point, turning in from seaward with a fine swing and thrash of propellors to steer a careful course through the boom defences. Screaming gulls wheel and poise and dive around them, exulting to welcome the new-comers in, and the musical clank and rattle of anchor cables, as the ships bring up in the Roads, mark emphatic periods to this--the short coasting section of the voyage. "Safe here!" sing the chains, as they link out over the open hawse. "Thus far, anyway, in spite of fog and coast danger, of mine and submarine," and the brown hill-side joins echo to the clamour of the wheeling gulls, letting all know the ships have come in to join the convoy. The bay, that but a day ago lay broad and silent and empty, now seems to narrow its proportions as each high-sided merchantman comes in; the hills draw nearer with every broad hull that anchors, wind-rode, in the blue of the bay. As if in key with the illusion, the broad expanse of shallow, inshore water, that before gave distance to the hills, now sheds its power, cut and furrowed as it becomes by thrash and wake of tugs and launches all making out to serve the larger vessels. On the high mound of the harbour-master's look-out, keen eyes note all movements in the bay. The signal-mast and yard bear a gay setting of flags and symbols, and rapid changes and successions show the yeoman of signals and his mates at work, recording and replying, taking mark and tally of the ships as they arrive. Up and down goes the red-and-white-barred answering pendant to say that it is duly noted--"_War Trident_, _Marmion_, and _Pearl Shell_ report arrival"--or the semaphore arms, swinging smartly, tell H.M.S. _03xyz_ that permission to enter harbour (she having safely escorted the trio to port) is approved. Out near the entrance to the bay, where the 'gateships' of the boom defences show clear water, the patrol steamer of the Examination Service lays-to, challenging each incoming vessel to state her name and particulars. These, in turn, are signalled to the shore and the yeoman writes: "Begins war trident for norfolk va. speed nine knots is ready for sea stop marmion for Bahia reports steering engine broken down will require ten hours complete repairs stop pearl shell nine and half short-handed one fireman two trimmers report agents stop ends." If room is scanty, the convoy office has at least an atmosphere in keeping with its mission. Nestling close under the steep brow of the harbour-master's look-out, it was, in happier days, the life-boat coxswain's dwelling, and a constant reminder of sea-menace and emergency almost blocks the door--the long boat-house and launch-ways of the life-boat. Four square and solid, the little house only has windows overlooking the bay, as if attending strictly to affairs at sea and having no eyes for landward doings; the peering eaves face straight out towards the 'gateships' as though even the stone and lime were intent on the sailing of the convoys, whose order and formation are arranged within their walls. The upper room has a desk or two, a telephone, a chart table, and a typewriter, and here the port convoy officer and his assistants trim and index and arrange the ships in order of their sailing. At the window a seaman-writer is typing out 'pictures' for the next sailing--signal tables, formation and dispersal diagrams, call signs, zigzags, constantly impressing that Greenwich Mean Time is the thing (no Summer Time at sea), and that courses are True, _not_ Magnetic. The clack and release of his machine seem quite a part of conversation between the convoy officer and his lieutenant; the whole is so apparently disjointed in references to this ship and that, to repairs and tides, and shortage of 'hands' and water-supply and turns in the hawse, and even Spanish influenza! To one accustomed to single-ship work the whole is mildly bewildering, and one readily understands that sailing a merchant convoy calls for more than the simple word of command. "_War Trident_, nine knots," reads the junior, from a signal slip. "_Marmion_, a doubtful starter--steering-gear disabled. _Pearl Shell_, three stokehold hands short." "_Trident_ only nine! That be damned for a yarn!" says his senior, reaching for the slip. "Nine will reduce the speed of the whole convoy a knot. She must be good for more--new ship, isn't she?" "Yes. One of these new standards--built for eleven knots and chocked up afterwards with fancy gear and 'gadjets' to rob the boilers." "Lemme see--nine knots"--turning to the pages of a tide-book, the convoy officer makes a rough sum of it. "High water at Oysterpool--so--arrived here--distance--and seventy-one. Why, he's come on from Oysterpool at ten, no less, and that's not allowing for the zigzag either!" The lieutenant looks round for his cap. Clearly there is a definite 'drill' for captains who come on from Oysterpool at ten and declare their speed as nine, and he is ready when the P.C.O. passes orders. "All right. You go off and see the captain. Try to get him to spring at least half a knot. I expect he's allowing a bit for 'coming up,' and going easy till he knows his new ship. . . . I'll 'phone _Pearl Shell's_ agents and warn 'em to hustle round for firemen. _Marmion?_ Yes. Board _Marmion_ on your way back. Wants ten hours--she should be able to keep her sailing." A year agone there would have been but moderate and passive interest in the varying troubles of the ships and their crews, but much water has flowed over the Red Ensign since then, and we are learning. The convoy lieutenant goes down a winding path to the boat-slip and boards his launch to set off for the Roads. The morning, that broke fair and unclouded, has turned grey; a damp sea-mist is wandering over the bay in thin wraiths and feathers, but sunlight on the brown of the distant hills promises a clearing as the day draws on. Fishing-smacks, delayed by want of wind, are creeping in to the market steps under sweep of their long oars, and their lazy canvas rustles, and the booms and sheet-blocks creak as the wash of the picket-launch sets them swaying. In from the sea channels, with their sweeps still wet and glistening, come the _Agnes Whitwell_, _Fortuna_, the _Dieudonné_, and _Brother Fred_, each with a White Ensign aloft and a naked grey gun on their high bows. They are late in their return, and one can guess at deadly iron spheres stirred from the depths of the fairways, thrown buoyant in the wash astern, and destroyed by crack of gunfire. The commodore of the sisterly pairs, a young lieutenant of Reserve, waves a cheery greeting as we pass. [Illustration: DAWN: CONVOY PREPARING TO PUT TO SEA] And now the Roads, windless and misty, the anchored merchantmen swung at different angles, in their gay fantasy of dazzle-paint, borrowing further motley from the mist, and leering grotesquely through the thin vapours. But for her lines, undeniably fine and graceful, _War Trident_ is the standardest of standards. Dazzle-painters have slapped their spite at her in lurid swathes and, not content, have draped her sheer in harlequin crenellations. Her low pipe-funnel upstands in rigid perpendicular. ("Chief! Pit yer haun' up an' feel if th' kettle's bilin'!") No masts break the long length of her, saving only a midship signal-pole that serves her wireless aerials and affords a hod-like perch for the look-out aloft. She is stark new, smooth of plating, and showing even the hammer-strokes on her rivets. Through the thin paint on her sides, marks and symbols of construction appear, the letters of her strakes painted in firm white, with here and there an unofficial shipyard embellishment--"Good old Jeemy Quin," or "Tae hell wi' the Kiser!" She is ready for sea, and life-boats and davits, swung outboard, tower overhead as the picket-launch draws up at her gaunt side. She is in ballast trim, and it is evident that her standard carpenters hold strictly to a rule that ignores a varying freeboard--the side ladder is short by eight feet, and only by middling the rungs (a leap at the bottom, a long swaying climb, and a drag at the top) are we able to clamber on board. A special 'drill' for conducting affairs with masters of brand-new ships should be devised immediately by Admiralty, and the mildest of Low-Church curates (trimmed by previous dire tortures to the utter limit of exasperation) be provided, on whom officials may be well practised. Usually the master has been hurried out of port by the last rivet driven home, with strange officers and the very weakest of new crews, in a ship jam-full of the newest 'gadjets,' and the least possible reserve of gear to work them. Quickly and bitterly the fourth sentence of Confession at Morning Prayer is recalled to him--the things undone crowd round, and there is nothing in the bare hull to serve as a makeshift. The engines and _auxiliaries_ (that, with a builder's man at every bearing, worked well on trials) now develop tricks and turns to keep the chief engineer and his fledgling juniors on the run; the mate cries "Kamerad" to all suggestions, pointing to his hopeless watch of one. (Eight deck: four in a watch, less one helmsman and two look-outs, equals one.) Add to the sum of difficulties that the captain has probably been ashore since he lost his last ship, and finds the new tactics and signals and zigzags unfamiliar; through it all the want of familiar little trifles and fixings (that go so far to help a ready action), sustains a feeling of irritation. It is little wonder that the convoy lieutenant goes warily, and, indeed, but for the brilliant inspiration of using the 'last ship,' it seems probable that the convoy will have to proceed at _Trident's_ modest nine knots. Bluntly, the captain is in undisguised ill-humour. He has been on deck practically since leaving the builder's yard, and his weary eyes suggest a need for prompt sleep. His room, still reeking of new paint and varnish, is in some disorder, and shows traces of an anxious passage along the coast. 'Notices to Mariners' lie open at the minefield sketches, with a half-smoked pipe atop to keep the pages open; chart upon chart is piled (for want of a rack) on bed and couch; oilskins, crumpled as when drawn off, hang over the edge of a door--not a peg to hang them on; an open sextant case, jammed secure by pillows, lies on the washstand lid; books of sailing directions, a taffrail log, some red socket-flares, are heaped awry in a corner of the room; the whole an evidence that lockers and minor ship conveniences are not yet standardized. Pray goodness he may have a stout honest thief of a chief mate, able and willing to find a baulk or two of timber, and a few nails and brass screws and copper tacks and a curtain-rod or two and a bolt of canvas! The convoy lieutenant, unheeding a somewhat surly return of his greeting, produces Convoy Form No. AX, and starts in cheerfully to fill the vacant columns. "Tonnage, captain?--register will do. Crew? Guns? Coal?--consumpt. at speeds. Revolutions per half-knot?" The form completed, he hands it over for signature, thus tactfully drawing the captain's attention to the secretarial work he has done for him. "What's the speed? Nine and a half?" "Speed!" answers the Old Man. "Hell! This bunch of hair-springs can't keep out of her own way! Speed? The damned funnel's so low we can't get draught to burn a cigarette-paper; and these new pumps they've given her! . . . Well, we might do nine, but only in fine weather, mind you. Nine knots!" "You'll have to do better for this convoy, captain. There's not a ship under nine and a half; but there may be a bunch of eight-knotters going out in five days." "Nothing under nine and a half! What? Why, there's _Pearl Shell_ came in with us. She hasn't a kick above nine. When I was in the old _Collonia_, we. . . ." "The _Collonia_? A fine ship, Gad! Were you in her, captain, when she was strafed? Let's see--Mediterranean, wasn't it?" The captain nods pleasantly, as if accepting a compliment. "_Umm!_ Mediterranean--troops--a hell of a job to get them off. Lost some, though"--regretfully. The convoy lieutenant turns a good card. "Must be a change to come down to ten knots, captain, after a crack ship like _Collonia_. What could she do? Sixteen?" "Oh no. We could get an eighteen-knot clip out of her--more, if we wanted!" (If _War Trident's_ speed be low and doubtful, the Old Man can safely pile the knots on his stricken favourite.) "_She_ was a ship, not a damned parish-rigged barge like this--a poverty-stricken hulk that. . . ." "Yes. I heard about her from Benson, of _War Trumpet_. He sailed in last convoy. Said he was glad he wasn't appointed here." "Wasn't appointed here, be damned! Didn't have the chance. Why, that ship of his isn't in the same class at all. The _Trident_ can steer, anyway, and when we get things fixed up. . . . She has the hull of a fine ship. If only we could get a decent funnel on her. . . . Here, I'll try her at your nine and a half knots! I'll bet _War Trumpet_ can't do a kick above nine!" * * * * * Be it noted that the convoy officers have the wavy gold lace of the R.N.R. for their rank stripes; plain half-inch ones of the Royal Navy might have had to let the convoy sail at nine, after all--not knowing the 'grip' of the 'last ship.' [Illustration: EVENING: PLYMOUTH HOE] XIX CONFERENCE "A LAUNCH will be sent off at 3 p.m., S.T., to bring masters on shore for conference. You are requested to bring"--etc. So reads the notice, and p.m. finds the coxswain of the convoy office picket-boat steaming and backing from ship to ship, and making no secret of his disapproval of a scheme of things that keeps him waiting (tootling, perhaps, an impatient blast), while leisurely shipmasters give final orders to their mates at the gangways. ("That damned ship's cat in the chart-room again, sir!") More ships have come in since the clearing of the morning mist, and calm weather and vagaries of the tide have combined to crowd the ships in the anchorage into uncomfortably close quarters; perhaps, after all, it would be rather the counter-swing of that River Plate boat, anchoring close abeam ("Given me a foul berth, damn him!"), than the insanitary ways of the ship's cat that kept the captain, one leg over the rail, so long in talk with his mate. Never, since the days of sailing ships and the leisurely deep-sea parliaments in the ship-chandler's back room, have we been brought so much together. The bustle and dispatch of steamer work, in pre-war days, kept us apart from our sea-fellows; there were few forgatherings where we could exchange views and experiences and abuse 'square-heads' and damn the Board of Trade. Now, the run of German torpedoes has banded us together again, and in convoy and their conferences, we are coming to know one another as never before. At first we were rather reserved, shy perhaps, and diffident, one to another. Careless, in a way, of longshore criticism and opinion, we were somewhat concerned that conduct among our peers should be dignified and seaworthy; then, the fine shades of precedence--largely a matter of the relative speeds of our commands--had to average out before the 'master' of an east-coast tramp and the 'captain' of an R.M.S. found joint and proper equality. In this again, the enemy torpedo served a turn, and we are not now surprised to learn that the 'captain' of a modest nine-knot freighter had been (till she went down with the colours apeak) 'master' of His Majesty's Transport of 16,000 tons. So we crowd up together in the convoy launch, and introduce ourselves, and talk a while of our ships and crews till stoppage of the engines and clatter of hardwood side-ladders mark another recruit, sprawling his way down the high wall-side of a ballasted ship. The coxswain sighs relief as he pockets his list--the names all now ticked off in order of their boarding--and puts his helm over to swing inshore. "A job o' work," he says. "Like 'unt th' slipper, this 'ere! 'Ow can I tell wot ships they is, names all painted hover; an' them as does show their names is only damn numbers!" In pairs, colloguing as we go, we mount the jetty steps and find a way to the conference-room. We make a varied gathering. Some few are in their company's service uniform, but most of us, misliking an array but grudgingly tolerated in naval company, wear longshore clothes and, in our style, affect soft felt hats and rainproof overcoats. Not very gallant raiment, it is true, but since brave tall hats and plain brass buttons and fancy waistcoats and Wellingtons went out with the lowering of the last single topsail, we have had no convention in our attire. In conference we come by better looks--bareheaded, and in stout blue serge, we sit a-row facing the blackboard on which our 'drills' are chalked. Many find a need for eyeglasses, the better to read the small typescript (uniformly bad) handed round to us, that sets forth our stations and the order of our sailing, and one wonders if the new look-out has brought us at last to the hands of the opticians; certainly, our eyes are 'giving' under the strain. Of all the novel routine that war has brought to seafaring, convoy work is, perhaps, the most apart from our normal practice. We have now to think of concerted action, outboard the limits of our own bulwark; we have become subject to restriction in our sailing; we conform to movements whose purpose may not, perhaps, be plainly apparent. Trained and accustomed to single and undisputed command, it was not easy to alter the habits of a lifetime at sea. We were autocrats in our small sea-world, bound only by our owner's instruction to proceed with prudence and dispatch. We had no super-captain on the sea to rule our lines and set our courses and define our speeds. We made 'eight bells!' But the 'bells' we made and the courses we steered and the rate we sped could not bring all of us safely to port. They gave us guns--and we used them passing well--but guns could not, at that date, deflect torpedoes, and ships went down. Then came convoy and its success, and we had to pocket our declarations of independence, and steer in fleets and company; and gladly enough, too, we availed ourselves of a union in strength, though it took time to custom us to a new order at sea. At first we were resentful of what, ill-judging, we deemed interference. Were we not master mariners, skilled seamen, able to trim and handle our ships in any state or case? And if, on our side, the great new machine revolved a turn or two uneasily, it is true that the naval spur-wheel was not itself entirely free of grit. The naval officers, who drilled us down, were at first distant and superior; masters were a class, forgotten since sail went out, who had now no prototype in His Majesty's Service; there was no guide to the standard of association. Having little, if any, knowledge of merchant-ship practice, naval officers expected the same many-handed efficiency as in their own service. Crew troubles were practically unknown in their experience; all coal was 'Best Welsh Navigation'; all ships, whatever their lading, turned, under helm, apace! Gradually we learned--as they did. We saw, in practice, that team work and not individual smartness was what counted in convoy; that, be our understanding of a signal as definite and clear as the loom of the Craig, it was imperative, for our own safety, that the reading of out-wing and more distant ships should be as ready and accurate. In this, our convoy education, the chief among our teachers were the commodores, R.N. and R.N.R., who came to sea with us, blest, by a happy star, with TACT! [Illustration: A CONVOY CONFERENCE] So, we learned, and now sit to listen, attentively and with respect, to what the King's Harbour Master has to say about our due and timely movements in forming up in convoy. On him, also, the happy star has shone, and we are conscious of an undernote that admits we are all good men and true and know our work. One among us, a junior by his looks, dissents on a movement, and not all-friendly eyes we turn on him; but he is right, all the same, and the point he raises is worthy the discussion that clears it. Our ranks are evidence of a world-wide league of seafarers against German brutality. While his frightfulness has barred the enemy for ever from sea-brotherhood, it has had effect in banding the world's seamen in a closer union. We are not alone belligerents devising measures of warfare; in our international gathering we represent a greater movement than a council of arms. British in majority, with Americans, Frenchmen, a Japanese, a Brazilian--we are at war and ruling our conduct to the sea-menace, but among us there are neutrals come to join our convoy; peaceful seamen seeking a place with us in fair trade on the free seas. Two Scandinavian masters and a Spaniard listen with intent preoccupation to the lecture--a recital in English, familiar to them as the Esperanto of the sea. The K.H.M.'s careful and detailed routine has a significance not entirely connected with our sailing of the morrow; in a way it impresses one with the extent of our sea-empire. Most of us have taken station as he orders, have all the manoeuvres by rote, but even at this late date, there are those among us, called from distant seas, to whom the instructions are novel. For them, we say, the emphasis on clearing hawse overnight, the definition of G.M.T., the exactitude of zigzag, and the necessity of ready answer to signals. We are old stagers now, _we_ know all these drills, _we_-- Damn! We, too, are becoming superior! In turn, the commodore who is to sail with us has his say. Signals and look-out, the cables of our distance, wireless calls, action guns and smoke-screen, the rubbish-heap, darkening ship, fog-buoys and hydroplanes, he deals with in a fine, confident, deep sea-voice. Only on question of the hearing of sound-signals in fog do we throw our weight about, and we make reminiscent tangents not wholly connected with the point at issue. Yarn-spinners, courteously recalled from their digressions, wind up somewhat lamely, and commodore goes on to deal with late encounters with the enemy in which a chink in our armour was bared. Methods approved to meet such emergencies are explained, and his part is closed by attention to orders detailed for convoy dispersal. The commander of the destroyer escort has a few words for us; a brief detail of the power of his under-water armament, a request for a 'fair field in action.' Conference comes to an end when the shipping intelligence officer has explained his routes and given us our sailing orders. Till now we have been actually an hour and a half without smoking, and our need is great. As one man we fumble for pipes and tobacco (a few lordly East-Indiamen flaunt cheroots), and in the fumes and at our ease arrange, in unofficial ways, the small brotherly measures that may help us at sea. "Oh yes, _Chelmsford_, you're my next ahead. Well, say, old man, if it comes fog, give me your brightest cargo 'cluster' to shine astern--daytime, too--found it a good----" "Fog, egad! What about fog when we are forming up? Looked none too clear t' the south'ard as we came ashore!" Somewhat late, we realize that not a great deal has been said about weather conditions for the start-off. The port convoy officer is still about, but all he can offer is a pious hope and the promise that he will have tugs on hand to help us out. "No use 'making almanacks' till the time comes," says our Nestor (a stout old greybeard who has been twice torpedoed). "We shall snake into column all right, and, anyhow, we're all bound the same way!" "What about towing one another out?" suggests a junior, and, the matter having been brought to jest, we leave it at that. The caretaker jangles his keys and, collecting our 'pictures,' we go out to the quayside, where thin rain and a mist shroud the harbour basin, and the dock warehouses loom up like tall clippers under sail. The coxswain comes, clamping in heavy sea-boots and an oilskin, to tell that the launch is at the steps, ready to take us off. Two of us have business to conclude with our agent, and remain on the jetty to see our fellows crowd into shelter of the hood and the launch back out. We call cheerfully, one to another, that we shall meet at Bahia or New York or Calcutta or Miramichi, and the mist takes them. Up the ancient cobbled street we come on an old church and, the rain increasing to a torrent, we shelter at the porch. Who knows, curiosity perhaps, urges us farther and we step quietly down-level to the old stone-flagged nave. The light is failing, and the tombs and monuments are dim and austere, the inscriptions faint and difficult to read. A line of Drakes lie buried here, and tablets to the memory of old sea-captains (whose bones may lie where tide is) are on the walls. A sculptured medallion of ships on the sea draws our attention and we read, with difficulty, for the stone is old and the lines faint and worn. ". . . INTERRED YE BODY OF EDMOND LEC----, FORMERLY COMMANDER OF HER MAJ---- SHIP YE _LINN FRIGOT_, 17-- . . . A FRENCH CORVAT FROM WHOM HE PROTECTED A LARGE FLEET OF MERCHANT SHIPS ALL INTO SAFETY. . . . AND BRAVELY HE GAVE YE ENEMY BATTEL AND FORCED HIM TO BEAR AWAY WITH MUCH DAMMAGE. . . ." We looked at one another. A good charge to take to sea in 1918! Quietly we closed the door and came away. [Illustration: THE OLD HARBOUR, PLYMOUTH] XX THE SAILING FOG, AND THE TURN OF THE TIDE RAINY weather overnight has turned to fog, and the lighthouse on the Point greets breaking dawn with raucous half-minute bellows. Less regular and insistent, comes a jangle of anchor-bells, breaking in from time to time, ship after ship repeating, then subsiding a while until the syren of a moving tugboat--as if giving time and chorus to the din--sounds a blast, and sets the look-outs on the anchored ships to their clangour again. From the open sea distant reedy notes tell that the minesweeping flotilla is out and at work, clearing the course for draught of the out-bound convoy, and searching the misty sea-channels for all the enemy may have moored there. The 'gateships' of the boom defences rasp out jarring discords to warn mariners of their bobbling floats and nets. Inshore the one sustained and solemn toll of bell at the pier-head measures out time to the sum of a dismal dayspring. By all the sound of it, it is ill weather for the sailing of a convoy. In time of peace there would not be a keel moving within harbour limits through such a pall. "Call me when the weather clears," would be the easy order, and we would turn the more cosily to blanket-bay, while the anchor-watch would pace athwart overhead, in good content, to await the raising of the curtain. Still and all, it is yet early to assess the rigour of the fog. Sound-signals, started late in the coming of it, became routine and mechanical, and persist--through clearing--till their need is more than over. The half-light of breaking day has still to brighten and diffuse; who knows; perhaps, after all, this may be only that dear and fond premise of hopeful sailormen--the pride o' the morning! The elder fishermen (the lads are out after the mines) have no such optimism. Roused by the habits of half a century, they turn out for a pipe and, from window and doorway, assure one another that their idle 'stand-by' decreed by harbour-master for outgoing of the convoy, is little hardship on a morning like this. "'Ark t' them bells," they say, thumb over shoulder. "All 'ung up. Thick as an 'edge out there, an' no room t' back an' fill. There won't be no move i' th' Bay till 'arf-ebb, my oath!" But they are wrong in that, if right in their estimation of the weather and congestion in the roads, for we are at war, and the port convoy officer, hurrying to his launch, is already sniffing for the bearings of the leader of the line. Prudently he has mapped their berths as they came in to anchor, and has, at least, a serviceable, if rough, chart to guide him on his rounds. [Illustration: CONVOY SAILING FROM PLYMOUTH SOUND] So far there are no reports from the sea-patrols that would call for an instant alteration of the routes, and for that the P.C.O. has a thankful heart. A 'hurrah's nest,' a panic on Exchange, a block at the Bank crossing, would be feeble comparison to the confusion he might look for in a combination of dense fog, counter-mandates, and a congested roadstead, for, even now, the ships to form up the next convoy are thrashing their way down the coast and (Article XVI of the Rule of the Road being lightly held by in war-time) may be expected off the 'gateships' before long. To them, as yet, the port is 'closed,' but every distant wail from seaward sets him anxiously wondering whether it be a minesweeper signalling a turn to his twin or a distant deep-waterman, early on the tide, standing in for the land. The sailor's morning litany--"Who wouldn't sell a farm and go to sea"--is near to him as he turns up the collar of his oilskin and gives a rough course to his coxswain. "South, s'west, and ease her when you hear th' Bell buoy. _British Standard_ first--she's lying close south of it." Turning out, the picket-boat sets her bows to the grey wall of mist and her wash and roundel of the screws (that on a clear busy day would scarce be noted) sound loud and important in the silence of the bay. The coxswain, cunning tidesman, steers a good course and reduces speed with the first toll of the buoy. The clamour of its iron tongue seems out of all relation to the calm sea and the cause is soon revealed. Silently, closely in line ahead, four grey destroyers break the mist, fleet swiftly across the arc of vision ahead, and disappear. "Near it," says the coxswain (and now sounds a blast of _his_ whistle). "Them fellers ain't 'arf goin' it!" Cautiously he rounds the buoy, noting the gaslight crown shining yet, though pale and sickly in the growing day. Out now, in seven fathoms, the lingering inshore fog has given place to a mist, through which the ships loom up in sombre grey silhouette. Full speed for a turn or two brings the launch abeam of a huge oil-tanker that, sharp to the tick of Greenwich Mean Time, already has her Convoy Distinguishing Flags hoisted and the windlass panting white steam to raise anchor. A small flag in the rigging assures the P.C.O. that the pilots have boarded in good time, and it is with somewhat of growing satisfaction that he hails the bridge and asks the captain to 'carry on!' Doubts and hesitancies that may have lingered in the prudent captain's mind are dispelled by the P.C.O.'s appearance. "It is decided, then, that the orders stand," and there is at least a certain relief in his tone as he orders, "Weigh anchor!" The _British Standard_ is deep-loaded, in contrast to the usual empty war-time outward bound, but her lading is clean salt water, no less, run into her compartments on the sound theory that Fritz, by a strafe, may only 'change the water in the tanks.' Homeward, from the west, there will be no such fine assurance, for a torpedo may well set her ablaze from stem to stern, and the enemy takes keen and peculiar delight in such _Schrecklichkeit_. Still, there is little thought to that; _British Standard_ is to lead the line, and her anchor comes to the hawse and she backs, then comes ahead again, swinging slowly under helm towards the sound of 'gateships'' hand-horns. High on the stern emplacement her men are uncovering her gun and clearing the ranges, and the long grey barrel is trained out to what will be the sun-glare side of the first tangent of her sea-course. Close astern of her comes _War Ordnance_, her pushful young captain having taken heed of the sounds of _Standard's_ weighing. "Good work," says the P.C.O. cheerfully, and cons his rough chart for the whereabouts of Number Three. As though the devil in the wind had heard him, down comes the fog again, dense this time, a thick blanket-curtain of it that shuts off the misty stage on which the prompter had hoped, passably, to complete his dispatch of the fleet. The compass again. "East 'll do," and the launch slips through the grey of it. All around in the roadstead the clank of cable linking over the spurs, and hiss and thrust of power windlasses are indication that _British Standard's_ movement has given signal to weigh, that it is plain to the others--"Convoy will proceed in execution of previous orders." A propellor, thrashing awash in trial, looms up through the fog ahead, but 'East' has brought the launch wide of her mark, and _Massilia_ is answer to the P.C.O.'s hail. _Massilia_ is Number Four, but needs must when the fog drives, so he advises the captain to get under way and head out. Number Three has stalled badly and is hot in a burst of graceless profanity from bridge to forecastle-head, and (increasing in volume and blood-red emphasis) from there to the chain-locker. There is a foul stow. Her nip-cheese builders have pared the locker-space to the mathematical limit (to swell her carrying tonnage), and the small crew that her nip-cheese owners have put on her are unable to range the tiers. Twenty fathoms of chain remain yet under water, the locker is jammed, and the mate, roughed (and through a megaphone, too), from the bridge, is calling on strange deities to take note that, 'of all the damn ships he ever sailed in. . . .' The pilot calls out from the bridge that they are going to pay out and restow, and the convoy officer, blessing the forethought that had bade him send off Number Four, swings off to speed the succession. High water has made and the tide ebbs, swinging the ships yet anchored till they head inshore, and adding to the pilots' worry of narrowed vision the need to turn short round in crowded waters. For this the tugs have been sent out in readiness, and the convoy launch has a busy mission in casting about to find and set them to the task of towing the laggards round. It is nothing easy, in the fog and confusion of moving ships, to back the _Seahorse_ in and harness her by warp and hawser, but with every vessel, canted, that straightens to her course, the press is lightened by so much sea-room cleared. Gradually the hail and counter-hail, hoarse order and repeat, whistle-signals, protest of straining tow-ropes, die away with the lessening note of each sea-going propeller. To Number Three again, last of the line and out of her station, the convoy officer seeks to return. The fog is denser than ever, and the echoes of the bay, now transferred to seaward, augment the uneasy short-blast mutterings where the ships, closed up at the narrow 'gateway,' are slowing and backing to drop their pilots. In his traverse of the anchorage the coxswain has lost bearing of the _Cinderella_ and steers a zigzag course through the murk. The sun has risen, brightening the overhead but proving (in sea glare and misty daze) an ally to the veil. No sound of heaving cable or thunder of escaping steam that would mark a vessel hurrying to get her anchor and make up for time lost is to be heard. Frankly puzzled, the coxswain stops his engines. "Must 'a sailed, sir," he says at length. "There ain't nothin' movin' this end o' th' bay." The convoy officer nods. "_Mmm!_ She may have gone on, while we were dragging _Marmion_ clear of th' stern of that 'blue funnel' boat. A good job. Well, carry on! Head in--think that was th' pier-head bell we heard abeam!" At easy speed the launch turns and coxswain bends to peer at the swinging compass-card. As one who has held out to a job o' work completed, the P.C.O. stretches his arms and yawns audibly and whole-hearted. "A good bath now and a bite o' breakfast and-- Oh, hell! What's that astern?" The turn in the wake has drawn his eye to a grey blur in the glare of the mist. An anchored ship! Keeping the helm over, the coxswain swings a wide circle and steadies on the mark. "Damn if it ain't her!" he says, as the launch draws on. The _Cinderella_ lies quiet with easy harbour smoke rising straight up from her funnel and no windlass party grouped on the forecastle-head; quiet, as if fog and convoy and the distant reverberations of her sister ships held no concern for her. To the P.C.O.'s surprised and somewhat indignant hail there is returned a short-phrased assurance that the ruddy anchor is down--and is going to remain down! "Think I'm going out in this to hunt my place in the pack? No damn fear!" says the captain. "Why, I can scarce see who's hailing me, less a line o' ships barging along!" The pilot, in a tone that suggests he has already 'put out an oar'--with little effect--joins in to reassure. "Clearin' outside now, captain. I haven't heard th' lighthouse syren for twenty minutes or more! The fog'll be hangin' here in harbour a bit." "Aye, aye! But it's here we are, pilot--not outside yet. A clearing out there doesn't show us th' leading marks, and I'll not risk it. I've no fancy for nosing into th' nets and booms. I know where I am here, and I won't stir a turn--unless"--bending over the light screen towards the launch--"unless you lead ahead!" The convoy officer is somewhat embarrassed. Certainly the weather is as thick as a hedge; there is no 'drill' of convoy practice that empowers him to order risks to be taken--navigation of the ships is not his province. It is enough for him to arrange and advise and assist. If he leads out and anything _does_ happen? Still, it is maddening to think of one hitch in a good programme--'almost a record, too!' He looks at his watch and notes that only fifty minutes have elapsed since _British Standard_ weighed. "Oh, hell! Right, captain," he says. "Heave up and I'll give you a lead out to clear weather!" 'IN EXECUTION OF PREVIOUS ORDERS' WE are Number Four in the line; _Vick--beer--code_ is our address, and we steam somewhat faster than the fog warrants to keep touch with our next ahead. She, in turn, is packing close up on the leader, and if, in the strict ruling of a 'line ahead,' we are stepping out a trifle wide, at least we keep in company. The farthest we can see is the thrash of foam, white in the grey, of _War Ordnance's_ propeller--a good moving mark, that, though faint, draws the eye by the lead of broken water. Nearer, we have a steering-guide in her hydroplane, cutting and dancing under the bows and throwing a sightly feather of spray. The sea is flat calm, save for our leader's wake--a broad ribbon of troubled water through which we steer. Our eyes, now limited in range by the fog, seem to focus readily on trifles; for want of major objects, roving glances take in driftwood and ship-litter, and turn on minute patches of seaweed with an interest that a wider range would dissipate. Spurring, black-crested puffins come at us from under the misty pall, floating still, as if set in glass, till our bow wash plays out and sets them, squawking in distress, to an ungainly splutter on the surface, or dipping swiftly to show white under-feathers and the widening rings of their dive. Astern of us, a medley of sound and steering-signals marks the gateway of the harbour where our followers are striving to drop their pilots and join in convoy; one loud trumpeter is drawing up at speed and showing, by the frequency of her whistle-blasts, anxiety to sight our wake. The lighthouse syren roars a warning of shoal-water out on the landward beam, a raucous discord of two weird notes. These, with the rare mournful wail of our leader, are our guiding sounds, but we have sight now and then of the destroyer escort passing and turning mistily on the rim of our narrowed vision, like swift sheep-dogs folding the stragglers of a scattered flock. The fog, that settled dense and deep as we got under way, shows a little sign and promise of thinning, a small portent that draws our eyes to the lift above the funnel. There is no wind, but our smoke-wrack, after curving with our speed to masthead height, seems turned by light upper draughts to the eastward. The sun has risen and peers mistily over the top of the grey curtain that surrounds us. The day is warming up. Pray fortune, a stout west wind may come out of it all, to clear the muck and give us one good honest look at one another, when we are due for that 'six-point' turn to the south'ard! To keep in station on our pacemaker, we call for constant alterations in the speed--a range of revolutions that rattles up scale and down, like first lessons on the piano, and sets the engineers below to a plaintive verge of tears. The junior officer at the voice-pipe looks reflective, after each order he passes, as though comparing the quality of the reply with the last sulphurous rejoinder. The fog has added to our starting vagaries and postponed a happy understanding, but we shall do better later on when we have gauged and discovered--and pitied--the tiresome vacillations of the _other_ ships! Meantime, as best we can, we chase the sheering hydroplane ahead that seems endowed with every chameleon gift of the classic gods. It vanishes, invisible, in a drift of fog, and though we con a course as steady as a cat on eggs, a clearing comes to show us its white feather broad on the bows and edging off at an angle to dip under the thick of the mist! It drops down to us; we sheer aside and slow a pace, and it lingers and dallies sportively abeam. It slips suddenly ahead, with a rush and a rip, as though, like a child among the daisies, it recalls a parent in advance. The trumpeter astern has come up and sighted our wake and fog-buoy, and the clamour of her questing syren is stilled. She looms up close on our quarter, a huge menacing bulk of sheering steel with the foam thundering under her bows and curling and shattering on her grey hull. _They_ have great difficulty in adjusting to our speed. She slows and fades back into the mist, grows again from gloomy shadow to threatening detail, steadies at a point for a few minutes, and resumes the round of her previous motions in irritating cycle. "Whatever can be the matter with them?" (We take the stout point of a position as steady as the Rock, and grow scornful of their clumsy efforts to keep station.) "_Huh!_ These gold-laced London men! Why can't they steady up a bit? Why can't they----" We note that our steering-mark and the wash of _War Ordnance's_ propeller are no longer in sight ahead, and set in to count the beats of the screw. ". . . t'-one, t'-two, t'-three, t'-- _Hell!_ Didn't we order seventy? Go full speed!" Jumping to the tube, the junior attends. "_I_ said seven-owe, sir, but he thought I said six-four! Says th' bl--, th' engines working, sir--can't hear properly!" Grudgingly, as though loath to give us our sight again, the fog clears. The first of the tantalizing rift in the curtain is signalled by the high look-out, who calls that he can see the topmasts of our near neighbours piercing the low-lying vapours. The sun shines through, showing now and then a clear-cut limb in place of the luminous misshapen brightening that has been with us since sunrise. In fits and starts the fog thins, and thickens again, at the will of wandering airs. A west wind comes away, freshens, and stirs the vapour till it whips close overhead in wraiths and streamers, raises here and there a fold on the distant horizon, then dies again. Growing in vigour, the breeze returns; a gallant breath that ruffles the smooth of the sea and sweeps the round of it, routing the lingering flurries that settle, dust-like, when the mass is cleared. The clearing of our outlook produces a curious confusion to the eye. We have become accustomed to a limited range in sight, and the sudden change to distant vision, in which there is no standard of position, no mark to judge by, effects an illusion as of a photographer's plate developing. Fragments, wisps, and sections of the sea-rim appear, breaking through as the fog lifts, and seeming strangely high and foreign in position. Topmasts and a funnel-wreath of black smoke loom up almost in mid-air; the water-line of a ship's hull grows to sight, low in the plane as though dangerously close. Distant, obscure, and blurred formations sharpen suddenly to detail and show our destroyer escort as almost suspended in mirage, floating in air. Piece by piece, the plate develops in sensible gradation, fitting and joining with exactitude; the ships ahead take up their true proportions, the sea-horizon runs to a definite hard line. Mast and funnel and spar stand out against the piled and shattered fog-bank, whose rear-guard lingers, sinking but slowly and sullenly, on the rim of the eastern horizon. The fog cleared, and a busy seascape in sight, we shake ourselves together and take heed of appearances. Our convoy signal hangs damp and twisted on the halyards, and needs to be cleared to blow out for recognition; the mirrored arc-lamp that we turned astern to aid the trumpeter is switched out. With the fog-buoy we are less urgent; it will be time enough to haul it aboard when we are assured the new-born breeze is healthy and likely to remain with us. The press of work about the decks has lessened with the hawsers and docking gear stowed away. Sea-trim is the order now--a war sea-trim, in which the boats, swung outboard and ready for instant use, rafts tilted to a launching angle, hoses rigged to lead water, and crew at the guns, form a constant reminder (if that be needed) of lurking under-water peril. In marked contrast to less exciting days, when we could afford to disregard whatever might go on behind us, we place look-outs to face all ways. The enemy may gamble on our occupation with the view ahead, but, with a new war wariness, we have grown eyes to search the sea astern. In the clearing weather we become sensitive to the strict and proper reading of our sailing orders. There must be no more faults in the voice-tube to let us down from confidence in our right to a sudden sense of guilt. We adjust our station in the line by sextant angles of the leader, measuring his height to fractions, and set an ear to the note of our engine-beats to ensure a steady gait. Clearing our motes, we turn a purged and critical eye on our fellows, now all clear of the mist, and steaming in sight. To far astern, where the land lies and the sun plays on wet roof and flashing window-pane, a long line of ships snakes out in procession, their smoke blowing and curling merrily alee to join the cumulus of the foundering fog-banks. There are gaps and kinks in our formation that would, perhaps, call for angry signals in a line of battle, but the laggards are closing up in hasty order to right the wayward tricks of sound and distance in the fog. If not quite ruled and ordered to figures of our text, at least we conform to the spirit, and are all at sea together, steering out on our ventures. Our distance run, _British Standard_ puts her helm over and turns out. Forewarned, all eyes have been focused on the line of her masts, and her sheer gives signal for a general cut and shuffle. We change partners. Curtsying to full rudder pressure, we join the dance, and swing to her measure, adjusting speed to mark time while other important leaders of columns draw up abeam. The flat bright sea is cut and curved by thrashing wakes as the convoy turns south. Ahead and abeam, round and about, the destroyers wheel and turn, fan in graceful formation and swerve quickly on their patrolling courses. We are less expert in the figures of our cotillion. It cannot be pretended that we slip into our convoy stations with anything approaching their speed and precision. We are too varied in our types, in turning periods, in the range of our dead-weight, to manoeuvre alike. Most of us have but a slender margin of speed to draw on, and, 'all bound the same way,' the spurt to an assigned position proves the stern a long chase. The fog, at starting, has thrown many of us out of our proper turn, and we zigzag, unofficially, this way and that, to gain our stations without reduction of speed. In the confusion to our surface eyes, there is this consoling thought--that the same perplexing evolutions (calling for frequent appeals to the high gods for enlightenment as to the 'capers' of the _other_ fellows) have, at least, no better meaning in the reflected angles of a periscope. Now the hum and drone that has puzzled us in the fog reveals itself as the note of a covey of seaplanes searching the waters ahead. They have come out at first sign of a clearing, and now fly low, trimming and banking in their flight like gannets at the fishing. A winking electric helio on one of them spits out a message to the leader of the destroyers, and she flashes answer and acknowledgment as readily as though the seaplane were a sister craft. A huge coastal airship thunders out across the land to join our forces. She grows to the eye as though expanding visibly, and noses down to almost masthead height in a sharp and steady-governed decline; abeam, she turns broad on, manoeuvring with ease and grace, and the sunlight on her silvered sides glints and sparkles purely, as though to shame the motley camouflage of the ships below. The commodore poises the baton as his ship draws up to her station. Till now we have steamed and steered 'in execution of previous orders' and, considering the dense fog and the press of ships at the anchorage and pilot-grounds, we have not been idle or neglectful. Now we are in sea order, and, with the ships closing up in formation, we attend our senior officer's signals as to course and speed. A string of flags goes up, fluttering to the yard of his ship, and we fret at the clumsy fingers that cannot get a similar hoist as quickly to ours. Anon, on all the ships, a gay setting of flags repeats the message, and we stand by to take measure and sheer of a tricky zigzag, at tap of the baton. The line of colour droops and fades quickly to the signalman's gathering; the convoy turns and swings into the silver-foil of the sun-ray. [Illustration: INWARD BOUND] XXI THE NORTH RIVER THE broad surface of the Hudson is scored by passage of craft of all trades and industries. Tugs and barges crowd the waterway in unending succession, threading their courses in a maze of harbour traffic; high-sided ferry-boats surge out from their slips and angle across the tide--crab-wise--towards the New Jersey shore; laden ocean steamers hold to the deeps of the fairway on their passage to the sea. Up stream and down, back and across, sheering in to the piers and wharves, the harbour traffic seems constantly to be scourged and hurried by the lash of an unseen taskmaster. The swift outrunning current adds a movement to the busy plying of the small craft--a hastening sweep to their progress, that suggests a driving power below the yellow tide. The stir of it! The thrash of screw and lapping of discoloured water, the shriek of impatient whistle-blasts, the thunder of escaping steam! As we approach from seaward, there is need for caution. The railway tugmen--who live by claims for damages from ocean steamers--are alert and determined that we shall not pass without a suitable parting of their hawsers, damage to barges, strain to engines and towing appliances. Off the Battery, they sidle to us in coy appeal, but we carry bare steerageway. As the pilot says: "Thar ain't nothin' doin'!" We disengage their ardent approach, and make a slow progress against the tide to our loading-berth. There, we drop in towards the pier-head and angle our bows alongside the guarding fenders. A flotilla of panting tugboats takes up station on our inshore side and 'punches' into us--head on--to shove our stern round against the full pressure of the strong ebb tide. The little vessels seem absurdly small for their task. They 'gittagoin',' as instructed by the pilot, and wake the dockside echoes with the strain of their energy. White steam spurts from the exhausts with every thrust of their power. The ferry-boats turning in to their slips come through the run of a combined stern wash that sets them on the boarding with a heavy impact. Power tells. Our stern wavers, then we commence to bear up-stream in a perceptible measure. The Hudson throws a curl of eddying water to bar our progress, but we pass up--marking our progress by the water-side of the west shore. Anon, the thunder of the tugs' pulsations eases, then stops: they back away, turn, and speed off on a quest for other employment--while we move ahead, out of the run of the tide, and make fast at the pier. Our ship is keenly in demand. The dockers are there, ready with gear and tackle to board and commence work. The wharf superintendent hails us from the dockside before the warps are fast. He is anxious to know the amount of ballast coal to be shifted from the holds before he can commence loading. "Toosday morning, capt'n," he adds, as reason for his anxiety--"Toosday morning--an' she's gotta go!" Tuesday, eh! And this is Saturday morning! They will have to hustle to do it. [Illustration: A TRANSPORT LOADING] 'Hustle'--as once he told us--is the superintendent's maiden name. Already the narrow water-space between us and our neighbour is jammed tight by laden barges, brought in to await our coming. Billets of steel, rough-cast shells, copper ingots, bars of lead and zinc are piled ready for acceptance. The shed on our inshore tide is packed by lighter and more perishable cargo, all standing to hand for shipment. Preparation for our rapid dispatch is manifest and complete. Before the pilot is off the ship with his docket signed, the blocks of our derricks are rattling and the stevedores are setting up their gear for an immediate start. Barred, on the sea-passage, from communication by wireless, we have been unable to give a timely advice of our condition to the dock. The factor of the coal to be shifted--till now unknown to them--is the first of many difficulties. We have no cargo to discharge (having crossed in ballast trim), but--the storms of the North Atlantic calling for a weight to make us seaworthy--we have a lading of coal sufficient to steam us back to our home port. This has all to be raised from the holds and stowed in the bunker spaces: the holds must be cleaned for food-stuffs: for grain in bulk there is carpenter-work in fitting the midship boards to ensure that our cargo shall not shift. Tuesday morning seems absurdly near! With a thud and jar to clear the stiffening of a voyage's inaction, our deck winches start in to their long heave that shall only end with the closing of the hatches on a laden cargo. The barges haul alongside at the holds that are ready for stowage and loading begins. The slings of heavy billets pass regularly across the deck and disappear into the void of the open hatchways. In the swing and steady progression there seems an assurance that we shall keep the sailing date, but our energy is measured by the capacity of the larger holds. In them there is the bulk of fuel to be handled. The superintendent concentrates the efforts of his gangs on this main issue: the loading of the smaller compartments is only useful in relieving the congestion of the barges overside. Under his direction the coalmen set to work at their hoists and stages and soon have the baskets swinging with loads from the open hatchways. The coal thunders down the chutes to the waiting barges, and raises a smother of choking dust. The language of South Italy rings out in the din and clatter. "Veera, veera," roars the stageman (not knowing that he is passing an ancient order on a British ship). It is a fine start. Antonio and Pasquali and their mates are fresh: they curse and praise one another alternately and impartially: they seem in a fair way to earn their tonnage bonus by having the holds cleared before the morning. It is almost like an engagement in arms. Good leadership is needed. There are grades and classes in the army of dockers; groups as clearly specialized in their work as the varied units that form an army corps. Italian labourers handle the coal; coloured men are employed for the heavy and rough cargo work; the Irish are set to fine stowage. There is little infringement of the others' work. Artillery and infantry are not more set apart in their special duties than the grades of the dockers. Certainly there is a rivalry between the coloured men and the Irish--the line that divides the cargo is perhaps lightly drawn. "Hey! You nigger! You gitta hell out o' this," says Mike. The coloured man bides his time. The thunder of the winches pauses for an instant--he shouts down the hatchway: "Mike! Ho, Mike!" An answering bellow sounds from below. "Ah say, Mike! When yo' gwine back hom' t' fight fo' King Gawge?" Sunday morning, the 'macaroni' gangs knock off work for a term. The holds are cleared, but our fuel has again to be hove up from the barges and stowed in the bunkers. That can be done while loading is in progress. Meantime--red-eyed and exhausted--the coalmen troop ashore and leave the ship to one solitary hour of Sunday quiet. At seven the turmoil of what the superintendent calls a 'fair start' begins. Overnight a floating-tower barge for grain elevation has joined the waiting list of our attendant lighters. She warps alongside and turns her long-beaked delivery-pipes on board; yellow grain pours through and spreads evenly over the floor-space of our gaping holds. Fore and aft we break into a full measure of activity. The loading of the cargo is not our only preparation for the voyage. The fittings of the 'tween-decks, thrown about in disorder by the coal-gangs, have to be reconstructed and the decks made ready for troops. Cleaning and refitting operations go on in the confusion of cargo work: conflicting interests have to be reconciled--the more important issues expedited--the fret of interfering actions turned to other channels. At the shore end of the gangways there is riot among the workers. Stores and provisions are delivered by the truckmen with an utter disregard for any convenience but their own. The narrow roadway through the shed is blocked and jammed by horse and motor wagons that, their load delivered, can find no way of egress. Cargo work on the quayside comes to a halt for want of service. The dockers roar abuse at the truckmen, the truckmen--in intervals of argument with their fellows--return the dockers' obloquy with added embellishment. The 'house-that-Jack-built' situation is cleared by the harassed pier-foreman. The shed gates are drawn across: outside the waiting charioteers stand by, their line extended to a block on the Twenty-Third Street cars. * * * * * The roar and thrust and rattle of the straining winches ceases on Monday evening. We are fully stowed: even our double-bottom tanks--intended for water-ballast alone--carry a load of fuel oil to help out the difficulties of transport. The superintendent goes around with his chest thrown out and draws our attention to the state of affairs--the ship drawing but eighteen inches short of her maximum draught, and the 'tween-decks cleared and fitted. "Fifty-four working hours, capt'n," he says proudly. It is no mean work! The silence of the ship, after the din and uproar of our busy week-end, seems uncanny. The dock is cleared of all our attendant craft, and the still backwater is markedly in contrast to the churned and troubled basin that we had known. From outside the dock a distant subdued murmur of traffic on the streets comes to us. Cross-river ferries cant into a neighbouring slip, and the glow of their brilliant lights sets a reflection on the high facades of the water-front buildings. Overhead, the sky is alight with the warm irradiance of the great city. Ship-life has become quiescent since the seamen bundled and put away their gear after washing decks. Only the dynamos purr steadily, and an occasional tattoo on the stokehold plates tells of the firemen on duty to raise steam. In the unfamiliar quiet of the night and absence of movement in the dock there is countenance to a mood of expectancy. It seems unreasonable that we should so lie idle after the past days of strenuous exertion in preparing for sea. The flood in the North River, dancing under the waterside lights, invites us out to begin the homeward voyage. Why wait? We are not yet ready. In our lading we have store of necessities to carry across the sea. Food, munitions and furniture of war, copper, arms, are packed tightly in the holds: power-fuel for our warships lies in our tanks. There is still a further burthen to be embarked--we wait a cargo of clear-headed, strong-limbed, young citizens bound east to bear arms in the Crusade. They come after midnight. There are no shouts and hurrahs and flag-waving. A high ferry-boat crosses from the west shore and cants into the berth alongside of us. The dock shed, now clear of goods, is used for a final muster. Encumbered by their heavy packs, they line out to the gangways and march purposely on board. The high-strung mimicry of jest and light heart that one would have looked for is absent. There is no boyish call and counter-call to cloak the tension of the moment. Stolidly they hitch their burdens to an easier posture, say '_yep_' to the call of their company officer, and embark. The troops on board, we lose no time in getting under way. Orders are definite that we should pass through the booms of the Narrows at daybreak, and join convoy in the Lower Bay with the utmost dispatch. We back out into the North River, turn to meet the flood-tide, and steer past the high crown of Manhattan. [Illustration: A CONVOY IN THE ATLANTIC] XXII HOMEWARDS THE ARGONAUTS THE boat guard (one post, section A) stir and grow restive as the hour of their relief draws on. Till now they have accepted wet quarters, the reeling ship, black dark night with fierce squalls of rain and sleet, as all a part of the unalterable purgatory of an oversea voyage. With a prospect of an end to two hours' spell of acute discomfort, of hot 'kawfee,' dry clothes, and a snug warm bunk, their spirits rise, and they show some liveliness. Muffled to the ear-tips in woollens and heavy sodden greatcoats, their rifles slung awkwardly across the bulge of ill-fitting cork life-belts, they shift in lumbering movement from foot to foot, or pace--two steps and a turn--between the boat-chocks of their post. A thunder of shattering salt spray lashes over from break of a sea on the foredeck, and they dodge and dive for such poor shelter as the wing of the bridge affords. Scraps of their protest to the fates carry to our post in breaks of the wind "Aw, you guys! Say! Wisha was back 'n li'l old N'yok, ringin' th' dial 'n a Twanny-Thoid Street car!" "Whaddya mean--a Scotch highball? Gee! I gotta thoist f'r all th' wet we soak!" "Bettcha Heinie's goin'a pay _me_ cents an' dallers f'r this!" ". . . an' a job claenin' me roifle. . . . th' sargint, be damn but, he . . . ." "Cut it! Less talk 'round there!" orders their duty officer from somewhere in the darkness; the talk ceases, though stamp and bustle of expectant relief persist, and we are recalled to survey and reflection on the gloom ahead. Midnight now, and no sign of a change! Anxiously we scan sea and sky for hope or a promise--not a token! A squall of driving sleet has passed over, and has left the outlook moderately clear, but a quick-rising bank of hard clouds in the nor'east threatens another, and a heavier, by the look, soon to follow. A moonless night, not a star shines through the sullen upper clouds to mark even a flying break in the lift of it. A hopeless turn for midnight, showing no relief, no prospect! Ahead, the dark bulk of our column leader sways and thrashes through the spiteful easterly sea, throwing the wash broad out and taking the spray high over bow and funnel. In turn, we lurch and drive at the same sea that has stirred her, and find it with strength enough to lash over and fill the fore-deck abrim. Weighed down forward, we throw our stern high, and the mad propeller thrashes in air, jarring every bolt and rivet in her. We cant to windward, joggling in an uneasy lurch, then throw swiftly on a sudden list that frees the decks of the encumbering water. We ease a pace or two as the propeller finds solid sea to churn, steady, then gather way to meet the next green wall. With it the squall breaks and lashes furiously over us, driving the icy slants of hard sleet to our face, cutting at our eyes in vicious persistence. Joined to the wind-burst, a heavy sea shatters on fore-end of the bridge, and ring of the steel bulkhead sounds in with the crash of broken water that floods on us. In this succession the day and half the night have passed. No 'let-up' in the round of it. Furious wind-bursts marking time on the face of a steady gale. Rain--and now sleet. Sleet! Who ever heard of icy sleet in North Atlantic, this time of the year? Gad! Every cursed thing seems to weigh in against us on this voyage! The weather seems in league with the enemy to baulk our passage. Every cursed thing! Head winds and heavy seas all the way. Fog! These horse transports having to heave-to, and forcing the rest of the convoy to head up and mark their damned time! And now this, just when we were looking for a 'slant' to make the land! Maddening! The bridge is astir with the change of the watch. A fine job they make of it! Like a burst of damned schoolboys! Oilskin-clad clumsy ruffians barging up the ladders, trampling and stumbling in their heavy sea-boots, across and about, peering to find their mates! Are they all blind? Why can't they arrange set posts for eight bells? Why can't they look where--"Th' light, damn you! Dowse that light! _Huh!_ Some blasted idiot foul of that binnacle-screen again! Th' way things are done on this ship! Egad! Would think we were safe in th' Ship Canal, instead of dodging submar----" A slat of driving spray cuts over and we dip quickly under edge of the weather-screen. The second officer arrives to stand his watch, and the Third, who goes below, is as damnably cheerful and annoying as the other is dour. "North, --ty-four east, th' course. She's turning seven-six just now, but you'll have to reduce shortly--drawing up on our next ahead. Seven-three or four sh'd keep her in station. _Neleus_ ahead there, two cables. Rotten weather all th' watch. Squalls, my hat! There's another big 'un making up now! Th' Old Man over there--like a bear with a sore--raisin' hell 'bout----" "Oh, a--ll right! Needn't make a song and dance of it! North, --ty-four east? Right!" Picking up binoculars, the Second scans the black of it ahead, as though now definitely set for business. The watch is taken over and all seems settled, but the Third is not yet completely happy. He gloats a while over the Second's gloomy outlook, and yawns in that irritating _arpeggio_, the foretaste of a good sound sleep. "Oh, d'ya read in orders 'bout th' zigzag for th' morning watch?--a new stunt, fours and sixes; start in at----" "Oh, g'rr out! How can a man keep a watch, you chewin' th' rag? Yes, I--read--the orders!" _S-snap!_ "_Huh!_ A pair of them!" It comes to us that something will have to be said about the way the damned bridge is relieved in this ship! Into the chart-room, to fumble awkwardly for light ('_T'tt!_ That switch out of order again!') and search for a portent in the jeering glassy face of the aneroid. _Tip, tip, whap!_ The cursed thing is falling still. 'Twenty-nine owe two--half an inch since ten o'clock! Whatever can be behind all this? That damn glass was never right, anyway!' [Illustration: THE BOWS OF THE _KASHMIR_ DAMAGED BY COLLISION] Drumming of the wireless-cabin telephone sounds out, and we listen to a brief account of Poldhu's war warning. An S.O.S. has been heard, but a shore station has accepted it. (They can identify the ship--might be the harping of a Fritz.) There is a long code message through, and the quartermaster brings it--a jumble of helplessly ugly consonants that looks as though the German Fleet, at last, is out--but resolves (after a wearisome cryptic wrestle) to back-chat that has little of interest for us. Poldhu has the reports of the day--mines and derelicts, wreckage, the patrols, and enemy submarines in the channels. Chart work for a while. The wrecks and the derelicts are figured and placed, and we dally with the subs, plotting and measuring to find a clue to their movements. 'Fifteen hours at six, and ten to come or go! _Mmm!_ That 'll be the same swine working to the nor'east. Hope he makes a good course into the minefield! This one is solo--and that! A ghastly bunch, anyway!' We project a line of our course, but hesitate at position. 'Not one decent observation in the last three days. Only a muggy guess at a horizon. Dead-reckoning? Of course, there is our dead-reckoning, but--but--wonder where the commodore got his position from? Must have added on th' day of th' month, or fingers and toes or something! Damned if we can see how, at twelve knots, we could be where----' The outspread chart, glaring white under the electric light, with a maze of heights and soundings, grows strangely indistinct, and it calls for an effort to set the counts and figures in their places. We realize that wandering thought and a warm chart-room are not the combination for wakefulness. So, on deck again, to steady up at the doorway and wonder why the night has become suddenly as hellish black as the pit! The second officer has found his composure at the bottom of a cup of steaming coffee, and seems mildly astonished that we are unable to pick up _Neleus_ in the darkness ahead. "Quite plain, sir, when these squalls pass. A bit murky while they blow over, but--see her clear enough, sir. Reduced two revolutions, and keeping good station on her at that!" Somewhat slowly (for we have been afoot since six yesterday morning) our eyes focus to the gloom and line out the sea and sky in their shaded proportions. _Neleus_ grows out of the sombre opacous curtain--a definite guide with the sea breaking white in her wake. Dark patches of smoke-wrack, around and about, mark bearings on the sea-line where our sisters of the convoy are forging through. The next astern has dropped badly in cleaning fires, and is now throwing a whirl of green smoke in the effort to regain her station. The sea seems to have lessened since last we viewed it. Our hot coffee may have had effect in producing a more impressionable frame of mind, but certainly the weather is no worse. The rain and sleet have beaten out a measure of the toppling sea-crests. We see the forecastle-head, black and upstanding, for longer periods, and only broken spray flies over, where, but a little ago, were green whelming seas. A sign of modest content comes from the boat-deck, where the guards are humming, "_Over there, over there, over there! Th' Yanks are coming!_" The duty officer (troops) comes to us to pass the time of the morning. He salutes with punctilio. (He has not yet learned that we are only a damn civilian, camouflaged, and not entitled to such respect.) It is reported to him that one of the ship's boats had been badly damaged by a sea during the night. "In event of--of an accident, is it in orders that the troops allocated [his word] to that boat shall not go in any other?" Good lad! For all that darkness and the gale, he looks very fine and bold, standing stiffly, if somewhat unsteadily, demanding detail of the Birkenhead Drill! We assure him that there will be no immediate need for regrouping the men, that measures have already been taken to repair the damaged planking, that half an hour of daylight will serve us--and turn the talk to less disquieting affairs. He is very keen. Till now he has never been farther out to sea than the Iron Steamboat Company would take him--to Coney Island or the more subdued delights of the Hook. A New-Yorker, he tempers quite natural vaunts to be the more in keeping with the great and impending trial that awaits. For all that, he is gravely concerned that we should recognize his men as good and true--"the best ever, yessa!" With a good experience of their conduct, under trying conditions, we assent. ". . . They kin number us up all they wanna, but we're the--th N' Yok National Guard--a right good team! Down there on th' Mexican barder, we sure got trimmed, good and planny! Hot! My! Saay, cap'n, I guess-- Ah well, a' course you've been through some heat, too--but it was sure some warm hell down there! Yes--sir!" A bright lad! His words recall to us a windy afternoon on Fifth Avenue, in the days when our Uncle Sam was dispassionate and neutral. Flags whipping noisily in the high breeze, the crowds, the bands, and the long khaki column in fours winding towards the North River ferries to embark for Mexico, on a task that called for inhuman restraint. Newsboys were shouting aloud the peril of Verdun, and the thought came to us then--"Will that stream of manhood ever march east?" And now, under our feet and in our charge, fourteen hundred--"the best ever, yessa!"--are bound east by every thrust of the screw, and out on the heaving waste of water around us are fifteen thousand more; and the source is sure, and the stream, as yet, is but trickling. ON OCEAN PASSAGE THE weather has certainly moderated. In but an hour the sea has gone down considerably. There is no longer height enough in the tumble of it to throw us about like a Deal lugger. We steam on a more even keel; the jar and racket of the racing propeller has altered to a steady rhythmic pulse-beat that thrusts our length steadily through the water. At times the rain lashes over and shuts out sight of our neighbours, but we have opportunity to regulate our station in the lengthening intervals between the squalls. Improvement in the wind and sea has brought our somewhat scattered fleet into better and closer order. The rear horse-transports have come up astern and seem to have got over the steering difficulties that their high topsides and small rudder-immersion effected in the heavier sea. Only the barometer shows no inclination to move, in keeping with the better conditions--the rain, perhaps, is keeping the mercury low. It seems plain sailing for a while. The Second can look out for her; no use having too many good men on the bridge. We are only in the way out here, stamping and turning on the wet foot-spars, or throwing bowlines in the 'dodger' stops to pass the night. Four bells--two a.m.--the time goes slowly! We are somewhat footsore. Perhaps, sea-boots off, a seat for a minute or two in the chart-room may ease our limbs for the long day that lies before us. A long day, and the best part of another long day before we reach port! A wearisome stretch of it! We ought to have some system of relief. Why not? Why not take a relief? The chief officer is as good a man as the master. Why not let him run the bus for a spell? Oh, just--just--just a rotten way we have of doing! In the Navy they make no bones about turning over to their juniors; why should we make it so hard for our-- "_Says it is hazy, sir! Told me to let you know he hasn't seen any of the ships for over an hour!_" Whatever is the man talking about! "_Ships?_" What ships? "_An hour?_" The quartermaster, in storm-rig of dripping oilskin, stands sheepish in the doorway. "Aff-past-three, sir," he says. "_Htt!_" In drowsy mood we don oilskin and sea-boots. Overhead the rain is drumming, heavy and persistent, on the deck. A glance at the barometer shows an upward spring. _Tip, tip, tip_--a good glass, that! Well-balanced! The Second is apologetic, almost as though his was the hand that had accidentally turned the tap. "Been like this for over an hour, sir! Was always hoping it would pass off, but there has been no sign of clearing. Would have called you sooner, but thought it would lift. I've kept her steady at average revolutions for the last eight hours' run--seven-three. Haven't seen a thing since shortly after you went below." A query brings answer that the fog-buoy has been streamed and gun's crew cautioned to a sharp look-out astern. Not that there is great need; our sailing experience has been that A---- will drop astern when 'the gas is turned down!' The wind has fallen and has hauled to south. It is black dark, with a heavy continuous downpour of rain. The air is milder, and the sea around has a glow of luminous milky patches. So, it is to be southerly weatherly for making the land! It might be worse! At least, this thrash of heavy rain will 'batten hatches' on a rise of the sea, and make a good parade-ground for our destroyer escort when they join company. We should be able to shove along at better speed when daylight comes. The mist or the haze or whatever combination it may be, is puzzling. From the outlook it is not easy to gauge the range of our vision. Near us the wash from our bows is sharply defined by phosphorescence in the broken water, a white scum churns and curls alongside, brightening suddenly in patches as though our passage had set spark to the fringe. Outboard the open sea merges away into the gloomy sky with no horizon, no ruling of a division. We seem to be steaming into a vertical face of vapour. There is no sound from the ships around us, not a light glimmers in the darkness. The eerie atmosphere through which we pass has effect on the night-life of the ship. On deck there is an inclination to move quietly, to preserve a silence in keeping with the weird spell that seems to environ us. There is no longer chatter and small talk among the duty troops; they sit about, huddled in glistening _ponchos_, peering out at the ghostly glow on the water. From far down in the bowels of the ship the rattle of a stoker's shovel on the plates rings out in startling clamour, and rouses an instant desire to suppress the jarring note. It seems impossible that there can be ships in our company--vessels moving with us through mystic seas. We peer around, on all the bearings, but see nothing on our encircling wall. Smell? We nose at the air, seeking a waft of coal-smoke, but the rain is beating straight down, basting the funnel-wraiths on the flat of the sea. An average of eight hours' steaming, seven-three revolutions, may be no good guide, considering the racing and the plunging we have gone through. In proper station we ought to see the loom of _Neleus_ ahead, or, at least, the wash of her fog-buoy. It is important that we should be in good touch at daybreak. We go full speed for a turn or two and post an officer in the bows to scan for our leader. New and vexing problems come at us as time draws on. We are due to start a zigzag, 'in execution of previous orders,' before the day breaks. We see a royal 'hurrah's nest'--a rough house--before us if we lay off without a proper sight of our fellows. So far there has come no negative to our orders; we are somewhat concerned. A message cannot have been missed, surely! "Nothing through yet, sir," is the wakeful assurance from the wireless operator. "X's fierce with this rain, but should get any near message all right." At eight bells we come in sight of one unit of the convoy. She shows up, broad off on our lee bow, in a position we had hardly looked for. There is little to see. A darkling patch, a blurred shadow, in the face of sea and sky, with a luminous curl of broken water astern. We cannot identify her in the darkness; flashing signals are barred in the submarine areas; we must wait daylight for recognition. She should be _Neleus_, but a hair-line on our steering-card may have brought us to the leader of the outside column. In any case we are in touch, and it is with some relief we ease speed to a close approximation of hers. Anon, our anxiety about the zigzag is dispelled by a message from the commodore, cancelling former orders. He has sat tight on it to nearly the last minute, hoping for a clearance. [Illustration: THE MAYFLOWER QUAY, THE BARBICAN, PLYMOUTH] With the coming of the chief officer's watch we feel that the 'day' is beginning. Twelve to four are unholy hours that belong to no proper order of our reckoning. They are past the night, and have no kinship with the day: bitter, tedious, helpless spaces of time that ought only to be passed in slumber and oblivion. By five, and the lift greying, there is something in the movement about the decks that suggests an awakening of the ship to busy life and action, after the sullen torpor of an uneasy night. The troop 'fatigue men' turn out to their duties, and traffic to the cooking-galleys goes on, even under the unceasing downpour that falls on us. The guard get busy on their rounds, challenging the men as they step out of the companionways, to show their life-belts in order and properly adjusted. Complaint and discussion are frequent, but the guard are firm in their insistence. "I should worry!" is the strange request, appeal, exhortation, demand, reply, aside, that punctuates each meeting on the decks below. In nowise influenced by the sinister import of the questioning, the duty troops on the boat-deck waken up. The spirit of matutinal expression descends on them, despite the rain, and they whistle cheerful 'harmonic discords,' till barked to silence by Sergeant 'Jawn.' The watch on deck trail hoses and deck-scrubbers from the racks and set about preparations for washing down, bent earnestly on their standard rites though the heavens fall! The carpenter and his mate are assembling their gear and tools, awaiting better daylight to get on with their repairs to the damaged lifeboats. On the bridge we seem congested. Extra 'day' look-outs obstruct our confined gangways and the bulk of their weather harness, plus life-belts and megaphones, restricts a ready movement. In preparation for busy daylight, the signalmen put out their bunting on the lettered hooks, and ease off the halyards that are set 'bar-tight' by the soaking rain. There is, withal, an air of freshness in the morning bustle that comes in company with the dawn. With gloom sufficient for our signal needs (and light enough for protection) we flash a message to our consort. She is _Neleus_, and answers that she has other vessels of the convoy in sight to leeward. We sheer into our proper position astern of her and find the outer column showing through the mist in good station. On our report that we had no others in sight, _Neleus_ alters course perceptibly to converge on the commodore, and daylight coming in finds us steaming in misty but visible touch with the other columns. The horse transports have dropped astern, and one is bellowing for position. She gets a word or two on the 'buzzer,' comes ahead, and lets go the whistle lanyard. If commodore's reckoning is right, we should now be on the destroyer rendezvous, but our wireless operator, who has been listening to the twitter of the birds, assures us that they are yet some distance off. We hope for a clearing to enable them to meet us without undue search; it will not be a simple matter to join company in the prevailing weather conditions, particularly as we are working on four days of dead-reckoning. By seven o'clock there is no sign of the small craft, and we note our ocean escort closing in to engage the commodore with signals. The rain lessens and turns to a deep Scotch mist, our range of vision is narrowed to a length or two. Anon, our advance guardship sets her syren sounding dismal wails at long intervals, as she swings over from wing to wing of the convoy. By what mysterious channel does information get about a ship? Is there a voice in the aerials? Are ears tuned to the many-tongued whisperings of rivet and shell-plate, that all hands have an inkling of events? The rendezvous is an official secret; the coming of the destroyers is supposedly unknown to all but the master, the navigators, and the wireless operator, but it is not difficult to see a knowing expectancy in the ranks of our company. Despite the wet and clammy mist, ignoring the dry comforts of the ''tween-decks,' the troops crowd the upper passages and hang long over the rails and bulwarks, pointing and shouting surmise and conjecture to their mates. The crew are equally sensitive. Never were engine-room and stokehold ventilators so tirelessly trimmed to the wind. At frequent intervals, one or other of the grimy firemen ascends to the upper gratings, cranks the cowls an inch or two this way or that, then stands around peering out through the mist for first sight of a welcome addition to our numbers. The official ship look-outs are infected by a new keenness, and every vagary in the wind that exposes a glimpse of our neighbours is greeted by instant hails from the crow's nest. Eight bells again! The watch is changed and, with new faces on the bridge, the length of our long spell is painfully recalled. With something of envy we note the posts relieved and the men gone below to their hours of rest. "What a life!" The wail of the guardship's syren fits in to our mood--_Wh-o-o-owe!_ Quick on the dying note a new syren throws out a powerful reedy blast, sounding from astern. Thus far on the voyage, with fog so long our portion, we have come to know the exact whistle-notes of our neighbours, down to the cough and steam splutter of the older ships. This is new--a stranger--a musical chime that recalls the powerful tug-boats on the Hudson. Our New-Yorker troops are quick to recognize the homely note. "Aw! Saay!" is the chorus. "Lissen! Th' _Robert E. Lee_!" The rear ships of the convoy now give tongue--a medley of confused reverberations. No reply comes to their tumult, but a line of American destroyers emerges from the mist astern and steams swiftly between the centre columns. There is still a long swell on the sea and they lie over to it, showing a broad strake of composition. They are bedizened in gaudy dazzle schemes, and the mist adds to the weird effect. The Stars and Stripes flies at each peak, standing out, board-like, from the speed of their carriers. As they pass, in line ahead, a wild tumult of enthusiasm breaks out among the troops. They join in a full-voiced anthem, carried on from ship to ship, "The Star-spangled Banner!" 'ONE LIGHT ON ALL FACES' A SLIGHT lift in the mist, edging from sou'west in a freshening of the wind, extends our horizon to include all ships of the convoy. With this modest clearing, the shield of vapour that has cloaked us from observation since early morning is withdrawn. Although still hazy, there is sight enough for torpedo range through a periscope, and the long-delayed zigzag is signalled by the commodore. There is no time lost in settling to the crazy courses. At rise of the mist we are steaming through the flat grey sea in parallel columns, our lines ruled for us by the wakes of our leaders. The contrasts of build and tonnage, the variegations of our camouflage, are dulled to a drab uniformity by the lingering mist, and we make a formal set-piece in the seascape, spaced and ordered and defined. The angle of the zigzag disturbs our symmetry. As one movement, on the tick of time, we swing over into an apparent confusion, like the flush of a startled covey. We make a pattern on the smooth sea with our stern wash. Wave counters wave and sets up a running break on the surface that draws the eye by its similarity to a sheering periscope; not for the first time we turn our glasses on the ripples, and scan the spurt of broken water in apprehension. Our escort is now joined by British sloops returning from their deep-sea patrols. The faster American destroyers spur out on the wings and far ahead, leaving the less active warships to trudge and turn in rear of the convoy. With our new additions, ship by ship steering to the east, we make a formidable international gathering on the high seas, a powerful fleet bringing the Pilgrim sons back over the weary sea-route of their fathers' _Mayflower_! Having far-flung scouts to safeguard our passage, there seems no reason for concern about our navigation, but the habits of a sea-routine urge us to establish a position--to right the uncertainty of four days' dead-reckoning. The mist still hangs persistently about us, but there is a prospect that the sun may break through. The strength of the wind keeps the upper vapours moving, but ever there are new banks to close up where a glimpse of clear vision shows a 'pocket' in the clouds. The westering sun brightens the lift and plays hide-and-seek behind the filmy strata. Time and again we stand by for an observation, but, should a nebulous limb of the sun shine through, the horizon is obscured--when the sea-line clears to a passable mark, the sun has gone! A vexing round of trial after trial! We put away the sextant, vowing that no tantalizing promise shall tempt us. "Bother the sun! 'We should worry!' We have got an approximation by soundings, we can do without--we-- _Look out, there!_"--we are hurrying for the instrument again and tapping 'stand by' to the marksman at the chronometer! At length a useful combination of a clean lower limb and a definite horizon gives opportunity for contact, and it is with a measure of satisfaction we figure the result on the chart, and work back to earlier soundings for a clue to the latitude. Busied with pencil and dividers, our findings are disturbed by gunfire--the whine of a slow-travelling shell is stifled by a dull explosion that jars the ship! On deck again; the men on the bridge have eyes turned to the inner column. The rearmost transport of that line has a high upheaval of debris and broken water suspended over her; it settles as we watch, and leaves only a wreath of lingering dust over the after part of the ship; she falls out of line, listing heavily; puffs of steam on her whistle preface the signal-blasts that indicate the direction from which the blow was struck. From a point astern of us a ruled line of disturbed water extends to the torpedoed ship--the settling wake of the missile! The smack and whine of our bomb-thrower speaks out a second time, joined by other vessels opening fire. Events have brought our ship's company quickly to their stations. The chief officer stands, step on the ladder, awaiting orders. "Right! Lay aft! Cease fire, unless you have a sure target! Look out for the destroyers blanking the range!" He runs along, struggling through the mass of troops. The men are strangely quiet; perhaps the steady beat of our engines measures out assurance to them--as it does to us. Their white-haired colonel has come to the bridge, and stands about quietly. Other officers are pushing along to their stations. There is not more than subdued and controlled excitement in a low murmur. The men below crowd up the companionways from the troop-decks. In group and mass, the ship seems packed to overflowing by a drab khaki swarm; the light on all faces turned on the one cant, arms pointing in one direction, rouses a haunting disquiet. However gallant and high of heart, they are standing on unfamiliar ground--at sea, in a ship, caged! If-- Two destroyers converge on us at frantic speed, tearing through the flat sea with a froth in their teeth. As the nearest thunders past, her commander yells a message through his megaphone. We cannot understand. Busied with manoeuvres of the convoy, with the commodore's signal for a four-point turn, we miss the hail, and can only take the swing and wave of his arms as a signal to get ahead--"Go full speed!" The jangle of the telegraph is still sounding, when we reel to a violent shock. The ship lists heavily, every plate and frame of her ringing out in clamour with the impact of a vicious sudden blow. She vibrates in passionate convulsion on recovery, masts oscillate like the spring of a whip-shaft, the rigging jars and rattles at the bolts, a crash of broken glass showers from the bridge to the deck below! The murmur among the troops swells to a higher note, there is a crowding mass-movement towards the boats. The guard is turned to face inboard. The colonel is impassive; only his eyes wander over the restless men and note the post of his officers. He turns towards us, inquiringly. What is it to be? His orderly bugler is standing by with arm crooked and trumpet half raised. Our lips are framing an order, when a second thundering shock jars the ship, not less in violence and shattering impact than the first. A high hurtling column of water shoots up skyward close astern of the ship. We suppress the order that is all but spoken, stifle the words in our throat. We are not torpedoed! Depth-charges! The destroyers' work! At a sign, the bugler sounds out "_Still!_" and slowly the tumult on deck is arrested. The commodore's _half-right_ has been instantly acted on, and we are steadied on a new course, bearing away at full speed, with the torpedoed horse transport and the racing, circling destroyers astern. Suddenly our bows begin to swing off to port, falling over towards the outer column. The helmsman has the wheel hard over against the sheer; we realize that our steering-gear has gone; the second depth-charge has put us out of control. We swing on the curve of a gathering impetus--it is evident that the rudder is held to port; converging on us at full speed, the rear ship of the outer column steams into the arc of our disorder! The signalman is instant with his 'not under command' hoist, the crew are scattered to throw in emergency gear, but there is no time to arrest the sheer. The first impulse is to stop and go astern. If we arrest the way of the ship, a collision is inevitably assured, but the impact may be lessened to a side boarding, to damage that would not be vital; if we swing as now, we may clear--our eye insists we should clear. If our tired eyes prove false, if the strain of a long look-out has dulled perception, our stem will go clean into her--we shall cut her down! Reason and impulse make a riot of our brain. The instinct to haul back on the reins, to go full astern on the engines, is maddening. Our hand curves over the brass hood of the telegraph, fingers tighten vice-like on the lever; with every nerve in tension, we fight the insane desire to ring up and end the torturing conflict in our mind! A confusion of minor issues comes crowding for settlement, small stabs to jar and goad in their trifling. There is a call to carry on side-actions. Every bell on the bridge clamours for attention. The engine-room rings up, the chief officer telephones from aft that the starboard chain has parted, the rudder jammed hard to port. From the upper spars, the signalman calls out a message from an approaching destroyer--"What is the matter? Are you torpedoed?" Through all, we swing out--swiftly, inexorably! Troops and look-outs scurry off the forecastle-head, in anticipation of a wrecking blow. On the other ship, there is outcry and excitement. She has altered course and her stern throws round towards us, further encroaching on the arc of our manoeuvre. So near we are, we look almost into the eyes of her captain as we head for the bridge. Troops, the boat-guard, are scrambling aboard from the out-swung lifeboats, their rifles held high. On her gun-platform the gunners slam open their breech, withdraw the charge, and hurry forward to join the mass of men amidships. All eyes are centred on the narrowing space of clear water that separates us, on our high sheering stem that cuts through her out-flung side-wash. Strangely the movement seems to be all in our sweeping bow. The other vessel appears stationary, inert--set motionless against the flat background of misty cloud; our swinging head passes point upon point of the chequered camouflage on her broadside; subconsciously we mark the colours of her scheme--red and green and grey. We clear her line of boats, and sway through the length of her after-deck--waver at the stern-house, then cover the grey mounting of her gun-emplacement. In inches we measure the rails and stanchions on her quarter, as our upstanding bow drives on. Tensely expectant, our mind trembles on the crash that seems inevitable. It does not come. Our eye was right--we clear her counter! With some fathoms to spare we sheer over the thrash of her propellers, the horizon runs a line across our stem, we have clear yielding blue water under the bows! The illusion of our sole movement is reversed as the mass of the other vessel bears away from us. The unbroken sea-line offers no further mark to judge our swing; we seem to have become suddenly as immobile as a pier-head, while our neighbour starts from our forefoot in an apparent outrush, closing and opening the line of her masts and funnels like shutting and throwing wide the panels of a door. With no indecision now we pull the lever over hood of the telegraph. One case is cleared; there still remains the peril of the lurking submarine. The destroyers are busy on the chase, manoeuvring at utmost speed and exploding depth-charges in the area. We are now some distance from them but the crash of their explosion sends an under-running shock to us still. Our sheer has brought us broadside on to the position from which the enemy loosed off his torpedo. At full astern we bring up and swing over towards the receding convoy. If we are barred from carrying on a zigzag by the mishap to our helm, we can still put a crazy gait on her by using the engines. Backing and coming ahead, we make little progress, but at least we present no sitting target. Reports come through from aft that the broken chain, springing from a fractured link, has jammed hard under the quadrant; the engineers are at work, jacking up to release the links; they will be cleared in ten minutes! The chief asks for the engines to be stopped; sternway is putting purchase on the binding pressure of the rudder. Reluctantly we bring up and lie-to. In no mood to advertise our distress, we lower the 'not under command' signals, and summon what patience may be left to us to await completion of repairs. A long 'ten minutes!' Every second's tick seems fraught with a new anxiety. Fearfully we scan the sea around, probing the line of each chance ripple for sight of an upstanding pin-point. Anon, steam pressure rises and thunders through the exhaust, throwing a battery of spurting white vapour to the sky, and letting even the sea-birds know we are crippled and helpless. The torpedoed ship still floats, though with a dangerous list and her stern low in the water. A sloop is taking her in tow, and we gather assurance of her state in the transport's boats still hanging from the davits; they have not abandoned. She falters at the end of the long tow-rope and sheers wildly in the wake of her salvor. The convoy has vanished into the grey of the east, and only a lingering smoke-wreath marks the bearing where they have entered the mist. The sun has gone, leaving but little afterglow to lengthen twilight; it will soon be dark. Apparently satisfied with their work the destroyers cease fire; whether there is oil on their troubled waters we cannot see. They linger a while, turning, then go on in the wake of the convoy. One turns north towards us, with a busy windmiller of a signalman a-top the bridge-house. "_What is the matter? Do you wish to be towed?_" We explain our case, and receive an answer that she will stand by, "_but use utmost dispatch effect repair_." 'Use utmost dispatch'! With every minute, as the time passes, goes our chance of regaining our station in the convoy; we are in ill content to linger! We have a liking for our chief engineer--a respect, an admiration--but never such a love as when he comes to the bridge-ladder, grimy, and handling his scrap of waste. "They're coupling up now! A job we had! Chain jammed and packed under th' quadrant, like it had been set by a hydraulic ram! If that one landed near Fritz, he'll trouble us no more!" [Illustration: EVENING: THE MERSEY FROM THE LANDING-STAGE] With the engines turning merrily, and helm governance under our hand, we regain composure. Our task is yet none too easy. Even at our utmost speed we cannot now rejoin the convoy before nightfall; snaking through the ships in the dark to take up station offers another harassing night out! Still, it might be worse--much worse! We think of the torpedoed ship towing so slowly abeam--of the khaki swarm on our decks, 'the light on all faces turned on one cant.' Surely our luck is in! The infection of the measured beat in our progress recalls a job unfinished; we step into the chart-room and take up pencil and dividers. [Illustration: THE STEERSMAN] [Illustration: THE WORK OF A TORPEDO] XXIII 'DELIVERING THE GOODS' OCTOBER on the Mersey is properly a month of hazy autumn weather, but the few clear days seem to gain an added brilliance from their rarity, and present the wide estuary in a vivid, clear-cut definition. The distant hills of North Wales draw nearer to the city, and stand over the slated roofs of the Cheshire shore as though their bases were set in the peninsula. Seaward the channel buoys and the nearer lightships are sharply distinct, cutting the distant sea-line like the topmast spars of ships hull down. Every ripple and swirl of the tide is exaggerated by the lens of a rare atmosphere; the bow wash of incoming vessels is thrown upward as by mirage. [Illustration: TRANSPORTS DISCHARGING IN LIVERPOOL DOCKS] On such a day a convoy bears in from the sea, rounding the lightships under columns of drifting smoke. Heading the merchantmen, the destroyers and sloops of the escort steam quickly between the channel buoys and pass in by New Brighton at a clip that shows their eagerness to complete the voyage. A sloop detaches from the flotilla and rounds-to off the landing-stage. Her decks are crowded by men not of her crew. Merchant seamen are grouped together at the stern, and a small body of Uncle Sam's coloured troops line the bulwarks in attitudes of ease and comfort. They are a happy crowd, and roar jest and catchword to the passengers on the crossing ferries. The merchantmen are less boisterous. They watch the preparations of the bluejackets for mooring at the stage with a detached professional interest; some of them gaze out to the nor'ard where the transports of the convoy are approaching. Doubtless their thoughts are with the one ship missing in the fleet--their ship. The sloop hauls alongside the stage and a gangway is passed aboard. Naval transport officers and a major of the U.S. Army staff are waiting, and engage the commander of the man-of-war in short conversation. The men are disembarked and stand about in straggling groups. There is little to be said by the sloop's commander. "A horse transport torpedoed yesterday. No! No losses. Tried to tow her for a bit, but had to cast off. She went down by the stern." The trooper horse-tenders are marshalled in some order and pass over to the waiting-rooms under charge of the American officer. With a word or two and a firm handshake to the sloop's commander, the master of the torpedoed ship comes ashore and joins his men. No word of command! He jerks his head in the direction of the Liver Buildings and strides off. The seamen pick up their few bundles of sodden clothing and make after him, walking in independent and disordered groups. As they straggle along the planking of the stage, a military band--in full array--comes marching down from the street-way. They step out in fine swing, carrying their glittering brasses. "Here, Bill," says one of the seamen, hitching his shoulder towards the burdened drummers, "who said we was too late for th' music!" The transports have come into the river. Every passing tug and ferry-boat gives _rrr--oot_ on her steam-whistle to welcome them as they round-to off the docks and landing-stage. Loud bursts of cheer and answering cheer sound over the water. The wide river, so lately clear of shipping, seems now narrowed to the breadth of a canal by the huge proportions of the liners bringing up in the tideway. The bizarre stripes and curves and the contrasted colours of their dazzle schemes stand out oddly against the background of the Cheshire shore. It is not easy to disentangle the lines of the ships in the massed grouping of funnel and spar and high topsides. They are merged into a bewildering composition with only the mastheads and the flags flying at the trucks to guide the eye in attempting a count. Fifteen large ships, brimming at the bulwarks with a packed mass of troops, all at a deep draught that marks their load below decks of food and stores and munitions. The landing-stage becomes rapidly crowded by disembarkation officers and their staffs. Transport wagons and cars arrive at the south end and run quietly on the smooth boarding to their allotted stands. A medical unit, gagged with fearsome disinfectant pads, musters outside their temporary quarters. Most prominent of all, tall men in their silver and blue, a sergeant and two constables of the City police stand by--the official embodiment of law and order. A flag is posted by the stage-men at the north end, and its flutter calls an answering whistle-blast from the nearest transport. Steadily she disengages from the press of ships and closes in towards the shore. The tugs guiding her sheer strain at the hawsers and lie over in a cant that shows the tremendous weight of their charge. A row-boat dances in the wash of their screws as it is backed in to the liner's bows to pass a hawser to the stage. Sharp, short blasts indicate the pilot's orders from the bridge: the stage-master keeps up a commentary on the manoeuvres through a huge megaphone. Stir and bustle and high-spirited movement! The troops that pack the liner's inshore rails give tongue to excited gaiety. A milkgirl (slouch hat, trousers and gaiters complete) passes along the stage on her way to the restaurant and is greeted with acclaim, "Thatta gel--thatta goil--oh, you kid!" The policemen come in for it: "Aw, say! Looka th' guys 'n tha lodge trimmings. What's th' secret sign, anyway!" An embarrassed and red-faced junior of the Transport Service is forced to tip it and accept three cheers for "th' Brissh Navy!" The opening bars of 'The Star-spangled Banner' brings an instant stop to their clamour. The troops spring to attention in a way that we had not observed before in their own land. The spirit of patriotism, pronounced in war! 'God Save the King' keeps them still at attention. As strong as war and patriotism--the spirit of a new brotherhood in arms! The transport makes fast and high gantries are linked to a position on the stage and their extensions passed on board. The stage-men make up their heaving-lines and move off to berth a second vessel at the south end. The tide is making swiftly in the river, and there must be no delay if the troops are to be disembarked and the ships cast off in time to dock before high water has passed. [Illustration: TROOP TRANSPORTS DISEMBARKING AT THE LANDING-STAGE, LIVERPOOL] Viewed from the low tidal stage, almost at a level with the water, the ship--that had appeared so delicate of line in the river--assumes a new and stronger character at close hand. The massive bulk of her, towering almost overhead, dwarfs the surrounding structures. The shear that gave her beauty at a distance is lost in the rapid foreshortening of her length: her weathered plating, strake upon strake bound by a pattern of close rivet-work, attracts the eye and imposes an instant impression of strength and seaworthiness. On her high superstructure the figures of men seem absurdly diminished. The sense of their control of such a vessel is difficult of realization. Pouring from her in an apparently endless stream of khaki, her living cargason passes over the gangways. They move rapidly from the ship to the shore. Waiting-sheds and the upper platforms are soon littered by their packs and equipment, and the troops squat on the roadway to await formation of their group. Large bodies are marched directly to the riverside station to entrain for camp, but the assortment and enumeration of most of the companies and detachments is carried through on the broad planking of the stage. In and out the mustered files of men, transport cars make a noisy trumpeting progress, piled high with baggage and stores, and each crowned by a waving party of high-spirited soldiers. A second transport is brought in at the other end of the stage, and adds her men to the throng of troops at the water-side. The disembarkation staff have work with the sheep and the goats. There is the natural desire to learn how 'th' fellers' got on in the other ship, and the two ships' complements are mixed in a fellowship that makes a tangle of the 'nominal rolls' and drives the harassed officers to an outburst of profanity. Ever and on, a block occurs on the gangways where the inevitable 'forgetters' are struggling back through the press of landing men, to search for the trifles of their kit. A prolonged blast of her siren warns the military officers that the first transport is about to cast off, and the movement of the troops is accelerated to a hurried rush and the withdrawal of the gangways. The waiting tugs drag the ship from the stage, and she moves slowly down-stream to dock at the Sandon entrance, there to discharge the burden of her packed holds. Another huge vessel takes her place, canting in at the north end, and shortly sending out more men to the already congested landing. She carries two full battalions, and they are disembarked with less confusion than the former varied details. Forming fours, and headed by their own band, they march off up the long bridgeway to the city streets. The tide is approaching high water and the pilots are growing anxious lest they should lose opportunity of docking on the tide. Already the dock gates are open, and the smaller vessels of the convoy have dropped out of the river into the basins. With three ships disembarked and a fourth drawing alongside, the Naval Transport officers decide that they can handle no more men on the stage, and send the remaining steamers to land their men in dock. There, with the troops away, an army of dockers can get to work to unload the store of their carriage from overseas. [Illustration: 'M N'] CONCLUSION 'M N' SHIMMERING in gilt sunlit threads, the grey North Sea lay calm and placid, at peace with the whip of the winds after days of storm and heavy weather. The sun had come up to peer over a low curtain of vapour that hung in the east. Past the meridian, the moon stood clear-cut in the motionless upper sky. The ring of quiet sea accepted the presence of the waiting ships as of friendly incomers, familiar to the round of the misty horizon. Two British destroyers, a flotilla of motor-vessels, drifters--the brown sails of Thames barges appearing, then vanishing, in the wisps of fickle vapour. A breathless dawn. Sun, the silver moon, the grey flat sea bearing motionless ships, were witness to the drama--the giving up of the murder craft, the end of piracy. Growing out of the mist, a squadron of British light cruisers and their convoy approached the rendezvous where the destroyers lay in readiness to take over charge of the German submarines. Two enemy transports under their commercial flags, headed the line of the water-snakes. Aircraft circled overhead and turned and returned on the line of progress. The leading ships swung out on approaching the destroyers and engaged them by signal. The destroyers weighed anchor and proceeded to carry out their orders. Each carried a number of officers and men to be placed aboard the submarines, to accept their surrender, to direct their further passage to within the booms at Harwich. The commander of _Melampus_ focused his glasses on the eleventh submarine of the long straggling line. The U-boat had a wash over his screws and was apparently steaming ahead to overtake his fellows, now fading into the mist in the direction of their prison gates. "Our group," he said: then, to the signalman, "Tell him to stop instantly!" The bluejacket stood out on the sparring of the bridge and signalled with his hand-flags. The submarine still moved ahead at speed, his exhaust panting at pressure. The German commander could not (or would not) understand, and it was necessary to hoist 'M N' of the International Code. The two flags were sufficient: he threw his engines astern and brought up to await further orders. His followers arrived on the station. Some cast anchor, others slowed and stopped. All took note of the flags--St. Andrew's cross over blue and white checquers, hoisted at the destroyer's yard-arm--and obeyed the summary signal. 'M N!' International Code! The old flags of the days when there was peace on the sea, when the German commercial ensign was known and familiar and respected in the seaports of the world! How many of the Germans would understand the full significance of the hoist that brought them to a standstill--the import of the flags drooping in the windless air--the beckoning of the coloured fabric that ended their murder trade. The day had long passed since they had used this warning signal for a procedure in law and order. No 'M N' to _Lusitania_ before littering the Irish Sea with wreckage and the pitiful bodies of women and small children: no signal to _Arabic_ or _Persia_: no warning to _Belgian Prince_, to _California_, to all the long and ghastly list: no summons to the hospital ships--alight and blazoned to advertise their humane mission. And now--their ensign dishonoured, their name as seamen condemned to the everlasting tale of infamy, their proud commercial seafaring destroyed--to come in with the blood on their hands, and render and submit to the mandate of a two-flag hoist! 'M N!' The Code of the Nations! The summons to peaceful seafarers! 'Stop instantly!' Disobey at your peril! At last, at long last, the Freedom of the Seas--the security of the ships--the safety of all who pass on their lawful occasions--completely re-established by the flaunt of the old flags! APPENDIX COMPELLED by the nature of their work to be long absent from home ports, seamen are frequently in ignorance of the current of longshore opinion. Newspapers do not reach out to the sea-routes (as yet), and the media of Guild Gazettes and Association Reporters come somewhat late on the tide of an appreciation. The tremendous historical importance of the Nation's Thanks to its Fighting Forces (in which the Merchants' Service was included) has not adequately been realized by the merchantmen. Some do not even know of it. For these reasons--not in a spirit of 'pride above desert'--the writer quotes the following: The Resolution of Parliament of October 29, 1917, placed upon record-- "That the thanks of this House be accorded to the officers and men of the Mercantile Marine for the devotion to duty with which they have continued to carry the vital supplies to the Allies through seas infested with deadly perils." A year later, an equally generous appreciation of the work of the Merchants' Service was issued by the Board of Admiralty. "On the occasion of the first Meeting of the Board of Admiralty after the signing of the German Armistice, their Lordships desire, on behalf of the Royal Navy, to express their admiration and thanks to the Owners, Masters, Officers, and Crews of the British Mercantile Marine, and to those engaged in the Fishing Industry, for the incomparable services which they have rendered during the War, making possible and complete the Victory which is now being celebrated. "The work of the Mercantile Marine has been inseparably connected with that of the Royal Navy, and without the loyal co-operation of the former, the enemy's Submarine Campaign must inevitably have achieved its object. The Mercantile Marine from the beginning met this unprecedented form of warfare with indomitable courage, magnificent endurance, and a total disregard of danger and death, factors which the enemy had failed to take into account and which went far towards defeating his object. "In no small measure also has the success achieved against the submarine been due to the interest taken by Owners in the defensive equipment of their ships, and to the ability, loyalty, and technical skill displayed by Masters and Officers in carrying out Admiralty regulations which, though tending to the safety of the vessels from submarine risks, enormously increased the strain and anxiety of navigation. The loyal observance of these precautions has been the more commendable since the need for absolute secrecy, on which safety largely depended, has prevented the reasons for their adoption being in all cases disclosed. "Further, the Convoy System, which has played such an important part in frustrating the designs of the enemy and securing the safe passage of the United States Army, could never have attained its success but for the ability and endurance displayed by Masters, Officers, and crews of the Merchant Service forming these Convoys. This system has called for the learning and practising of a new science--that of station-keeping--the accuracy of which has depended in no small measure on the adaptability and skill of the Engineers and their Departments. "Their Lordships also desire to acknowledge the ready response of Owners to the heavy calls made on the Merchant Service for Officers and men to meet the increasing requirement of the Navy. On board our ships of every type, from the largest Dreadnought down to the smallest Patrol Boat are to be found Officers and men of the Merchant Navy who have combined with those of the Royal Navy in fighting the enemy and defeating his nefarious methods of warfare at sea. "The Merchant Service and the Royal Navy have never been so closely brought together as during this War. In the interests of our glorious Empire this connection must prove a lasting one." The Resolution of Parliament of August 6, 1919, placed upon record-- "That the thanks of this House be accorded to the officers and men of the Mercantile Marine for the fine and fearless seamanship by which our people have been preserved from want and our cause from disaster." INDEX ABERDEEN, 82 Admiralty, xiii, 11, 32, 35-37, 41, 42, 64, 110, 113, 144, 178, 195, 255 Adriatic, 25, 99 _Agnes Whitwell_, 192 Aleppo, 4 "Allo," 118, 119 Amadas, 6 _Anglo-Californian_, 18 Antwerp, 45, 78 _Aquitania_, 13, 100 _Arabic_, 253 Arctic Ocean, 25 Arklow, 82 Arlington, 108 Armada, The Great, 4, 6 _Atalanta_, 82 Atlantic, 107, 117, 128, 178, 218, 224, 225 Atlantic City, 104, 109 _Augustine_, 62, 63, 66 Australia, 126 Austrian Navy, 99 _Avocet_, 85 BABYLON, 4 Backhouse, John, 5 Baffin, 6 Bahia, 191, 204 Balsara, 4 Barlow, 6 Barnegat Lighthouse, 109 Beaumaris, 78 Beaverbrook, Lord, xiii _Belgian Prince_, 173, 253 Bell, Captain, 79 Bengal, 9 Bennett, Arnold, xiii Bermuda, 107, 108 Berry, 11 Biggatt, William, 5 _Birchgrove_, 85 Black Middens, 78 Blake, 10 Board of Trade, 61-66, 121, 131, 185 Boer War, 22 Boom defences, 100, 191, 206 Bordeaux, 55 Boston, 108 _Boy Ernie_, 101 _Boy Jacob_, 78 Bremen Hansa Line, 31 Brennell, Captain, 85 Bridgwater, 10 Bristol Channel, 80, 116 _Britannic_, 78 _British Standard_, 209, 210, 211, 215 Brixham, 101 _Brother Fred_, 192 Brownrigg, Rear-Admiral Sir Douglas, xiii _Brussels_, 79 _Cabotia_, 114 Cagliari, 181 Calcutta, 204 _Calgarian_, 178 _California_, 253 _Cameronia_, 140 Canada, 126, 128 Canute, 141, 142 Cape Cod, 108 Cardiff, 181 Caspian Sea, 4 Cats, 198-99 Cavendish, Thomas, 6 Cerigo Channel, 114, 132 Channel, The, 88, 89, 95, 96, 131, 147 Charles II, 57 Chaucer, 55 _Chelmsford_, 204 Cheshire, 244, 247 China, 22, 165 _Cinderella_, 210, 211 Clyde, xi, 100, 116 Cochrane, Lord, 181 Collins, Captain Greenville, 57, 58, 64 _Collonia_, 196 _Commissioner_, 82 Coney Island, 230 Constantinople, 4 Contalmaison, 51 Cook, James, 10 Copenhagen, 11 _Coquet_, 173 Cork, 85 Cornford, L. Cope, xiii Costello (boatswain of _Gull_, trawler), 99 _Cottingham_, 80, 81 Coverley, Captain, 114 _Crane_, 99 Crimea, 22 Crystal Palace, 122 Cunard Line, 118, 119 Custom House, 184, 185 D�DALUS Light, 170 Dampier, 10 Davis, 6 Deal, 77, 89, 230 Deptford, 56, 58 _Deutschland_, 104 _Devonshire_ (East Indiaman), 9 Dieppe, 31 _Dieudonné_, 192 Dixon, W. Macneile, xiii Dogger Bank, 99 Doiran, 133 Downs, The, 9, 88-90, 96 Drake, 6 _Drei Geschwister_, 85 Dublin, 15 EAST India Company, 9 Eddystone Lighthouse, 91 Egypt, 22, 126 Elbow Buoy, 97 _Emden_, 164 _Empress of Fort William_, 95 Esperanto, 169, 203 FAIR Head, 117 _Falaba_, 164 _Fermo_, 101 Fishermen, 98-102, 206, 255 Flanders, 51, 79, 126 _Floandi_, 99 Foley, 11 Forbes, Captain, 63 Foreign consuls, 185 _Formidable_, 101 _Fortuna_, 192 France, 125, 126 _Franz Fischer_, 85 Frobisher, 6 Fryatt, Captain, 79 _Fürst_, 27, 28 GALATZ, 170 Gallipoli, 127 "Gamecock" Fleet, 99 Garron Head, 116 German Navy, 17, 24, 26, 28, 41, 253 Crimes on the sea, 170-74, 253 Fishing-boats, 79, 100, 101 Hospital ships, 92, 173, 253 Lightships, 92 Merchantmen, 17, 81, 82, 85, 114, 164, 173 Mines, 92, 95 Rafts and open boats, 92 Submarine minelayers, 80, 92 _See under_ Merchants' Service: German _Schrecklichkeit_, and Submarine piracy Submarines, 17-20, 37, 41-43, 79-86, 95, 96, 107-9, 113-15, 118-19, 173, 177, 181, 182, 237-40, 252-53, 255-56 Gibbs, Richard, 5 Gibraltar, 126, 183 Glasgow, 33, 39, 78, 116 Goodwin Sands, 89, 96 _Gowan Lea_, 99, 100 Grand Banks, 103 Gravesend, 3, 59 Greece, King of, 63 Greenwich Mean Time, 191 _Gulflight_, 109 _Gull_ (trawler), 99 HAKLUYT, Richard, 4, 5, 9 Halifax, 108 Hardy, 11 Harwich, xi, 90, 253 Hawkins, Sir John, 6 Henderson, Algernon C. F., v Henry VIII, 6 Hohenzollern, 174 Hollesay Bay, 90 Holy Land, 54 Horn, Cape, 77 Hudson, 6 Hudson Bay, 86 Hudson River, 217, 218 Hull, 90 ICELAND, 170 Imperial War Museum, xiii India, 22, 126 International Code of Signals, 169 Islay, 117 Isle of Man, 32 Istria, 55 _Jane Williamson_, 82 Japan, 178 Java, 13 Johnson, Dr., 47-48 _Justitia_, 78 _Karlsruhe_, 104 _Kashmir_, 227 Keith, Captain, 131 Kiel, 24 King John, 55 Kingsdown, 89 King's Harbour Master, 203 Kingsway, 124 _Kölnische Zeitung_, 81 _Kronprinz Wilhelm_, 104 _Lady of the Lake_, 79 Lamport and Holt Line, 109 Langton, Stephen, Archbishop of Canterbury, 55 Leggatt (of _Crane_), 99 Leghorn, 181 _Leviathan_, 135 Leyland Line, 117, 118, 119 Liége, 27 Lightships, 57, 91-96 Gull Lightship, 53, 89, 93, 96 Ostend Lightship, 92 Royal Sovereign Lightship, 95 Shambles Lightship, 95 South Goodwin Lightship, 95 _Linn_ ("frigot"), 204 Liver Buildings, 49, 247 Liverpool, 62, 69, 78, 103, 116, 135, 245, 249 _Lobelia_, 100 London, 89, 213 Louis XIV, of France, 91 Lowestoft, 90 _Lusitania_, 164, 173, 253 MALAY pirates, 165 _Maloja_, 95 Malta, 126, 128, 132, 182 Manchester, 124 _Manchester Commerce_, 164 Manhattan, 223 "Manual on Seamanship," 144 Marconi, 123 Marconi Company, 110 _Maréchal de Villars_, 82 _Margaret_, 15 _Mariston_, 173 Maritime Code, 54 _seq._ _Marmion_, 191, 192, 211 Marseilles, 128, 131, 132 _Mary Rose_, 178 _Massilia_, 186, 210 _Mayflower_, 236 Mayo, Walter H., xiii Meadowside, 140 Mediterranean, 30, 114, 127, 128, 178, 182, 196 _Melampus_, 253 Merchant Adventurers, 4, 5 Merchants' Service: Growth, 3-5; parent of Navy, 6, 18; Imperial significance, xii, 10, 12, 14, 15, 126; unrecognized work, 10, 46 _seq._; educational function, 11; introduction of steamships, 11, 12, 13; international supremacy, 12, 13; outbreak of Great War, 14, 24, 163; submarine piracy, 17, 18 _seq._, 51, 177, _passim_; arming of, 19, 37 _seq._, 113-5; differences with Navy, 7, 21-25; reconciliation, 25 _seq._; liaison with Navy, 14, 18-19, 21-43, 120-3, 134, 191, 197, 199-203, 255-6 _passim_; commerce-raiders, 28, 51; Naval War Staff, 30 _seq._; transporting of troops, 14, 30 _seq._, 44, 45, 125-40, 223, 224-51; popular recognition of, and the longshore view, 46 _seq._, 254; discipline, 64, 68-71; wanted, a Ministry of Marine, 66; manning, 68-73; German _Schrecklichkeit_, 72, 73, 80-85, 92, 173, 203, 209; coastal Services, 77-86; war-time navigation, 85-6, 87-95; traditions, 4, 5, 9-13, 23, 98, 99-100; signals and wireless, 110-3, 120-4, 169-70, 191; destroyer escort, 29-30, 126-8, 178, 203, 235; torpedoing of a transport, 137-40, 237-40; camouflage and dazzle, 163-7; naming of standard ships, 168; owners' customs clerks, 184, 185; clearing for sea, 184-9; convoy conference, 198-204; putting to sea, 205-16; unloading and loading, 217-23, 247-51. _See under_ Navy Merchant Shipping Act, 67 Mersey, 49, 80, 107, 241, 244 Mexico, 230 Middleton, 6 Minesweeping, 25, 88, 89, 91, 95, 97-99, 102, 205 Ministry of Information, xiii Ministry of Shipping, 178, 181 Miramichi, 204 'M N', 252-53 Mobbs, Engineman, 99 Mons, 126 Monson, 6 Muscovy Company, 5 NANTUCKET Lightship, 104, 107, 109 _Nautical Magazine_, xiii Navesink, 109 Navy: Offshoot from Merchants' Service, 6, 18; press-gangs, 9; naval science, 11; arming of merchantmen, 19, 37; War Staff, 30 _seq._, 128; Naval Transport Officer, 32 _seq._, 131, 247, 251; Shipping Intelligence Officer, 36 _seq._, 185; D.A.M.S., 37-8, 185; 'Otters,' 38, 185; convoys, 41, 110, 121, 178-83, 189-97, 198-204, 205-12, 255; anti-submarine measures, 41-3, 95-6, 110, 113, 203, 255; 'Q. ships,' 42; gunnery, 43; wireless on sea-going merchantmen, 110-3; Transport Department, 126, 127; Salvage Section, 144-7; Examination Service, 190. _See under_ Merchants' Service _Nebraskan_, 109 _Neleus_, 226, 229, 232, 233, 234 Nelson, 11, 22 _Nelson_, 79 _Nemesis_, 139 Neutral shipping, 17, 91, 177, 203 New Brighton, 247 Newhaven, 31 New Jersey, 217 Newport, U.S.A., 107 New York, 27, 103, 109, 204 _New York Herald_, 109 Nichols, Skipper, 99 Nile, 11 Nore, 97 Norfolk, Va., 104, 191 North River, 217-23, 230 North Sea, 85, 88, 252 _Olympic_, 131 'Otters,' 38, 80, 166 Oversay, 117 PADRIG Flats, 148 _Palermo_, 81 _Palm Branch_, 18, 19, 20 Patrols, 28, 114, 117, 128, 150, 189, 190, 236 _Pearl Shell_, 191, 192 _Persia_, 253 Philanthropic Seamen's Societies, 65 Pilots, 59, 87-91, 98, 149, 187, 189, 210, 218, 251 Plymouth, 205, 233 Hoe, 198 Sound, 207 Poldhu, 226 Portliskey, 81 _Present Help_, 97, 98 Prince Line, 109 _Provident_, 101 Prussian Guard, 51 Psiloriti, 132 Purchas, 5 _Queen Alexandra_, 131 Quetta Staff College, 30 RAMSGATE, 56, 98 Rate of Exchange, 103, 109 Rathbone, Master John, 11 Rathlin Island, 116 Rathlin Sound, 116 Rea (of _Crane_), 99 _Redcap_, 82 Richard Coeur de Lion, 54, 55 _Rifleman_, 139 River Plate, 4, 13, 181, 199 Rôles d'Oléron, 54 _seq._ Rowlatt, Mr. Justice, 62 _Royal Edward_, 127 Royal Naval Reserve, 23-25, 36-37, 41, 64, 122, 197 Royal Naval Reserve (_Temporary_), 18, 25, 26 Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, 122 Rozhdestvensky, 98 Rue Point, 117 ST. HELENS, 131 _St. Paul_, 108 Salonika, 128, 132, 133, 183 Salvage, 141-62 Salving a merchantman, 147-56 Repairing in dry dock, 156-62 Sandon, 251 Sandy Hook, 230 San Miguel, 170 _Sarah Pritchard_, 78 _Seahorse_, 210 Seaplanes, 85, 92, 150, 182, 215 Sea-slang, 26 Selsey Bill, 95 _Serapis_, 173 Shanghai, 42 Sir Ralph the Rover, 91 Skullmartin, 116 Smeaton, 91 Smith (of _Crane_), 99 South Africa, 126 Southampton, 65, 67, 129, 131 Southampton Water, 131 _Speedy_, 181 Stevedores, 185, 186, 218 Straits of Dover, 85 Strand, 124 _Strongbow_, 178 Suda Bay, 128, 132 Suez Canal, 137 Sutherland, 132 THAMES, 78, 79, 86, 184, 252 _Thordis_, 79 _Thracia_, 173 _Titan_, 149-55 _Titanic_, 123 Tor Point, 116 Trafalgar, 11 Trinity Bay, 89 Trinity House, 56-61, 88, 95, 149 Tripolis, 4 Turkey Company, 9 _Tuscania_, 15 Tyne, 78, 86 _Umaria_, 173 United States, 72, 89, 103, 128, 178 United States Seamen's Act, 72 U 53, 109 VALENCIA, 13 Valparaiso, 42 _Vanilla_, 101 Verdun, 230 Virginia, 104 _Virginia_, 114 Volapük, 169 _Volturno_, 123 _Vosges_, 17, 18 WALMER, 89 _Wandle_, 79 'War Channel,' 86, 88 _War Ordnance_, 209, 211, 213 War Risks Associations, 36 _War Trident_, 191, 192, 195-97 Waterford, 30 Watt, Skipper Joseph, 99 Westmark Shoal, 149, 150 White Star Line, 109 Whymper, F., xiii Wilhelmshaven, 24, 100 _William_, 82 _William_ (East Indiaman), 9 Wood, Walter, xiii YARMOUTH, 90 Yarmouth, I. of W., 141 ZEPPELINS, 85, 92 PRINTED AT THE COMPLETE PRESS WEST NORWOOD LONDON * * * * * Transcriber's Notes: Text uses both propeller and propellor. Obvious punctuation errors repaired. Page 47, "hard" changed to "herd" (herd with his high-heeled) Page 56, "Brethern" changed to "Brethren" (Brethren of Trinity held their) Page 78, "vayage" changed to "voyage" (a coasting voyage could not) Page 86, "upChannel" changed to "up Channel" (that passes up Channel) Page 92, "Ostende" changed to "Ostend" (they shelled the Ostend Lightship) Page 153, "mess-kids" changed to "mess-kits" (of pots and mess-kits) Page 178, "warcraft" changed to "war craft" to match rest of usage (of strange war craft) Page 196, "knoters" changed to "knotters" (bunch of the eight-knotters) Page 226, "slatt" changed to "slat" (A slat of driving spray) Page 257, "5 ," changed to "57," (Collins, Captain Greenville, 57,) Page 258, "254-55" changed to "255-56" (252-53, 255-56) Page 259, "254" changed to "255" (Fishermen, 98-102, 206, 255) Page 259, "8" changed to "9" (traditions, 4, 5, 9-13) Page 259, the reference to page 136 was removed as this is a blank page following an illustration. The original read (coastal Services, 77-86, 136;) 
15648	----	Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 15648-h.htm or 15648-h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/1/5/6/4/15648/15648-h/15648-h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/1/5/6/4/15648/15648-h.zip) Transcriber's Note: General: Varied hyphenation is retained. In list of Illustrations DeLong is one word; in Table of Contents it is De Long; in text it is DeLong. More Transcriber's notes will be found at the end of sections. AMERICAN MERCHANT SHIPS AND SAILORS by WILLIS J. ABBOT Author of _Naval History of the United States_, _Bluejackets of 1898_, etc. Illustrated by RAY BROWN New York Dodd, Mead & Company The Caxton Press New York 1902 [Illustration] BOOKS BY WILLIS J. ABBOT [Illustration] Naval History of the United States Blue Jackets of 1898 Battlefields of '61 Battlefields and Campfires Battlefields and Victory Preface In an earlier series of books the present writer told the story of the high achievements of the men of the United States Navy, from the day of Paul Jones to that of Dewey, Schley, and Sampson. It is a record Americans may well regard with pride, for in wars of defense or offense, in wars just or unjust, the American blue jacket has discharged the duty allotted to him cheerfully, gallantly, and efficiently. But there are triumphs to be won by sea and by land greater than those of war, dangers to be braved, more menacing than the odds of battle. It was a glorious deed to win the battle of Santiago, but Fulton and Ericsson influenced the progress of the world more than all the heroes of history. The daily life of those who go down to the sea in ships is one of constant battle, and the whaler caught in the ice-pack is in more direful case than the blockaded cruiser; while the captain of the ocean liner, guiding through a dense fog his colossal craft freighted with two thousand human lives, has on his mind a weightier load of responsibility than the admiral of the fleet. In all times and ages, the deeds of the men who sail the deep as its policemen or its soldiery have been sung in praise. It is time for chronicle of the high courage, the reckless daring, and oftentimes the noble self-sacrifice of those who use the Seven Seas to extend the markets of the world, to bring nations nearer together, to advance science, and to cement the world into one great interdependent whole. WILLIS JOHN ABBOT. Ann Arbor, Mich., May 1, 1902. [Illustration: NEW ENGLAND EARLY TOOK THE LEAD IN BUILDING SHIPS] List of Illustrations PAGE NEW ENGLAND EARLY TOOK THE LEAD IN BUILDING SHIPS _Frontispiece_ THE SHALLOP 2 THE KETCH 5 "THE BROAD ARROW WAS PUT ON ALL WHITE PINES 24 INCHES IN DIAMETER" 7 "THE FARMER-BUILDER TOOK HIS PLACE AT THE HELM" 8 SCHOONER-RIGGED SHARPIE 11 AFTER A BRITISH LIEUTENANT HAD PICKED THE BEST OF HER CREW 18 EARLY TYPE OF SMACK 21 THE SNOW, AN OBSOLETE TYPE 29 THE BUG-EYE 34 A "PINK" 38 "INSTANTLY THE GUN WAS RUN OUT AND DISCHARGED" 42 "THE WATER FRONT OF A GREAT SEAPORT LIKE NEW YORK" 55 AN ARMED CUTTER 57 "THE LOUD LAUGH OFTEN ROSE AT MY EXPENSE" 65 "THE DREADNAUGHT"--NEW YORK AND LIVERPOOL PACKET 69 THERE ARE BUILDING IN AMERICAN YARDS _facing_ 82 "A FAVORITE TRICK OF THE FLEEING SLAVER WAS TO THROW OVER SLAVES" 95 DEALERS WHO CAME ON BOARD WERE THEMSELVES KIDNAPPED _facing_ 98 "THE ROPE WAS PUT AROUND HIS NECK" 103 "BOUND THEM TO THE CHAIN CABLE" 114 "SENDING BOAT AND MEN FLYING INTO THE AIR" 128 "SUDDENLY THE MATE GAVE A HOWL--'STARN ALL!" _facing_ 132 "ROT AT MOLDERING WHARVES" 140 "THERE SHE BLOWS!" 144 "TAKING IT IN HIS JAWS" 146 NEARLY EVERY MAN ON THE QUARTERDECK OF THE "ARGO" WAS KILLED OR WOUNDED 162 THE PRISON SHIP "JERSEY" 163 IF THEY RETREATED FARTHER HE WOULD BLOW UP THE SHIP _facing_ 176 "I THINK SHE IS A HEAVY SHIP" 179 "STRIVING TO REACH HER DECKS AT EVERY POINT" 186 "THEY FELL DOWN AND DIED AS THEY WALKED" 199 "THE TREACHEROUS KAYAK" 203 THE SHIP WAS CAUGHT IN THE ICE PACK _facing_ 204 ADRIFT ON AN ICE FLOE 206 DE LONG'S MEN DRAGGING THEIR BOATS OVER THE ICE 210 AN ARCTIC HOUSE 224 AN ESQUIMAU 227 THE WOODEN BATEAUX OF THE FUR TRADERS _facing_ 236 "THE RED-MEN SET UPON THEM AND SLEW THEM ALL" 241 ONE OF THE FIRST LAKE SAILORS 243 "TWO BOAT-LOADS OF REDCOATS BOARDED US AND TOOK US PRISONERS" 245 A VANISHING TYPE ON THE LAKES 249 "THE WHALEBACK" 253 FLATBOATS MANNED WITH RIFLEMEN _facing_ 266 "THE EVENING WOULD PASS IN RUDE AND HARMLESS JOLLITY" 271 THE MISSISSIPPI PILOT 286 A DECK LOAD OF COTTON 290 FEEDING THE FURNACE 293 ON THE BANKS 314 "THE BOYS MARKED THEIR FISH BY CUTTING OFF THEIR TAILS" 322 FISHING FROM THE RAIL 328 TRAWLING FROM A DORY 333 STRIKES A SCHOONER AND SHEARS THROUGH HER LIKE A KNIFE _facing_ 334 MINOT'S LEDGE LIGHT 345 WHISTLING BUOY 354 REVENUE CUTTER 360 LAUNCHING A LIFEBOAT THROUGH THE SURF 364 THE EXCITING MOMENT IN THE PILOT'S TRADE _facing_ 366 **Transcriber's notes: Illustrations: Most quirks were left as written, only changes made listed below. List reads: "THE LOUD LAUGH OFTEN ROSE AT MY EXPENSE" Tag reads: "THE LOUD LAUGH ROSE AT MY EXPENSE" Added missing illustration to list: AFTER A BRITISH LIEUTENANT HAD PICKED THE BEST OF HER CREW 18 Changed MOULDERING to MOLDERING to match illustration and text Page 227: Changed Illustration tag "AN ESQUIMAUX" to "AN ESQUIMAU" to fit text. Contents PAGE CHAPTER I. 1 THE AMERICAN SHIP AND THE AMERICAN SAILOR--NEW ENGLAND'S LEAD ON THE OCEAN--THE EARLIEST AMERICAN SHIP-BUILDING--HOW THE SHIPYARDS MULTIPLIED--LAWLESS TIMES ON THE HIGH SEAS--SHIP-BUILDING IN THE FORESTS AND ON THE FARM--SOME EARLY TYPES--THE COURSE OF MARITIME TRADE--THE FIRST SCHOONER AND THE FIRST FULL-RIGGED SHIP--JEALOUSY AND ANTAGONISM OF ENGLAND--THE PEST OF PRIVATEERING--ENCOURAGEMENT FROM CONGRESS--THE GOLDEN DAYS OF OUR MERCHANT MARINE--FIGHTING CAPTAINS AND TRADING CAPTAINS--GROUND BETWEEN FRANCE AND ENGLAND--CHECKED BY THE WARS--SEALING AND WHALING--INTO THE PACIFIC--HOW YANKEE BOYS MOUNTED THE QUARTER-DECK--SOME STORIES OF EARLY SEAMEN--THE PACKETS AND THEIR EXPLOITS CHAPTER II. 53 THE TRANSITION FROM SAILS TO STEAM--THE CHANGE IN MARINE ARCHITECTURE--THE DEPOPULATION OF THE OCEAN--CHANGES IN THE SAILOR'S LOT--FROM WOOD TO STEEL--THE INVENTION OF THE STEAMBOAT--THE FATE OF FITCH--FULTON'S LONG STRUGGLES--OPPOSITION OF THE SCIENTISTS--THE "CLERMONT"--THE STEAMBOAT ON THE OCEAN--ON WESTERN RIVERS--THE TRANSATLANTIC PASSAGE--THE "SAVANNAH" MAKES THE FIRST CROSSING--ESTABLISHMENT OF BRITISH LINES--EFFORTS OF UNITED STATES SHIP-OWNERS TO COMPETE--THE FAMOUS COLLINS LINE--THE DECADENCE OF OUR MERCHANT MARINE--SIGNS OF ITS REVIVAL--OUR GREAT DOMESTIC SHIPPING INTEREST--AMERICA'S FUTURE ON THE SEA CHAPTER III. 89 AN UGLY FEATURE OF EARLY SEAFARING--THE SLAVE TRADE AND ITS PROMOTERS--PART PLAYED BY EMINENT NEW ENGLANDERS--HOW THE TRADE GREW UP--THE PIOUS AUSPICES WHICH SURROUNDED THE TRAFFIC--SLAVE-STEALING AND SABBATH-BREAKING--CONDITIONS OF THE TRADE--SIZE OF THE VESSELS--HOW THE CAPTIVES WERE TREATED--MUTINIES, MAN-STEALING, AND MURDER--THE REVELATIONS OF THE ABOLITION SOCIETY--EFFORTS TO BREAK UP THE TRADE--AN AWFUL RETRIBUTION--ENGLAND LEADS THE WAY--DIFFICULTY OF ENFORCING THE LAW--AMERICA'S SHAME--THE END OF THE EVIL--THE LAST SLAVER CHAPTER IV. 121 THE WHALING INDUSTRY--ITS EARLY DEVELOPMENT IN NEW ENGLAND--KNOWN TO THE ANCIENTS--SHORE WHALING BEGINNINGS OF THE DEEP-SEA FISHERIES--THE PRIZES OF WHALING--PIETY OF ITS EARLY PROMOTERS--THE RIGHT WHALE AND THE CACHALOT--A FLURRY--SOME FIGHTING WHALES--THE "ESSEX" AND THE "ANN ALEXANDER"--TYPES OF WHALERS--DECADENCE OF THE INDUSTRY--EFFECT OF OUR NATIONAL WARS--THE EMBARGO--SOME STORIES OF WHALING LIFE CHAPTER V. 155 THE PRIVATEERS--PART TAKEN BY MERCHANT SAILORS IN BUILDING UP THE PRIVATEERING SYSTEM--LAWLESS STATE OF THE HIGH SEAS--METHOD OF DISTRIBUTING PRIVATEERING PROFITS--PICTURESQUE FEATURES OF THE CALLING--THE GENTLEMEN SAILORS--EFFECTS ON THE REVOLUTIONARY ARMY--PERILS OF PRIVATEERING--THE OLD JERSEY PRISON SHIP--EXTENT OF PRIVATEERING--EFFECT ON AMERICAN MARINE ARCHITECTURE--SOME FAMOUS PRIVATEERS--THE "CHASSEUR," THE "PRINCE DE NEUFCHÁTEL," THE "MAMMOTH"--THE SYSTEM OF CONVOYS AND THE "RUNNING SHIPS"--A TYPICAL PRIVATEERS' BATTLE--THE "GENERAL ARMSTRONG" AT FAYAL--SUMMARY OF THE WORK OF THE PRIVATEERS CHAPTER VI. 193 THE ARCTIC TRAGEDY--AMERICAN SAILORS IN THE FROZEN DEEP--THE SEARCH FOR SIR JOHN FRANKLIN--REASONS FOR SEEKING THE NORTH POLE--TESTIMONY OF SCIENTISTS AND EXPLORERS--PERTINACITY OF POLAR VOYAGERS--DR. KANE AND DR. HAYES--CHARLES F. HALL, JOURNALIST AND EXPLORER--MIRACULOUS ESCAPE OF HIS PARTY--THE ILL-FATED "JEANNETTE" EXPEDITION--SUFFERING AND DEATH OF DE LONG AND HIS COMPANIONS--A PITIFUL DIARY--THE GREELY EXPEDITION--ITS CAREFUL PLAN AND COMPLETE DISASTER--RESCUE OF THE GREELY SURVIVORS--PEARY, WELLMAN, AND BALDWIN CHAPTER VII. 233 THE GREAT LAKES--THEIR SHARE IN THE MARITIME TRAFFIC OF THE UNITED STATES--THE EARLIEST RECORDED VOYAGERS--INDIANS AND FUR TRADERS--THE PIGMY CANAL AT THE SAULT STE. MARIE--BEGINNING OF NAVIGATION BY SAILS--DE LA SALLE AND THE "GRIFFIN"--RECOLLECTIONS OF EARLY LAKE SEAMEN--THE LAKES AS A HIGHWAY FOR WESTWARD EMIGRATION--THE FIRST STEAMBOAT--EFFECT OF MINERAL DISCOVERIES ON LAKE SUPERIOR--THE ORE-CARRYING FLEET--THE WHALEBACKS--THE SEAMEN OF THE LAKES--THE GREAT CANAL AT THE "SOO"--THE CHANNEL TO BUFFALO--BARRED OUT FROM THE OCEAN CHAPTER VIII. 261 THE MISSISSIPPI AND TRIBUTARY RIVERS--THE CHANGING PHASES OF THEIR SHIPPING--RIVER NAVIGATION AS A NATION-BUILDING FORCE--THE VALUE OF SMALL STREAMS--WORK OF THE OHIO COMPANY--AN EARLY PROPELLER--THE FRENCH FIRST ON THE MISSISSIPPI--THE SPANIARDS AT NEW ORLEANS--EARLY METHODS OF NAVIGATION--THE FLATBOAT, THE BROADHORN, AND THE KEELBOAT--LIFE OF THE RIVERMEN--PIRATES AND BUCCANEERS--LAFITTE AND THE BARATARIANS--THE GENESIS OF THE STEAMBOATS--CAPRICIOUS RIVER--FLUSH TIMES IN NEW ORLEANS--RAPID MULTIPLICATION OF STEAMBOATS--RECENT FIGURES ON RIVER SHIPPING--COMMODORE WHIPPLE'S EXPLOIT--THE MEN WHO STEERED THE STEAMBOATS--THEIR TECHNICAL EDUCATION--THE SHIPS THEY STEERED--FIRES AND EXPLOSIONS--HEROISM OF THE PILOTS--THE RACES CHAPTER IX. 303 THE NEW ENGLAND FISHERIES--THEIR PART IN EFFECTING THE SETTLEMENT OF AMERICA--THEIR RAPID DEVELOPMENT--WIDE EXTENT OF THE TRADE--EFFORT OF LORD NORTH TO DESTROY IT--THE FISHERMEN IN THE REVOLUTION--EFFORTS TO ENCOURAGE THE INDUSTRY--ITS PART IN POLITICS AND DIPLOMACY--THE FISHING BANKS--TYPES OF BOATS--GROWTH OF THE FISHING COMMUNITIES--FARMERS AND SAILORS BY TURNS--THE EDUCATION OF THE FISHERMEN--METHODS OF TAKING MACKEREL--THE SEINE AND THE TRAWL--SCANT PROFITS OF THE INDUSTRY--PERILS OF THE BANKS--SOME PERSONAL EXPERIENCES--THE FOG AND THE FAST LINERS--THE TRIBUTE OF HUMAN LIFE CHAPTER X. 341 THE SAILOR'S SAFEGUARDS--IMPROVEMENTS IN MARINE ARCHITECTURE--THE MAPPING OF THE SEAS--THE LIGHTHOUSE SYSTEM--BUILDING A LIGHTHOUSE--MINOT'S LEDGE AND SPECTACLE REEF--LIFE IN A LIGHTHOUSE--LIGHTSHIPS AND OTHER BEACONS--THE REVENUE MARINE SERVICE--ITS FUNCTION AS A SAFEGUARD TO SAILORS--ITS WORK IN THE NORTH PACIFIC--THE LIFE-SAVING SERVICE--ITS RECORD FOR ONE YEAR--ITS ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT--THE PILOTS OF NEW YORK--THEIR HARDSHIPS AND SLENDER EARNINGS--JACK ASHORE--THE SAILORS' SNUG HARBOR **Transcriber Notes on Table of Contents: Chapter V reads "Effects on the Revolutionary Army"; Chapter on page 155 reads "Effect on the Revolutionary Army"; Chapter VII reads reads "Beginning of Navigation", Chapter on page 233 reads "Beginnings of Navigation" American Merchant Ships and Sailors CHAPTER I. THE AMERICAN SHIP AND THE AMERICAN SAILOR--NEW ENGLAND'S LEAD ON THE OCEAN--THE EARLIEST AMERICAN SHIP-BUILDING--HOW THE SHIPYARDS MULTIPLIED--LAWLESS TIMES ON THE HIGH SEAS--SHIP-BUILDING IN THE FORESTS AND ON THE FARM--SOME EARLY TYPES--THE COURSE OF MARITIME TRADE--THE FIRST SCHOONER AND THE FIRST FULL-RIGGED SHIP--JEALOUSY AND ANTAGONISM OF ENGLAND--THE PEST OF PRIVATEERING--ENCOURAGEMENT FROM CONGRESS--THE GOLDEN DAYS OF OUR MERCHANT MARINE--FIGHTING CAPTAINS AND TRADING CAPTAINS--GROUND BETWEEN FRANCE AND ENGLAND--CHECKED BY THE WARS--SEALING AND WHALING--INTO THE PACIFIC--HOW YANKEE BOYS MOUNTED THE QUARTER-DECK--SOME STORIES OF EARLY SEAMEN--THE PACKETS AND THEIR EXPLOITS. When the Twentieth Century opened, the American sailor was almost extinct. The nation which, in its early and struggling days, had given to the world a race of seamen as adventurous as the Norse Vikings had, in the days of its greatness and prosperity turned its eyes away from the sea and yielded to other people the mastery of the deep. One living in the past, reading the newspapers, diaries and record-books of the early days of the Nineteenth Century, can hardly understand how an occupation which played so great a part in American life as seafaring could ever be permitted to decline. The dearest ambition of the American boy of our early national era was to command a clipper ship--but how many years it has been since that ambition entered into the mind of young America! In those days the people of all the young commonwealths from Maryland northward found their interests vitally allied with maritime adventure. Without railroads, and with only the most wretched excuses for post-roads, the States were linked together by the sea; and coastwise traffic early began to employ a considerable number of craft and men. Three thousand miles of ocean separated Americans from the market in which they must sell their produce and buy their luxuries. Immediately upon the settlement of the seaboard the Colonists themselves took up this trade, building and manning their own vessels and speedily making their way into every nook and corner of Europe. We, who have seen, in the last quarter of the Nineteenth Century, the American flag the rarest of all ensigns to be met on the water, must regard with equal admiration and wonder the zeal for maritime adventure that made the infant nation of 1800 the second seafaring people in point of number of vessels, and second to none in energy and enterprise. [Illustration: THE SHALLOP] New England early took the lead in building ships and manning them, and this was but natural since her coasts abounded in harbors; navigable streams ran through forests of trees fit for the ship-builder's adze; her soil was hard and obdurate to the cultivator's efforts; and her people had not, like those who settled the South, been drawn from the agricultural classes. Moreover, as I shall show in other chapters, the sea itself thrust upon the New Englanders its riches for them to gather. The cod-fishery was long pursued within a few miles of Cape Ann, and the New Englanders had become well habituated to it before the growing scarcity of the fish compelled them to seek the teeming waters of Newfoundland banks. The value of the whale was first taught them by great carcasses washed up on the shore of Cape Cod, and for years this gigantic game was pursued in open boats within sight of the coast. From neighborhood seafaring such as this the progress was easy to coasting voyages, and so to Europe and to Asia. There is some conflict of historians over the time and place of the beginning of ship-building in America. The first vessel of which we have record was the "Virginia," built at the mouth of the Kennebec River in 1608, to carry home a discontented English colony at Stage Island. She was a two-master of 30 tons burden. The next American vessel recorded was the Dutch "yacht" "Onrest," built at New York in 1615. Nowadays sailors define a yacht as a vessel that carries no cargo but food and champagne, but the "Onrest" was not a yacht of this type. She was of 16 tons burden, and this small size explains her description. The first ship built for commercial purposes in New England was "The Blessing of the Bay," a sturdy little sloop of 60 tons. Fate surely designed to give a special significance to this venture, for she was owned by John Winthrop, the first of New England statesmen, and her keel was laid on the Fourth of July, 1631--a day destined after the lapse of one hundred and forty-five years to mean much in the world's calendar. Sixty tons is not an awe-inspiring register. The pleasure yacht of some millionaire stock-jobber to-day will be ten times that size, while 20,000 tons has come to be an every-day register for an ocean vessel; but our pleasure-seeking "Corsairs," and our castellated "City of New York" will never fill so big a place in history as this little sloop, the size of a river lighter, launched at Mistick, and straightway dispatched to the trade with the Dutch at New Amsterdam. Long before her time, however, in 1526, the Spanish adventurer, Lucas Vasquez de Ayllon, losing on the coast of Florida a brigantine out of the squadron of three ships which formed his expedition, built a small craft called a gavarra to replace it. From that early Fourth of July, for more than two hundred years shipyards multiplied and prospered along the American coast. The Yankees, with their racial adaptability, which long made them jacks of all trades and good at all, combined their shipbuilding with other industries, and to the hurt of neither. Early in 1632, at Richmond Island, off the coast of Maine, was built what was probably the first regular packet between England and America. She carried to the old country lumber, fish, furs, oil, and other colonial products, and brought back guns, ammunition, and liquor--not a fortunate exchange. Of course meanwhile English, Dutch, and Spanish ships were trading to the colonies, and every local essay in shipbuilding meant competition with old and established ship-yards and ship owners. Yet the industry throve, not only in the considerable yards established at Boston and other large towns, but in a small way all along the coast. Special privileges were extended to ship-builders. They were exempt from military and other public duties. In 1636 the "Desire," a vessel of 120 tons, was built at Marblehead, the largest to that time. By 1640 the port records of European ports begin to show the clearings of American-built vessels. [Illustration: THE KETCH] In those days of wooden hulls and tapering masts the forests of New England were the envy of every European monarch ambitious to develop a navy. It was a time, too, of greater naval activity than the world had ever seen--though but trivial in comparison with the present expenditures of Christian nations for guns and floating steel fortresses. England, Spain, Holland, and France were struggling for the control of the deep, and cared little for considerations of humanity, honor, or honesty in the contest. The tall, straight pines of Maine and New Hampshire were a precious possession for England in the work of building that fleet whose sails were yet to whiten the ocean, and whose guns, under Drake and Rodney, were to destroy successfully the maritime prestige of the Dutch and the Spaniards. Sometimes a colony, seeking royal favor, would send to the king a present of these pine timbers, 33 to 35 inches in diameter, and worth £95 to £115 each. Later the royal mark, the "broad arrow," was put on all white pines 24 inches in diameter 3 feet from the ground, that they might be saved for masts. It is, by the way, only about fifteen years since our own United States Government has disposed of its groves of live oaks, that for nearly a century were preserved to furnish oaken knees for navy vessels. [Illustration: "THE BROAD ARROW WAS PUT ON ALL WHITE PINES 24 INCHES IN DIAMETER"] The great number of navigable streams soon led to shipbuilding in the interior. It was obviously cheaper to build the vessel at the edge of the forest, where all the material grew ready to hand, and sail the completed craft to the seaboard, than to first transport the material thither in the rough. But American resourcefulness before long went even further. As the forests receded from the banks of the streams before the woodman's axe, the shipwrights followed. In the depths of the woods, miles perhaps from water, snows, pinnaces, ketches, and sloops were built. When the heavy snows of winter had fallen, and the roads were hard and smooth, runners were laid under the little ships, great teams of oxen--sometimes more than one hundred yoke--were attached, and the craft dragged down to the river, to lie there on the ice until the spring thaw came to gently let it down into its proper element. Many a farmer, too, whose lands sloped down to a small harbor, or stream, set up by the water side the frame of a vessel, and worked patiently at it during the winter days when the flinty soil repelled the plough and farm work was stopped. Stout little craft were thus put together, and sometimes when the vessel was completed the farmer-builder took his place at the helm and steered her to the fishing banks, or took her through Hell Gate to the great and thriving city of New York. The world has never seen a more amphibious populace. [Illustration: "THE FARMER-BUILDER TOOK HIS PLACE AT THE HELM"] The cost of the little vessels of colonial times we learn from old letters and accounts to have averaged four pounds sterling to the ton. Boston, Charleston, Salem, Ipswich, Salisbury, and Portsmouth were the chief building places in Massachusetts; New London in Connecticut, and Providence in Rhode Island. Vessels of a type not seen to-day made up the greater part of the New England fleet. The ketch, often referred to in early annals, was a two-master, sometimes rigged with lanteen sails, but more often with the foremast square-rigged, like a ship's foremast, and the mainmast like the mizzen of a modern bark, with a square topsail surmounting a fore-and-aft mainsail. The foremast was set very much aft--often nearly amidships. The snow was practically a brig, carrying a fore-and-aft sail on the mainmast, with a square sail directly above it. A pink was rigged like a schooner, but without a bowsprit or jib. For the fisheries a multitude of smaller types were constructed--such as the lugger, the shallop, the sharpie, the bug-eye, the smack. Some of these survive to the present day, and in many cases the name has passed into disuse, while the type itself is now and then to be met with on our coasts. The importance of ship-building as a factor in the development of New England did not rest merely upon the use of ships by the Americans alone. That was a day when international trade was just beginning to be understood and pushed, and every people wanted ships to carry their goods to foreign lands and bring back coveted articles in exchange. The New England vessel seldom made more than two voyages across the Atlantic without being snapped up by some purchaser beyond seas. The ordinary course was for the new craft to load with masts or spars, always in demand, or with fish; set sail for a promising market, dispose of her cargo, and take freight for England. There she would be sold, her crew making their way home in other ships, and her purchase money expended in articles needed in the colonies. This was the ordinary practice, and with vessels sold abroad so soon after their completion the shipyards must have been active to have fitted out, as the records show, a fleet of fully 280 vessels for Massachusetts alone by 1718. Before this time, too, the American shipwrights had made such progress in the mastery of their craft that they were building ships for the royal navy. The "Falkland," built at Portsmouth about 1690, and carrying 54 guns, was the earliest of these, but after her time corvettes, sloops-of-war, and frigates were launched in New England yards to fight for the king. It was good preparation for building those that at a later date should fight against him. Looking back over the long record of American maritime progress, one cannot but be impressed with the many and important contributions made by Americans--native or adopted--to marine architecture. To an American citizen, John Ericsson, the world owes the screw propeller. Americans sent the first steamship across the ocean--the "Savannah," in 1819. Americans, engaged in a fratricidal war, invented the ironclad in the "Monitor" and the "Merrimac," and, demonstrating the value of iron ships for warfare, sounded the knell of wooden ships for peaceful trade. An American first demonstrated the commercial possibilities of the steamboat, and if history denies to Fulton entire precedence with his "Clermont," in 1807, it may still be claimed for John Fitch, another American, with his imperfect boat on the Delaware in 1787. But perhaps none of these inventions had more homely utility than the New England schooner, which had its birth and its christening at Gloucester in 1713. The story of its naming is one of the oldest in our marine folk-lore. "See how she schoons!" cried a bystander, coining a verb to describe the swooping slide of the graceful hull down the ways into the placid water. [Illustration: SCHOONER-RIGGED SHARPIE] "A schooner let her be!" responded the builder, proud of his handiwork, and ready to seize the opportunity to confer a novel title upon his novel creation. Though a combination of old elements, the schooner was in effect a new design. Barks, ketches, snows, and brigantines carried fore-and-aft rigs in connection with square sails on either mast, but now for the first time two masts were rigged fore and aft, and the square sails wholly discarded. The advantages of the new rig were quickly discovered. Vessels carrying it were found to sail closer to the wind, were easier to handle in narrow quarters, and--what in the end proved of prime importance--could be safely manned by smaller crews. With these advantages the schooner made its way to the front in the shipping lists. The New England shipyards began building them, almost to the exclusion of other types. Before their advance brigs, barks, and even the magnificent full-rigged ship itself gave way, until now a square-rigged ship is an unusual spectacle on the ocean. The vitality of the schooner is such that it bids fair to survive both of the crushing blows dealt to old-fashioned marine architecture--the substitution of metal for wood, and of steam for sails. To both the schooner adapted itself. Extending its long, slender hull to carry four, five, and even seven masts, its builders abandoned the stout oak and pine for molded iron and later steel plates, and when it appeared that the huge booms, extending the mighty sails, were difficult for an ordinary crew to handle, one mast, made like the rest of steel, was transformed into a smokestack--still bearing sails--a donkey engine was installed in the hold, and the booms went aloft, or the anchor rose to the peak to the tune of smoky puffing instead of the rhythmical chanty songs of the sailors. So the modern schooner, a very leviathan of sailing craft, plows the seas, electric-lighted, steering by steam, a telephone system connecting all parts of her hull--everything modern about her except her name. Not as dignified, graceful, and picturesque as the ship perhaps--but she lasts, while the ship disappears. But to return to the colonial shipping. Boston soon became one of the chief building centers, though indeed wherever men were gathered in a seashore village ships were built. Winthrop, one of the pioneers in the industry, writes: "The work was hard to accomplish for want of money, etc., but our shipwrights were content to take such pay as the country could make," and indeed in the old account books of the day we can read of very unusual payments made for labor, as shown, for example, in a contract for building a ship at Newburyport in 1141, by which the owners were bound to pay "£300 in cash, £300 by orders on good shops in Boston; two-thirds money; four hundred pounds by orders up the river for tim'r and plank, ten bbls. flour, 50 pounds weight of loaf sugar, one bagg of cotton wool, one hund. bushels of corn in the spring; one hhd. of Rum, one hundred weight of cheese * * * whole am't of price for vessel £3000 lawful money." By 1642 they were building good-sized vessels at Boston, and the year following was launched the first full-rigged ship, the "Trial," which went to Malaga, and brought back "wine, fruit, oil, linen and wool, which was a great advantage to the country, and gave encouragement to trade." A year earlier there set out the modest forerunner of our present wholesale spring pilgrimages to Europe. A ship set sail for London from Boston "with many passengers, men of chief rank in the country, and great store of beaver. Their adventure was very great, considering the doubtful estate of affairs of England, but many prayers of the churches went with them and followed after them." By 1698 Governor Bellomont was able to say of Boston alone, "I believe there are more good vessels belonging to the town of Boston than to all Scotland and Ireland." Thereafter the business rapidly developed, until in a map of about 1730 there are noted sixteen shipyards. Rope walks, too, sprung up to furnish rigging, and presently for these Boston was a centre. Another industry, less commendable, grew up in this as in other shipping centres. Molasses was one of the chief staples brought from the West Indies, and it came in quantities far in excess of any possible demand from the colonial sweet tooth. But it could be made into rum, and in those days rum was held an innocent beverage, dispensed like water at all formal gatherings, and used as a matter of course in the harvest fields, the shop, and on the deck at sea. Moreover, it had been found to have a special value as currency on the west coast of Africa. The negro savages manifested a more than civilized taste for it, and were ready to sell their enemies or their friends, their sons, fathers, wives, or daughters into slavery in exchange for the fiery fluid. So all New England set to turning the good molasses into fiery rum, and while the slave trade throve abroad the rum trade prospered at home. Of course the rapid advance of the colonies in shipbuilding and in maritime trade was not regarded in England with unqualified pride. The theory of that day--and one not yet wholly abandoned--was that a colony was a mine, to be worked for the sole benefit of the mother country. It was to buy its goods in no other market. It was to use the ships of the home government alone for its trade across seas. It must not presume to manufacture for itself articles which merchants at home desired to sell. England early strove to impress such trade regulations upon the American colonies, and succeeded in embarrassing and handicapping them seriously, although evasions of the navigation laws were notorious, and were winked at by the officers of the crown. The restrictions were sufficiently burdensome, however, to make the ship-owners and sailors of 1770 among those most ready and eager for the revolt against the king. The close of the Revolution found American shipping in a reasonably prosperous condition. It is true that the peaceful vocation of the seamen had been interrupted, all access to British ports denied them, and their voyages to Continental markets had for six years been attended by the ever-present risk of capture and condemnation. But on the other hand, the war had opened the way for privateering, and out of the ports of Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut the privateers swarmed like swallows from a chimney at dawn. To the adventurous and not over-scrupulous men who followed it, privateering was a congenial pursuit--so much so, unhappily, that when the war ended, and a treaty robbed their calling of its guise of lawfulness, too many of them still continued it, braving the penalties of piracy for the sake of its gains. But during the period of the Revolution privateering did the struggling young nation two services--it sorely harassed the enemy, and it kept alive the seafaring zeal and skill of the New Englanders. For a time it seemed that not all this zeal and skill could replace the maritime interests where they were when the Revolution began. For most people in the colonies independence meant a broader scope of activity--to the shipowner and sailor it meant new and serious limitations. England was still engaged in the effort to monopolize ocean traffic by the operation of tariffs and navigation laws. New England having become a foreign nation, her ships were denied admittance to the ports of the British West Indies, with which for years a nourishing trade had been conducted. Lumber, corn, fish, live stock, and farm produce had been sent to the islands, and coffee, sugar, cotton, rum, and indigo brought back. This commerce, which had come to equal £3,500,000 a year, was shut off by the British after American independence, despite the protest of Pitt, who saw clearly that the West Indians would suffer even more than the Americans. Time showed his wisdom. Terrible sufferings came upon the West Indies for lack of the supplies they had been accustomed to import, and between 1780 and 1787 as many as 15,000 slaves perished from starvation. Another cause held the American merchant marine in check for several years succeeding the declaration of peace. If there be one interest which must have behind it a well-organized, coherent national government, able to protect it and to enforce its rights in foreign lands, it is the shipping interest. But American ships, after the Treaty of Paris, hailed from thirteen independent but puny States. They had behind them the shadow of a confederacy, but no substance. The flags they carried were not only not respected in foreign countries--they were not known. Moreover, the States were jealous of each other, possessing no true community of interest, and each seeking advantage at the expense of its neighbors. They were already beginning to adopt among themselves the very tactics of harassing and crippling navigation laws which caused the protest against Great Britain. This "Critical Period of American History," as Professor Fiske calls it, was indeed a critical period for American shipping. The new government, formed under the Constitution, was prompt to recognize the demands of the shipping interests upon the country. In the very first measure adopted by Congress steps were taken to encourage American shipping by differential duties levied on goods imported in American and foreign vessels. Moreover, in the tonnage duties imposed by Congress an advantage of almost 50 per cent. was given ships built in the United States and owned abroad. Under this stimulus the shipping interests throve, despite hostile legislation in England, and the disordered state of the high seas, where French and British privateers were only a little less predatory than Algierian corsairs or avowed pirates. It was at this early day that Yankee skippers began making those long voyages that are hardly paralleled to-day when steamships hold to a single route like a trolley car between two towns. The East Indies was a favorite trading point. Carrying a cargo suited to the needs of perhaps a dozen different peoples, the vessel would put out from Boston or Newport, put in at Madeira perhaps, or at some West Indian port, dispose of part of its cargo, and proceed, stopping again and again on its way, and exchanging its goods for money or for articles thought to be more salable in the East Indies. Arrived there, all would be sold, and a cargo of tea, coffee, silks, spices, nankeen cloth, sugar, and other products of the country taken on. If these goods did not prove salable at home the ship would make yet another voyage and dispose of them at Hamburg or some other Continental port. In 1785 a Baltimore ship showed the Stars and Stripes in the Canton River, China. In 1788 the ship "Atlantic," of Salem, visited Bombay and Calcutta. The effect of being barred from British ports was not, as the British had expected, to put an abrupt end to American maritime enterprise. It only sent our hardy seamen on longer voyages, only brought our merchants into touch with the commerce of the most distant lands. Industry, like men, sometimes thrives upon obstacles. [Illustration: "AFTER A BRITISH LIEUTENANT HAD PICKED THE BEST OF HER CREW"] For twenty-five years succeeding the adoption of the Constitution the maritime interest--both shipbuilding and shipowning--thrived more, perhaps, than any other gainful industry pursued by the Americans. Yet it was a time when every imaginable device was employed to keep our people out of the ocean-carrying trade. The British regulations, which denied us access to their ports, were imitated by the French. The Napoleonic wars came on, and the belligerents bombarded each other with orders in council and decrees that fell short of their mark, but did havoc among neutral merchantmen. To the ordinary perils of the deep the danger of capture--lawful or unlawful--by cruiser or privateer, was always to be added. The British were still enforcing their so-called "right of search," and many an American ship was left short-handed far out at sea, after a British naval lieutenant had picked the best of her crew on the pretense that they were British subjects. The superficial differences between an American and an Englishman not being as great as those between an albino and a Congo black, it is not surprising that the boarding officer should occasionally make mistakes--particularly when his ship was in need of smart, active sailors. Indeed, in those years the civilized--by which at that period was meant the warlike--nations were all seeking sailors. Dutch, Spanish, French, and English were eager for men to man their fighting ships; hired them when they could, and stole them when they must. It was the time of the press gang, and the day when sailors carried as a regular part of their kit an outfit of women's clothing in which to escape if the word were passed that "the press is hot to-night." The United States had never to resort to impressment to fill its navy ships' companies, a fact perhaps due chiefly to the small size of its navy in comparison with the seafaring population it had to draw from. As for the American merchant marine, it was full of British seamen. Beyond doubt inducements were offered them at every American port to desert and ship under the Stars and Stripes. In the winter of 1801 every British ship visiting New York lost the greater part of its crew. 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. In those days the men that went down to the sea in ships had to be prepared to fight other antagonists than Neptune and Æolus. All the ships went armed. It is curious to read in old annals of the number of cannon carried by small merchantmen. We find the "Prudent Sarah" mounting 10 guns; the "Olive Branch," belied her peaceful name with 3, while the pink "Friendship" carried 8. These years, too, were the privateers' harvest time. During the Revolution the ships owned by one Newburyport merchant took 23,360 tons of shipping and 225 men, the prizes with their cargoes selling for $3,950,000. But of the size and the profits of the privateering business more will be said in the chapter devoted to that subject. It is enough to note here that it made the American merchantman essentially a fighting man. The growth of American shipping during the years 1794-1810 is almost incredible in face of the obstacles put in its path by hostile enactments and the perils of the war. In 1794 United States ships, aggregating 438,863 tons, breasted the waves, carrying fish and staves to the West Indies, bringing back spices, rum, cocoa, and coffee. Sometimes they went from the West Indies to the Canaries, and thence to the west coast of Africa, where very valuable and very pitiful cargoes of human beings, whose black skins were thought to justify their treatment as dumb beasts of burden, were shipped. Again the East Indies opened markets for buying and selling both. But England and almost the whole of Western Europe were closed. It is not possible to understand the situation in which the American sailor and shipowner of that day was placed, without some knowledge of the navigation laws and belligerent orders by which the trade was vexed. In 1793 the Napoleonic wars began, to continue with slight interruptions until 1815. France and England were the chief contestants, and between them American shipping was sorely harried. The French at first seemed to extend to the enterprising Americans a boon of incalculable value to the maritime interest, for the National Convention promulgated a decree giving to neutral ships--practically to American ships, for they were the bulk of the neutral shipping--the rights of French ships. Overjoyed by this sudden opening of a rich market long closed, the Yankee barks and brigs slipped out of the New England harbors in schools, while the shipyards rung with the blows of the hammers, and the forest resounded with the shouts of the woodsmen getting out ship-timbers. The ocean pathway to the French West Indies was flecked with sails, and the harbors of St. Kitts, Guadaloupe, and Martinique were crowded. But this bustling trade was short-lived. The argosies that set forth on their peaceful errand were shattered by enemies more dreaded than wind or sea. Many a ship reached the port eagerly sought only to rot there; many a merchant was beggared, nor knew what had befallen his hopeful venture until some belated consular report told of its condemnation in some French or English admiralty court. [Illustration: EARLY TYPE OF SMACK] For England met France's hospitality with a new stroke at American interests. The trade was not neutral, she said. France had been forced to her concession by war. Her people were starving because the vigilance of British cruisers had driven French cruisers from the seas, and no food could be imported. To permit Americans to purvey food for the French colonies would clearly be to undo the good work of the British navy. Obviously food was contraband of war. So all English men-of-war were ordered to seize French goods on whatever ship found; to confiscate cargoes of wheat, corn, or fish bound for French ports as contraband, and particularly to board all American merchantmen and scrutinize the crews for English-born sailors. The latter injunction was obeyed with peculiar zeal, so that the State Department had evidence that at one time, in 1806, there were as many as 6000 American seamen serving unwillingly in the British navy. France, meanwhile, sought retaliation upon England at the expense of the Americans. The United States, said the French government, is a sovereign nation. If it does not protect its vessels against unwarrantable British aggressions it is because the Americans are secretly in league with the British. France recognizes no difference between its foes. So it is ordered that any American vessel which submitted to visitation and search from an English vessel, or paid dues in a British port, ceased to be neutral, and became subject to capture by the French. The effect of these orders and decrees was simply that any American ship which fell in with an English or French man-of-war or privateer, or was forced by stress of weather to seek shelter in an English or French port, was lost to her owners. The times were rude, evidence was easy to manufacture, captains were rapacious, admiralty judges were complaisant, and American commerce was rich prey. The French West Indies fell an easy spoil to the British, and at Martinique and Basseterre American merchantmen were caught in the harbor. Their crews were impressed, their cargoes, not yet discharged, seized, the vessels themselves wantonly destroyed or libelled as prizes. Nor were passengers exempt from the rigors of search and plunder. The records of the State Department and the rude newspapers of the time are full of the complaints of shipowners, passengers, and shipping merchants. The robbery was prodigious in its amount, the indignity put upon the nation unspeakable. And yet the least complaint came from those who suffered most. The New England seaport towns were filled with idle seamen, their harbors with pinks, schooners, and brigs, lying lazily at anchor. The sailors, with the philosophy of men long accustomed to submit themselves to nature's moods and the vagaries of breezes, cursed British and French impartially, and joined in the general depression and idleness of the towns and counties dependent on their activity. It was about this period (1794) that the American navy was begun; though, curiously enough, its foundation was not the outcome of either British or French depredations, but of the piracies of the Algerians. That fierce and predatory people had for long years held the Mediterranean as a sort of a private lake into which no nation might send its ships without paying tribute. With singular cowardice, all the European peoples had acquiesced in this conception save England alone. The English were feared by the Algerians, and an English pass--which tradition says the illiterate Corsairs identified by measuring its enscrolled border, instead of by reading--protected any vessel carrying it. American ships, however, were peculiarly the prey of the Algerians, and many an American sailor was sold by them into slavery until Decatur and Rodgers in 1805 thrashed the piratical states of North Africa into recognition of American power. In 1794, however, the Americans were not eager for war, and diplomats strove to arrange a treaty which would protect American shipping, while Congress prudently ordered the beginning of six frigates, work to be stopped if peace should be made with the Dey. The treaty--not one very honorable to us--was indeed made some months later, and the frigates long remained unfinished. It has been the fashion of late years to sneer at our second war with England as unnecessary and inconclusive. But no one who studies the records of the life, industry, and material interests of our people during the years between the adoption of the Constitution and the outbreak of that war can fail to wonder that it did not come sooner, and that it was not a war with France as well as England. For our people were then essentially a maritime people. Their greatest single manufacturing industry was ship-building. The fisheries--whale, herring, and cod--employed thousands of their men and supported more than one considerable town. The markets for their products lay beyond seas, and for their commerce an undisputed right to the peaceful passage of the ocean was necessary. Yet England and France, prosecuting their own quarrel, fairly ground American shipping as between two millstones. Our sailors were pressed, our ships seized, their cargoes stolen, under hollow forms of law. The high seas were treated as though they were the hunting preserves of these nations and American ships were quail and rabbits. The London "Naval Chronicle" at that time, and for long after, bore at the head of its columns the boastful lines: "The sea and waves are Britain's broad domain, And not a sail but by permission spreads." And France, while vigorously denying the maxim in so far as it related to British domination, was not able to see that the ocean could be no one nation's domain, but must belong equally to all. It was the time when the French were eloquently discoursing of the rights of man; but they did not appear to regard the peaceful navigation of the ocean as one of those rights; they were preaching of the virtues of the American republic, but their rulers issued orders and decrees that nearly brought the two governments to the point of actual war. But the very fact that France and England were almost equally arrogant and aggressive delayed the formal declaration of hostilities. Within the United States two political parties--the Federalists and the Republicans--were struggling for mastery. The one defended, though half-heartedly, the British, and demanded drastic action against the French spoliators. The other denounced British insolence and extolled our ancient allies and brothers in republicanism, the French. While the politicians quarreled the British stole our sailors and the French stole our ships. In 1798 our, then infant, navy gave bold resistance to the French ships, and for a time a quasi-war was waged on the ocean, in which the frigates "Constitution" and "Constellation" laid the foundation for that fame which they were to finally achieve in the war with Great Britain in 1812. No actual war with France grew out of her aggressions. The Republicans came into power in the United States, and by diplomacy averted an actual conflict. But the American shipping interests suffered sadly meanwhile. The money finally paid by France as indemnity for her unwarranted spoliations lay long undivided in the United States Treasury, and the easy-going labor of urging and adjudicating French spoliation claims furnished employment to some generations of politicians after the despoiled seamen and shipowners had gone down into their graves. In 1800 the whole number of American ships in foreign and coasting trades and the fisheries had reached a tonnage of 972,492. The growth was constant, despite the handicap resulting from the European wars. Indeed, it is probable that those wars stimulated American shipping more than the restrictive decrees growing out of them retarded it, for they at least kept England and France (with her allies) out of the active encouragement of maritime enterprise. But the vessels of that day were mere pigmies, and the extent of the trade carried on in them would at this time seem trifling. The gross exports and imports of the United States in 1800 were about $75,000,000 each. The vessels that carried them were of about 250 tons each, the largest attaining 400 tons. An irregular traffic was carried on along the coast, and it was 1801 before the first sloop was built to ply regularly on the Hudson between New York and Albany. She was of 100 tons, and carried passengers only. Sometimes the trip occupied a week, and the owner of the sloop established an innovation by supplying beds, provisions, and wines for his passengers. Between Boston and New York communication was still irregular, passengers waiting for cargoes. But small as this maritime interest now seems, more money was invested in it, and it occupied more men, than any other American industry, save only agriculture. To this period belong such shipowners as William Gray, of Boston, who in 1809, though he had sixty great square-rigged ships in commission, nevertheless heartily approved of the embargo with which President Jefferson vainly strove to combat the outrages of France and England. Though the commerce of those days was world-wide, its methods--particularly on the bookkeeping side--were primitive. "A good captain," said Merchant Gray, "will sail with a load of fish to the West Indies, hang up a stocking in the cabin on arriving, put therein hard dollars as he sells fish, and pay out when he buys rum, molasses, and sugar, and hand in the stocking on his return in full of all accounts." The West Indies, though a neighboring market, were far from monopolizing the attention of the New England shipping merchants. Ginseng and cash were sent to China for silks and tea, the voyage each way, around the tempestuous Horn, occupying six months. In 1785 the publication of the journals of the renowned explorer, Captain Cook, directed the ever-alert minds of the New Englanders to the great herds of seal and sea-otters on the northwestern coast of the United States, and vessels were soon faring thither in pursuit of fur-bearing animals, then plentiful, but now bidding fair to become as rare as the sperm-whale. A typical expedition of this sort was that of the ship "Columbia," Captain Kendrick, and the sloop "Washington," Captain Gray, which sailed September 30, 1787, bound to the northwest coast and China. The merchant who saw his ships drop down the bay bound on such a voyage said farewell to them for a long time--perhaps forever. Years must pass before he could know whether the money he had invested, the cargo he had adventured, the stout ships he had dispatched, were to add to his fortune or to be at last a total loss. Perhaps for months he might be going about the wharves and coffee-houses, esteeming himself a man of substance and so held by all his neighbors, while in fact his all lay whitening in the surf on some far-distant Pacific atoll. So it was almost three years before news came back to Boston of these two ships; but then it was glorious, for then the "Federalist," of New York, came into port, bringing tidings that at Canton she had met the "Columbia," and had been told of the discovery by that vessel of the great river in Oregon to which her name had been given. Thus Oregon and Washington were given to the infant Union, the latter perhaps taking its name from the little sloop of 90 tons which accompanied the "Columbia" on her voyage. Six months later the two vessels reached Boston, and were greeted with salutes of cannon from the forts. They were the first American vessels to circumnavigate the globe. It is pleasant to note that a voyage which was so full of advantage to the nation was profitable to the owners. Thereafter an active trade was done with miscellaneous goods to the northwest Indians, skins and furs thence to the Chinese, and teas home. A typical outbound cargo in this trade was that of the "Atakualpa" in 1800. The vessel was of 218 tons, mounted eight guns, and was freighted with broadcloth, flannel, blankets, powder, muskets, watches, tools, beads, and looking-glasses. How great were the proportions that this trade speedily assumed may be judged from the fact that between June, 1800, and January, 1803, there were imported into China, in American vessels, 34,357 sea-otter skins worth on an average $18 to $20 each. Over a million sealskins were imported. In this trade were employed 80 ships and 9 brigs and schooners, more than half of them from Boston. [Illustration: THE SNOW, AN OBSOLETE TYPE] Indeed, by the last decade of the eighteenth century Boston had become the chief shipping port of the United States. In 1790 the arrivals from abroad at that port were 60 ships, 7 snows, 159 brigs, 170 schooners, 59 sloops, besides coasters estimated to number 1,220 sail. In the _Independent Chronicle_, of October 27, 1791, appears the item: "Upwards of seventy sail of vessels sailed from this port on Monday last, for all parts of the world." A descriptive sketch, written in 1794 and printed in the Massachusetts Historical Society collections, says of the appearance of the water front at that time: "There are eighty wharves and quays, chiefly on the east side of the town. Of these the most distinguished is Boston pier, or the Long Wharf, which extends from the bottom of State Street 1,743 feet into the harbor. Here the principal navigation of the town is carried on; vessels of all burdens load and unload; and the London ships generally discharge their cargoes.... The harbor of Boston is at this date crowded with vessels. It is reckoned that not less than 450 sail of ships, brigs, schooners, sloops, and small craft are now in this port." New York and Baltimore, in a large way; Salem, Hull, Portsmouth, New London, New Bedford, New Haven, and a host of smaller seaports, in a lesser degree, joined in this prosperous industry. It was the great interest of the United States, and so continued, though with interruptions, for more than half a century, influencing the thought, the legislation, and the literature of our people. When Daniel Webster, himself a son of a seafaring State, sought to awaken his countrymen to the peril into which the nation was drifting through sectional dissensions and avowed antagonism to the national authority, he chose as the opening metaphor of his reply to Hayne the description of a ship, drifting rudderless and helpless on the trackless ocean, exposed to perils both known and unknown. The orator knew his audience. To all New England the picture had the vivacity of life. The metaphors of the sea were on every tongue. The story is a familiar one of the Boston clergyman who, in one of his discourses, described a poor, sinful soul drifting toward shipwreck so vividly that a sailor in the audience, carried away by the preacher's imaginative skill, cried out: "Let go your best bower anchor, or you're lost." In another church, which had its pulpit set at the side instead of at the end, as customary, a sailor remarked critically: "I don't like this craft; it has its rudder amidships." At this time, and, indeed, for perhaps fifty years thereafter, the sea was a favorite career, not only for American boys with their way to make in the world, but for the sons of wealthy men as well. That classic of New England seamanship, "Two Years Before the Mast," was not written until the middle of the nineteenth century, and its author went to sea, not in search of wealth, but of health. But before the time of Richard Henry Dana, many a young man of good family and education--a Harvard graduate like him, perhaps--bade farewell to a home of comfort and refinement and made his berth in a smoky, fetid forecastle to learn the sailor's calling. The sons of the great shipping merchants almost invariably made a few voyages--oftenest as supercargoes, perhaps, but not infrequently as common seamen. In time special quarters, midway between the cabin and the forecastle, were provided for these apprentices, who were known as the "ship's cousins." They did the work of the seamen before the mast, but were regarded as brevet officers. There was at that time less to engage the activities and arouse the ambitions of youth than now, and the sea offered the most promising career. Moreover, the trading methods involved, and the relations of the captain or other officers to the owners, were such as to spur ambition and promise profit. The merchant was then greatly dependent on his captain, who must judge markets, buy and sell, and shape his course without direction from home. So the custom arose of giving the captain--and sometimes other officers--an opportunity to carry goods of their own in the ship, or to share the owner's adventure. In the whaling and fishery business we shall see that an almost pure communism prevailed. These conditions attracted to the maritime calling men of an enterprising and ambitious nature--men to whom the conditions to-day of mere wage servitude, fixed routes, and constant dependence upon the cabled or telegraphed orders of the owner would be intolerable. Profits were heavy, and the men who earned them were afforded opportunities to share them. Ships were multiplying fast, and no really lively and alert seaman need stay long in the forecastle. Often they became full-fledged captains and part owners at the age of twenty-one, or even earlier, for boys went to sea at ages when the youngsters of equally prosperous families in these days would scarcely have passed from the care of a nurse to that of a tutor. Thomas T. Forbes, for example, shipped before the mast at the age of thirteen; was commander of the "Levant" at twenty; and was lost in the Canton River before he was thirty. He was of a family great in the history of New England shipping for a hundred years. Nathaniel Silsbee, afterwards United States Senator from Massachusetts, was master of a ship in the East India trade before he was twenty-one; while John P. Cushing at the age of sixteen was the sole--and highly successful--representative in China of a large Boston house. William Sturges, afterwards the head of a great world-wide trading house, shipped at seventeen, was a captain and manager in the China trade at nineteen, and at twenty-nine left the quarter-deck with a competence to establish his firm, which at one time controlled half the trade between the United States and China. A score of such successes might be recounted. But the fee which these Yankee boys paid for introduction into their calling was a heavy one. Dana's description of life in the forecastle, written in 1840, holds good for the conditions prevailing for forty years before and forty after he penned it. The greeting which his captain gave to the crew of the brig "Pilgrim" was repeated, with little variation, on a thousand quarter-decks: "Now, my men, we have begun a long voyage. If we get along well together we shall have a comfortable time; if we don't, we shall hay hell afloat. All you have to do is to obey your orders and do your duty like men--then you will fare well enough; if you don't, you will fare hard enough, I can tell you. If we pull together you will find me a clever fellow; if we don't, you will find me a bloody rascal. That's all I've got to say. Go below the larboard watch." But the note of roughness and blackguardism was not always sounded on American ships. We find, in looking over old memoirs, that more than one vessel was known as a "religious ship"--though, indeed, the very fact that few were thus noted speaks volumes for the paganism of the mass. But the shipowners of Puritan New England not infrequently laid stress on the moral character of the men shipped. Nathaniel Ames, a Harvard graduate who shipped before the mast, records that on his first vessel men seeking berths even in the forecastle were ordered to bring certificates of good character from the clergyman whose church they had last attended. Beyond doubt, however, this was a most unusual requirement. More often the majority of the crew were rough, illiterate fellows, often enticed into shipping while under the influence of liquor, and almost always coming aboard at the last moment, much the worse for long debauches. The men of a better sort who occasionally found themselves unluckily shipped with such a crew, have left on record many curious stories of the way in which sailors, utterly unable to walk on shore or on deck for intoxication, would, at the word of command, spring into the rigging, clamber up the shrouds, shake out reefs, and perform the most difficult duties aloft. [Illustration: THE BUG-EYE] Most of the things which go to make the sailor's lot at least tolerable nowadays, were at that time unknown. A smoky lamp swung on gimbals half-lighted the forecastle--an apartment which, in a craft of scant 400 tons, did not afford commodious quarters for a crew of perhaps a score, with their sea chests and bags. 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. The unceasing round of salt pork, stale beef, "duff," "lobscouse," doubtful coffee sweetened with molasses, and water, stale, lukewarm, and tasting vilely of the hogshead in which it had been stored, required sturdy appetites to make it even tolerable. Even in later days Frank T. Bullen was able to write: "I have often seen the men break up a couple of biscuits into a pot of coffee for their breakfast, and after letting it stand a minute or two, skim off the accumulated scum of vermin from the top--maggots, weevils, etc--to the extent of a couple of tablespoonsful, before they could shovel the mess into their craving stomachs." It may be justly doubted whether history has ever known a race of men so hardy, so self-reliant, so adaptable to the most complex situations, so determined to compel success, and so resigned in the presence of inevitable failure, as the early American sea captains. 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 would 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. He must study markets, sell his cargo at the most profitable point, buy what his prophetic vision suggested would sell profitably, and sell half a dozen intermediate cargoes before returning, and even dispose of the vessel herself, if gain would result. His experience was almost as much commercial as nautical, and many of the shipping merchants who formed the aristocracy of old New York and Boston, mounted from the forecastle to the cabin, thence to the counting-room. In a paper on the maritime trade of Salem, the Rev. George Bachelor tells of the conditions of this early seafaring, the sort of men engaged in it, and the stimulus it offered to all their faculties: "After a century of comparative quiet, the citizens of the little town were suddenly dispersed to every part of the Oriental world, and to every nook of barbarism which had a market and a shore. The borders of the commercial world received sudden enlargement, and the boundaries of the intellectual world underwent similar expansion. 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. When a captain was asked at Manila how he contrived to find his way in the teeth of a northeast monsoon by mere dead reckoning, he replied that he had a crew of twelve men, any one of whom could take and work a lunar observation as well, for all practical purposes, as Sir Isaac Newton himself. "When, in 1816, George Coggeshall coasted the Mediterranean in the 'Cleopatra's Barge,' a magnificent yacht of 197 tons, which excited the wonder even of the Genoese, the black cook, who had once sailed with Bowditch, was found to be as competent to keep a ship's reckoning as any of the officers. "Rival merchants sometimes drove the work of preparation night and day, when virgin markets had favors to be won, and ships which set out for unknown ports were watched when they slipped their cables and sailed away by night, and dogged for months on the high seas, in the hopes of discovering a secret, well kept by the owner and crew. Every man on board was allowed a certain space for his own little venture. People in other pursuits, not excepting the owner's minister, entrusted their savings to the supercargo, and watched eagerly the result of their adventure. This great mental activity, the profuse stores of knowledge brought by every ship's crew, and distributed, together with India shawls, blue china, and unheard-of curiosities from every savage shore, gave the community a rare alertness of intellect." The spirit in which young fellows, scarcely attained to years of maturity, met and overcame the dangers of the deep is vividly depicted in Captain George Coggeshall's narrative of his first face-to-face encounter with death. He was in the schooner "Industry," off the Island of Teneriffe, during a heavy gale. "Captain K. told me I had better go below, and that he would keep an outlook and take a little tea biscuit on deck. I had entered the cabin, when I felt a terrible shock. I ran to the companion-way, when I saw a ship athwart our bows. At that moment our foremast went by the board, carrying with it our main topmast. In an instant the two vessels separated, and we were left a perfect wreck. The ship showed a light for a few moments and then disappeared, leaving us to our fate. When we came to examine our situation, we found our bowsprit gone close to the knight-heads." An investigation showed that the collision had left the "Industry" in a grievous state, while the gale, ever increasing, blew directly on shore. But the sailors fought sturdily for life. "To retard the schooner's drift, we kept the wreck of the foremast, bowsprit, sails, spars, etc., fast by the bowsprit shrouds and other ropes, so that we drifted to leeward but about two miles the hour. To secure the mainmast was now the first object. I therefore took with me one of the best of the crew, and carried the end of a rope cable with us up to the mainmast head, and clenched it round the mast, while it was badly springing. We then took the cable to the windlass and hove taut, and thus effectually secured the mast.... We were then drifting directly on shore, where the cliffs were rocky, abrupt, and almost perpendicular, and were perhaps almost 1,000 feet high. At each blast of lightning we could see the surf break, whilst we heard the awful roar of the sea dashing and breaking against the rocks and caverns of this iron-bound island. [Illustration: A "PINK"] "When I went below I found the captain in the act of going to bed; and as near as I can recollect, the following dialogue took place: "'Well, Captain K., what shall we do next? We have now about six hours to pass before daylight; and, according to my calculation, we have only about three hours more drift. Still, before that time there may, perhaps, be some favorable change.' "He replied: 'Mr. C., we have done all we can, and can do nothing more. I am resigned to my fate, and think nothing can save us.' "I replied: 'Perhaps you are right; still, I am resolved to struggle to the last. I am too young to die; I am only twenty-one years of age, and have a widowed mother, three brothers, and a sister looking to me for support and sympathy. No, sir, I will struggle and persevere to the last.' "'Ah,' said he, 'what can you do? Our boat will not live five minutes in the surf, and you have no other resource.' "'I will take the boat,' said I, 'and when she fills I will cling to a spar. I will not die until my strength is exhausted and I can breathe no longer.' Here the conversation ended, when the captain covered his head with a blanket. I then wrote the substance of our misfortune in the log-book, and also a letter to my mother; rolled them up in a piece of tarred canvas; and, assisted by the carpenter, put the package into a tight keg, thinking that this might probably be thrown on shore, and thus our friends might perhaps know of our end." Men who face Death thus sturdily are apt to overcome him. The gale lessened, the ship was patched up, the craven captain resumed command, and in two weeks' time the "Industry" sailed, sorely battered, into Santa Cruz, to find that she had been given up as lost, and her officers and crew "were looked upon as so many men risen from the dead." Young Coggeshall lived to follow the sea until gray-haired and weather-beaten, to die in his bed at last, and to tell the story of his eighty voyages in two volumes of memoirs, now growing very rare. Before he was sixteen he had made the voyage to Cadiz--a port now moldering, but which once was one of the great portals for the commerce of the world. In his second voyage, while lying in the harbor of Gibraltar, he witnessed one of the almost every-day dangers to which American sailors of that time were exposed: "While we were lying in this port, one morning at daylight we heard firing at a distance. I took a spy-glass, and from aloft could clearly see three gunboats engaged with a large ship. It was a fine, clear morning, with scarcely wind enough to ruffle the glass-like surface of the water. During the first hour or two of this engagement the gunboats had an immense advantage; being propelled both by sails and oars, they were enabled to choose their own position. While the ship lay becalmed and unmanageable they poured grape and canister shot into her stern and bows like hailstones. At this time the ship's crew could not bring a single gun to bear upon them, and all they could do was to use their small arms through the ports and over the rails. Fortunately for the crew, the ship had thick and high bulwarks, which protected them from the fire of the enemy, so that while they were hid and screened by the boarding cloths, they could use their small arms to great advantage. At this stage of the action, while the captain, with his speaking-trumpet under his left arm, was endeavoring to bring one of his big guns to bear on one of the gunboats, a grapeshot passed through the port and trumpet and entered his chest near his shoulder-blade. The chief mate carried him below and laid him upon a mattress on the cabin floor. For a moment it seemed to dampen the ardor of the men; but it was but for an instant. The chief mate (I think his name was Randall), a gallant young man from Nantucket, then took the command, rallied, and encouraged the men to continue the action with renewed obstinacy and vigor. At this time a lateen-rigged vessel, the largest of the three privateers, was preparing to make a desperate attempt to board the ship on the larboard quarter, and, with nearly all his men on the forecastle and long bowsprit, were ready to take the final leap. "In order to meet and frustrate the design of the enemy, the mate of the ship had one of the quarter-deck guns loaded with grape and canister shot; he then ordered all the ports on this quarter to be shut, so that the gun could not be seen; and thus were both parties prepared when the privateer came boldly up within a few yards of the ship's lee quarter. The captain, with a threatening flourish of his sword, cried out with a loud voice, in broken English: 'Strike, you damned rascal, or I will put you all to death.' At this moment a diminutive-looking man on board the 'Louisa,' with a musket, took deliberate aim through one of the waist ports, and shot him dead. Instantly the gun was run out and discharged upon the foe with deadly effect, so that the remaining few on board the privateer, amazed and astounded, were glad to give up the conflict and get off the best way they could. "Soon after this a breeze sprung up, so that they could work their great guns to some purpose. I never shall forget the moment when I saw the Star-Spangled Banner blow out and wave gracefully in the wind, through the smoke. I also at the same moment saw with pleasure the three gunboats sailing and rowing away toward the land to make their escape. When the ship drew near the port, all the boats from the American shipping voluntarily went to assist in bringing her to anchor. She proved to be the letter-of-marque ship 'Louisa,' of Philadelphia. "I went with our captain on board of her, and we there learned that, with the exception of the captain, not a man had been killed or wounded. The ship was terribly cut up and crippled in her sails and rigging--lifts and braces shot away; her stern was literally riddled like a grater, and both large and small shot, in great numbers, had entered her hull and were sticking to her sides. How the officers and crew escaped unhurt is almost impossible to conceive. The poor captain was immediately taken on shore, but only survived his wound a few days. He had a public funeral, and was followed to the grave by all the Americans in Gibraltar, and very many of the officers of the garrison and inhabitants of the town. [Illustration: "INSTANTLY THE GUN WAS RUN OUT AND DISCHARGED"] "The ship had a rich cargo of coffee, sugar, and India goods on board, and I believe was bound for Leghorn. The gunboats belonged to Algeciras and fought under French colors, but were probably manned by the debased of all nations. I can form no idea how many were killed or wounded on board the gunboats, but from the great number of men on board, and from the length of the action, there must have been great slaughter. Neither can I say positively how long the engagement lasted; but I should think at least from three to four hours. To the chief mate too much credit can not be given for saving the ship after the captain was shot." This action occurred in 1800, and the assailants fought under French colors, though the United States were at peace with France. It was fought within easy eyesight of Gibraltar, and therefore in British waters; but no effort was made by the British men-of-war--always plentiful there--to maintain the neutrality of the port. For sailors to be robbed or murdered, or to fight with desperation to avert robbery and murder, was then only a commonplace of the sea. Men from the safety of the adjoining shore only looked on in calm curiosity, as nowadays men look on indifferently to see the powerful freebooter of the not less troubled business sea rob, impoverish, and perhaps drive down to untimely death others who only ask to be permitted to make their little voyages unvexed by corsairs. From a little book of memoirs of Captain Richard J. Cleveland, the curious observer can learn what it was to belong to a seafaring family in the golden days of American shipping. His was a Salem stock. His father, in 1756, when but sixteen years old, was captured by a British press-gang in the streets of Boston, and served for years in the British navy. For this compulsory servitude he exacted full compensation in later years by building and commanding divers privateers to prey upon the commerce of England. His three sons all became sailors, taking to the water like young ducks. A characteristic note of the cosmopolitanism of the young New Englander of that day is sounded in the most matter-of-fact fashion by young Cleveland in a letter from Havre: "I can't help loving home, though I think a young man ought to be at home in any part of the globe." And at home everywhere Captain Cleveland certainly was. All his life was spent in wandering over the Seven Seas, in ships of every size, from a 25-ton cutter to a 400-ton Indiaman. In those days of navigation laws, blockades, hostile cruisers, hungry privateers, and bloodthirsty pirates, the smaller craft was often the better, for it was wiser to brave nature's moods in a cockle-shell than to attract men's notice in a great ship. Captain Cleveland's voyages from Havre to the Cape of Good Hope, in a 45-ton cutter; from Calcutta to the Isle of France, in a 25-ton sloop; and Captain Coggeshall's voyage around Cape Horn in an unseaworthy pilot-boat are typical exploits of Yankee seamanship. We see the same spirit manifested occasionally nowadays when some New Englander crosses the ocean in a dory, or circumnavigates the world alone in a 30-foot sloop. But these adventures are apt to end ignominiously in a dime museum. A noted sailor in his time was Captain Benjamin I. Trask, master of many ships, ruler of many deeps, who died in harness in 1871, and for whom the flags on the shipping in New York Bay were set at half-mast. An appreciative writer, Mr. George W. Sheldon, in _Harper's Magazine_, tells this story to show what manner of man he was; it was on the ship "Saratoga," from Havre to New York, with a crew among whom were several recently liberated French convicts: "The first day out the new crew were very troublesome, owing in part, doubtless, to the absence of the mate, who was ill in bed and who died after a few hours. Suddenly the second mate, son of the commander, heard his father call out, 'Take hold of the wheel,' and going forward, saw him holding a sailor at arm's length. The mutineer was soon lodged in the cockpit; but all hands--the watch below and the watch on deck--came aft as if obeying a signal, with threatening faces and clenched fists. The captain, methodical and cool, ordered his son to run a line across the deck between him and the rebellious crew, and to arm the steward and the third mate. "'Now go forward and get to work', he said to the gang, who immediately made a demonstration to break the line. 'The first man who passes that rope,' added the captain, 'I will shoot. I am going to call you one by one; if two come at a time I will shoot both.' "The first to come forward was a big fellow in a red shirt. He had hesitated to advance when called; but the 'I will give you one more invitation, sir,' of the captain furnished him with the requisite resolution. So large were his wrists that ordinary shackles were too small to go around them, and ankle-shackles took their place. Escorted by the second and third mates to the cabin, he was made to lie flat on his stomach, while staples were driven through the chains of his handcuffs to pin him down. After eighteen of the mutineers had been similarly treated, the captain himself withdrew to the cabin and lay on a sofa, telling the second mate to call him in an hour. The next minute he was asleep with the stapled ruffians all around him." As the ocean routes became more clearly defined, and the limitations and character of international trade more systematized, there sprung up a new type of American ship-master. The older type--and the more romantic--was the man who took his ship from Boston or New York, not knowing how many ports he might enter nor in how many markets he might have to chaffer before his return. But in time there came to be regular trade routes, over which ships went and came with almost the regularity of the great steamships on the Atlantic ferry to-day. Early in the nineteenth century the movement of both freight and passengers between New York or Boston on this side and London and Liverpool on the other began to demand regular sailings on announced days, and so the era of the American packet-ship began. Then, too, the trade with China grew to such great proportions that some of the finest fortunes America knew in the days before the "trust magnate" and the "multimillionaire"--were founded upon it. The clipper-built ship, designed to bring home the cargoes of tea in season to catch the early market, was the outcome of this trade. Adventures were still for the old-time trading captain who wandered about from port to port with miscellaneous cargoes; but the new aristocracy of the sea trod the deck of the packets and the clippers. Their ships were built all along the New England coast; but builders on the shores of Chesapeake Bay soon began to struggle for preëminence in this style of naval architecture. Thus, even in the days of wooden ships, the center of the ship-building industry began to move toward that point where it now seems definitely located. By 1815 the name "Baltimore clipper" was taken all over the world to signify the highest type of merchant vessel that man's skill could design. It was a Baltimore ship which first, in 1785, displayed the American flag in the Canton River and brought thence the first cargo of silks and teas. Thereafter, until the decline of American shipping, the Baltimore clippers led in the Chinese trade. These clippers in model were the outcome of forty years of effort to evade hostile cruisers, privateers, and pirates on the lawless seas. To be swift, inconspicuous, quick in maneuvering, and to offer a small target to the guns of the enemy, were the fundamental considerations involved in their design. Mr. Henry Hall, who, as special agent for the United States census, made in 1880 an inquiry into the history of ship-building in the United States, says in his report: "A permanent impression has been made upon the form and rig of American vessels by forty years of war and interference. It was during that period that the shapes and fashions that prevail to-day were substantially attained. The old high poop-decks and quarter galleries disappeared with the lateen and the lug-sails on brigs, barks, and ships; the sharp stem was permanently abandoned; the curving home of the stem above the house poles went out of vogue, and vessels became longer in proportion to beam. The round bottoms were much in use, but the tendency toward a straight rise of the floor from the keel to a point half-way to the outer width of the ship became marked and popular. Hollow water-lines fore and aft were introduced; the forefoot of the hull ceased to be cut away so much, and the swell of the sides became less marked; the bows became somewhat sharper and were often made flaring above the water, and the square sprit-sail below the bowsprit was given up. American ship-builders had not yet learned to give their vessels much sheer, however, and in a majority of them the sheer line was almost straight from stem to stern; nor had they learned to divide the topsail into an upper and lower sail, and American vessels were distinguished by their short lower mast and the immense hoist of the topsail. The broadest beam was still at two-fifths the length of the hull. Hemp rigging, with broad channels and immense tops to the masts, was still retained; but the general arrangement and cut of the head, stay, square, and spanker sails at present in fashion were reached. The schooner rig had also become thoroughly popularized, especially for small vessels requiring speed; and the fast vessels of the day were the brigs and schooners, which were made long and sharp on the floor and low in the water, with considerable rake to the masts." Such is the technical description of the changes which years of peril and of war wrought in the model of the American sailing ship. How the vessel herself, under full sail, looked when seen through the eyes of one who was a sailor, with the education of a writer and the temperament of a poet, is well told in these lines from "Two Years Before the Mast": "Notwithstanding all that has been said about the beauty of a ship under full sail, there are very few who have ever seen a ship literally under all her sail. A ship never has all her sail upon her except when she has a light, steady breeze very nearly, but not quite, dead aft, and so regular that it can be trusted and is likely to last for some time. Then, with all her sails, light and heavy, and studding-sails on each side alow and aloft, she is the most glorious moving object in the world. Such a sight very few, even some who have been at sea a good deal, have ever beheld; for from the deck of your own vessel you can not see her as you would a separate object. "One night, while we were in the tropics, I went out to the end of the flying jib-boom upon some duty; and, having finished it, turned around and lay over the boom for a long time, admiring the beauty of the sight before me. Being so far out from the deck, I could look at the ship as at a separate vessel; and there rose up from the water, supported only by the small black hull, a pyramid of canvas spreading far out beyond the hull and towering up almost, as it seemed in the indistinct night, into the clouds. The sea was as still as an inland lake; the light trade-wind was gently and steadily breathing from astern; the dark-blue sky was studded with the tropical stars; there was no sound but the rippling of the water under the stem; and the sails were spread out wide and high--the two lower studding-sails stretching on either side far beyond the deck; the topmost studding-sails like wings to the topsails; the topgallant studding-sails spreading fearlessly out above them; still higher the two royal studding-sails, looking like two kites flying from the same string; and highest of all the little sky-sail, the apex of the pyramid, seeming actually to touch the stars and to be out of reach of human hand. So quiet, too, was the sea, and so steady the breeze, that if these sails had been sculptured marble they could not have been more motionless--not a ripple on the surface of the canvas; not even a quivering of the extreme edges of the sail, so perfectly were they distended by the breeze. I was so lost in the sight that I forgot the presence of the man who came out with me, until he said (for he, too, rough old man-of-war's man that he was, had been gazing at the show), half to himself, still looking at the marble sails: 'How quietly they do their work!'" The building of packet ships began in 1814, when some semblance of peace and order appeared upon the ocean, and continued until almost the time of the Civil War, when steamships had already begun to cut away the business of the old packets, and the Confederate cruisers were not needed to complete the work. But in their day these were grand examples of marine architecture. The first of the American transatlantic lines was the Black Ball line, so called from the black sphere on the white pennant which its ships displayed. This line was founded in 1815, by Isaac Wright & Company, with four ships sailing the first of every month, and making the outward run in about twenty-three days, the homeward voyage in about forty. These records were often beaten by ships of this and other lines. From thirteen to fifteen days to Liverpool was not an unknown record, but was rare enough to cause comment. It was in this era that the increase in the size of ships began--an increase which is still going on without any sign of check. Before the War of 1812 men circumnavigated the world in vessels that would look small now carrying brick on the Tappan Zee. The performances of our frigates in 1812 first called the attention of builders to the possibilities of the bigger ship. The early packets were ships of from 400 to 500 tons each. As business grew larger ones were built--stout ships of 900 to 1100 tons, double-decked, with a poop-deck aft and a top-gallant forecastle forward. The first three-decker was the "Guy Mannering," 1419 tons, built in 1849 by William H. Webb, of New York, who later founded the college and home for ship-builders that stands on the wooded hills north of the Harlem River. In 1841, Clark & Sewall, of Bath, Me.--an historic house--built the "Rappahannock," 179.6 feet long, with a tonnage of 1133 tons. For a time she was thought to be as much of a "white elephant" as the "Great Eastern" afterwards proved to be. People flocked to study her lines on the ways and see her launched. They said only a Rothschild could afford to own her, and indeed when she appeared in the Mississippi--being built for the cotton trade--freights to Liverpool instantly fell off. But thereafter the size of ships--both packet and clippers--steadily and rapidly increased. Glancing down the long table of ships and their records prepared for the United States census, we find such notations as these. Ship "Flying Cloud," built 1851; tonnage 1782; 374 miles in one day; from New York to San Francisco in 89 days 18 hours; in one day she made 433-1/2 miles, but reducing this to exactly 24 hours, she made 427-1/2 miles. Ship "Comet," built 1851; tonnage 1836; beautiful model and good ship; made 332 knots in 24 hours, and 1512 knots in 120 consecutive hours. "Sovereign of the Seas," built 1852; tonnage 2421; ran 6,245 miles in 22 days; 436 miles in one day; for four days her average was 398 miles. "Lightning," built 1854; tonnage 2084; ran 436 miles in 24 hours, drawing 22 feet; from England to Calcutta with troops, in 87 days, beating other sailing vessels by from 16 to 40 days; from Boston to Liverpool in 13 days 20 hours. "James Baines," built 1854, tonnage 2515; from Boston to Liverpool in 12 days 6 hours. Three of these ships came from the historic yards of Donald McKay, at New York, one of the most famous of American ship-builders. The figures show the steady gain in size and speed that characterized the work of American ship-builders in those days. Then the United States was in truth a maritime nation. Every boy knew the sizes and records of the great ships, and each magnificent clipper had its eager partisans. Foreign trade was active. Merchants made great profit on cargoes from China, and speed was a prime element in the value of a ship. In 1840 the discovery of gold in California added a new demand for ocean shipping; the voyage around the Horn, already common enough for whalemen and men engaged in Asiatic trade, was taken by tens of thousands of adventurers. Then came the news of gold in Australia, and again demands were clamorous for more swift American ships. All nations of Europe were buyers at our shipyards, and our builders began seriously to consider whether the supply of timber would hold out. The yards of Maine and Massachusetts sent far afield for white oak knees and pine planking. Southern forests were drawn upon, and even the stately pines of Puget Sound were felled to make masts for a Yankee ship. **Transcriber's notes: Page 4: Removed extraneous ' after "Corsairs" Page 41: changed atempt to attempt CHAPTER II. THE TRANSITION FROM SAILS TO STEAM--THE CHANGE IN MARINE ARCHITECTURE--THE DEPOPULATION OF THE OCEAN--CHANGES IN THE SAILOR'S LOT--FROM WOOD TO STEEL--THE INVENTION OF THE STEAMBOAT--THE FATE OF FITCH--FULTON'S LONG STRUGGLES--OPPOSITION OF THE SCIENTISTS--THE "CLERMONT"--THE STEAMBOAT ON THE OCEAN--ON WESTERN RIVERS--THE TRANSATLANTIC PASSAGE--THE "SAVANNAH" MAKES THE FIRST CROSSING--ESTABLISHMENT OF BRITISH LINES--EFFORTS OF UNITED STATES SHIP-OWNERS TO COMPETE--THE FAMOUS COLLINS LINE--THE DECADENCE OF OUR MERCHANT MARINE--SIGNS OF ITS REVIVAL--OUR GREAT DOMESTIC SHIPPING INTEREST--AMERICA'S FUTURE ON THE SEA. Even as recently as twenty years ago, the water front of a great seaport like New York, viewed from the harbor, showed a towering forest of tall and tapering masts, reaching high up above the roofs of the water-side buildings, crossed with slender spars hung with snowy canvas, and braced with a web of taut cordage. Across the street that passed the foot of the slips, reached out the great bowsprits or jibbooms, springing from fine-drawn bows where, above a keen cut-water, the figurehead--pride of the ship--nestled in confident strength. Neptune with his trident, Venus rising from the sea, admirals of every age and nationality, favorite heroes like Wellington and Andrew Jackson were carved, with varying skill, from stout oak, and set up to guide their vessels through tumultuous seas. [Illustration: "THE WATER FRONT OF A GREAT SEAPORT LIKE NEW YORK"] To-day, alas, the towering masts, the trim yards, the web of cordage, the quaint figureheads, are gone or going fast. The docks, once so populous, seem deserted--not because maritime trade has fallen off, but because one steamship does the work that twenty stout clippers once were needed for. The clipper bow with figurehead and reaching jib-boom are gone, for the modern steamship has its bow bluff, its stem perpendicular, the "City of Rome" being the last great steamship to adhere to the old model. It is not improbable, however, that in this respect we shall see a return to old models, for the straight stem--an American invention, by the way--is held to be more dangerous in case of collisions. Many of the old-time sailing ships have been shorn of their towering masts, robbed of their canvas, and made into ignoble barges which, loaded with coal, are towed along by some fuming, fussing tugboat--as Samson shorn of his locks was made to bear the burdens of the Philistines. This transformation from sail to steam has robbed the ocean of much of its picturesqueness, and seafaring life of much of its charm, as well as of many of its dangers. The greater size of vessels and their swifter trips under steam, have had the effect of depopulating the ocean, even in established trade routes. In the old days of ocean travel the meeting of a ship at sea was an event long to be remembered. The faint speck on the horizon, discernible only through the captain's glass, was hours in taking on the form of a ship. If a full-rigged ship, no handiwork of man could equal her impressiveness as she bore down before the wind, sail mounting on sail of billowing whiteness, until for the small hull cleaving the waves so swiftly, to carry all seemed nothing sort of marvelous. Always there was a hail and an interchange of names and ports; sometimes both vessels rounded to and boats passed and repassed. But now the courtesies of the sea have gone with its picturesqueness. Great ocean liners rushing through the deep, give each other as little heed as railway trains passing on parallel tracks. A twinkle of electric signals, or a fluttering of parti-colored flags, and each seeks its own horizon--the incident bounded by minutes where once it would have taken hours. It would not be easy to say whether the sailor's lot has been lightened or not, by the substitution of steel for wood, of steam for sail. Perhaps the best evidence that the native-born American does not regard the change as wholly a blessing, is to be found in the fact that but few of them now follow the sea, and scarcely a vestige is left of the old New England seafaring population except in the fisheries--where sails are still the rule. Doubtless the explanation of this lies in the changed conditions of seafaring as a business. In the days which I have sketched in the first chapter, the boy of good habits and reasonable education who shipped before the mast, was fairly sure of prompt promotion to the quarter-deck, of a right to share in the profits of the voyage, and of finally owning his own ship. After 1860 all these conditions changed. Steamships, always costly to build, involved greater and greater investments as their size increased. Early in the history of steam navigation they became exclusively the property of corporations. Latterly the steamship lines have become adjuncts to great railway lines, and are conducted by the practiced stock manipulator--not by the veteran sea captain. Richard J. Cleveland, a successful merchant navigator of the early days of the nineteenth century, when little more than a lad, undertook an enterprise, thus described by him in a letter from Havre: "I have purchased a cutter-sloop of forty-three tons burden, on a credit of two years. This vessel was built at Dieppe and fitted out for a privateer; was taken by the English, and has been plying between Dover and Calais as a packet-boat. She has excellent accommodations and sails fast. I shall copper her, put her in ballast, trim with £1000 or £1500 sterling in cargo, and proceed to the Isle of France and Bourbon, where I expect to sell her, as well as the cargo, at a very handsome profit, and have no doubt of being well paid for my twelve months' work, calculating to be with you next August." [Illustration: AN ARMED CUTTER] In such enterprises the young American sailors were always engaging--braving equally the perils of the deep and not less treacherous reefs and shoals of business but always struggling to become their own masters to command their own ships, and if possible, to carry their own cargoes. The youth of a nation that had fought for political independence, fought themselves for economic independence. To men of this sort the conditions bred by the steam-carrying trade were intolerable. To-day a great steamship may well cost $2,000,000. It must have the favor of railway companies for cargoes, must possess expensive wharves at each end of its route, must have an army of agents and solicitors ever engaged upon its business. The boy who ships before the mast on one of them, is less likely to rise to the position of owner, than the switchman is to become railroad president--the latter progress has been known, but of the former I can not find a trace. So comparatively few young Americans choose the sea for their workshop in this day of steam. If this book were the story of the merchant marine of all lands and all peoples, a chapter on the development of the steamship would be, perhaps, the most important, and certainly the most considerable part of it. But with the adoption of steam for ocean carriage began the decline of American shipping, a decline hastened by the use of iron, and then steel, for hulls. Though we credit ourselves--not without some protest from England--with the invention of the steamboat, the adaptation of the screw to the propulsion of vessels, and the invention of triple-expansion engines, yet it was England that seized upon these inventions and with them won, and long held, the commercial mastery of the seas. To-day (1902) it seems that economic conditions have so changed that the shipyards of the United States will again compete for the business of the world. We are building ships as good--perhaps better--than can be constructed anywhere else, but thus far we have not been able to build them as cheap. Accordingly our builders have been restricted to the construction of warships, coasters, and yachts. National pride has naturally demanded that all vessels for the navy be built in American shipyards, and a federal law has long restricted the trade between ports of the United States to ships built here. The lake shipping, too--prodigious in numbers and activity--is purely American. But until within a few years the American flag had almost disappeared from vessels engaged in international trade. Americans in many instances are the owners of ships flying the British flag, for the United States laws deny American registry--which is to a ship what citizenship is to a man--to vessels built abroad. While the result of this attempt to protect American shipyards has been to drive our flag from the ocean, there are indications now that our shipyards are prepared to build as cheaply as others, and that the flag will again figure on the high seas. Popular history has ascribed to Robert Fulton the honor of building and navigating the first steamboat. Like claims to priority in many other inventions, this one is strenuously contested. Two years before Fulton's "Clermont" appeared on the Hudson, John Stevens, of Hoboken, built a steamboat propelled by a screw, the model of which is still in the Stevens Polytechnic Institute. Earlier still, John Fitch, of Pennsylvania, had made a steamboat, and urged it upon Franklin, upon Washington, and upon the American Philosophical Society without success; tried it then with the Spanish minister, and was offered a subsidy by the King of Spain for the exclusive right to the invention. Being a patriotic American, Fitch refused. "My invention must be first for my own country and then for all the world," said he. But later, after failing to reap any profit from his discover and finding himself deprived even of the honor of first invention, he wrote bitterly in 1792: "The strange ideas I had at that time of serving my country, without the least suspicion that my only reward would be contempt and opprobrious names! To refuse the offer of the Spanish nation was the act of a blockhead of which I should not be guilty again." Indeed Fitch's fortune was hard. His invention was a work of the purest originality. He was unread, uneducated, and had never so much as heard of a steam-engine when the idea of propelling boats by steam came to him. After repeated rebuffs--the lot of every inventor--he at length secured from the State of New Jersey the right to navigate its waters for a term of years. With this a stock company was formed and the first boat built and rebuilt. At first it was propelled by a single paddle at the stem; then by a series of paddles attached to an endless chain on each side of the boat; afterwards by paddle-wheels, and finally by upright oars at the side. The first test made on the Delaware River in August, 1787--twenty years before Fulton--in the presence of many distinguished citizens, some of them members of the Federal Convention, which had adjourned for the purpose, was completely successful. The boiler burst before the afternoon was over, but not before the inventor had demonstrated the complete practicability of his invention. For ten years, struggling the while against cruel poverty, John Fitch labored to perfect his steamboat, and to force it upon the public favor, but in vain. Never in the history of invention did a new device more fully meet the traditional "long-felt want." Here was a growing nation made up of a fringe of colonies strung along an extended coast. No roads were built. Dense forests blocked the way inland but were pierced by navigable streams, deep bays, and placid sounds. The steamboat was the one thing necessary to cement American unity and speed American progress; but a full quarter of a century passed after Fitch had steamed up and down the Delaware before the new system of propulsion became commercially useful. The inventor did not live to see that day, and was at least spared the pain of seeing a later pioneer get credit for a discovery he thought his own. In 1798 he died--of an overdose of morphine--leaving behind the bitter writing: "The day will come when some powerful man will get fame and riches from my invention; but nobody will ever believe that poor John Fitch can do anything worthy of attention." In trying to make amends for the long injustice done to poor Fitch, modern history has come near to going beyond justice. It is undoubted that Fitch applied steam to the propulsion of a boat, long before Fulton, but that Fitch himself was the first inventor is not so certain. Blasco de Garay built a rude steamboat in Barcelona in 1543; in Germany one Papin built one a few years later, which bargemen destroyed lest their business be injured by it. Jonathan Hulls, of Liverpool, in 1737 built a stern-wheeler, rude engravings of which are still in existence, and Symington in 1801 built a thoroughly practical steamboat at Dundee. 'Tis a vexed question, and perhaps it is well enough to say that Fitch first scented the commercial possibilities of steam navigation, while Fulton actually developed them--the one "raised" the fox, while the other was in at the death. To trace a great idea to the actual birth is apt to be obstructive to national pride. It is even said that the Chinese of centuries ago understood the value of the screw-propeller--for inventing which our adoptive citizen Ericsson stands in bronze on New York's Battery. From the time of Robert Fulton, at any rate, dates the commercial usage of the steamboat. Others had done the pioneering--Fitch on the Delaware, James Rumsey on the Potomac, William Longstreet on the Savannah, Elijah Ormsley on the waters of Rhode Island, while Samuel Morey had actually traveled by steamboat from New Haven to New York. Fulton's craft was not materially better than any of these, but it happened to be launched on ----that tide in the affairs of men Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. But the flood of that tide did not come to Fulton without long waiting and painstaking preparation. He was the son of an Irish immigrant, and born in Pennsylvania in 1765. To inventive genius he added rather unusual gifts for drawing and painting; for a time followed the calling of a painter of miniatures and went to London to study under Benjamin West, whom all America of that day thought a genius scarcely second to Raphael or Titian. He was not, like poor Fitch, doomed to the narrowest poverty and shut out from the society of the men of light and learning of the day, for we find him, after his London experience, a member of the family of Joel Barlow, then our minister to France. By this time his ambition had forsaken art for mechanics, and he was deep in plans for diving boats, submarine torpedoes, and steamboats. Through various channels he succeeded in getting his plan for moving vessels with steam, before Napoleon--then First Consul--who ordered the Minister of Marine to treat with the inventor. The Minister in due time suggested that 10,000 francs be spent on experiments to be made in the Harbor of Brest. To this Napoleon assented, and sent Fulton to the Institute of France to be examined as to his fitness to conduct the tests. Now the Institute is the most learned body in all France. In 1860 one of its members wrote a book to prove that the earth does not revolve upon its axis, nor move about the sun. In 1878, when Edison's phonograph was being exhibited to the eminent scientists of the Institute, one rushed wrathfully down the aisle and seizing by the collar the man who manipulated the instrument, cried out, "Wretch, we are not to be made dupes of by a ventriloquist!" So it is readily understandable that after being referred to the Institute, Fulton and his project disappeared for a long time. The learned men of the Institute of France were not alone in their incredulity. In 1803 the Philosophical Society of Rotterdam wrote to the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia, for information concerning the development of the steam-engine in the United States. The question was referred to Benjamin H. Latrobe, the most eminent engineer in America, and his report was published approvingly in the _Transactions_. "A sort of mania," wrote Mr. Latrobe, "had indeed prevailed and not yet entirely subsided, for impelling boats by steam-engines." But his scientific hearers would at once see that there were general objections to it which could not be overcome. "These are, first, the weight of the engine and of the fuel; second, the large space it occupies; third, the tendency of its action to rack the vessel and render it leaky; fourth, the expense of maintenance; fifth, the irregularity of its motion and the motion of the water in the boiler and cistern, and of the fuel vessel in rough weather; sixth, the difficulty arising from the liability of the paddles, or oars, to break, if light, and from the weight if made strong." But the steamboat survived this scientific indictment in six counts. Visions proved more real than scientific reasoning. While in the shadow of the Institute's disfavor, Fulton fell in with the new minister to France, Robert R. Livingston, and the result of this acquaintance was that America gained primacy in steam navigation, and Napoleon lost the chance to get control of an invention which, by revolutionizing navigation, might have broken that British control of the sea, that in the end destroyed the Napoleonic empire. Livingston had long taken an intelligent interest in the possibilities of steam power, and had built and tested, on the Hudson, an experimental steamboat of his own. Perhaps it was this, as much as anything, which aroused the interest of Thomas Jefferson--to whom he owed his appointment as minister to France--for Jefferson was actively interested in every sort of mechanical device, and his mind was not so scientific as to be inhospitable to new, and even, revolutionary, ideas. But Livingston was not possessed by that idea which, in later years, politicians have desired us to believe especially Jeffersonian. He was no foe to monopoly. Indeed, before he had perfected his steamboat, he used his political influence to get from New York the concession of the _exclusive_ right to navigate her lakes and rivers by steam. The grant was only to be effective if within one year he should produce a boat of twenty tons, moved by steam. But he failed, and in 1801 went to France, where he found Fulton. A partnership was formed, and it was largely through Livingston's money and influence that Fulton succeeded where others, earlier in the field than he, had failed. Yet even so, it was not all easy sailing for him. "When I was building my first steamboat," he said, "the project was viewed by the public either with indifference, or with contempt as a visionary scheme. My friends, indeed, were civil, but were shy. They listened with patience to my explanations, but with a settled cast of incredulity upon their countenances. I felt the full force of the lamentation of the poet-- Truths would you teach, or save a sinking land; All fear, none aid you, and few understand. [Illustration: "THE LOUD LAUGH ROSE AT MY EXPENSE"] "As I had occasion to pass daily to and from the building yard while my boat was in progress, I have often loitered unknown near the idle groups of strangers gathered in little circles and heard various inquiries as to the object of this new vehicle. The language was uniformly that of scorn, or sneer, or ridicule. The loud laugh often rose at my expense; the dry jest; the wise calculation of losses and expenditures; the dull, but endless repetition of 'the Fulton Folly.' Never did a single encouraging remark, a bright hope, or a warm wish cross my path." The boat which Fulton was building while the wiseacres wagged their heads and prophesied disaster, was named "The Clermont." She was 130 feet long, 18 feet wide, half-decked, and provided with a mast and sail. In the undecked part were the boiler and engine, set in masonry. The wheels were fifteen feet in diameter, with buckets four feet wide, dipping two feet into the water. It was 1806 when Fulton came home to begin her construction. Since his luckless experience with the French Institute he had tested a steamer on the Seine; failed to interest Napoleon; tried, without success, to get the British Government to adopt his torpedo; tried and failed again with the American Government at Washington. Fulton's thoughts seemed to have been riveted on his torpedo; but Livingston was confident of the future of the steamboat, and had had an engine built for it in England, which Fulton found lying on a wharf, freight unpaid, on his return from Europe. The State of New York had meantime granted the two another monopoly of steam navigation, and gave them until 1807 to prove their ability and right. The time, though brief, proved sufficient, and on the afternoon of August 7, 1807, the "Clermont" began her epoch-making voyage. The distance to Albany--150 miles--she traversed in thirty-two hours, and the end of the passenger sloop traffic on the Hudson was begun. Within a year steamboats were plying on the Raritan, the Delaware, and Lake Champlain, and the development and use of the new invention would have been more rapid than it was, save for the monopoly rights which had been granted to Livingston and Fulton. They had the sole right to navigate by steam, the waters of New York. Well and good. But suppose the stream navigated touched both New York and New Jersey. What then? Would it be seriously asserted that a steamer owned by New Jersey citizens could not land passengers at a New York port? Fulton and Livingston strove to protect their monopoly, and the two States were brought to the brink of war. In the end the courts settled the difficulty by establishing the exclusive control of navigable waters by the Federal Government. From the day the "Clermont" breasted the tide of the Hudson there was no check in the conquest of the waters by steam. Up the narrowest rivers, across the most tempestuous bays, along the placid waters of Long Island Sound, coasting along the front yard of the nation from Portland to Savannah the steamboats made their way, tying the young nation indissolubly together. Curiously enough it was Livingston's monopoly that gave the first impetus to the extension of steam navigation. A mechanic by the name of Robert L. Stevens, one of the first of a family distinguished in New York and New Jersey, built a steamboat on the Hudson. After one or two trips had proved its usefulness, the possessors of the monopoly became alarmed and began proceedings against the new rival. Driven from the waters about New York, Stevens took his boat around to Philadelphia. Thus not only did he open an entirely new field of river and inland water transportation, but the trip to Philadelphia demonstrated the entire practicability of steam for use in coastwise navigation. Thereafter the vessels multiplied rapidly on all American waters. Fulton himself set up a shipyard, in which he built steam ferries, river and coastwise steamboats. In 1809 he associated himself with Nicholas J. Roosevelt, to whom credit is due for the invention of the vertical paddle-wheel, in a partnership for the purpose of putting steamboats on the great rivers of the Mississippi Valley, and in 1811 the "New Orleans" was built and navigated by Roosevelt himself, from Pittsburg to the city at the mouth of the Mississippi. The voyage took fourteen days, and before undertaking it, he descended the two rivers in a flatboat, to familiarize himself with the channel. The biographer of Roosevelt prints an interesting letter from Fulton, in which he says, "I have no pretensions to be the inventor of the steamboat. Hundreds of others have tried it and failed." Four years after Roosevelt's voyage, the "Enterprise" made for the first time in history the voyage up the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers from New Orleans to Louisville, and from that era the great rivers may be said to have been fairly opened to that commerce, which in time became the greatest agency in the building up of the nation. The Great Lakes were next to feel the quickening influence of the new motive power, but it was left for the Canadian, John Hamilton, of Queenston, to open this new field. The progress of steam navigation on both lakes and rivers will be more fully described in the chapters devoted to that topic. So rapidly now did the use of the steamboat increase on Long Island Sound, on the rivers, and along the coast that the newspapers began to discuss gravely the question whether the supply of fuel would long hold out. The boats used wood exclusively--coal was then but little used--and despite the vast forests which covered the face of the land the price of wood in cities rose because of their demand. Mr. McMaster, the eminent historian, discovers that in 1825 thirteen steamers plying on the Hudson burned sixteen hundred cords of wood per week. Fourteen hundred cords more were used by New York ferry boats, and each trip of a Sound steamer consumed sixty cords. The American who traverses the placid waters of Long Island Sound to-day in one of the swift and splendid steamboats of the Fall River or other Sound lines, enjoys very different accommodations from those which in the second quarter of the last century were regarded as palatial. The luxury of that day was a simple sort at best. When competition became strong, the old Fulton company, then running boats to Albany, announced as a special attraction the "safety barge." This was a craft without either sails or steam, of about two hundred tons burden, and used exclusively for passengers. It boasted a spacious dining-room, ninety feet long, a deck cabin for ladies, a reading room, a promenade deck, shaded and provided with seats. One of the regular steamers of the line towed it to Albany, and its passengers were assured freedom from the noise and vibration of machinery, as well as safety from possible boiler explosions--the latter rather a common peril of steamboating in those days. [Illustration: "THE DREADNAUGHT"--NEW YORK AND LIVERPOOL PACKET] It was natural that the restless mind of the American, untrammeled by traditions and impatient of convention, should turn eagerly and early to the question of crossing the ocean by steam. When the rivers had been made busy highways for puffing steamboats; when the Great Lakes, as turbulent as the ocean, and as vast as the Mediterranean, were conquered by the new marine device; when steamships plied between New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Savannah, and Charleston, braving what is by far more perilous than mid-ocean, the danger of tempests on a lee shore, and the shifting sands of Hatteras, there seemed to the enterprising man no reason why the passage from New York to Liverpool might not be made by the same agency. The scientific authorities were all against it. Curiously enough, the weight of scientific authority is always against anything new. Marine architects and mathematicians proved to their own satisfaction at least that no vessel could carry enough coal to cross the Atlantic, that the coal bunkers would have to be bigger than the vessel itself, in order to hold a sufficient supply for the furnaces. It is a matter of history that an eminent British scientist was engaged in delivering a lecture on this very subject in Liverpool when the "Savannah," the first steamship to cross the ocean, steamed into the harbor. It is fair, however, to add that the "Savannah's" success did not wholly destroy the contention of the opponents of steam navigation, for she made much of the passage under sail, being fitted only with what we would call now "auxiliary steam power." This was in 1819, but so slow were the shipbuilders to progress beyond what had been done with the "Savannah," that in 1835 a highly respected British scientist said in tones of authority: "As to the project which was announced in the newspapers, of making the voyage from New York to Liverpool direct by steam, it was, he had no hesitation in saying, perfectly chimerical, and they might as well talk of making a voyage from New York or Liverpool to the moon." Nevertheless, in three years from that time transatlantic steam lines were in operation, and the doom of the grand old packets was sealed. The American who will read history free from that national prejudice which is miscalled patriotism, can not fail to be impressed by the fact that, while as a nation we have led the world in the variety and audacity of our inventions, it is nearly always some other nation that most promptly and most thoroughly utilizes the genius of our inventors. Emphatically was this the case with the application of steam power to ocean steamships. Americans showed the way, but Englishmen set out upon it and were traveling it regularly before another American vessel followed in the wake of the "Savannah." In 1838 two English steamships crossed the Atlantic to New York, the "Sirius" and the "Great Western." That was the beginning of that great fleet of British steamers which now plies up and down the Seven Seas and finds its poet laureate in Mr. Kipling. A very small beginning it was, too. The "Sirius" was of 700 tons burden and 320 horse-power; the "Great Western" was 212 feet long, with a tonnage of 1340 and engines of 400 horse-power. The "Sirius" brought seven passengers to New York, at a time when the sailing clippers were carrying from eight hundred to a thousand immigrants, and from twenty to forty cabin passengers. To those who accompanied the ship on her maiden voyage it must have seemed to justify the doubts expressed by the mathematicians concerning the practicability of designing a steamship which could carry enough coal to drive the engines all the way across the Atlantic, for the luckless "Sirius" exhausted her four hundred and fifty tons of coal before reaching Sandy Hook, and could not have made the historic passage up New York Bay under steam, except for the liberal use of spars and barrels of resin which she had in cargo. Her voyage from Cork had occupied eighteen and a half days. The "Great Western," which arrived at the same time, made the run from Queenstown in fifteen days. That two steamships should lie at anchor in New York Bay at the same time, was enough to stir the wonder and awaken the enthusiasm of the provincial New Yorkers of that day. The newspapers published editorials on the marvel, and the editor of _The Courier and Enquirer_, the chief maritime authority of the time, hazarded a prophecy in this cautious fashion: "What may be the ultimate fate of this excitement--whether or not the expenses of equipment and fuel will admit of the employment of these vessels in the ordinary packet service--we cannot pretend to form an opinion; but of the entire feasibility of the passage of the Atlantic by steam, as far as regards safety, comfort, and dispatch, even in the roughest and most boisterous weather, the most skeptical must now cease to doubt." Unfortunately for our national pride, the story of the development of the ocean steamship industry from this small beginning to its present prodigious proportions, is one in which we of the United States fill but a little space. We have, it is true, furnished the rich cargoes of grain, of cotton, and of cattle, that have made the ocean passage in one direction profitable for shipowners. We found homes for the millions of immigrants who crowded the "'tween decks" of steamers of every flag and impelled the companies to build bigger and bigger craft to carry the ever increasing throngs. And in these later days of luxury and wealth unparalleled, we have supplied the millionaires, whose demands for quarters afloat as gorgeous as a Fifth Avenue club have resulted in the building of floating palaces. America has supported the transatlantic lines, but almost every civilized people with a seacoast has outdone us in building the ships. For a time, indeed, it seemed that we should speedily overcome the lead that England immediately took in building steamships. Her entrance upon this industry was, as we have seen, in 1838. The United States took it up about ten years later. In 1847 the Ocean Steam Navigation Company was organized in this country and secured from the Government a contract to carry the mails between New York and Bremen. Two ships were built and regular trips made for a year or more; but when the Government contract expired and was not renewed, the venture was abandoned. About the same time the owners of one of the most famous packet lines, the Black Ball, tried the experiment of supplementing their sailing service with a steamship, but it proved unprofitable. Shortly after the New York and Havre Steamship Company, with two vessels and a postal subsidy of $150,000, entered the field and continued operations with only moderate success until 1868. The only really notable effort of Americans in the early days of steam navigation to get their share of transatlantic trade--indeed, I might almost say the most determined effort until the present time--was that made by the projectors of the Collins line, and it ended in disaster, in heavy financial loss, and in bitter sorrow. E.K. Collins was a New York shipping merchant, the organizer and manager of one of the most famous of the old lines of sailing packets between that port and Liverpool--the Dramatic line, so called from the fact that its ships were named after popular actors of the day. Recognizing the fact that the sailing ship was fighting a losing fight against the new style of vessels, Mr. Collins interested a number of New York merchants in a distinctly American line of transatlantic ships. It was no easy task. Capital was not over plenty in the American city which now boasts itself the financial center of the world, while the opportunities for its investment in enterprises longer proved and less hazardous than steamships were numerous. But a Government mail subsidy of $858,000 annually promised a sound financial basis, and made the task of capitalization possible. It seems not unlikely that the vicissitudes of the line were largely the result of this subsidy, for one of its conditions was extremely onerous: namely, that the vessels making twenty-six voyages annually between New York and Liverpool, should always make the passage in better time than the British Cunard line, which was then in its eighth year. However, the Collins line met the exaction bravely. Four vessels were built, the "Atlantic," "Pacific," "Arctic," and "Baltic," and the time of the fleet for the westward passage averaged eleven days, ten hours and twenty-one minutes, while the British ships averaged twelve days, nineteen hours and twenty-six minutes--a very substantial triumph for American naval architecture. The Collins liners, furthermore, were models of comfort and even of luxury for the times. They averaged a cost of $700,000 apiece, a good share of which went toward enhancing the comfort of passengers. To our English cousins these ships were at first as much of a curiosity as our vestibuled trains were a few years since. When the "Atlantic" first reached Liverpool in 1849, the townspeople by the thousand came down to the dock to examine a ship with a barber shop, fitted with the curious American barber chairs enabling the customer to recline while being shaved. The provision of a special deck-house for smokers, was another innovation, while the saloon, sixty-seven by twenty feet, the dining saloon sixty by twenty, the rich fittings of rosewood and satinwood, marble-topped tables, expensive upholstery, and stained-glass windows, decorated with patriotic designs, were for a long time the subject of admiring comment in the English press. Old voyagers who crossed in the halcyon days of the Collins line and are still taking the "Atlantic ferry," agree in saying that the increase in actual comfort is not so great as might reasonably be expected. Much of the increased expenditures of the companies has gone into more gorgeous decoration, vastly more of course into pushing for greater speed; but even in the early days there was a lavish table, and before the days of the steamships the packets offered such private accommodations in the of roomy staterooms as can be excelled only by the "cabins de luxe" of the modern liner. Aside from the question of speed, however, it is probable that the two inventions which have added most to the passengers' comfort are the electric light and artificial refrigeration. The Collins line charged from thirty to forty dollar a ton for freight, a charge which all the modern improvements and the increase in the size of vessels, has not materially lessened. In six years, however, the corporation was practically bankrupt. The high speed required by the Government more than offset the generous subsidy, and misfortune seemed to pursue the ships. The "Arctic" came into collision with a French steamer in 1854, and went down with two hundred and twenty-two of the two hundred and sixty-eight people on board. The "Pacific" left Liverpool June 23, 1856, and was never more heard of. Shortly thereafter the subsidy was withdrawn, and the famous line went slowly down to oblivion. It was during the best days of the Collins line that it seemed that the United States might overtake Great Britain in the race for supremacy on the ocean. In 1851 the total British steam shipping engaged in foreign trade was 65,921 tons. The United States only began building steamships in 1848, yet by 1851 its ocean-going steamships aggregated 62,390 tons. For four years our growth continued so that in 1855 we had 115,000 tons engaged in foreign trade. Then began the retrograde movement, until in 1860--before the time of the Confederate cruisers--there were; according to an official report to the National Board of Trade, "no ocean mail steamers away from our own coasts, anywhere on the globe, under the American flag, except, perhaps, on the route between New York and Havre, where two steamships may then have been in commission, which, however, were soon afterward withdrawn. The two or three steamship companies which had been in existence in New York had either failed or abandoned the business; and the entire mail, passenger, and freight traffic between Great Britain and the United States, so far as this was carried on by steam, was controlled then (as it mainly is now) by British companies." And from this condition of decadence the merchant marine of the United States is just beginning to manifest signs of recovery. When steam had fairly established its place as the most effective power for ocean voyages of every duration, and through every zone and clime, improvements in the methods of harnessing it, and in the form and material of the ships that it was to drive, followed fast upon each other. As in the case of the invention of the steamboat, the public has commonly lightly awarded the credit for each invention to some belated experimenter who, walking more firmly along a road which an earlier pioneer had broken, attained the goal that his predecessor had sought in vain. So we find credit given almost universally to John Ericsson, the Swedish-born American, for the invention of the screw-propeller. But as early as 1770 it was suggested by John Watt, and Stevens, the American inventor, actually gave a practical demonstration of its efficiency in 1804. Ericsson perfected it in 1836, and soon thereafter the British began building steamships with screws instead of paddle-wheels. For some reason, however, not easy now to conjecture, shipbuilders clung to the paddle-wheels for vessels making the transatlantic voyage, long after they were discarded on the shorter runs along the coasts of the British isles. It so happened, too, that the first vessel to use the screw in transatlantic voyages, was also first iron ship built. She was the "Great Britain," a ship of 3,000 tons, built for the Great Western Company at Bristol, England, and intended to eclipse any ship afloat. Her hull was well on the way to completion when her designer chanced to see the "Archimedes," the first screw steamer built, and straightway changed his plans to admit the use of the new method of propulsion So from 1842 may be dated the use of both screw propellers and iron ships. We must pass hastily over the other inventions, rapidly following each other, and all designed to make ocean travel more swift, more safe, and more comfortable, and to increase the profit of the shipowner. The compound engine, which has been so developed that in place of Fulton's seven miles an hour, our ocean steamships are driven now at a speed sometimes closely approaching twenty-five miles an hour, seems already destined to give way to the turbine form of engine which, applied thus far to torpedo-boats only, has made a record of forty-four miles an hour. Iron, which stood for a revolution in 1842, has itself given way to steel. And a new force, subtile, swift, and powerful, has found endless application in the body of the great ships, so that from stem to stern-post they are a network of electric wires, bearing messages, controlling the independent engines that swing the rudder, closing water-tight compartments at the first hint of danger, and making the darkest places of the great hulls as light as day at the throwing of a switch. During the period of this wonderful advance in marine architecture ship-building in the United States languished to the point of extinction. Yachts for millionaires who could afford to pay heavily for the pleasure of flying the Stars and Stripes, ships of 2500 to 4000 tons for the coasting trade, in which no foreign-built vessel was permitted to compete, and men-of-war--very few of them before 1890--kept a few shipyards from complete obliteration. But as an industry, ship-building, which once ranked at the head of American manufactures, had sunk to a point of insignificance. The present moment (1902) seems to show the American shipping interest in the full tide of successful reëstablishment. In Congress and in boards of trade men are arguing for and against subsidies, for and against the policy of permitting Americans to buy ships of foreign builders if they will, and fly the American flag above them. But while these things remain subjects of discussion natural causes are taking Americans again to sea. Some buy great British ships, own and manage them, even although the laws of the United States compel the flying of a foreign flag. For example, the Atlantic Transport line is owned wholly by citizens of the United States, although at the present moment all its ships fly the British flag. Two new ships are, however, being completed for this line in American shipyards, the "Minnetonka" and "Minnewaska," of 13,401 tons each. This line, started by Americans in 1887, was the first to use the so-called bilge keels, or parallel keels along each side of the hull to prevent rolling. It now has a fleet of twenty-three vessels, with a total tonnage of about 90,000, and does a heavy passenger business despite the fact that its ships were primarily designed to carry cattle. Quite as striking an illustration of the fact that capital is international, and will be invested in ships or other enterprises which promise profit quite heedless of sentimental considerations of flags, was afforded by the purchase in 1901 of the Leyland line of British steamships by an American. Immediately following this came the consolidation of ownership, or merger, of the principal British-American lines, in one great corporation, a majority of the stock of which is held by Americans. Despite their ownership on this side of the water, these ships will still fly the British flag, and a part of the contract of merger is that a British shipyard shall for ten years build all new vessels needed by the consolidated lines this situation will persist. This suggests that the actual participation of Americans in the ocean-carrying trade of the world is not to be estimated by the frequency or infrequency with which the Stars and Stripes are to be met on the ocean. It furthermore gives some indication of the rapidity with which the American flag would reappear if the law to register only ships built in American yards were repealed. Indeed, it would appear that the law protecting American ship-builders, while apparently effective for that purpose, has destroyed American shipping. Our ship-building industry has attained respectable and even impressive proportions; but our shipping, wherever brought into competition with foreign ships, has vanished. One transatlantic line only, in 1902 displayed the American flag, and that line enjoyed special and unusual privileges, without which it probably could not have existed. In consideration of building two ships in American yards, this line, the International Navigation Company, was permitted to transfer two foreign-built ships to American registry, and a ten years' postal contract was awarded it, which guaranteed in advance the cost of construction of all the ships it was required to build. It is a fact worth noting that, while the foreign lines have been vying with each other in the construction of faster and bigger ships each year, this one has built none since its initial construction, more than a decade ago. Ten years ago its American-built ships, the "New York" and the "Paris," were the largest ships afloat; now there are eighteen larger in commission, and many building. Besides this, there are only two American lines on the Atlantic which ply to other than coastwise ports--the Pacific Mail, which is run in connection with the Panama railway, and the Admiral line, which plies between New York and the West Indies. Indeed, the Commissioner of Navigation, in his report for 1901, said: "For serious competition with foreign nations under the conditions now imposed upon ocean navigation, we are practically limited to our registered iron and steam steel vessels, which in all number 124, of 271,378 gross tons. Those under 1,000 gross tons are not now commercially available for oversea trade. There remains 4 steamships, each of over 10,000 gross tons; 5 of between 5,000 and 6,000 gross tons; 2 of between 4,000 and 5,000 tons; 18 between 3000 and 4000 tons; 35 between 2000 and 3000 tons, and 33 between 1000 and 2000 tons; in all 97 steamships over 1000 tons, aggregating 260,325 gross tons." Most of these are engaged in coastwise trade. The fleet of the Hamburg-American line alone, among our many foreign rivals, aggregates 515,628 gross tons. However, we must bear in mind that this seemingly insignificant place held by the United States merchant marine represents only the part it holds in the international carrying trade of the world. Such a country as Germany must expend all its maritime energies on international trade. It has little or no river and coastwise traffic. But the United States is a little world in itself; not so very small, and of late years growing greater. Our wide extended coasts on Atlantic, Pacific, and the Mexican Gulf, are bordered by rich States crowded with a people who produce and consume more per capita than any other race. From the oceans great navigable rivers, deep bays, and placid sounds, extend into the very heart of the country. The Great Lakes are bordered by States more populous and cities more busy and enterprising than those, which in the proudest days of Rome, and Carthage and Venice skirted the Mediterranean and the Adriatic. The traffic of all these trade highways is by legislation reserved for American ships alone. On the Great Lakes has sprung up a merchant marine rivaling that of some of the foremost maritime peoples, and conducting a traffic that puts to shame the busiest maritime highways of Europe. Long Island Sound bears on its placid bosom steamships that are the marvel of the traveling public the world over. The Hudson, the Ohio, the Mississippi, are all great arteries through which the life current of trade is ceaselessly flowing. A book might be written on the one subject of the part that river navigation has played in developing the interior States of this Union. Another could well be devoted to the history of lake navigation, which it is no overstatement to pronounce the most impressive chapter in the history of the American merchant marine. In this volume, however, but brief attention can be given to either. The figures show how honorably our whole body of shipping compares in volume to that operated by any maritime people. Our total registered shipping engaged in the fisheries, coastwise, and lake traffic, and foreign trade numbered at the beginning of 1902, 24,057 vessels, with an aggregate tonnage of 5,524,218 tons. In domestic trade alone we had 4,582,683 tons, or an amount exceeding the total tonnage of Germany and Norway combined, or of Germany and France. Only England excelled us, but her lead, which in 1860 was inconsiderable, in 1901 was prodigious; the British flag flying over no less than 14,261,254 tons of shipping, more than three times our tonnage! It is proper to note that more than two-thirds of our registered tonnage is of wood. [Illustration: THERE ARE BUILDING IN AMERICAN YARDS ] I have already given reasons why, in the natural course of things, this disparity between the American and the British foreign-going merchant marine will not long continue. And indeed, as this book is writing, it is apparent that its end is near. Though shipyards have multiplied fast in the last five years of the nineteenth century, the first years of the new century found them all occupied up to the very limit of their capacity. Yards that began, like the Cramps, building United States warships and finding little other work, were soon under contract to build men-of-war for Russia and Japan. The interest of the people in the navy afforded a great stimulus to shipbuilding. It is told of one of the principal yards, that its promotor went to Washington with a bid for naval construction in his pocket, but without either a shipyard or capital wherewith to build one. He secured a contract for two ships, and capital readily interested itself in his project. When that contract is out of the way the yard will enter the business of building merchant vessels, just as several yards, which long had their only support from naval contracts, are now doing. There were built in the year ending June 30, 1901, in American yards, 112 vessels of over 1000 tons each, or a total of 311,778. Many of these were lake vessels; some were wooden ships. Of modern steel steamers, built on the seaboard, there were but sixteen. At the present moment there are building in American yards, or contracted for, almost 255,325 tons of steel steamships, to be launched within a year--or 89 vessels, more than twice the output of any year in our history, and an impressive earnest for the future. Nor is this rapid increase in the ship-building activity of the United States accompanied by any reduction in the wages of the American working men. Their high wages, of which ship-builders complain, and in which everyone else rejoices, remain high. But it has been demonstrated to the satisfaction, even of foreign observers, that the highly-paid American labor is the most effective, and in the end the cheapest. Our workingmen know how to use modern tools, to make compressed air, steam, electricity do their work at every possible point, and while the United States still ranks far below England as a ship-building center, Englishmen, Germans, and Frenchmen are coming over here to learn how we build the ships that we do build. If it has not yet been demonstrated that we can build ships as cheaply as any other nation, we are so near the point of demonstration, that it may be said to be expected momentarily. With the cheapest iron in the world, we have at least succeeded in making steel, the raw material of the modern ship, cheaper than it can be made elsewhere, and that accomplished, our primacy in the matter of ship-building is a matter of the immediate future. A picturesque illustration of this change is afforded by the fact that in 1894 the plates of the "Dirigo," the first steel square-rigged vessel built in the United States, were imported from England. In 1898 we exported to England some of the plates for the "Oceanic," the largest vessel built to that time. Even the glory, such as it may be, of building the biggest ship of the time is now well within the grasp of the United States. At this writing, indeed, the biggest ship is the "Celtic," British built, and of 20,000 tons. But the distinction is only briefly for her, for at New London, Connecticut, two ponderous iron fabrics are rising on the ways that presently shall take form as ocean steamships of 25,000 tons each, to fly the American flag, and to ply between Seattle and China. These great ships afford new illustrations of more than one point already made in this chapter. To begin with they are, of course, not constructed for any individual owner. Time was that the farmer with land sloping down to New London would put in his spare time building a staunch schooner of 200 tons, man her with his neighbors, and engage for himself in the world's carrying trade. It is rather different now. The Northern Pacific railroad directors concluded that their railroad could not be developed to its fullest earning capacity without some way of carrying to the markets of the far East the agricultural products gathered up along its line. As the tendency of the times is toward gathering all branches of a business under one control, they determined to not rely upon independent shipowners, but to build their own vessels. That meant the immediate letting of a contract for $5,000,000 worth of ship construction, and that in turn meant that there was a profit to somebody in starting an entirely new shipyard to do the work. So, suddenly, one of the sleepiest little towns in New England, Groton, opposite New London, was turned into a ship-building port. The two great Northern Pacific ships will be launched about the time this book is published, but the yard by that time will have become a permanent addition to the ship-building enterprises of the United States. So, too, all along the Atlantic coast, we find ancient shipyards where, in the very earliest colonial days, wooden vessels were built, adapting themselves to the construction of the new steel steamships. How wonderful is the contrast between the twentieth century, steel, triple-screw, 25,000-ton, electric-lighted, 25-knot steamship, and Winthrop's little "Blessing of the Bay," or Fulton's "Clermont," or even the ships of the Collins line--floating palaces as they were called at the time! Time has made commonplace the proportions of the "Great Eastern," the marine marvel not only of her age, but of the forty years that succeeded her breaking-up as impracticable on account of size. She was 19,000 tons, 690 feet long, and built with both paddle-wheels and a screw. The "Celtic" is 700 feet long, 20,000 tons, with twin screws. The one was too big to be commercially valuable, the other has held the record for size only for a year, being already outclassed by the Northern Pacific 25,000-ton monsters. That one was a failure, the other a success, is almost wholly due to the improvements in engines, which effect economy of space both in the engine-room and in the coal bunkers. It is, by the way, rather a curious illustration of the growing luxury of life, and of ocean travel, that the first voyage of this enormous ship was made as a yacht, carrying a party of pleasure-seekers, with not a pound of cargo, through the show places of the Mediterranean. It will be interesting to chronicle here some of the characteristics of the most modern of ocean steamships, and to show by the use of some figures, the enormous proportions to which their business has attained. For this purpose it will be necessary to use figures drawn from the records of foreign lines, and from such vessels as the "Deutschland" and the "Celtic," although the purpose of this book is to tell the story of the American merchant marine. But the figures given will be approximately correct for the great American ships now building, while there are not at present in service any American passenger ships which are fairly representative of the twentieth century liner. The "Celtic," for example, will carry 3,294 persons, of whom 2,859 will be passengers. That is, it could furnish comfortable accommodations, heated and lighted, with ample food for all the students in Harvard University, or the University of Michigan, or Columbia University, or all in Amherst, Dartmouth, Cornell, and Williams combined. If stood on end she would almost attain the height of the Washington monument placed on the roof of the Capitol at Washington. She has nine decks, and a few years ago, if converted into a shore edifice, might fairly have been reckoned in the "skyscraper" class. Her speed, as she was built primarily for capacity is only about seventeen knots, and to attain that she burns about 260 tons of coal a day. The "Deutschland," which holds the ocean record for speed, burns nearly 600 tons of coal a day, and with it carries through the seas only 16,000 tons as against the "Celtic's" 20,000. But she is one of the modern vessels built especially to carry passengers. In her hold, huge as it is, there is room for only about 600 tons of cargo, and she seldom carries more than one-sixth of that amount. One voyage of this great ship costs about $45,000, and even at that heavy expense, she is a profit earner, so great is the volume of transatlantic travel and so ready are people to pay for speed and luxury. Her coal alone costs $5,000 a trip, and the expenses of the table, laundry, etc., equal those of the most luxurious hotel. But will ever these great liners, these huge masses of steel, guided by electricity and sped by steam, build up anew the race of American sailors? Who shall say now? To-day they are manned by Scandinavians and officered, in the main, by the seamen of the foreign nations whose flags they float. But the American is an adaptable type. He at once attends upon changing conditions and conquers them. He turned from the sea to the railroads when that seemed to be the course of progress; he may retrace his steps now that the pendulum seems to swing the other way. And if he finds under the new regime less chance for the hardy topman, no opportunity for the shrewd trader to a hundred ports, the gates closed to the man of small capital, yet be sure he will conquer fate in some way. We have seen it in the armed branch of the seafaring profession only within a few months. When the fine old sailing frigates vanished from the seas, when the "Constitution" and the "Hartford" became as obsolete as the caravels of Columbus, when a navy officer found that electricity and steam were more serious problems in his calling than sails and rigging, and a bluejacket could be with the best in his watch without ever having learned to furl a royal, then said everybody: "The naval profession has gone to the dogs. Its romance has departed. Our ships should be manned from our boiler shops, and officered from our institutions of technology. There will be no more Decaturs, Somerses, Farraguts, Cushings." And then came on the Spanish war and the rush of the "Oregon" around Cape Horn, the cool thrust of Dewey's fleet into the locked waters of Manila Bay, the plucky fight and death of Bagley at Cardenas, the braving of death by Hobson at Santiago, and the complete destruction of Cervera's fleet by Schley showed that Americans could fight as well in steel ships as in wooden ones. Nor can we doubt that the history of the next half-century will show that the new order at sea will breed a new race of American seamen able as in the past to prove themselves masters of the deep. CHAPTER III AN UGLY FEATURE OF EARLY SEAFARING--THE SLAVE TRADE AND ITS PROMOTERS--PART PLAYED BY EMINENT NEW ENGLANDERS--HOW THE TRADE GREW UP--THE PIOUS AUSPICES WHICH SURROUNDED THE TRAFFIC--SLAVE-STEALING AND SABBATH-BREAKING--CONDITIONS OF THE TRADE--SIZE OF THE VESSELS--HOW THE CAPTIVES WERE TREATED--MUTINIES, MAN-STEALING, AND MURDER--THE REVELATIONS OF THE ABOLITION SOCIETY--EFFORTS TO BREAK UP THE TRADE--AN AWFUL RETRIBUTION--ENGLAND LEADS THE WAY--DIFFICULTY OF ENFORCING THE LAW--AMERICA'S SHAME--THE END OF THE EVIL--THE LAST SLAVER. At the foot of Narragansett Bay, with the surges of the open ocean breaking fiercely on its eastward side, and a sheltered harbor crowded with trim pleasure craft, leading up to its rotting wharves, lies the old colonial town of Newport. A holiday place it is to-day, a spot of splendor and of wealth almost without parallel in the world. From the rugged cliffs on its seaward side great granite palaces stare, many-windowed, over the Atlantic, and velvet lawns slope down to the rocks. These are the homes of the people who, in the last fifty years, have brought new life and new riches to Newport. But down in the old town you will occasionally come across a fine old colonial mansion, still retaining some signs of its former grandeur, while scattered about the island to the north are stately old farmhouses and homesteads that show clearly enough the existence in that quiet spot of wealth and comfort for these one hundred and fifty years. Looking upon Newport to-day, and finding it all so fair, it seems hard to believe that the foundation of all its wealth and prosperity rested upon the most cruel, the most execrable, the most inhuman traffic that ever was plied by degraded men--the traffic in slaves. Yet in the old days the trade was far from being held either cruel inhuman--indeed, vessels often set sail for the Bight of Benin to swap rum for slaves, after their owners had invoked the blessing of God upon their enterprise. Nor were its promoters held by the community to be degraded. Indeed, some of the most eminent men in the community engaged in it, and its receipts were so considerable that as early as 1729 one-half of the impost levied on slaves imported into the colony was appropriated to pave the streets of the town and build its bridges--however, we are not informed that the streets were very well paved. It was not at Newport, however, nor even in New England that the importation of slaves first began, though for reasons which I will presently show, the bulk of the traffic in them fell ultimately to New Englanders. The first African slaves in America were landed by a Dutch vessel at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. The last kidnapped Africans were brought here probably some time in the latter part of 1860--for though the traffic was prohibited in 1807, the rigorous blockade of the ports of the Confederacy during the Civil War was necessary to bring it actually to an end. The amount of human misery which that frightful traffic entailed during those 240 years almost baffles the imagination. The bloody Civil War which had, perhaps, its earliest cause in the landing of those twenty blacks at Jamestown, was scarcely more than a fitting penalty, and there was justice in the fact that it fell on North and South alike, for if the South clung longest to slavery, it was the North--even abolition New England--which had most to do with establishing it on this continent. However, it is not with slavery, but with the slave trade we have to do. Circumstances largely forced upon the New England colonies their unsavory preëminence in this sort of commerce. To begin with, their people were as we have already seen, distinctively the seafaring folk of North America. Again, one of their earliest methods of earning a livelihood was in the fisheries, and that curiously enough, led directly to the trade in slaves. To sell the great quantities of fish they dragged up from the Banks or nearer home, foreign markets must needs be found. England and the European countries took but little of this sort of provender, and moreover England, France, Holland, and Portugal had their own fishing fleets on the Banks. The main markets for the New Englanders then were the West India Islands, the Canaries, and Madeira. There the people were accustomed to a fish diet and, indeed, were encouraged in it by the frequent fastdays of the Roman Catholic church, of which most were devout members. A voyage to the Canaries with fish was commonly prolonged to the west coast of Africa, where slaves were bought with rum. Thence the vessel would proceed to the West Indies where the slaves would be sold, a large part of the purchase price being taken in molasses, which, in its turn, was distilled into rum at home, to be used for buying more slaves--for in this traffic little of actual worth was paid for the hapless captives. Fiery rum, usually adulterated and more than ever poisonous, was all the African chiefs received for their droves of human cattle. For it they sold wives and children, made bloody war and sold their captives, kidnapped and sold their human booty. Nothing in the history of our people shows so strikingly the progress of man toward higher ideals, toward a clearer sense of the duties of humanity and the rightful relation of the strong toward the weak, than the changed sentiment concerning the slave trade. In its most humane form the thought of that traffic to-day fills us with horror. The stories of its worst phases seem almost incredible, and we wonder that men of American blood could have been such utter brutes. But two centuries ago the foremost men of New England engaged in the trade or profited by its fruits. Peter Fanueil, who-built for Boston that historic hall which we call the Cradle of Liberty, and which in later years resounded with the anti-slavery eloquence of Garrison and Phillips, was a slave owner and an actual participant in the trade. The most "respectable" merchants of Providence and Newport were active slavers--just as some of the most respectable merchants and manufacturers of to-day make merchandise of white men, women, and children, whose slavery is none the less slavery because they are driven by the fear of starvation instead of the overseer's lash. Perhaps two hundred years from now our descendants will see the criminality of our industrial system to-day, as clearly as we see the wrong in that of our forefathers. The utmost piety was observed in setting out a slave-buying expedition. The commissions were issued "by the Grace of God," divine guidance was implored for the captain who was to swap fiery rum for stolen children, and prayers were not infrequently offered for long delayed or missing slavers. George Dowing, a Massachusetts clergyman, wrote of slavery in Barbadoes: "I believe they have bought this year no less than a thousand negroes, and the more they buie, the better able they are to buie, for in a year and a half they will earne _with God's blessing_, as much as they cost." Most of the slaves brought from the coast of Guinea in New England vessels were deported again--sent to the southern States or to the West Indies for a market. The climate and the industrial conditions of New England were alike unfavorable to the growth there of slavery, and its ports served chiefly as clearing-houses for the trade. Yet there was not even among the most enlightened and leading people of the colony any moral sentiment against slavery, and from Boston to New York slaves were held in small numbers and their prices quoted in the shipping lists and newspapers like any other merchandise. Curiously enough, the first African slaves brought to Boston were sent home again and their captors prosecuted--not wholly for stealing men, but for breaking the Sabbath. It happened in this way: A Boston ship, the "Rainbow," in 1645, making the usual voyage to Madeira with staves and salt fish, touched on the coast of Guinea for a few slaves. Her captain found the English slavers on the ground already, mightily discontented, for the trade was dull. It was still the time when there was a pretense of legality about the method of procuring the slaves; they were supposed to be malefactors convicted of crime, or at the very least, prisoners taken by some native king in war. In later years the native kings, animated by an ever-growing thirst for the white man's rum, declared war in order to secure captives, and employed decoys to lure young men into the commission of crime. These devices for keeping the man-market fully supplied had not at this time been invented, and the captains of the slavers, lying off a dangerous coast in the boiling heat of a tropical country, grew restive at the long delay. Perhaps some of the rum they had brought to trade for slaves inflamed their own blood. At any rate, dragging ashore a small cannon called significantly enough a "murderer," they attacked a village, killed many of its people, and brought off a number of blacks, two of whom fell to the lot of the captain of the "Rainbow," and were by him taken to Boston. He found no profit, however, in his piratical venture, for the story coming out, he was accused in court of "murder, man-stealing, and Sabbath-breaking," and his slaves were sent home. It was wholly as merchandise that the blacks were regarded. It is impossible to believe that the brutalities of the traffic could have been tolerated so long had the idea of the essential humanity of the Africa been grasped by those who dealt in them. Instead, they were looked upon as a superior sort of cattle, but on the long voyage across the Atlantic were treated as no cattle are treated to-day in the worst "ocean tramps" in the trade. The vessels were small, many of them half the size of the lighters that ply sluggishly up and down New York harbor. Sloops, schooners, brigantines, and scows of 40 or 50 tons burden, carrying crews of nine men including the captain and mates, were the customary craft in the early days of the eighteenth century. In his work on "The American Slave-Trade," Mr. John R. Spears gives the dimensions of some of these puny vessels which were so heavily freighted with human woe. The first American slaver of which we have record was the "Desire," of Marblehead, 120 tons. Later vessels, however, were much smaller. The sloop, "Welcome," had a capacity of 5000 gallons of molasses. The "Fame" was 79 feet long on the keel--about a large yacht's length. In 1847, some of the captured slavers had dimensions like these: The "Felicidade" 67 tons; the "Maria" 30 tons; the "Rio Bango" 10 tons. When the trade was legal and regulated by law, the "Maria" would have been permitted to carry 45 slaves--or one and one-half to each ton register. In 1847, the trade being outlawed, no regulations were observed, and this wretched little craft imprisoned 237 negroes. But even this 10-ton slaver was not the limit. Mr. Spears finds that open rowboats, no more than 24 feet long by 7 wide, landed as many as 35 children in Brazil out of say 50 with which the voyage began. But the size of the vessels made little difference in the comfort of the slaves. Greed packed the great ones equally with the small. The blacks, stowed in rows between decks, the roof barely 3 feet 10 inches above the floor on which they lay side by side, sometimes in "spoon-fashion" with from 10 to 16 inches surface-room for each, endured months of imprisonment. Often they were so packed that the head of one slave would be between the thighs of another, and in this condition they would pass the long weeks which the Atlantic passage under sail consumed. This, too, when the legality of the slave trade was recognized, and nothing but the dictates of greed led to overcrowding. Time came when the trade was put under the ban of law and made akin to piracy. Then the need for fast vessels restricted hold room and the methods of the trade attained a degree of barbarity that can not be paralleled since the days of Nero. [Illustration: "A FAVORITE TRICK OF THE FLEEING SLAVER WAS TO THROW OVER SLAVES"] Shackled together "spoon-wise," as the phrase was, they suffered and sweltered through the long middle passage, dying by scores, so that often a fifth of the cargo perished during the voyage. The stories of those who took part in the effort to suppress the traffic give some idea of its frightful cruelty. The Rev. Pascoa Grenfell Hill, a chaplain in the British navy, once made a short voyage on a slaver which his ship, the "Cleopatra," had captured. The vessel had a full cargo, and when the capture was effected, the negroes were all brought on deck for exercise and fresh air. The poor creatures quite understood the meaning of the sudden change in their masters, and kissed the hands and clothing of their deliverers. The ship was headed for the Cape of Good Hope, where the slaves were to be liberated; but a squall coming on, all were ordered below again. "The night," enters Mr. Hill in his journal, "being intensely hot, four hundred wretched beings thus crammed into a hold twelve yards in length, seven feet in breadth, and only three and one-half feet in height, speedily began to make an effort to reissue to the open air. Being thrust back and striving the more to get out, the afterhatch was forced down upon them. Over the other hatchway, in the fore part of the vessel, a wooden grating was fastened. To this, the sole inlet for the air, the suffocating heat of the hold and, perhaps, panic from the strangeness of their situation, made them flock, and thus a great part of the space below was rendered useless. They crowded to the grating and clinging to it for air, completely barred its entrance. They strove to force their way through apertures in length fourteen inches and barely six inches in breadth, and in some instances succeeded. The cries, the heat, I may say without exaggeration, the smoke of their torment which ascended can be compared to nothing earthly. One of the Spaniards gave warning that the consequences would be 'many deaths;' this prediction was fearfully verified, for the next morning 54 crushed and mangled corpses were brought to the gangway and thrown overboard. Some were emaciated from disease, many bruised and bloody. Antoine tells me that some were found strangled; their hands still grasping each others' throats." It is of a Brazilian slaver that this awful tale is told, but the event itself was paralleled on more than one American ship. Occasionally we encounter stories of ships destroyed by an exploding magazine, and the slaves, chained to the deck, going down with the wreck. Once a slaver went ashore off Jamaica, and the officers and crew speedily got out the boats and made for the beach, leaving the human cargo to perish. When dawn broke it was seen that the slaves had rid themselves of their fetters and were busily making rafts on which the women and children were put, while the men, plunging into the sea, swam alongside, and guided the rafts toward the shore. Now mark what the white man, the supposed representative of civilization and Christianity, did. Fearing that the negroes would exhaust the store of provisions and water that had been landed, they resolved to destroy them while still in the water. As soon as the rafts came within range, those on shore opened fire with rifles and muskets with such deadly effect that between three hundred and four hundred blacks were murdered. Only thirty-four saved themselves--and for what? A few weeks later they were sold in the slave mart at Kingston. [Illustration: DEALERS WHO CAME ON BOARD WERE THEMSELVES KIDNAPPED] In the early days of the trade, the captains dealt with recognized chiefs along the coast of Guinea, who conducted marauding expeditions into the interior to kidnap slaves. Rum was the purchase price, and by skillful dilution, a competent captain was able to double the purchasing value of his cargo. The trade was not one calculated to develop the highest qualities of honor, and to swindling the captains usually added theft and murder. Any negro who came near the ship to trade, or through motives of curiosity, was promptly seized and thrust below. Dealers who came on board with kidnapped negroes were themselves kidnapped after the bargain was made. Never was there any inquiry into the title of the seller. Any slave offered was bought, though the seller had no right--even under legalized slavery--to sell. A picturesque story was told in testimony before the English House of Commons. To a certain slaver lying off the Windward coast a girl was brought in a canoe by a well-known black trader, who took his pay and paddled off. A few moments later another canoe with two blacks came alongside and inquired for the girl. They were permitted to see her and declared she had been kidnapped; but the slaver, not at all put out by that fact, refused to give her up. Thereupon the blacks paddled swiftly off after her seller, overtook, and captured him. Presently they brought him back to the deck of the ship--an article of merchandise, where he had shortly before been a merchant. "You won't buy me," cried the captive. "I a grand trading man! I bring you slaves." But no scruples entered the mind of the captain of the slaver. "If they will sell you I certainly will buy you," he answered, and soon the kidnapped kidnapper was in irons and thrust below in the noisome hold with the unhappy being he had sent there. A multitude of cases of negro slave-dealers being seized in this way, after disposing of their human cattle, are recorded. It is small wonder that torn thus from home and relatives, immured in filthy and crowded holds, ill fed, denied the two great gifts of God to man--air and water--subjected to the brutality of merciless men, and wholly ignorant of the fate in store for them, many of the slaves should kill themselves. As they had a salable value the captains employed every possible device to defeat this end--every device, that is, except kind treatment, which was beyond the comprehension of the average slaver. Sometimes the slaves would try to starve themselves to death. This the captains met by torture with the cat and thumbscrews. There is a horrible story in the testimony before the English House of Commons about a captain who actually whipped a nine-months-old child to death trying to force it to eat, and then brutally compelled the mother to throw the lacerated little body overboard. Another captain found that his captives were killing themselves, in the belief that their spirits would return to their old home. By way of meeting this superstition, he announced that all who died in this way should have their heads cut off, so that if they did return to their African homes, it would be as headless spirits. The outcome of this threat was very different from what the captain had anticipated. When a number of the slaves were brought on deck to witness the beheading of the body of one of their comrades, they seized the occasion to leap overboard and were drowned. Many sought death in this way, and as they were usually good swimmers, they actually forced themselves to drown, some persistently holding their heads under water, others raising their arms high above their heads, and in one case two who died together clung to each other so that neither could swim. Every imaginable way in which death could be sought was employed by these hopeless blacks, though, indeed, the hardships of the voyage were such as to bring it often enough unsought. When the ship's hold was full the voyage was begun, while from the suffering blacks below, unused to seafaring under any circumstances, and desperately sick in their stifling quarters, there arose cries and moans as if the cover were taken off of purgatory. The imagination recoils from the thought of so much human wretchedness. The publications of some of the early anti-slavery associations tell of the inhuman conditions of the trade. In an unusually commodious ship carrying over six hundred slaves, we are told that "platforms, or wide shelves, were erected between the decks, extending so far from the side toward the middle of the vessel as to be capable of containing four additional rows of slaves, by which means the perpendicular height between each tier was, after allowing for the beams and platforms, reduced to three feet, six inches, so that they could not even sit in an erect posture, besides which in the men's apartment, instead of four rows, five were stowed by putting the head of one between the thighs of another." In another ship, "In the men's apartment the space allowed to each is six feet length by sixteen inches in breadth, the boys are each allowed five feet by fourteen inches, the women five feet, ten by sixteen inches, and the girls four feet by one foot each." "A man in his coffin has more room than one of these blacks," is the terse way in which witness after witness before the British House of Commons described the miserable condition of the slaves on shipboard. An amazing feature of this detestable traffic is the smallness and often the unseaworthiness of the vessels in which it was carried on. Few such picayune craft now venture outside the landlocked waters of Long Island Sound, or beyond the capes of the Delaware and Chesapeake. In the early days of the eighteenth century hardy mariners put out in little craft, the size of a Hudson River brick-sloop or a harbor lighter, and made the long voyage to the Canaries and the African West Coast, withstood the perils of a prolonged anchorage on a dangerous shore, went thence heavy laden with slaves to the West Indies, and so home. To cross the Atlantic was a matter of eight or ten weeks; the whole voyage would commonly take five or six months. Nor did the vessels always make up in stanchness for their diminutive proportions. Almost any weather-beaten old hulk was thought good enough for a slaver. Captain Linsday, of Newport, who wrote home from Aumboe, said: "I should be glad I cood come rite home with my slaves, for my vessel will not last to proceed far. We can see daylight all round her bow under deck." But he was not in any unusual plight. And not only the perils of the deep had to be encountered, but other perils, some bred of man's savagery, then more freely exhibited than now, others necessary to the execrable traffic in peaceful blacks. It as a time of constant wars and the seas swarmed with French privateers alert for fat prizes. When a slaver met a privateer the battle was sure to be a bloody one for on either side fought desperate men--one party following as a trade legalized piracy and violent theft of cargoes, the other employed in the violent theft of men and women, and the incitement of murder and rapine that their cargoes might be the fuller. There would have been but scant loss to mankind in most of these conflicts had privateer and slaver both gone to the bottom. Not infrequently the slavers themselves turned pirate or privateer for the time--sometimes robbing a smaller craft of its load of slaves, sometimes actually running up the black flag and turning to piracy for a permanent calling. In addition to the ordinary risks of shipwreck or capture the slavers encountered perils peculiar to their calling. Once in a while the slaves would mutiny, though such is the gentle and almost childlike nature of the African negro that this seldom occurred. The fear of it, however, was ever present to the captains engaged in the trade, and to guard against it the slaves--always the men and sometimes the women as well--were shackled together in pairs. Sometimes they were even fastened to the floor of the dark and stifling hold in which they were immured for months at a time. If heavy weather compelled the closing of the hatches, or if disease set in, as it too often did, the morning would find the living shackled to the dead. In brief, to guard against insurrection the captains made the conditions of life so cruel that the slaves were fairly forced to revolt. In 1759 a case of an uprising that was happily successful was recorded. The slaver "Perfect," Captain Potter, lay at anchor at Mana with one hundred slaves aboard. The mate, second mate, the boatswain, and about half the crew were sent into the interior to buy some more slaves. Noticing the reduced numbers of their jailors, the slaves determined to rise. Ridding themselves of their irons, they crowded to the deck, and, all unarmed as they were, killed the captain, the surgeon, the carpenter, the cooper, and a cabin-boy. Whereupon the remainder of the crew took to the boats and boarded a neighboring slaver, the "Spencer." The captain of this craft prudently declined to board the "Perfect," and reduce the slaves to subjection again; but he had no objection to slaughtering naked blacks at long range, so he warped his craft into position and opened fire with his guns. For about an hour this butchery was continued, and then such of the slaves as still lived, ran the schooner ashore, plundered, and burnt her. [Illustration: "THE ROPE WAS PUT AROUND HIS NECK"] How such insurrections were put down was told nearly a hundred years later in an official communication to Secretary of State James Buchanan, by United States Consul George W. Gordon, the story being sworn testimony before him. The case was that of the slaver "Kentucky," which carried 530 slaves. An insurrection which broke out was speedily suppressed, but fearing lest the outbreak should be repeated, the captain determined to give the wretched captives an "object lesson" by punishing the ringleaders. This is how he did it: "They were ironed, or chained, two together, and when they were hung, a rope was put around their necks and they were drawn up to the yard-arm clear of the sail. This did not kill them, but only choked or strangled them. They were then shot in the breast and the bodies thrown overboard. If only one of two that were ironed together was to be hung, the rope was put around his neck and he was drawn up clear of the deck, and his leg laid across the rail and chopped off to save the irons and release him from his companion, who at the same time lifted up his leg until the other was chopped off as aforesaid, and he released. The bleeding negro was then drawn up, shot in the breast and thrown overboard. The legs of about one dozen were chopped off this way. "When the feet fell on the deck they were picked up by the crew and thrown overboard, and sometimes they shot at the body while it still hung, living, and all sorts of sport was made of the business." Forty-six men and one woman were thus done to death: "When the woman was hung up and shot, the ball did not take effect, and she was thrown overboard living, and was seen to struggle some time in the water before she sunk;" and deponent further says, "that after this was over, they brought up and flogged about twenty men and six women. The flesh of some of them where they were flogged putrified, and came off, in some cases, six or eight inches in diameter, and in places half an inch thick." This was in 1839, a time when Americans were very sure that for civilization, progress, humanity, and the Christian virtues, they were at least on as high a plane as the most exalted peoples of the earth. Infectious disease was one of the grave perils with which the slavers had to reckon. The overcrowding of the slaves, the lack of exercise and fresh air, the wretched and insufficient food, all combined to make grave, general sickness an incident of almost every voyage, and actual epidemics not infrequent. This was a peril that moved even the callous captains and their crews, for scurvy or yellow-jack developing in the hold was apt to sweep the decks clear as well. A most gruesome story appears in all the books on the slave trade, of the experience of the French slaver, "Rodeur." With a cargo of 165 slaves, she was on the way to Guadaloupe in 1819, when opthalmia--a virulent disease of the eyes--appeared among the blacks. It spread rapidly, though the captain, in hopes of checking its ravages, threw thirty-six negroes into the sea alive. Finally it attacked the crew, and in a short time all save one man became totally blind. Groping in the dark, the helpless sailors made shift to handle the ropes, while the one man still having eyesight clung to the wheel. For days, in this wretched state, they made their slow way along the deep, helpless and hopeless. At last a sail was sighted. The "Rodeur's" prow is turned toward it, for there is hope, there rescue! As the stranger draws nearer, the straining eyes of the French helmsman discerns something strange and terrifying about her appearance. Her rigging is loose and slovenly, her course erratic, she seems to be idly drifting, and there is no one at the wheel. A derelict, abandoned at sea, she mocks their hopes of rescue. But she is not entirely deserted, for a faint shout comes across the narrowing strip of sea and is answered from the "Rodeur." The two vessels draw near. There can be no launching of boats by blind men, but the story of the stranger is soon told. She, too, is a slaver, a Spaniard, the "Leon," and on her, too, every soul is blind from opthalmia originating among the slaves. Not even a steersman has the "Leon." All light has gone out from her, and the "Rodeur" sheers away, leaving her to an unknown fate, for never again is she heard from. How wonderful the fate--or the Providence--that directed that upon all the broad ocean teeming with ships, engaged in honest or in criminal trade, the two that should meet must be the two on which the hand of God was laid most heavily in retribution for the suffering and the woe which white men and professed Christians were bringing to the peaceful and innocent blacks of Africa. It will be readily understood that the special and always menacing dangers attending the slave trade made marine insurance upon that sort of cargoes exceedingly high. Twenty pounds in the hundred was the usual figure in the early days. This heavy insurance led to a new form of wholesale murder committed by the captains. The policies covered losses resulting from jettisoning, or throwing overboard the cargo; they did not insure against loss from disease. Accordingly, when a slaver found his cargo infected, he would promptly throw into the sea all the ailing negroes, while still alive, in order to save the insurance. Some of the South American states, where slaves were bought, levied an import duty upon blacks, and cases are on record of captains going over their cargo outside the harbor and throwing into the sea all who by disease or for other causes, were rendered unsalable--thus saving both duty and insurance. In the clearer light which illumines the subject to-day, the prolonged difficulty which attended the destruction of the slave trade seems incredible. It appears that two such powerful maritime nations as Great Britain and the United States had only to decree the trade criminal and it would be abandoned. But we must remember that slaves were universally regarded as property, and an attempt to interfere with the right of their owners to carry them where they would on the high seas was denounced as an interference with property rights. We see that even to-day men are very tenacious of "property rights," and the law describes them as sacred--however immoral or repugnant to common sense and common humanity they may be. So the effort to abolish the "right" of a slaver to starve, suffocate, mutilate, torture, or murder a black man in whom he had acquired a property right by the simple process of kidnapping required more than half a century to attain complete success. The first serious blow to the slave-trade fell in 1772, when an English court declared that any slave coming into England straightway became free. That closed all English ports to the slavers. Two years after the American colonists, then on the threshold of the revolt against Great Britain, thought to put America on a like high plane, and formally resolved that they would "not purchase any slave imported after the first day of December next; after which time, we will wholly discontinue the slave-trade, and will neither be concerned in it ourselves, nor will we hire our vessels, nor sell our commodities or manufactures to those who are concerned in it." But to this praiseworthy determination the colonists were unable to live up, and in 1776, when Jefferson proposed to put into the Declaration of Independence the charge that the British King had forced the slave-trade on the colonies, a proper sense of their own guilt made the delegates oppose it. It was in England that the first earnest effort to break up the slave-trade began. It was under the Stars and Stripes that the slavers longest protected their murderous traffic. For a time the effort of the British humanitarians was confined to the amelioration of the conditions of the trade, prescribing space to be given each slave, prescribing surgeons, and offering bounties to be paid captains who lost less than two per cent. of their cargoes on the voyage. It is not recorded that the bounty was often claimed. On the contrary, the horrors of what was called "the middle passage" grew with the greed of the slave captains. But the revelations of inhumanity made during the parliamentary investigation were too shocking for even the indifferent and callous public sentiment of that day. Humane people saw at once that to attempt to regulate a traffic so abhorrent to every sense of humanity, was for the nation to go into partnership with murderers and manstealers, and so the demand for the absolute prohibition of the traffic gained strength from the futile attempt to regulate it. Bills for its abolition failed, now in the House of Lords, then in the House of Commons; but in 1807 a law prohibiting all participation in the trade by British ships or subjects was passed. The United States moved very slowly. Individual States under the old confederation prohibited slavery within their borders, and in some cases the slave trade; but when our forefathers came together to form that Constitution under which the nation still exists, the opposition of certain Southern States was so vigorous that the best which could be done was to authorize a tax on slaves of not more than ten dollars a head, and to provide that the traffic should not be prohibited before 1808. But there followed a series of acts which corrected the seeming failure of the constitutional convention. One prohibited American citizens "carrying on the slave trade from the United States to any foreign place or country." Another forbade the introduction of slaves into the Mississippi Territory. Others made it unlawful to carry slaves to States which prohibited the traffic, or to fit out ships for the foreign slave trade, or to serve on a slaver. The discussion caused by all these measures did much to build up a healthy public sentiment, and when 1808--the date set by the Constitution--came round, a prohibitory law was passed, and the President was authorized to use the armed vessels of the United States to give it force and effect. Notwithstanding this, however, the slave trade, though now illegal and outlawed, continued for fully half a century. Slaves were still stolen on the coast of Africa by New England sea captains, subjected to the pains and horrors of the middle passage, and smuggled into Georgia or South Carolina, to be eagerly bought by the Southern planters. A Congressman estimated that 20,000 blacks were thus smuggled into the United States annually. Lafitte's nest of pirates at Barataria was a regular slave depot; so, too, was Amelia Island, Florida. The profit on a slave smuggled into the United States amounted to $350 or $500, and the temptation was too great for men to be restrained by fear of a law, which prescribed but light penalties. It is even matter of record that a governor of Georgia resigned his office to enter the smuggling trade on a large scale. The scandal was notorious, and the rapidly growing abolition sentiment demanded that Congress so amend its laws as to make manstealers at least as subject to them as other malefactors. But Congress tried the politician's device of passing laws which would satisfy the abolitionists, the slave trader, and the slave owner as well. To-day the duty of the nation seems to have been so clear that we have scant patience with the paltering policy of Congress and the Executive that permitted half a century of profitable law-breaking. But we must remember that slaves were property, that dealing in them was immensely profitable, and that while New England wanted this profit the South wanted the blacks. Macaulay said that if any considerable financial interest could be served by denying the attraction of gravitation, there would be a very vigorous attack on that great physical truth. And so, as there were many financial interests concerned in protecting slavery, every effort to effectually abolish the trade was met by an outcry and by shrewd political opposition. The slaves were better off in the United States than at home, Congress was assured; they had the blessings of Christianity; were freed from the endless wars and perils of the African jungle. Moreover, they were needed to develop the South, while in the trade, the hardy and daring sailors were trained, who in time would make the American navy the great power of the deep. Political chicanery in Congress reinforced the clamor from without, and though act after act for the destruction of the traffic was passed, none proved to be enforcible--in each was what the politicians of a later day called a "little joker," making it ineffective. But in 1820 a law was passed declaring slave-trading piracy, and punishable with death. So Congress had done its duty at last, but it was long years before the Executive rightly enforced the law. It is needless to go into the details of the long series of Acts of Parliament and of Congress, treaties, conventions, and naval regulations, which gradually made the outlawry of the slaver on the ocean complete. In the humane work England took the lead, sacrificing the flourishing Liverpool slave-trade with all its allied interests; sacrificing, too, the immediate prosperity of its West Indian colonies, whose plantations were tilled exclusively with slave labor, and even paying heavy cash indemnity to Spain to secure her acquiescence. Unhappily, the United States was as laggard as England was active. Indeed, a curious manifestation of national pride made the American flag the slaver's badge of immunity, for the Government stubbornly--and properly--refused to grant to British cruisers the right to search vessels under our flag, and as there were few or no American men-of-war cruising on the African coast, the slaver under the Stars and Stripes was virtually immune from capture. In 1842 a treaty with Great Britain bound us to keep a considerable squadron on that coast, and thereafter there was at least some show of American hostility to the infamous traffic. The vitality of the traffic in the face of growing international hostility is to be explained by its increasing profits. The effect of the laws passed against it was to make slaves cheaper on the coast of Africa and dearer at the markets in America. A slave that cost $20 would bring $500 in Georgia. A ship carrying 500 would bring its owners $240,000, and there were plenty of men willing to risk the penalties of piracy for a share of such prodigious profits. Moreover, the seas swarmed then with adventurous sailors--mostly of American birth--to whom the very fact that slaving was outlawed made it more attractive. The years of European war had bred up among New Englanders a daring race of privateersmen--their vocation had long been piracy in all but name, a fact which in these later days the maritime nations recognize by trying to abolish privateering by international agreement. When the wars of the early years of the nineteenth century ended the privateersmen looked about for some seafaring enterprise which promised profit. A few became pirates, more went into the slave-trade. Men of this type were not merely willing to risk their lives in a criminal calling, but were quite as ready to fight for their property as to try to save it by flight. The slavers soon began to carry heavy guns, and with desperate crews were no mean antagonists for a man-of-war. Many of the vessels that had been built for privateers were in the trade, ready to fight a cruiser or rob a smaller slaver, as chance offered. We read of some carrying as many as twenty guns, and in that sea classic, "Tom Cringle's Log," there is a story--obviously founded on fact--of a fight between a British sloop-of-war and a slaver that gives a vivid idea of the desperation with which the outlaws could fight. But sometimes the odds were hopeless, and the slaver could not hope to escape by force of arms or by flight. Then the sternness of the law, together with a foolish rule concerning the evidence necessary to convict, resulted in the murder of the slaves, not by ones or twos, but by scores, and even hundreds, at a time. For it was the unwise ruling of the courts that actual presence of slaves on a captured ship was necessary to prove that she was engaged in the unlawful trade. Her hold might reek with the odor of the imprisoned blacks, her decks show unmistakable signs of their recent presence, leg-irons and manacles might bear dumb testimony to the purpose of her voyage, informers in the crew might even betray the captain's secret; but if the boarders from the man-of-war found no negroes on the ship, she went free. What was the natural result? When a slaver, chased by a cruiser, found that capture was certain, her cargo of slaves was thrown overboard. The cruiser in the distance might detect the frightful odor that told unmistakably of a slave-ship. Her officers might hear the screams of the unhappy blacks being flung into the sea. They might even see the bodies floating in the slaver's wake; but if, on boarding the suspected craft, they found her without a single captive, they could do nothing. This was the law for many years, and because of it thousands of slaves met a cruel death as the direct result of the effort to save them from slavery. Many stories are told of these wholesale drownings. The captain of the British cruiser "Black Joke" reports of a case in which he was pursuing two slave ships: "When chased by the tenders both put back, made all sail up the river, and ran on shore. During the chase they were seen from our vessels to throw the slaves overboard by twos, shackled together by the ankles, and left in this manner to sink or swim as best they could. Men, women, and children were seen in great numbers struggling in the water by everyone on board the two tenders, and, dreadful to relate, upward of 150 of these wretched creatures perished in this way." In this case, the slavers did not escape conviction, though the only penalty inflicted was the seizure of their vessels. The pursuers rescued some of the drowning negroes, who were able to testify that they had been on the suspected ship, and condemnation followed. The captain of the slaver "Brillante" took no chance of such a disaster. Caught by four cruisers in a dead calm, hidden from his enemy by the night, but with no chance of escaping before dawn, this man-stealer set about planning murder on a plan so large and with such system as perhaps has not been equaled since Caligula. First he had his heaviest anchor so swung that cutting a rope would drop it. Then the chain cable was stretched about the ship, outside the rail, and held up by light bits of rope, that would give way at any stout pull. Then the slaves--600 in all--were brought up from below, open-eyed, whispering, wondering what new act in the pitiful drama of their lives this midnight summons portended. With blows and curses the sailors ranged them along the rail and bound them to the chain cable. The anchor was cut loose, plunging into the sea it carried the cable and the shackled slaves with it to the bottom. The men on the approaching man-of-war's boats, heard a great wail of many voices, a rumble, a splash, then silence, and when they reached the ship its captain politely showed them that there were no slaves aboard, and laughed at their comments on the obvious signs of the recent presence of the blacks. [Illustration: "BOUND THEM TO THE CHAIN CABLE"] A favorite trick of the slaver, fleeing from a man-of-war, was to throw over slaves a few at a time in the hope that the humanity of the pursuers would impel them to stop and rescue the struggling negroes, thus giving the slave-ship a better chance of escape. Sometimes these hapless blacks thus thrown out, as legend has it Siberian peasants sometimes throw out their children as ransom to pursuing wolves, were furnished with spars or barrels to keep them afloat until the pursuer should come up; and occasionally they were even set adrift by boat-loads. It was hard on the men of the navy to steel their hearts to the cries of these castaways as the ship sped by them; but if the great evil was to be broken up it could not be by rescuing here and there a slave, but by capturing and punishing the traders. Many officers of our navy have left on record their abhorrence of the service they were thus engaged in, but at the same time expressed their conviction that it was doing the work of humanity. They were obliged to witness such human suffering as might well move the stoutest human heart. At times they were even forced to seem as merciless to the blacks as the slave-traders themselves; but in the end their work, like the merciful cruelty of the surgeon, made for good. When a slaver was overhauled after so swift a chase that her master had no opportunity to get rid of his damning cargo, the boarding officers saw sights that scarce Inferno itself could equal. To look into her hold, filled with naked, writhing, screaming, struggling negroes was a sight that one could see once and never forget. The effluvium that arose polluted even the fresh air of the ocean, and burdened the breeze for miles to windward. The first duty of the boarding officer was to secure the officers of the craft with their papers. Not infrequently such vessels would be provided with two captains and two sets of papers, to be used according to the nationality of the warship that might make the capture; but the men of all navies cruising on the slave coast came in time to be expert in detecting such impostures. The crew once under guard, the first task was to alleviate in some degree the sufferings of the slaves. But this was no easy task, for the overcrowded vessel could not be enlarged, and its burden could in no way be decreased in mid-ocean. Even if near the coast of Africa, the negroes could not be released by the simple process of landing them at the nearest point, for the land was filled with savage tribes, the captives were commonly from the interior, and would merely have been murdered or sold anew into slavery, had they been thus abandoned. In time the custom grew up of taking them to Liberia, the free negro state established in Africa under the protection of the United States. But it can hardly be said that much advantage resulted to the individual negroes rescued by even this method, for the Liberians were not hospitable, slave traders camped upon the borders of their state, and it was not uncommon for a freed slave to find himself in a very few weeks back again in the noisome hold of the slaver. Even under the humane care of the navy officers who were put in command of captured slavers the human cattle suffered grievously. Brought on deck at early dawn, they so crowded the ships that it was almost impossible for the sailors to perform the tasks of navigation. One officer, who was put in charge of a slaver that carried 700 slaves, writes: "They filled the waist and gangways in a fearful jam, for there were over 700 men, women, boys, and young girls. Not even a waistcloth can be permitted among slaves on board ship, since clothing even so slight would breed disease. To ward off death, ever at work on a slave ship, I ordered that at daylight the negroes should be taken in squads of twenty or more, and given a salt-water bath by the hose-pipe of the pumps. This brought renewed life after their fearful nights on the slave deck.... No one who has never seen a slave deck can form an idea of its horrors. Imagine a deck about 20 feet wide, and perhaps 120 feet long, and 5 feet high. Imagine this to be the place of abode and sleep during long, hot, healthless nights of 720 human beings! At sundown, when they were carried below, trained slaves received the poor wretches one by one, and laying each creature on his side in the wings, packed the next against him, and the next, and the next, and so on, till like so many spoons packed away they fitted into each other a living mass. Just as they were packed so must they remain, for the pressure prevented any movement or the turning of hand or foot, until the next morning, when from their terrible night of horror they were brought on deck once more, weak and worn and sick." Then, after all had come up and been splashed with salt water from the pumps, men went below to bring up the dead. There was never a morning search of this sort that was fruitless. The stench, the suffocation, the confinement, oftentimes the violence of a neighbor, brought to every dawn its tale, of corpses, and with scant gentleness all were brought up and thrown over the side to the waiting sharks. The officer who had this experience writes also that it was thirty days after capturing the slaver before he could land his helpless charges. No great moral evil can long continue when the attention of men has been called to it, and when their consciences, benumbed by habit, have been aroused to appreciation of the fact that it is an evil. To be sure, we, with the accumulated knowledge of our ancestors and our minds filled with a horror which their teachings instilled, sometimes think that they were slow to awaken to the enormity of some evils they tolerated. So perhaps our grandchildren may wonder that we endured, and even defended, present-day conditions, which to them will appear indefensible. And so looking back on the long continuance of the slave-trade, we wonder that it could have made so pertinacious a fight for life. We marvel, too, at the character of some of the men engaged in it in its earlier and more lawful days, forgetting that their minds had not been opened, that they regarded the negro as we regard a beeve. If in some future super-refined state men should come to abstain from all animal food, perhaps the history of the Chicago stock-yards will be as appalling as is that of the Bight of Benin to-day, and that the name of Armour should be given to a great industrial school will seem as curious as to us it is inexplicable that the founder of Fanueil Hall should have dealt in human flesh. It is, however, a chapter in the story of the American merchant sailor upon which none will wish to linger, and yet which can not be ignored. In prosecuting the search for slaves and their markets he showed the qualities of daring, of fine seamanship, of pertinacity, which have characterized him in all his undertakings; but the brutality, the greed, the inhumanity inseparable from the slave-trade make the participation of Americans in it something not pleasant to enlarge upon. It was, as I have said, not until the days of the Civil War blockade that the traffic was wholly destroyed. As late as 1860 the yacht "Wanderer," flying the New York Yacht Club's flag, owned by a club member, and sailing under the auspices of a member of one of the foremost families of the South, made several trips, and profitable ones, as a slaver. No armed vessel thought to overhaul a trim yacht, flying a private flag, and on her first trip her officers actually entertained at dinner the officers of a British cruiser watching for slavers on the African coast. But her time came, and when in 1860 the slaver, Nathaniel Gordon, a citizen of Portland, Maine, was actually hanged as a pirate, the death-blow of the slave-trade was struck. Thereafter the end came swiftly. **Transcriber's Note: Page 91: changed preeminance to preëminence CHAPTER IV THE WHALING INDUSTRY--ITS EARLY DEVELOPMENT IN NEW ENGLAND--KNOWN TO THE ANCIENTS--SHORE WHALING--BEGINNINGS OF THE DEEP-SEA FISHERIES--THE PRIZES OF WHALING--PIETY OF ITS EARLY PROMOTERS--THE RIGHT WHALE AND THE CACHALOT--A FLURRY--SOME FIGHTING WHALES--THE "ESSEX" AND THE "ANN ALEXANDER"--TYPES OF WHALERS--DECADENCE OF THE INDUSTRY--EFFECT OF OUR NATIONAL WARS--THE EMBARGO--SOME STORIES OF WHALING LIFE. In the old "New England Primer," on which the growing minds of Yankee infants in the early days of the eighteenth century were regaled, appears a clumsy woodcut of a spouting whale, with these lines of excellent piety but doubtful rhyme: Whales in the sea Their Lord obey. It is significant of the part which the whale then played in domestic economy that his familiar bulk should be utilized to "point a moral and adorn a tale" in the most elementary of books for the instruction of children. And indeed by the time the "New England Primer" was published, with its quaint lettering and rude illustrations, the whale fishery had come to be one of the chief occupations of the seafaring men of the North Atlantic States. The pursuit of this "royal fish"--as the ancient chroniclers call him in contented ignorance of the fact that he is not a fish at all--had not, indeed, originated in New England, but had been practised by all maritime peoples of whom history has knowledge, while the researches of archeologists have shown that prehistoric peoples were accustomed to chase the gigantic cetacean for his blubber, his oil, and his bone. The American Indians, in their frail canoes, the Esquimaux, in their crank kayaks, braved the fury of this aquatic monster, whose size was to that of one of his enemies as the bulk of a battle-ship is to that of a pigmy torpedo launch. But the whale fishery in vessels fitted for cruises of moderate length had its origin in Europe, where the Basques during the Middle Ages fairly drove the animals from the Bay of Biscay, which had long swarmed with them. Not a prolific breeder, the whales soon showed the effect of Europe's eagerness for oil, whalebone and ambergris, and by the beginning of the sixteenth century the industry was on the verge of extinction. Then began that search for a sea passage to India north of the continents of Europe and America, which I have described in another chapter. The passage was not discovered, but in the icy waters great schools of right whales were found, and the chase of the "royal fish" took on new vigor. Of course there was effort on the part of one nation to acquire by violence a monopoly of this profitable business, and the Dutch, who have done much in the cause of liberty, defeated the British in a naval battle at the edge of the ice before the principle of the freedom of the fisheries was accepted. To-day science has discovered substitutes for almost all of worth that the whales once supplied, and the substitutes are in the main marked improvements on the original. But in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the clear whale oil for illuminating purposes, the tough and supple whalebone, the spermaceti which filled the great case in the sperm-whale's head, the precious ambergris--prized even among the early Hebrews, and chronicled in the Scriptures as a thing of great price--were prizes, in pursuit of which men braved every terror of the deep, threaded the ice-floes of the Arctic, fought against the currents about Cape Horn, and steered to every corner of the Seven Seas the small, stout brigs and barks of New England make. The whale came to the New Englander long before the New Englanders went after him. In the earliest colonial days the carcasses of whales were frequently found stranded on the beaches of Cape Cod and Long Island. Old colonial records are full of the lawsuits growing out of these pieces of treasure-trove, the finder, the owner of the land where the gigantic carrion lay stranded, and the colony all claiming ownership, or at least shares. By 1650 all the northern colonies had begun to pursue the business of shore whaling to some extent. Crews were organized, boats kept in readiness on the beach, and whenever a whale was sighted they would put off with harpoons and lances after the huge game, which, when slain, would be towed ashore, and there cut up and tried out, to the accompaniment of a prodigious clacking of gulls and a widely diffused bad smell. This method of whaling is still followed at Amagansett and Southampton, on the shore of Long Island, though the growing scarcity of whales makes catches infrequent. In the colonial days, however, it was a source of profit assiduously cultivated by coastwise communities, and both on Long Island and Cape Cod citizens were officially enjoined to watch for whales off shore. Whales were then seen daily in New York harbor, and in 1669 one Samuel Maverick recorded in a letter that thirteen whales had been taken along the south shore during the winter, and twenty in the spring. Little by little the boat voyages after the leviathans extended further into the sea as the industry grew and the game became scarce and shy. The people of Cape Cod were the first to begin the fishery, and earliest perfected the art of "saving" the whale--that is, of securing all of value in the carcass. But the people of the little island of Nantucket brought the industry to its highest development, and spread most widely the fame of the American whaleman. Indeed, a Nantucket whaler laden with oil was the first vessel flying the Stars and Stripes that entered a British port. It is of a sailor on this craft that a patriotic anecdote, now almost classic, is told. He was unhappily deformed, and while passing along a Liverpool street was greeted by a British tar with a blow on his "humpback" and the salutation: "Hello, Jack! What you got there?" "Bunker Hill, d----n ye!" responded the Yankee. "Think you can climb it?" Far out at sea, swept ever by the Atlantic gales, a mere sand-bank, with scant surface soil to support vegetation, this island soon proved to its settlers its unfitness to maintain an agricultural people. There is a legend that an islander, weary perhaps with the effort of trying to wrest a livelihood from the unwilling soil, looked from a hilltop at the whales tumbling and spouting in the ocean. "There," he said, "is a green pasture where our children's grandchildren will go for bread." Whether the prophecy was made or not, the event occurred, for before the Revolution the American whaling fleet numbered 360 vessels, and in the banner year of the industry, 1846, 735 ships engaged in it, the major part of the fleet hailing from Nantucket. The cruises at first were toward Greenland after the so-called right whales, a variety of the cetaceans which has an added commercial value because of the baleen, or whalebone, which hangs in great strips from the roof of its mouth to its lower jaw, forming a sort of screen or sieve by which it sifts its food out of prodigious mouthfuls of sea water. This most enormous of known living creatures feeds upon very small shell-fish, swarm in the waters it frequents. Opening wide its colossal mouth, a cavity often more than fifteen feet in length, and so deep from upper to lower jaw that the flexible sheets of whalebone, sometimes ten feet long, hang straight without touching its floor, it takes a great gulp of water. Then the cavernous jaws slowly close, expelling the water through the whalebone sieve, somewhat as a Chinese laundryman sprinkles clothes, and the small marine animals which go to feed that prodigious bulk are caught in the strainer. The right whale is from 45 to 60 feet long in its maturity, and will yield about 15 tons of oil and 1500 weight of whalebone, though individuals have been known to give double this amount. Most of the vessels which put out of Nantucket and New Bedford, in the earliest days of the industry, after whales of this sort, were not fitted with kettles and furnaces for trying out the oil at the time of the catch, as was always the custom in the sperm-whale fishery. Their prey was near at hand, their voyages comparatively short. So the fat, dripping, reeking blubber was crammed into casks, or some cases merely thrown into the ship's hold, just as it was cut from the carcass, and so brought back weeks later to the home port--a shipload of malodorous putrefaction. Old sailors who have cruised with cargoes of cattle, of green hides, and of guano, say that nothing that ever offended the olfactories of man equals the stench of a right-whaler on her homeward voyage. Scarcely even could the slave-ships compare with it. Brought ashore, this noisome mass was boiled in huge kettles, and the resulting oil sent to lighten the night in all civilized lands. England was a good customer of the colonies, and Boston shipowners did a thriving trade with oil from New Bedford or Nantucket to London. The sloops and ketches engaged in this commerce brought back, as an old letter of directions from shipowner to skipper shows, "course wicker flasketts, Allom, Copress, drum rims, head snares, shod shovells, window-glass." The trade was conducted with the same piety that we find manifested in the direction of slave-ships and privateers. In order that the oil may fetch a good price, and the voyage be speedy, the captain is commended to God, and "That hee may please to take the Conduct of you, we pray you look carefully that hee bee worshipped dayly in yor shippe, his Sabbaths Sanctifiede, and all sinne and prophainesse let bee Surpressed." In the Revolution the fisheries suffered severely from the British cruisers, and when, after peace was declared, the whalemen began coming back from the privateers, in which they had sought service, and the wharves of Nantucket, New Bedford, and New London began again to show signs of life, the Americans were confronted by the closing of their English markets. "The whale fisheries and the Newfoundland fisheries were the nurseries of British seamen," said the British ministry to John Adams, who went to London to remonstrate. "If we let Americans bring oil to London, and sell fish to our West India colonies, the British marine will decline." For a long time, therefore, the whalers had to look elsewhere than to England for a market. Nevertheless the trade grew. New Bedford, which by the middle of the nineteenth century held three-fourths of the business, took it up with great vigor. For a time Massachusetts gave bounties to encourage the industry, but it was soon strong enough to dispense with them. By 1789 the whalers found their way to the Pacific--destined in later years to be their chief fishing-ground. In that year the total whaling tonnage of Massachusetts was 10,210, with 1611 men and an annual product of 7880 barrels sperm and 13,130 barrels whale oil. Fifteen years earlier--before the war--the figures were thrice as great. [Illustration: "SENDING BOAT AND MEN FLYING INTO THE AIR"] Before this period, however, whaling had taken on a new form. Deep-sea whaling, as it was called, to distinguish it from the shore fisheries, had begun long ago. Capt. Christopher Hursey, a stout Nantucket whaleman, cruising about after right whales, ran into a stiff northwest gale and was carried far out to sea. He struck a school of sperm-whales, killed one, and brought blubber home. It was not a new discovery, for the sperm-whale or cachalot, had been known for years, but the great numbers of right whales and the ease with which they were taken, had made pursuit of this nobler game uncommon. But now the fact, growing yearly more apparent, that right whales were being driven to more inaccessible haunts, made whalers turn readily to this new prey. Moreover, the sperm-whale had in him qualities of value that made him a richer prize than his Greenland cousin. True, he lacked the useful bone. His feeding habits did not necessitate a sieve, for, as beseems a giant, he devoured stout victuals, pieces of great squids--the fabled devil-fish--as big as a man's body being found in his stomach. Such a diet develops his fighting qualities, and while the right whale usually takes the steel sullenly, and dies like an overgrown seal, the cachalot fights fiercely, now diving with such a rush that he has been known to break his jaw by the fury with which he strikes the bottom at the depth of 200 fathoms; now raising his enormous bulk in air, to fall with an all-obliterating crash upon the boat which holds his tormentors, or sending boat and men flying into the air with a furious blow of his gristly flukes, or turning on his back and crunching his assailants between his cavernous jaws. Descriptions of the dying flurry of the sperm-whale are plentiful in whaling literature, many of the best of them being in that ideal whaleman's log "The Cruise of the Cachalot," by Frank T. Bullen. I quote one of these: "Suddenly the mate gave a howl: 'Starn all--starn all! Oh, starn!' and the oars bent like canes as we obeyed--there was an upheaval of the sea just ahead; then slowly, majestically, the vast body of our foe rose into the air. Up, up it went while my heart stood still, until the whole of that immense creature hung on high, apparently motionless, and then fell--a hundred tons of solid flesh--back into the sea. On either side of that mountainous mass the waters rose in shining towers of snowy foam, which fell in their turn, whirling and eddying around us as we tossed and fell like a chip in a whirlpool. Blinded by the flying spray, baling for very life to free the boat from the water, with which she was nearly full, it was some minutes before I was able to decide whether we were still uninjured or not. Then I saw, at a little distance, the whale lying quietly. As I looked he spouted and the vapor was red with his blood. 'Starn all!' again cried our chief, and we retreated to a considerable distance. The old warrior's practised eye had detected the coming climax of our efforts, the dying agony, or 'flurry,' of the great mammal. Turning upon his side, he began to move in a circular direction, slowly at first, then faster and faster, until he was rushing round at tremendous speed, his great head raised quite out of water at times, slashing his enormous jaws. Torrents of blood poured from his spout-hole, accompanied by hoarse bellowings, as of some gigantic bull, but really caused by the laboring breath trying to pass through the clogged air-passages. The utmost caution and rapidity of manipulation of the boat was necessary to avoid his maddened rush, but this gigantic energy was short-lived. In a few minutes he subsided slowly in death, his mighty body reclined on one side, the fin uppermost waving limply as he rolled to the swell, while the small waves broke gently over the carcass in a low, monotonous surf, intensifying the profound silence that had succeeded the tumult of our conflict with the late monarch of the deep." [Illustration: "SUDDENLY THE MATE GAVE A HOWL--'STARN ALL!'"] Not infrequently the sperm-whale, breaking loose from the harpoon, would ignore the boats and make war upon his chief enemy--the ship. The history of the whale fishery is full of such occurrences. The ship "Essex," of Nantucket, was attacked and sunk by a whale, which planned its campaign of destruction as though guided by human intelligence. He was first seen at a distance of several hundred yards, coming full speed for the ship. Diving, he rose again to the surface about a ship's length away, and then surged forward on the surface, striking the vessel just forward of the fore-chains. "The ship brought up as suddenly and violently as if she had struck a rock," said the mate afterward, "and trembled for few seconds like a leaf." Then she began to settle, but not fast enough to satisfy the ire of the whale. Circling around, he doubled his speed, and bore down upon the "Essex" again. This time his head fairly stove in the bows, and the ship sank so fast that the men were barely able to provision and launch the boats. Curiously enough, the monster that had thus destroyed a stout ship paid no attention whatsoever to the little boats, which would have been like nutshells before his bulk and power. But many of the men who thus escaped only went to a fate more terrible than to have gone down with their stout ship. Adrift on a trackless sea, 1000 miles from land, in open boats, with scant provision of food or water, they faced a frightful ordeal. After twenty-eight days they found an island, but it proved a desert. After leaving it the boats became separated--one being never again heard of. In the others men died fast, and at last the living were driven by hunger actually to eat the dead. Out of the captain's boat two only were rescued; out of the mate's, three. In all twelve men were sacrificed to the whale's rage. Mere lust for combat seemed to animate this whale, for he had not been pursued by the men of the "Essex," though perhaps in some earlier meeting with men he had felt the sting of the harpoon and the searching thrust of the lance. So great is the vitality of the cachalot that it not infrequently breaks away from its pursuers, and with two or three harpoon-heads in its body lives to a ripe, if not a placid, old age. The whale that sunk the New Bedford ship "Ann Alexander" was one of these fighting veterans. With a harpoon deep in his side he turned and deliberately ran over and sunk the boat that was fast to him; then with equal deliberation sent a second boat to the bottom. This was before noon, and occurred about six miles from the ship, which bore down as fast as could be to pick up the struggling men. The whale, apparently contented with his escape, made off. But about sunset Captain Delois, iron in hand, watching from the knight-heads of the "Ann Alexander" for other whales to repair his ill-luck, saw the redoubtable fighter not far away, swimming at about a speed of five knots. At the same time the whale spied the ship. Increasing his speed to fifteen knots, he bore down upon her, and with the full force of his more than 100 tons bulk struck her "a terrible blow about two feet from the keel and just abreast of the foremast, breaking a large hole in her bottom, through which the water poured in a rushing stream." The crew had scarce time to get out the boats, with one day's provisions, but were happily picked up by a passing vessel two days later. The whale itself met retribution five months later, when it was taken by another American ship. Two of the "Ann Alexander's" harpoons were in him, his head bore deep scars, and in it were imbedded pieces of the ill-fated ship's timbers. Instances of the combativeness of the sperm-whale are not confined to the records of the whale fishery. Even as I write I find in a current San Francisco newspaper the story of the pilot-boat "Bonita," sunk near the Farallon Islands by a whale that attacked her out of sheer wantonness and lust for fight. The "Bonita" was lying hove-to, lazily riding the swells, when in the dark--it was 10 o'clock at night--there came a prodigious shock, that threw all standing to the deck and made the pots and pans of the cook's galley jingle like a chime out of tune. From the deck the prodigious black bulk of a whale, about eighty feet long, could be made out, lying lazily half out of water near the vessel. The timbers of the "Bonita" must have been crushed by his impact, for she began to fill, and soon sank. In this case the disaster was probably not due to any rage or malicious intent on the part of the whale. Indeed, in the days when the ocean was more densely populated with these huge animals, collision with a whale was a well-recognized maritime peril. How many of the stout vessels against whose names on the shipping list stands the fatal word "missing," came to their ends in this way can never be known; but maritime annals are full of the reports of captains who ran "bows on" into a mysterious reef where the chart showed no obstruction, but which proved to be a whale, reddening the sea with his blood, and sending the ship--not less sorely wounded--into some neighboring port to refit. The tools with which the business of hunting the whale is pursued are simple, even rude. Steam, it is true, has succeeded to sails, and explosives have displaced the sinewy arm of the harpooner for launching the deadly shafts; but in the main the pursuit of the monsters is conducted now as it was sixty years ago, when to command a whaler was the dearest ambition of a New England coastboy. The vessels were usually brigs or barks, occasionally schooners, ranging from 100 to 500 tons. They had a characteristic architecture, due in part to the subordination of speed to carrying capacity, and further to the specially heavy timbering about the bows to withstand the crushing of the Arctic ice-pack. The bow was scarce distinguishable from the stern by its lines, and the masts stuck up straight, without that rake, which adds so much to the trim appearance of a clipper. Three peculiarities chiefly distinguished the whalers from other ships of the same general character. At the main royal-mast head was fixed the "crow's nest"--in some vessels a heavy barrel lashed to the mast, in others merely a small platform laid on the cross-trees, with two hoops fixed to the mast above, within which the lookout could stand in safety. On the deck, amidships, stood the "try-works," brick furnaces, holding two or three great kettles, in which the blubber was reduced to odorless oil. Along each rail were heavy, clumsy wooden cranes, or davits, from which hung the whale-boats--never less than five, sometimes more, while still others were lashed to the deck, for boats were the whale's sport and playthings, and seldom was a big "fish" made fast that there was not work for the ship's carpenter. The whale-boat, evolved from the needs of this fishery, is one of the most perfect pieces of marine architecture afloat--a true adaptation of means to an end. It is clinker-built, about 27 feet long, by 6 feet beam, with a depth of about 2 feet 6 inches; sharp at both ends and clean-sided as a mackerel. Each boat carried five oarsmen, who wielded oars of from nine to sixteen feet in length, while the mate steers with a prodigious oar ten feet long. The bow oarsman is the harpooner, but when he has made fast to the whale he goes aft and takes the mate's place at the steering oar, while the latter goes forward with the lances to deal the final murderous strokes. This curious and dangerous change of position in the boat, often with a heavy sea running, and with a 100-ton whale tugging at the tug-line seems to have grown out of nothing more sensible than the insistence of mates on recognition of their rank. But a whale-boat is not the only place where a spill is threatened because some one in power insists on doing something at once useless and dangerous. The whale-boat also carried a stout mast, rigging two sprit sails. The mast was instantly unshipped when the whale was struck. The American boats also carried centerboards, lifting into a framework extending through the center of the craft, but the English whalemen omitted these appendages. A rudder was hung over the side, for use in emergencies. Into this boat were packed, with the utmost care and system, two line-tubs, each holding from 100 to 200 fathoms of fine manila rope, one and one-half inches round, and of a texture like yellow silk; three harpoons, wood and iron, measuring about eight feet over all, and weighing about ten pounds; three lances of the finest steel, with wooden handles, in all about eight feet long; a keg of drinking water and one of biscuits; a bucket and piggin for bailing, a small spade, knives, axes, and a shoulder bomb-gun. It can be understood easily that six men, maneuvering in so crowded a boat, with a huge whale flouncing about within a few feet, a line whizzing down the center, to be caught in which meant instant death, and the sea often running high, had need to keep their wits about them. Harpoons and lances are kept ground to a razor edge, and, propelled by the vigorous muscles of brawny whalemen, often sunk out of sight through the papery skin and soft blubber of the whale. Beyond these primitive appliances the whale fishery never progressed very far. It is true that in later days a shoulder-gun hurled the harpoon, explosive bombs replaced the lances, the ships were in some cases fitted with auxiliary steam-power, and in a few infrequent instances steam launches were employed for whale-boats. But progress was not general. The old-fashioned whaling tubs kept the seas, while the growing scarcity of the whales and the blow to the demand for oil dealt by the discovery of petroleum, checked the development of the industry. Now the rows of whalers rotting at New Bedford's wharves, and the somnolence of Nantucket, tell of its virtual demise. These two towns were built upon the prosperity of the whale fishery. When it languished their fortunes sunk, never to rise to their earlier heights, though cotton-spinning came to occupy the attention of the people of New Bedford, while Nantucket found a placid prosperity in entertaining summer boarders. And even during the years when whales were plentiful, and their oil still in good demand, there came periods of interruption to the trade and poverty to its followers. The Revolution first closed the seas to American ships for seven long years, and at its close the whalers found their best market--England--still shut against them. Moreover, the high seas during the closing years of the eighteenth and the opening of the nineteenth centuries were not as to-day, when a pirate is as scarce a beast of prey as a highwayman on Hounslow Heath. The Napoleonic wars had broken down men's natural sense of order and of right, and the seas swarmed with privateers, who on occasion were ready enough to turn pirates. Many whalers fell a prey to these marauders, whose operations were rather encouraged than condemned by the European nations. Both England and France were at this period endeavoring to lure the whalemen from the United Colonies by promise of special concessions in trade, or more effective protection on the high seas than their own weakling governments could assure them. Some Nantucket whalemen were indeed enticed to the new English whaling town at Dartmouth, near Halifax, or to the French town of Dunkirk. But the effort to transplant the industry did not succeed, and the years that followed, until the fateful embargo of 1807, were a period of rapid growth for the whale fishery and increasing wealth for those who pursued it. In the form of its business organization the business of whaling was the purest form of profit-sharing we have ever seen in the United States. Everybody on the ship, from captain to cabin-boy, was a partner, vitally interested in the success of the voyage. Each had his "lay"--that is to say, his proportionate share of the proceeds of the catch. Obed Macy, in his "History of Nantucket," says: "The captain's lay is generally one-seventeenth part of all obtained; the first officer's one-twenty-eighth part; the second officer's, one-forty-fifth; the third officer's, one-sixtieth; a boat-steerer's from an eightieth to a hundred-and-twentieth, and a foremast hand's, from a hundred-and-twentieth to a hundred-and-eighty-fifth each." These proportions, of course, varied--those of the men according to the ruling wages in other branches of the merchant service; those of the officers to correspond with special qualities of efficiency. All the remainder of the catch went to the owners, who put into the enterprise the ship and outfitted her for a cruise, which usually occupied three years. Their investment was therefore a heavy one, a suitable vessel of 300-tons burden costing in the neighborhood of $22,000, and her outfit $18,000 to $20,000. Not infrequently the artisans engaged in fitting out a ship were paid by being given "lays," like the sailor. In such a case the boatmaker who built the whale-boats, the ropemaker who twisted the stout, flexible manila cord to hold the whale, the sailmaker and the cooper were all interested with the crew and the owners in the success of the voyage. It was the most practical communism that industry has ever seen, and it worked to the satisfaction of all concerned as long as the whaling trade continued profitable. The wars in which the American people engaged during the active days of the whale fishery--the Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Civil War--were disastrous to that industry, and from the depredations committed by the Confederate cruisers in the last conflict it never fully recovered. The nature of their calling made the whalemen peculiarly vulnerable to the evils of war. Cruising in distant seas, always away from home for many months, often for years, a war might be declared and fought to a finish before they knew of it. In the disordered Napoleonic days they never could tell whether the flag floating at the peak of some armed vessel encountered at the antipodes was that of friend or foe. During both the wars with England they were the special objects of the enemy's malignant attention. From the earliest days American progress in maritime enterprise was viewed by the British with apprehension and dislike. Particularly did the growth of the cod fisheries and the chase of the whale arouse transatlantic jealousy, the value of these callings as nurseries for seamen being only too plainly apparent. Accordingly the most was made of the opportunities afforded by war for crushing the whaling industry. Whalers were chased to their favorite fishing-grounds, captured, and burned. With cynical disregard of all the rules of civilized warfare--supposing war ever to be civilized--the British gave to the captured whalers only the choice of serving in British men-of-war against their own countrymen, or re-entering the whaling trade on British ships, thus building up the British whale fishery at the expense of the American. The American response to these tactics was to abandon the business during war time. In 1775 Nantucket alone had had 150 vessels, aggregating 15,000 tons, afloat in pursuit of the whale. The trade was pushed with such daring and enterprise that Edmund Burke was moved to eulogize its followers in an eloquent speech in the British House of Commons. "Neither the perseverance of Holland," he said, "nor the activity of France, nor the dexterous and firm sagacity of English enterprise, ever carried this most perilous mode of hardy industry to the extent to which it has been pushed by this most recent people." But the eloquence of Burke could not halt the British ministry in its purpose to tax the colonies despite their protests. The Revolution followed, and the whalemen of Nantucket and New Bedford stripped their vessels, sent down yards and all running rigging, stowed the sails, tied their barks and brigs to the deserted wharves and went out of business. The trade thus rudely checked had for the year preceding the outbreak of the war handled 45,000 barrels of sperm oil, 8500 barrels of right-whale oil, and 75,000 pounds of bone. The enforced idleness of the Revolutionary days was not easily forgotten by the whalemen, and their discontent and complainings were great when the nation was again embroiled in war with Great Britain in 1812. It can not be said that their attitude in the early days of that conflict was patriotic. They had suffered--both at the hands of France and England--wrongs which might well rouse their resentment. They had been continually impressed by England, and the warships of both nations had seized American whalers for real or alleged violations of the Orders in Council or the Ostend Manifesto; but the whalemen were more eager for peace, even with the incidental perils due to war in Europe, than for war, with its enforced idleness. When Congress ordered the embargo the whalers were at first explicitly freed from its operations; but this provision being seized upon to cover evasions of the embargo, they were ultimately included. When war was finally declared, the protests of the Nantucket people almost reached the point of threatening secession. A solemn memorial was first addressed to Congress, relating the exceedingly exposed condition of the island and its favorite calling to the perils of war, and begging that the actual declaration of war might be averted. When this had availed nothing, and the young nation had rushed into battle with a courage that must seem to us now foolhardy, the Nantucketers adopted the doubtful expedient of seeking special favor from the enemy. An appeal for immunity from the ordinary acts of war was addressed to the British Admiral Cochrane, and a special envoy was sent to the British naval officer commanding the North American station, to announce the neutrality of the island and to beg immunity from assault and pillage, and assurance that one vessel would be permitted to ply unmolested between the island and the mainland. As a result of these negotiations, Nantucket formally declared her neutrality, and by town meeting voted to accede to the British demand that her people pay no taxes for the support of the United States. In all essential things the island ceased to be a part of the United States, its people neither rendering military service nor contributing to the revenues. But their submission to the British demands did not save the whale-trade, for repeated efforts to get the whalers declared neutral and exempt from capture failed. Half a century of peace followed, during which the whaling industry rose to its highest point; but was again on the wane when the Civil War let loose upon the remaining whalemen the Confederate cruisers, the "Shenandoah" alone burning thirty-four of them. From this last stroke the industry, enfeebled by the lessened demand for its chief product, and by the greater cost and length of voyages resulting from the growing scarcity of whales, never recovered. To-day its old-time ports are deserted by traffic. Stripped of all that had salable value, its ships rot on mud-banks or at moldering wharves. The New England boy, whose ambition half a century ago was to ship on a whaler, with a boy's lay and a straight path to the quarter-deck, now goes into a city office, or makes for the West as a miner or a railroad man. The whale bids fair to become as extinct as the dodo, and the whaleman is already as rare as the buffalo. [Illustration: "ROT AT MOLDERING WHARVES"] With the extension of the fishing-grounds to the Pacific began the really great days of the whale fishery. Then, from such a port as Nantucket or New Bedford a vessel would set out, to be gone three years, carrying with her the dearest hopes and ambitions of all the inhabitants. Perhaps there would be no house without some special interest in her cruise. Tradesmen of a dozen sorts supplied stores on shares. Ambitious boys of the best families sought places before the mast, for there was then no higher goal for youthful ambition than command of a whaler. Not infrequently a captain would go direct from the marriage altar to his ship, taking a young bride off on a honeymoon of three years at sea. Of course the home conditions created by this almost universal masculine employment were curious. The whaling towns were populated by women, children, and old men. The talk of the street was of big catches and the prices of oil and bone. The conversation in the shaded parlors, where sea-shells, coral, and the trophies of Pacific cruises were the chief ornaments, was of the distant husbands and sons, the perils they braved, and when they might be expected home. The solid, square houses the whalemen built, stoutly timbered as though themselves ships, faced the ocean, and bore on their ridge-pole a railed platform called the bridge, whence the watchers could look far out to sea, scanning the horizon for the expected ship. Lucky were they if she came into the harbor without half-masted flag or other sign of disaster. The profits of the calling in its best days were great. The best New London record is that of the "Pioneer," made in an eighteen-months' cruise in 1864-5. She brought back 1391 barrels of oil and 22,650 pounds of bone, all valued at $150,060. The "Envoy," of New Bedford, after being condemned as unseaworthy, was fitted out in 1847 at a cost of $8000, and sent out on a final cruise. She found oil and bone to the value of $132,450; and reaching San Francisco in the flush times, was sold for $6000. As an offset to these records, is the legend of the Nantucket captain who appeared off the harbor's mouth after a cruise of three years. "What luck, cap'n?" asked the first to board. "Well, I got nary a barrel of oil and nary a pound of bone; but I had a _mighty good sail_." When the bar was crossed and the ship fairly in blue water, work began. Rudyard Kipling has a characteristic story, "How the Ship Found Herself," telling how each bolt and plate, each nut, screw-thread, brace, and rivet in one of those iron tanks we now call ships adjusts itself to its work on the first voyage. On the whaler the crew had to find itself, to readjust its relations, come to know its constituent parts, and learn the ways of its superiors. Sometimes a ship was manned by men who had grown up together and who had served often on the same craft; but as a rule the men of the forecastle were a rough and vagrant lot; capable seamen, indeed, but of the adventurous and irresponsible sort, for service before the mast on a whaler was not eagerly sought by the men of the merchant service. For a time Indians were plenty, and their fine physique and racial traits made them skillful harpooners. As they became scarce, negroes began to appear among the whalemen, with now and then a Lascar, a South Sea Islander, Portuguese, and Hawaiians. The alert New Englanders, trained to the life of the sea, seldom lingered long in the forecastle, but quickly made their way to the posts of command. There they were despots, for nowhere was the discipline more severe than on whalemen. The rule was a word and a blow--and the word was commonly a curse. The ship was out for a five-years' cruise, perhaps, and the captain knew that the safety of all depended upon unquestioning obedience to his authority. Once in a while even the cowed crew would revolt, and infrequent stories of mutiny and murder appear in the record of the whale trade. The whaler, like a man-of-war, carried a larger crew than was necessary for the work of navigation, and it was necessary to devise work to keep the men employed. As a result, the ships were kept cleaner than any others in the merchant service, even though the work of trying out the blubber was necessarily productive of smoke, soot, and grease. As a rule the voyage to the Pacific whaling waters was round Cape Horn, though occasionally a vessel made its way to the eastward and rounded the Cape of Good Hope. Almost always the world was circumnavigated before return. In early days the Pacific whalers found their game in plenty along the coast of Chili; but in time they were forced to push further and further north until the Japan Sea and Bering Sea became the favorite fishing places. The whale was usually first sighted by the lookout in the crow's nest. A warm-blooded animal, breathing with lungs, and not with gills, like a fish, the whale is obliged to come to the surface of the water periodically to breathe. As he does so he exhales the air from his lungs through blow-holes or spiracles at the top of his head; and this warm, moist air, coming thus from his lungs into the cool air, condenses, forming a jet of vapor looking like a fountain, though there is, in fact, no spout of water. "There she blows! B-l-o-o-o-ws! Blo-o-ows!" cries the lookout at this spectacle. All is activity at once on deck, the captain calling to the lookout for the direction and character of the "pod" or school. The sperm whale throws his spout forward at an angle, instead of perpendicularly into the air, and hence is easily distinguished from right whales at a distance. The ship is then headed toward the game, coming to about a mile away. As the whale, unless alarmed, seldom swims more than two and a half miles an hour, and usually stays below only about forty-five minutes at a time, there is little difficulty in overhauling him. Then the boats are launched, the captain and a sufficient number of men staying with the ship. [Illustration: "THERE SHE BLOWS"] In approaching the whale, every effort is made to come up to him at the point of least danger. This point is determined partly by the lines of the whale's vision, partly by his methods of defense. The right whale can only see dead ahead, and his one weapon is his tail, which gigantic fin, weighing several tons and measuring sometimes twenty feet across the tips of the flukes, he swings with irresistible force and all the agility of a fencer at sword-play. He, therefore, is attacked from the side, well toward his jaws. The sperm whale, however, is dangerous at both ends. His tail, though less elastic than that of the right whale, can deal a prodigious up-and-down blow, while his gigantic jaws, well garnished with sharp teeth, and capacious gullet, that readily could gulp down a man, are his chief terrors. His eyes, too, set obliquely, enable him to command the sea at all points save dead ahead, and it is accordingly from this point that the fishermen approach him. But however stealthily they move, the opportunities for disappointment are many. Big as he is, the whale is not sluggish. In an instant he may sink bodily from sight; or, throwing his flukes high in air, "sound," to be seen no more; or, casting himself bodily on the boat, blot it out of existence; or, taking it in his jaws, carry it down with him. But supposing the whale to be oblivious of its approach, the boat comes as near as seems safe, and the harpooner, poised in the bow, his knee against the bracket that steadies him, lets fly his weapon; and, hit or miss, follows it up at once with a second bent onto the same line. Some harpooners were of such strength and skill that they could hurl their irons as far as four or five fathoms. In one famous case boats from an American and British ship were in pursuit of the same whale, the British boat on the inside. It is the law of the fishery that the whale belongs to the boat that first makes fast--and many a pretty quarrel has grown out of this rule. So in this instance--seeing the danger that his rival might win the game--the American harpooner, with a prodigious effort, darted his iron clear over the rival boat and deep into the mass of blubber. [Illustration: "TAKING IT IN HIS JAWS"] What a whale will do when struck no man can tell before the event. The boat-load of puffing, perspiring men who have pulled at full speed up to the monster may suddenly find themselves confronted with a furious, vindictive, aggressive beast weighing eighty tons, and bent on grinding their boat and themselves to powder; or he may simply turn tail and run. Sometimes he sounds, going down, down, down, until all the line in the boat is exhausted, and all that other boats can bend on is gone too. Then the end is thrown over with a drag, and his reappearance awaited. Sometimes he dashes off over the surface of the water at a speed of fifteen knots an hour, towing the boat, while the crew hope that their "Nantucket sleigh-ride" will end before they lose the ship for good. But once fast, the whalemen try to pull close alongside the monster. Then the mate takes the long, keen lance and plunges it deep into the great shuddering carcass, "churning" it up and down and seeking to pierce the heart or lungs. This is the moment of danger; for, driven mad with pain, the great beast rolls and thrashes about convulsively. If the boat clings fast to his side, it is in danger of being crushed or engulfed at any moment; if it retreats, he may recover himself and be off before the death-stroke can be delivered. In later days the explosive bomb, discharged from a distance, has done away with this peril; but in the palmy days of the whale fishery the men would rush into the circle of sea lashed into foam by those mighty fins, get close to the whale, as the boxer gets under the guard of his foe, smite him with lance and razor-edged spade until his spouts ran red, and to his fury there should succeed the calm of approaching death. Then the boats, pulled off. The command was "Pipes all"; and, placidly smoking in the presence of that mighty death, the whalers awaited their ship. Stories of "fighting whales" fill the chronicles of our old whaling ports. There was the old bull sperm encountered by Captain Huntling off the River De La Plata, which is told us in a fascinating old book, "The Nimrod of the Sea." The first boat that made fast to this tough old warrior he speedily bit in two; and while her crew were swimming away from the wreck with all possible speed, the whale thrashed away at the pieces until all were reduced to small bits. Two other boats meanwhile made fast to the furious animal. Wheeling about in the foam, reddened with his blood, he crushed them as a tiger would crunch its prey. All about him were men struggling in the water--twelve of them, the crews of the two demolished boats. Of the boats themselves nothing was left big enough to float a man. The ship was miles away. Three of the sailors climbed on the back of their enemy, clinging by the harpoons and ropes still fast to him, while the others swam away for dear life, thinking only of escaping that all-engulfing jaw or the blows of that murderous tail. Now came another boat from the ship, picked up the swimmers, and cautiously rescued those perched on the whale's back from their island of shuddering flesh. The spirit of the monster was still undaunted. Though six harpoons were sunk into his body and he was dragging 300 fathoms of line, he was still in fighting mood, crunching oars, kegs, and bits of boat for more enemies to demolish. All hands made for the ship, where Captain Hunting, quite as dogged and determined as his adversary, was preparing to renew the combat. Two spare boats were fitted for use, and again the whalemen started after their foe. He, for his part, remained on the battle-ground, amid the débris of his hunters' property, and awaited attack. Nay, more; he churned the water with his mighty tail and moved forward to meet his enemy, with ready jaw to grind them to bits. The captain at the boat-oar, or steering-oar, made a mighty effort and escaped the rush; then sent an explosive bomb into the whale's vitals as he surged past. Struck unto death, the great bull went into his flurry; but in dying he rolled over the captain's boat like an avalanche, destroying it as completely as he had the three others. So man won the battle, but at a heavy cost. The whaleman who chronicled this fight says significantly: "The captain proceeded to Buenos Ayres, as much to allow his men, who were mostly green, to run away, as for the purpose of refitting, as he knew they would be useless thereafter." It was well recognized in the whaling service that men once thoroughly "gallied," or frightened, were seldom useful again; and, indeed, most of the participants in this battle did, as the captain anticipated, desert at the first port. Curiously enough, there did not begin to be a literature of whaling until the industry went into its decadence. The old-time whalers, leading lives of continual romance and adventure, found their calling so commonplace that they noted shipwrecks, mutinies, and disaster in the struggles of the whale baldly in their logbooks, without attempt at graphic description. It is true the piety of Nantucket did result in incorporating the whale in the local hymn-book, but with what doubtful literary success these verses from the pen of Peleg Folger--himself a whaleman--will too painfully attest: Thou didst, O Lord, create the mighty whale, That wondrous monster of a mighty length; Vast is his head and body, vast his tail, Beyond conception his unmeasured strength. When the surface of the sea hath broke Arising from the dark abyss below, His breath appears a lofty stream of smoke, The circling waves like glittering banks of snow. And though he furiously doth us assail, Thou dost preserve us from all dangers free; He cuts our boats in pieces with his tail, And spills us all at once into the sea. Stories of the whale fishery are plentiful, and of late years there has been some effort made to gather these into a kind of popular history of the industry. The following incidents are gathered from a pamphlet, published in the early days of the nineteenth century, by Thomas Nevins, a New England whaler: "A remarkable instance of the power which the whale possesses in its tail was exhibited within my own observation in the year 1807. On the 29th of May a whale was harpooned by an officer belonging to the 'Resolution.' It descended a considerable depth, and on its reappearance evinced an uncommon degree of irritation. It made such a display of its fins and tail that few of the crew were hardy enough to approach it. The captain, observing their timidity, called a boat and himself struck a second harpoon. Another boat immediately followed, and unfortunately advanced too far. The tail was again reared into the air in a terrific attitude. The impending blow was evident. The harpooner, who was directly underneath, leaped overboard, and the next moment the threatened stroke was impressed on the center of the boat, which it buried in the water. Happily no one was injured. The harpooner who leaped overboard escaped death by the act, the tail having struck the very spot on which he stood. The effects of the blow were astonishing--the keel was broken, the gunwales and every plank excepting two were cut through, and it was evident that the boat would have been completely divided, had not the tail struck directly upon a coil of lines. The boat was rendered useless. "The Dutch ship 'Gort-Moolen,' commanded by Cornelius Gerard Ouwekaas, with a cargo of seven fish, was anchored in Greenland, in the year 1660. The captain, perceiving a whale ahead of his ship, beckoned his attendants and threw himself into a boat. He was the first to approach the whale, and was fortunate enough to harpoon it before the arrival of the second boat, which was on the advance. Jacques Vienkes, who had the direction of it, joined his captain immediately afterward, and prepared to make a second attack on the fish when it should remount to the surface. At the moment of its ascension, the boat of Vienkes, happening, unfortunately, to be perpendicularly above it, was so suddenly and forcibly lifted up by a stroke of the head of the whale that it was dashed to pieces before the harpooner could discharge his weapon. Vienkes flew along with the pieces of the boat, and fell upon the back of the animal. This intrepid seaman, who still retained his weapon in his grasp, harpooned the whale on which he stood; and by means of the harpoon and the line, which he never abandoned, he steadied himself firmly upon the fish, notwithstanding his hazardous situation, and regardless of a considerable wound that he received in his leg in his fall along with the fragments of the boat. All the efforts of the other boats to approach the whale and deliver the harpooner were futile. The captain, not seeing any other method of saving his unfortunate companion, who was in some way entangled with the line, called him to cut it with his knife and betake himself to swimming. Vienkes, embarrassed and disconcerted as he was, tried in vain to follow this council. His knife was in the pocket of his drawers, and being unable to support himself with one hand, he could not get it out. The whale, meanwhile, continued advancing along the surface of the water with great rapidity, but fortunately never attempted to dive. While his comrades despaired of his life, the harpoon by which he held at length disengaged itself from the body of the whale. Vienkes, being thus liberated, did not fail to take advantage of this circumstance. He cast himself into the sea, and by swimming endeavored to regain the boats, which continued the pursuit of the whale. When his shipmates perceived him struggling with the waves, they redoubled their exertions. They reached him just as his strength was exhausted, and had the happiness of rescuing this adventurous harpooner from his perilous situation. "Captain Lyons, of the 'Raith,' of Leith, while prosecuting the whale fishery on the Labrador coast, in the season of 1802, discovered a large whale at a short distance from the ship. Four boats were dispatched in pursuit, and two of them succeeded in approaching it so closely together that two harpoons were struck at the same moment. The fish descended a few fathoms in the direction of another of the boats, which was on the advance, rose accidentally beneath it, struck it with his head, and threw the boat, men, and apparatus about fifteen feet in the air. It was inverted by the stroke, and fell into the water with its keel upward. All the people were picked up alive by the fourth boat, which was just at hand, excepting one man, who, having got entangled in the boat, fell beneath it and was unfortunately drowned. The fish was soon afterward killed. "In 1822 two boats belonging to the ship 'Baffin' went in pursuit of a whale. John Carr was harpooner and commander of them. The whale they pursued led them into a vast shoal of his own species. They were so numerous that their blowing was incessant, and they believed that they did not see fewer than a hundred. Fearful of alarming them without striking any, they remained a while motionless. At last one rose near Carr's boat, and he approached and, fatally for himself, harpooned it. When he struck, the fish was approaching the boat; and, passing very rapidly, jerked the line out of its place over the stern and threw it upon the gunwale. Its pressure in this unfavorable position so careened the boat that the side was pulled under water and it began to fill. In this emergency Carr, who was a brave, active man, seized the line, and endeavored to release the boat by restoring it to its place; but by some circumstance which was never accounted for, a turn of the line flew over his arm, dragged him overboard in an instant, and drew him under the water, never more to rise. So sudden was the accident that only one man, who was watching him, saw what had happened; so that when the boat righted, which it immediately did, though half full of water, the whole crew, on looking round, inquired what had become of Carr. It is impossible to imagine a death more awfully sudden and unexpected. The invisible bullet could not have effected more instantaneous destruction. The velocity of the whale at its first descent is from thirteen to fifteen feet per second. Now, as this unfortunate man was adjusting the line at the water's very edge, where it must have been perfectly tight, owing to its obstruction in running out of the boat, the interval between the fastening of the line about him and his disappearance could not have exceeded the third part of a second of time, for in one second only he must have been dragged ten or twelve feet deep. Indeed, he had not time for the least exclamation; and the person who saw his removal observed that it was so exceeding quick that, though his eye was upon him at the moment, he could scarcely distinguish his figure as he disappeared. "As soon as the crew recovered from their consternation, they applied themselves to the needful attention which the lines required. A second harpoon was struck from the accompanying boat, on the rising of the whale to the surface, and some lances were applied; but this melancholy occurrence had cast such a damp on all present that they became timid and inactive in their subsequent duties. The whale, when nearly exhausted, was allowed to remain some minutes unmolested, till, having recovered some degree of energy, it made a violent effort and tore itself away from the harpoons. The exertions of the crews thus proved fruitless, and were attended with serious loss. "A harpooner belonging to the 'Henrietta,' of Whitby, when engaged in lancing a whale into which he had previously struck a harpoon, incautiously cast a little line under his feet that he had just hauled into the boat, after it had been drawn out by the fish. A painful stroke of his lance induced the whale to dart suddenly downward. His line began to run out from under his feet, and in an instant caught him by a turn round his body. He had but just time to cry out, 'Clear away the line! Oh, dear!' when he was almost cut asunder, dragged overboard, and never seen afterward. The line was cut at that moment, but without avail. The fish descended to a considerable depth and died, from whence it was drawn to the surface by the lines connected with it and secured." Whaling has almost ceased to have a place in the long list of our national industries. Its implements and the relics of old-time cruises fill niches in museums as memorials of a practically extinct calling. Along the wharves of New Bedford and New London a few old brigs lie rotting, but so effective have been the ravages of time that scarcely any of the once great fleet survive even in this invalid condition. The whales have been driven far into the Arctic regions, whither a few whalers employing the modern and unsportsmanlike devices of steam and explosives, follow them for a scanty profit. But the glory of the whale fishery is gone, leaving hardly a record behind it. In its time it employed thousands of stout sailors; it furnished the navy with the material that made that branch of our armed service the pride and glory of the nation. It explored unknown seas and carried the flag to undiscovered lands. Was not an Austrian exploring expedition, interrupted as it was about to take possession of land in the Antarctic in the name of Austria by encountering an American whaler, trim and trig, lying placidly at anchor in a harbor where the Austrian thought no man had ever been? It built up towns in New England that half a century of lethargy has been unable to kill. And so if its brigs--and its men--now molder, if its records are scanty and its history unwritten, still Americans must ever regard the whale fishery as one of the chief factors in the building of the nation--one of the most admirable chapters in our national story. CHAPTER V THE PRIVATEERS--PART TAKEN BY MERCHANT SAILORS IN BUILDING UP THE PRIVATEERING SYSTEM--LAWLESS STATE OF THE HIGH SEAS--METHOD OF DISTRIBUTING PRIVATEERING PROFITS--PICTURESQUE FEATURES OF THE CALLING--THE GENTLEMEN SAILORS--EFFECT ON THE REVOLUTIONARY ARMY--PERILS OF PRIVATEERING--THE OLD JERSEY PRISON SHIP--EXTENT OF PRIVATEERING--EFFECT ON AMERICAN MARINE ARCHITECTURE--SOME FAMOUS PRIVATEERS--THE "CHASSEUR," THE "PRINCE DE NEUFCHÁTEL," THE "MAMMOTH"--THE SYSTEM OF CONVOYS AND THE "RUNNING SHIPS"--A TYPICAL PRIVATEERS' BATTLE--THE "GENERAL ARMSTRONG" AT FAYAL--SUMMARY OF THE WORK OF THE PRIVATEERS In the early days of a new community the citizen, be he never so peaceful, is compelled, perforce, to take on the ways and the trappings of the fighting man. The pioneer is half hunter, half scout. The farmer on the outposts of civilization must be more than half a soldier; the cowboy or ranchman on our southwest frontier goes about a walking arsenal, ready at all times to take the laws into his own hands, and scorning to call on sheriffs or other peace officers for protection against personal injury. And while the original purpose of this militant, even defiant, attitude is self-protection, those who are long compelled to maintain it conceive a contempt for the law, which they find inadequate to guard them, and not infrequently degenerate into bandits. It is hardly too much to say that the nineteenth century was already well into its second quarter before there was a semblance of recognized law upon the high seas. Pirates and buccaneers, privateers, and the naval vessels of the times that were little more than pirates, made the lot of the merchant sailor of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a precarious one. Wars were constant, declared on the flimsiest pretexts and with scant notice; so that the sailor putting out from port in a time of universal peace could feel no certainty that the first foreign vessel he met might not capture him as spoil of some war of which he had no knowledge. Accordingly, sailors learned to defend themselves, and the ship's armory was as necessary and vastly better stocked than the ship's medicine case. To point a carronade became as needful an accomplishment as to box the compass; and he was no A.B. who did not know how to swing a cutlass. Out of such conditions, and out of the wars which the Napoleonic plague forced upon the world, sprung the practise of privateering; and while it is the purpose of this book to tell the story of the American merchant sailor only, it could not be complete without some account, however brief, of the American privateersman. For, indeed, the two were one throughout a considerable period of our maritime history, the sailor turning privateersman or the privateersman sailor as political or trade conditions demanded. In our colonial times, and in the earlier days of the nation, to be a famous privateersman, or to have had a hand in fitting out a successful privateer, was no mean passport to fame and fortune. Some of the names most eminent in the history of our country appear in connection with the outfitting or command of privateers; and not a few of the oldest fortunes of New England had their origin in this form of legalized piracy. And, after all, it is the need of the times that fixes the morality of an act. To-day privateering is dead; not by any formal agreement, for the United States, at the Congress of Paris, refused to agree to its outlawry; but in our war with Spain no recourse was had to letters of marque by either combatant, and it seems unlikely that in any future war between civilized nations either party will court the contempt of the world by going back to the old custom of chartering banditti to steal the property of private citizens of the hostile nation if found at sea. Private property on shore has long been respected by the armies of Christendom, and why its presence in a ship rather than in a cart makes it a fit object of plunder baffles the understanding. Perhaps in time the kindred custom of awarding prize money to naval officers, which makes of them a species of privateers, and pays them for capturing a helpless merchant ship, while an army officer gets nothing for taking the most powerful fort, may likewise be set aside as a relic of medieval warfare. In its earliest days, of course, privateering was the weapon of a nation weak at sea against one with a large navy. So when the colonies threw down the gage of battle to Great Britain, almost the first act of the Revolutionary government was to authorize private owners to fit out armed ships to prey on British commerce. Some of the shipowners of New England had enjoyed some experience of the profits of this peculiar industry in the Seven Years' War, when quite a number of colonial privateers harried the French on the seas, and accordingly the response was prompt. In enterprises of this character the system of profit-sharing, already noted in connection with whaling, obtained. The owners took a certain share of each prize, and the remainder was divided among the officers and crew in certain fixed proportions. How great were the profits accruing to a privateersman in a "run of luck" might be illustrated by two facts set forth by Maclay, whose "History of American Privateers" is the chief authority on the subject. He asserts that "it frequently happened that even the common sailors received as their share in one cruise, over and above their wages, one thousand dollars--a small fortune in those days for a mariner," and further that "one of the boys in the 'Ranger,' who less than a month before had left a farm, received as his share one ton of sugar, from thirty to forty gallons of fourth-proof Jamaica rum, some twenty pounds of cotton, and about the same quantity of ginger, logwood, and allspice, besides seven hundred dollars in money." To be sure, in order to enjoy gains like these, the men had to risk the perils of battle in addition to the common ones of the sea; but it is a curious fact, recognized in all branches of industry, that the mere peril of a calling does not deter men from following it, and when it promises high profit it is sure to be overcrowded. In civil life to-day the most dangerous callings are those which are, as a rule, the most ill paid. Very speedily the privateersmen became the most prosperous and the most picturesque figures along the waterside of the Atlantic cities. While the dignified merchant or shipowner, with a third interest in the "Daredevil" or the "Flybynight," might still maintain the sober demeanor of a good citizen and a pillar of the church, despite his profits of fifty or an hundred per cent. on each cruise, the gallant sailors who came back to town with pockets full of easily-won money, and the recollection of long and dismal weeks at sea behind them, were spectacular in their rejoicings. Their money was poured out freely while it lasted; and their example stirred all the townsboys, from the best families down to the scourings of the docks, to enter the same gentlemanlike profession. Queerly enough, in a time of universal democracy, a provision was made on many of the privateers for the young men of family who desired to follow the calling. They were called "gentlemen sailors," and, in consideration of their social standing and the fact that they were trained to arms, were granted special and unusual privileges, such as freedom from the drudgery of working the ship, better fare than the common sailors, and more comfortable quarters. Indeed, they were free of duty except when fighting was to be done, and at other times fulfilled the function of the marine guards on our modern men-of-war. This came to be a very popular calling for adventurous young men of some family influence. It has been claimed by some writers that "the Revolution was won by the New England privateers"; and, indeed, there can be no doubt that their activity did contribute in no small degree to the outcome of that struggle. Britain was then, as now, essentially a commercial nation, and the outcry of her merchants when the ravages of American privateers drove marine insurance rates up to thirty-three per cent., and even for a time made companies refuse it altogether, was clamorous. But there was another side to the story. Privateering, like all irregular service, was demoralizing, not alone to the men engaged in it, but to the youth of the country as well. The stories of the easy life and the great profits of the privateersmen were circulated in every little town, while the revels of these sea soldiers in the water-front villages were described with picturesque embellishments throughout the land. As a result, it became hard to get young men of spirit into the patriot armies. Washington complained that when the fortunes of his army were at their lowest, when he could not get clothing for his soldiers, and the snow at Valley Forge was stained with the blood of their unshod feet, any American shipping on a privateer was sure of a competence, while great fortunes were being made by the speculators who fitted them out. Nor was this all. Such was the attraction of the privateer's life that it drew to it seamen from every branch of the maritime calling. The fisheries and the West India trade, which had long been the chief mainstay of New England commerce, were ruined, and it seemed for a time as if the hardy race of American seamen were to degenerate into a mere body of buccaneers, operating under the protection of international law, but plunderers and spoilers nevertheless. Fortunately, the long peace which succeeded the War of 1812 gave opportunity for the naturally lawful and civilized instincts of the Americans to assert themselves, and this peril was averted. It is, then, with no admiration for the calling, and yet with no underestimate of its value to the nation, that I recount some of the achievements of those who followed it. The periods when American privateering was important were those of the Revolution and the War of 1812. During the Civil War the loss incurred by privateers fell upon our own people, and it is curious to note how different a tone the writers on this subject adopt when discussing the ravages of the Confederate privateers and those which we let loose upon British commerce in the brave days of 1812. A true type of the Revolutionary privateersmen was Captain Silas Talbot, of Massachusetts. He was one of the New England lads apprenticed to the sea at an early age, having been made a cabin-boy at twelve. He rose to command and acquired means in his profession, as we have seen was common among our early merchant sailors, and when the Revolution broke out was living comfortably in his own mansion in Providence. He enlisted in Washington's army, but left it to become a privateer; and from that service he stepped to the quarter-deck of a man-of-war. This was not an uncommon line of development for the early privateersmen; and, indeed, it was not unusual to find navy officers, temporarily without commands, taking a cruise or two as privateers, until Congress should provide more ships for the regular service--a system which did not tend to make a Congress, which was niggardly at best, hasten to provide public vessels for work which was being reasonably well done at private expense. As a result of this system, we find such famous naval names as Decatur, Porter, Hopkins, Preble, Barry, and Barney also figuring in the lists of privateersmen. Talbot's first notable exploit was clearing New York harbor of several British men-of-war by the use of fire-ships. Washington, with his army, was then encamped at Harlem Heights, and the British ships were in the Hudson River menacing his flank. Talbot, in a fire-ship, well loaded with combustibles, dropped down the river and made for the biggest of the enemy's fleet, the "Asia." Though quickly discovered and made the target of the enemy's battery, he held his vessel on her course until fairly alongside of and entangled with the "Asia," when the fuses were lighted and the volcanic craft burst into roaring flames from stem to stern. So rapid was the progress of the flames that Talbot and his companions could scarcely escape with their lives from the conflagration they had themselves started, and he lay for days, badly burned and unable to see, in a little log hut on the Jersey shore. The British ships were not destroyed; but, convinced that the neighborhood was unsafe for them, they dropped down the bay; so the end sought for was attained. In 1779 Talbot was given command of the sloop "Argo," of 100 tons; "a mere shallop, like a clumsy Albany sloop," says his biographer. Sixty men from the army, most of whom had served afloat, were given him for crew, and he set out to clear Long Island Sound of Tory privateers; for the loyalists in New York were quite as avid for spoils as the New England Revolutionists. On his second cruise he took seven prizes, including two of these privateers. One of these was a 300-ton ship, vastly superior to the "Argo" in armament and numbers, and the battle was a fierce one. Nearly every man on the quarter-deck of the "Argo" was killed or wounded; the speaking trumpet in Talbot's hand was pierced by two bullets, and a cannon-ball carried away the tail of his coat. The damages sustained in this battle were scarce repaired when another British privateer appeared, and Talbot again went into action and took her, though of scarce half her size. In all this little "Argo"--which, by the way, belonged to Nicholas Low, of New York, an ancestor of the eminent Seth Low--took twelve prizes. Her commander was finally captured and sent first to the infamous "Jersey" prison-ship, and afterward to the Old Mill Prison in England. [Illustration: NEARLY EVERY MAN ON THE QUARTERDECK OF THE "ARGO" WAS KILLED OR WOUNDED.] The "Jersey" prison-ship was not an uncommon lot for the bold privateersman, who, when once consigned to it, found that the reward of a sea-rover was not always wealth and pleasure. A Massachusetts privateersman left on record a contemporary account of the sufferings of himself and his comrades in this pestilential hulk, which may well be condensed here to show some of the perils that the adventurers dared when they took to the sea. [Illustration: THE PRISON SHIP "JERSEY".] After about one-third of the captives made with this writer had been seized and carried away to serve against their country on British war-ships, the rest were conveyed to the "Jersey," which had been originally a 74-gun ship, then cut down to a hulk and moored at the Wallabout, at that time a lonely and deserted place on the Long Island shore, now about the center of the Brooklyn river front. "I found myself," writes the captive, "in a loathsome prison among a collection of the most wretched and disgusting objects I ever beheld in human form. Here was a motley crew covered with rags and filth, visages pallid with disease, emaciated with hunger and anxiety, and retaining hardly a trace of their original appearance.... The first day we could obtain no food, and seldom on the second could prisoners secure it in season for cooking it. Each prisoner received one-third as much as was allotted to a tar in the British navy. Our bill of fare was as follows: On Sunday, one pound of biscuit, one pound of pork, and half a pint of peas; Monday, one pound of biscuit, one pint of oatmeal, and two ounces of butter; Tuesday, one pound of biscuit and two pounds of salt beef, etc., etc. If this food had been of good quality and properly cooked, as we had no labor to perform, it would have kept us comfortable; but all our food appeared to be damaged. As for the pork, we were cheated out of more than half of it, and when it was obtained one would have judged from its motley hues, exhibiting the consistency and appearance of variegated fancy soap, that it was the flesh of the porpoise or sea-hog, and had been an inhabitant of the ocean rather than the sty. The peas were about as digestible as grape-shot; and the butter--had it not been for its adhesive properties to retain together the particles of biscuit that had been so riddled by the worms as to lose all their attraction of cohesion, we should not have considered it a desirable addition to our viands. The flour and oatmeal were sour, and the suet might have been nosed the whole length of our ship. Many times since, when I have seen in the country a large kettle of potatoes and pumpkins steaming over the fire to satisfy the appetite of some farmer's swine, I have thought of our destitute and starved condition, and what a luxury we should have considered the contents of that kettle aboard the 'Jersey.'... About two hours before sunset orders were given the prisoners to carry all their things below; but we were permitted to remain above until we retired for the night into our unhealthy and crowded dungeons. At sunset our ears were saluted with the insulting and hateful sound from our keepers of 'Down, rebels, down,' and we were hurried below, the hatchways fastened over us, and we were left to pass the night amid the accumulated horrors of sighs and groans, of foul vapor, a nauseous and putrid atmosphere, in a stifled and almost suffocating heat.... When any of the prisoners had died during the night, their bodies were brought to the upper deck in the morning and placed upon the gratings. If the deceased had owned a blanket, any prisoner might sew it around the corpse; and then it was lowered, with a rope tied round the middle, down the side of the ship into a boat. Some of the prisoners were allowed to go on shore under a guard to perform the labor of interment. In a bank near the Wallabout, a hole was excavated in the sand, in which the body was put, then slightly covered. Many bodies would, in a few days after this mockery of a burial, be exposed nearly bare by the action of the elements." Such was, indeed, the end of many of the most gallant of the Revolutionary privateersmen; but squalid and cruel as was the fate of these unfortunates, it had no effect in deterring others from seeking fortune in the same calling. In 1775-76 there were commissioned 136 vessels, with 1360 guns; in 1777, 73 vessels, with 730 guns; in 1778, 115 privateers, with a total of 1150 guns; in 1779, 167 vessels, with 2505 guns; in 1780, 228 vessels, with 3420 guns; in 1781, 449 vessels, with 6735 (the high-water mark): and in 1782, 323 vessels, with 4845 guns. Moreover, the vessels grew in size and efficiency, until toward the latter end of the war they were in fact well-equipped war-vessels, ready to give a good account of themselves in a fight with a British frigate, or even to engage a shore battery and cut out prizes from a hostile harbor. It is, in fact, a striking evidence of the gallantry and the patriotism of the privateersmen that they did not seek to evade battle with the enemy's armed forces. Their business was, of course, to earn profits for the merchants who had fitted them out, and profits were most easily earned by preying upon inferior or defenseless vessels. But the spirit of the war was strong upon many of them, and it is not too much to say that the privateers were handled as gallantly and accepted unfavorable odds in battle as readily as could any men-of-war. Their ravages upon British commerce plunged all commercial England into woe. The war had hardly proceeded two years when it was formally declared in the House of Commons that the losses to American privateers amounted to seven hundred and thirty-three ships, of a value of over $11,000,000. Mr. Maclay estimates from this that "our amateur man-of-war's men averaged more than four prizes each," while some took twenty and one ship twenty-eight in a single cruise. Nearly eleven hundred prisoners were taken with the captured ships. While there are no complete figures for the whole period of the war obtainable, it is not to be believed that quite so high a record was maintained, for dread of privateers soon drove British shipping into their harbors, whence they put forth, if at all, under the protection of naval convoys. Nevertheless, the number of captures must have continued great for some years; for, as is shown by the foregoing figures, the spoils were sufficiently attractive to cause a steady increase in the number of privateers until the last year of the war. There followed dull times for the privateersmen. Most of them returned to their ordinary avocations of sea or shore--became peaceful sailors, or fishermen, or ship-builders, or farmers once again. But in so great a body of men who had lived sword in hand for years, and had fattened on the spoils of the commerce of a great nation, it was inevitable that there should be many utterly unable to return to the humdrum life of honest industry. Many drifted down to that region of romance and outlawry, dear to the heart of the romantic boy, the Spanish Main, and there, as pirates in a small way and as buccaneers, pursued the predatory life. For a time the war which sprung up between England and France seemed to promise these turbulent spirits congenial and lawful occupation. France, it will be remembered, sent the Citizen Genet over to the United States to take advantage of the supposed gratitude of the American people for aid during the Revolution to fit out privateers and to make our ports bases of operation against the British. It must be admitted that Genet would have had an easy task, had he had but the people to reckon with. He found privateering veterans by the thousand eager to take up that manner of life once more. In all the seacoast towns were merchants quite as ready for profitable ventures in privateering under the French flag as under their own, provided they could be assured of immunity from governmental prosecution. And, finally, he found the masses of the people fired with enthusiasm for the principles of the French Revolution, and eager to show sympathy for a people who, like themselves, had thrown off the yoke of kings. The few privateers that Minister Genet fitted out before President Washington became aroused to his infraction of the principles of neutrality were quickly manned, and began sending in prizes almost before they were out of sight of the American shore. The crisis came, however, when one of these ships actually captured a British merchantman in Delaware Bay. Then the administration made a vigorous protest, demanded the release of the vessels taken, arrested two American sailors who had shipped on the privateer, and broke up at once the whole project of the Frenchman. It was a critical moment in our national history, for, between France and England abroad, the Federalist and Republican at home, the President had to steer a course beset with reefs. The maritime community was not greatly in sympathy with his suppression of the French minister's plans, and with some reason, for British privateers had been molesting our vessels all along our coasts and distant waters. It was a time when no merchant could tell whether the stout ship he had sent out was even then discharging her cargo at her destination, or tied up as a prize in some British port. We Americans are apt to regard with some pride Washington's stout adherence to the most rigid letter of the law of neutrality in those troublous times, and our historians have been at some pains to impress us with the impropriety of Jefferson's scarcely concealed liking for France; but the fact is that no violation of the neutrality law which Genet sought was more glaring than those continually committed by Great Britain, and which our Government failed to resent. In time France, moved partly by pique because of our refusal to aid her, and partly by contempt for a nation that failed to protect its ships against British aggression, began itself to prey upon our commerce. Then the state of our maritime trade was a dismal one. Our ships were the prey of both France and England; but since we were neutral, the right of fitting out privateers of our own was denied our shipping interests. We were ground between the upper and nether millstones. But, as so often happens, persecution bred the spirit and created the weapons for its correction. When it was found that every American vessel was the possible spoil of any French or English cruiser or privateer that she might encounter; that our Government was impotent to protect its seamen; that neither our neutrality rights nor the neutrality of ports in which our vessels lay commanded the respect of the two great belligerents, the Yankee shipping merchants set about meeting the situation as best they might. They did not give up their effort to secure the world's trade--that was never an American method of procedure. But they built their ships so as to be able to run away from anything they might meet; and they manned and armed them so as to fight if fighting became necessary. So the American merchantman became a long, sharp, clipper-built craft that could show her heels to almost anything afloat; moderate of draft, so that she could run into lagoons and bays where no warship could follow. They mounted from four to twelve guns, and carried an armory of rifles and cutlasses which their men were well trained to handle. Accordingly, when the depredations of foreign nations became such as could not longer be borne, and after President Jefferson's plan of punishing Europe for interfering with our commerce by laying an embargo which kept our ships at home had failed, war was declared with England; and from every port on the Atlantic seaboard privateers--ships as fit for their purpose as though specially built for it--swarmed forth seeking revenge and spoils. Their very names told of the reasons of the American merchantmen for complaint--the reasons why they rejoiced that they were now to have their turn. There were the "Orders-in-Council," the "Right-of-Search," the "Fair-trader," the "Revenge." Some were mere pilot-boats, with a Long Tom amidships and a crew of sixty men; others were vessels of 300 tons, with an armament and crew like a man-of-war. Before the middle of July, 1812, sixty-five such privateers had sailed, and the British merchantmen were scudding for cover like a covey of frightened quail. The War of 1812 was won, so far as it was won at all, on the ocean. In the land operations from the very beginning the Americans came off second best; and the one battle of importance in which they were the victors--the battle of New Orleans--was without influence upon the result, having been fought after the treaty of peace had been signed at Ghent. But on the ocean the honors were all taken by the Americans, and no small share of these honors fell to the private armed navy of privateers. As the war progressed these vessels became in type more like the regular sloop-of-war, for the earlier craft, while useful before the British began sending out their merchantmen under convoy, proved to be too small to fight and too light to escape destruction from one well-aimed broadside. The privateer of 1813 was usually about 115 to 120 feet long on the spar-deck, 31 feet beam, and rigged as a brig or ship. They were always fast sailers, and notable for sailing close to the wind. While armed to fight, if need be, that was not their purpose, and a privateersman who gained the reputation among owners of being a fighting captain was likely to go long without a command. Accordingly, these vessels were lightly built and over-rigged (according to the ideas of British naval construction), for speed was the great desideratum. They were at once the admiration and the envy of the British, who imitated their models without success and tried to utilize them for cruisers when captured, but destroyed their sailing qualities by altering their rig and strengthening their hulls at the expense of lightness and symmetry. I have already referred to Michael Scott's famous story of sea life, "Tom Cringle's Log," which, though in form a work of fiction, contains so many accounts of actual happenings, and expresses so fully the ideas of the British naval officer of that time, that it may well be quoted in a work of historical character. Tom Cringle, after detailing with a lively description the capture of a Yankee privateer, says that she was assigned to him for his next command. He had seen her under weigh, had admired her trim model, her tapering spars, her taut cordage, and the swiftness with which she came about and reached to windward. He thus describes the change the British outfitters made in her: "When I had last seen her she was the most beautiful little craft, both in hull and rigging, that ever delighted the eyes of a sailor; but the dock yard riggers and carpenters had fairly bedeviled her at least so far as appearances went. First, they had replaced the light rail on her gunwale by heavy, solid bulwarks four feet high, surmounted by hammock nettings at least another foot; so that the symmetrical little vessel, that formerly floated on the foam light as a seagull, now looked like a clumsy, dish-shaped Dutch dogger. Her long, slender wands of masts, which used to swing about as if there were neither shrouds nor stays to support them, were now as taut and stiff as church-steeples, with four heavy shrouds of a side, and stays, and back-stays, and the devil knows what all." It is a curious fact that no nation ever succeeded in imitating these craft. The French went into privateering without in the least disturbing the equanimity of the British shipowner; but the day the Yankee privateers took the sea a cry went up from the docks and warehouses of Liverpool and London that reverberated among the arches of Westminster Hall. The newspapers were loud in their attacks upon the admiralty authorities. Said the _Morning Chronicle_ in 1814: "That the whole coast of Ireland, from Wexford round by Cape Clear to Carrickfergus, should have been for above a month under the unresisted domination of a few petty fly-by-nights from the blockaded ports of the United States is a grievance equally intolerable and disgraceful." This wail may have resulted from the pleasantry of one Captain Boyle, of the privateer "Chasseur," a famous Baltimore clipper, mounting sixteen guns, with a complement of one hundred officers, seamen, and marines. Captain Boyle, after exhausting, as it seemed to him, the possibilities of the West Indies for excitement and profit, took up the English channel for his favorite cruising-ground. One of the British devices of that day for the embarrassment of an enemy was what is called a "paper blockade." That is to say, when it appeared that the blockading fleet had too few vessels to make the blockade really effective by watching each port, the admiral commanding would issue a proclamation that such and such ports were in a state of blockade, and then withdraw his vessels from those ports; but still claim the right to capture any neutral vessels which he might encounter bound thither. This practise is now universally interdicted by international law, which declares that a blockade, to be binding upon neutrals, must be effective. But in those days England made her own international law--for the sea, at any rate--and the paper blockade was one of her pet weapons. Captain Boyle satirized this practise by drawing up a formal proclamation of blockade of all the ports of Great Britain and Ireland, and sending it to Lloyds, where it was actually posted. His action was not wholly a jest, either, for he did blockade the port of St. Vincent so effectively for five days that the inhabitants sent off a pitiful appeal to Admiral Durham to send a frigate to their relief. It was at this time, too, that the _Annual Register_ recorded as "a most mortifying reflection" that, with a navy of more than one thousand ships in commission, "it was not safe for a British vessel to sail without convoy from one part of the English or Irish Channel to another." Merchants held meetings, insurance corporations and boards of trade memorialized the government on the subject; the shipowners and merchants of Glasgow, in formal resolutions, called the attention of the admiralty to the fact that "in the short space of twenty-four months above eight hundred vessels have been captured by the power whose maritime strength we have hitherto impolitically held in contempt." It was, indeed, a real blockade of the British Isles that was effected by these irregular and pigmy vessels manned by the sailors of a nation that the British had long held in high scorn. The historian Henry Adams, without attempting to give any complete list of captures made on the British coasts in 1814, cites these facts: "The 'Siren,' a schooner of less than 200 tons, with seven guns and seventy-five men, had an engagement with His Majesty's cutter 'Landrail,' of four guns, as the cutter was crossing the Irish sea with dispatches. The 'Landrail' was captured, after a somewhat smart action, and was sent to America, but was recaptured on the way. The victory was not remarkable, but the place of capture was very significant, and it happened July 12 only a fortnight after Blakely captured the 'Reindeer' farther westward. The 'Siren' was but one of many privateers in those waters. The 'Governor Tompkins' burned fourteen vessels successively in the British Channel. The 'Young Wasp,' of Philadelphia, cruised nearly six months about the coasts of England and Spain, and in the course of West India commerce. The 'Harpy,' of Baltimore, another large vessel of some 350 tons and fourteen guns, cruised nearly three months off the coast of Ireland, in the British Channel, and in the Bay of Biscay, and returned safely to Boston filled with plunder, including, as was said, upward of £100,000 in British treasury notes and bills of exchange. The 'Leo,' a Boston schooner of about 200 tons, was famous for its exploits in these waters, but was captured at last by the frigate 'Tiber,' after a chase of about eleven hours. The 'Mammoth,' a Baltimore schooner of nearly 400 tons, was seventeen days off Cape Clear, the southernmost point of Ireland. The most mischievous of all was the 'Prince of Neufchâtel,' New York, which chose the Irish Channel as its favorite haunt, where during the summer it made ordinary coasting traffic impossible." The vessels enumerated by Mr. Adams were by no means among the more famous of the privateers of the War of 1812; yet when we come to examine their records we find something notable or something romantic in the career of each--a fact full of suggestion of the excitement of the privateersman's life. The "Leo," for example, at this time was under command of Captain George Coggeshall, the foremost of all the privateers, and a man who so loved his calling that he wrote an excellent book about it. Under an earlier commander she made several most profitable cruises, and when purchased by Coggeshall's associates was lying in a French port. France and England were then at peace, and it may be that the French remembered the way in which we had suppressed the Citizen Genet. At any rate, they refused to let Coggeshall take his ship out of the harbor with more than one gun--a Long Tom--aboard. Nothing daunted, he started out with this armament, to which some twenty muskets were added, on a privateering cruise in the channel, which was full of British cruisers. Even the Long Tom proved untrustworthy, so recourse was finally had to carrying the enemy by boarding; and in this way four valuable prizes were taken, of which three were sent home with prize crews. But a gale carried away the "Leo's" foremast, and she fell a prey to an English frigate which happened along untimely. The "Mammoth" was emphatically a lucky ship. In seven weeks she took seventeen merchantmen, paying for herself several times over. Once she fought a lively battle with a British transport carrying four hundred men, but prudently drew off. True, the Government was paying a bonus of twenty-five dollars a head for prisoners; but cargoes were more valuable. Few of the privateers troubled to send in their prisoners, if they could parole and release them. In all, the "Mammoth" captured twenty-one vessels, and released on parole three hundred prisoners. Of all the foregoing vessels, the "Prince de Neufchátel" was the most famous. She was an hermaphrodite brig of 310 tons, mounting 17 guns. She was a "lucky" vessel, several times escaping a vastly superior force and bringing into port, for the profit of her owners, goods valued at $3,000,000, besides large quantities of specie. Her historic achievement, however, was beating off the British frigate "Endymion," off Nantucket, one dark night, after a battle concerning which a British naval historian, none too friendly to Americans, wrote: "So determined and effective a resistance did great credit to the American captain and his crew." The privateer had a prize in tow, by which, of course, her movements were much hampered, for her captain was not inclined to save himself at the expense of his booty. But, more than this, she had thirty-seven prisoners aboard, while her own crew was sorely reduced by manning prizes. The night being calm, the British attempted to take the ship by boarding from small boats, for what reason does not readily appear, since the vessels were within range of each other, and the frigate's superior metal could probably have reduced the Americans to subjection. Instead, however, of opening fire with his broadside, the enemy sent out boarding parties in five boats. Their approach was detected on the American vessel, and a rapid fire with small arms and cannon opened upon them, to which they paid no attention, but pressed doggedly on. In a moment the boats surrounded the privateer--one on each bow, one on each side, and one under the stern--and the boarders began to swarm up the sides like cats. It was a bloody hand-to-hand contest that followed, in which every weapon, from cutlass and clubbed musket down to bare hands, was employed. Heavy shot, which had been piled up in readiness on deck, were thrown into the boats in an effort to sink them. Hundreds of loaded muskets were ranged along the rail, so that the firing was not interrupted to reload. Time and again the British renewed their efforts to board, but were hurled back by the American defenders. A few who succeeded in reaching the decks were cut down before they had time to profit by their brief advantage. Once only did it seem that the ship was in danger. Then the assailants, who outnumbered the Americans four to one, had reached the deck over the bows in such numbers that they were gradually driving the defenders aft. Every moment more men came swarming over the side; and as the Americans ran from all parts of the ship to meet and overpower those who had already reached the deck, new ways were opened for others to clamber aboard. The situation was critical; but was saved by Captain Ordronaux by a desperate expedient, and one which it is clear would have availed nothing had not his men known him for a man of fierce determination, ready to fulfil any desperate threat. Seizing a lighted match from one of the gunners, he ran to the hatch immediately over the magazine, and called out to his men that if they retreated farther he would blow up the ship, its defenders, and its assailants. The men rallied. They swung a cannon in board so that it commanded the deck, and swept away the invaders with a storm of grape. In a few minutes the remaining British were driven back to their boats. The battle had lasted less than half an hour when the British called for quarter, the smoke cleared away, the cries of combat ceased, and both parties were able to count their losses. The crew of the privateer had numbered thirty-seven, of whom seven were killed and twenty-four wounded. The British had advanced to the attack with a force of one hundred and twenty-eight, in five boats. Three of the boats drifted away empty, one was sunk, and one was captured. Of the attacking force not one escaped; thirty were made prisoners, many of them sorely wounded, and the rest were either killed or swept away by the tide and drowned. The privateers actually had more prisoners than they had men of their own. Some of the prisoners were kept towing in a launch at the stern, and, by way of strategy, Captain Ordronaux set two boys to playing a fife and drum and stamping about in a sequestered part of his decks as though he had a heavy force aboard. Only by sending the prisoners ashore under parole was the danger of an uprising among the captives averted. [Illustration: IF THEY RETREATED FARTHER HE WOULD BLOW UP THE SHIP] In the end the "Prince de Neufchátel" was captured by a British squadron, but only after a sudden squall had carried away several of her spars and made her helpless. As the war progressed it became the custom of British merchants to send out their ships only in fleets, convoyed by one or two men-of-war, a system that, of course, could be adopted only by nations very rich in war-ships. The privateers' method of meeting this was to cruise in couples, a pair of swift, light schooners, hunting the prize together. When the convoy was encountered, both would attack, picking out each its prey. The convoys were usually made up with a man-of-war at the head of the column, and as this vessel would make sail after one of the privateers, the other would rush in at some point out of range, and cut out its prize. When the British began sending out two ships of war with each convoy, the privateers cruised in threes, and the same tactics were observed. But the richest prizes won by the privateer were the single going ships, called "running ships," that were prepared to defend themselves, and scorned to wait for convoy. These were generally great packets trading to the Indies, whose cargoes were too valuable to be delayed until some man-of-war could be found for their protection. They were heavily armed, often, indeed, equaling a frigate in their batteries and the size of their crews. But, although to attack one of these meant a desperate fight, the Yankee privateer always welcomed the chance, for besides a valuable cargo, they were apt to carry a considerable sum in specie. The capture of one of these vessels, too, was the cause of annoyance to the enemy disproportionate to even their great value to their captors, for they not only carried the Royal Mail, but were usually the agencies by which the dispatches of the British general were forwarded. Mail and dispatches, alike, were promptly thrown overboard by their captors. In the diary of a privateersman of Revolutionary days is to be found the story of the capture of an Indiaman which may well be reprinted as typical. [Illustration: "I THINK SHE IS A HEAVY SHIP."] "As the fog cleared up, we perceived her to be a large ship under English colors, to the windward, standing athwart our starboard bow. As she came down upon us, she appeared as large as a seventy-four; and we were not deceived respecting her size, for it afterwards proved that she was an old East Indiaman, of 1100 tons burden, fitted out as a letter of marque for the West India trade, mounted with thirty-two guns, and furnished with a complement of one hundred and fifty men. She was called the 'Admiral Duff,' commanded by Richard Strange, from St. Christopher and St. Eustachia, laden with sugar and tobacco, and bound to London. I was standing near our first lieutenant, Mr. Little, who was calmly examining the enemy as she approached, with his spy-glass, when Captain Williams stepped up and asked his opinion of her. The lieutenant applied the glass to his eye again and took a deliberate look in silence, and replied: 'I think she is a heavy ship, and that we shall have some hard fighting, but of one thing I am certain, she is not a frigate; if she were, she would not keep yawing and showing her broadsides as she does; she would show nothing but her head and stern; we shall have the advantage of her, and the quicker we get alongside the better.' Our captain ordered English colors to be hoisted, and the ship to be cleared for action. "The enemy approached 'till within musket-shot of us. The two ships were so near to each other that we could distinguish the officers from the men; and I particularly noticed the captain on the gangway, a noble-looking man, having a large gold-laced cocked hat on his head, and a speaking-trumpet in his hand. Lieutenant Little possessed a powerful voice, and he was directed to hail the enemy; at the same time the quartermaster was ordered to stand ready to haul down the English flag and to hoist up the American. Our lieutenant took his station on the after part of the starboard gangway, and elevating his trumpet, exclaimed: 'Hullo. Whence come you?' "'From Jamaica, bound to London,' was the answer. "'What is the ship's name?' inquired the lieutenant. "'The "Admiral Duff",' was the reply. "The English captain then thought it his turn to interrogate, and asked the name of our ship. Lieutenant Little, in order to gain time, put the trumpet to his ear, pretending not to hear the question. During the short interval thus gained, Captain Williams called upon the gunner to ascertain how many guns could be brought to bear upon the enemy. 'Five,' was the answer. 'Then fire, and shift the colors,' were the orders. The cannons poured forth their deadly contents, and, with the first flash, the American flag took the place of the British ensign at our masthead. "The compliment was returned in the form of a full broadside, and the action commenced. I was stationed on the edge of the quarter-deck, to sponge and load a six-pounder; this position gave me a fine opportunity to see the whole action. Broadsides were exchanged with great rapidity for nearly an hour; our fire, as we afterward ascertained, produced a terrible slaughter among the enemy, while our loss was as yet trifling. I happened to be looking for a moment toward the main deck, when a large shot came through our ship's side and killed a midshipman. At this moment a shot from one of our marines killed the man at the wheel of the enemy's ship, and, his place not being immediately supplied, she was brought alongside of us in such a manner as to bring her bowsprit directly across our forecastle. Not knowing the cause of this movement, we supposed it to be the intention of the enemy to board us. Our boarders were ordered to be ready with their pikes to resist any such attempt, while our guns on the main deck were sending death and destruction among the crew of the enemy. Their principal object now seemed to be to get liberated from us, and by cutting away some of their rigging, they were soon clear, and at the distance of a pistol shot. "The action was then renewed, with additional fury; broadside for broadside continued with unabated vigor; at times, so near to each other that the muzzles of our guns came almost in contact, then again at such a distance as to allow of taking deliberate aim. The contest was obstinately continued by the enemy, although we could perceive that great havoc was made among them, and that it was with much difficulty that their men were compelled to remain at their quarters. A charge of grape-shot came in at one of our portholes, which dangerously wounded four or five of our men, among whom was our third lieutenant, Mr. Little, brother to the first. "The action had now lasted about an hour and a half, and the fire from the enemy began to slacken, when we suddenly discovered that all the sails on her mainmast were enveloped in a blaze. Fire spread with amazing rapidity, and, running down the after rigging, it soon communicated with her magazine, when her whole stern was blown off, and her valuable cargo emptied into the sea. Our enemy's ship was now a complete wreck, though she still floated, and the survivors were endeavoring to save themselves in the only boat that had escaped the general destruction. The humanity of our captain urged him to make all possible exertions to save the miserable wounded and burned wretches, who were struggling for their lives in the water. The ship of the enemy was greatly our superior in size, and lay much higher out of the water. Our boats had been exposed to his fire, as they were placed on spars between the fore and mainmasts during the action, and had suffered considerable damage. The carpenters were ordered to repair them with the utmost expedition, and we got them out in season to take up fifty-five men, the greater part of whom had been wounded by our shot, or burned when the powder-magazine exploded. Their limbs were mutilated by all manner of wounds, while some were burned to such a degree that the skin was nearly flayed from their bodies. Our surgeon and his assistants had just completed the task of dressing the wounds of our own crew, and then they directed their attention to the wounded of the enemy. Several of them suffered the amputation of their limbs, five of them died of their wounds, and were committed to their watery graves. From the survivors we learned that the British commander had frequently expressed a desire to come in contact with a 'Yankee frigate' during his voyage, that he might have a prize to carry to London. Poor fellow. He little thought of losing his ship and his life in an engagement with a ship so much inferior to his own--with an enemy upon whom he looked with so much contempt." But most notable of all the battles fought by privateersmen in the War of 1812, was the defense of the brig "General Armstrong," in the harbor of Fayal, in September, 1814. This famous combat has passed into history, not only because of the gallant fight made by the privateer, but because the three British men-of-war to whom she gave battle, were on their way to cooperate with Packenham at New Orleans, and the delay due to the injuries they received, made them too late to aid in that expedition, and may have thus contributed to General Jackson's success. The "General Armstrong" had always been a lucky craft, and her exploits in the capture of merchantmen, no less than the daring of her commander in giving battle to ships-of-war which he encountered, had won her the peculiar hate of the British navy. At the very beginning of her career, when in command of Captain Guy R. Champlin, she fought a British frigate for more than an hour, and inflicted such grave damage that the enemy was happy enough to let her slip away when the wind freshened. On another occasion she engaged a British armed ship of vastly superior strength, off the Surinam River, and forced her to run ashore. Probably the most valuable prize taken in the war fell to her guns--the ship "Queen," with a cargo invoiced at £90,000. Indeed, such had been her audacity, and so many her successes, that the British were eager for her capture or destruction, above that of any other privateer. In September, 1814, the "General Armstrong," now under command of Captain Samuel G. Reid, was at anchor in the harbor at Fayal, a port of Portugal, when her commander saw a British war-brig come nosing her way into the harbor. Soon after another vessel appeared, and then a third, larger than the first two, and all flying the British ensign. Captain Reid immediately began to fear for his safety. It was true that he was in a neutral port, and under the law of nations exempt from attack, but the British had never manifested that extreme respect for neutrality that they exacted of President Washington when France tried to fit out privateers in our ports. More than once they had attacked and destroyed our vessels in neutral ports, and, indeed, it seemed that the British test of neutrality was whether the nation whose flag was thus affronted, was able or likely to resent it. Portugal was not such a nation. All this was clear to Captain Reid, and when he saw a rapid signaling begun between the three vessels of the enemy, he felt confident that he was to be attacked. He had already discovered that the strangers were the 74-gun ship of the line "Plantagenet," the 38-gun frigate "Rota," and the 18-gun war-brig "Carnation," comprising a force against which he could not hope to win a victory. The night came on clear, with a bright moon, and as the American captain saw boats from the two smaller vessels rallying about the larger one, he got out his sweeps and began moving his vessel inshore, so as to get under the guns of the decrepit fort, with which Portugal guarded her harbor. At this, four boats crowded with men, put out from the side of the British ship, and made for the privateer, seeing which, Reid dropped anchor and put springs on his cables, so as to keep his broadside to bear on the enemy as they approached. Then he shouted to the British, warning them to keep off, or he would fire. They paid no attention to the warning, but pressed on, when he opened a brisk fire upon them. For a time there was a lively interchange of shots, but the superior marksmanship of the Americans soon drove the enemy out of range with heavy casualties. The British retreated to their ships with a hatred for the Yankee privateer even more bitter than that which had impelled them to the lawless attack, and a fiercer determination for her destruction. It is proper to note, that after the battle was fought, and the British commander had calmly considered the possible consequences of his violation of the neutrality laws, he attempted to make it appear that the Americans themselves were the aggressors. His plea, as made in a formal report to the admiralty, was that he had sent four boats to discover the character of the American vessel; that they, upon hailing her, had been fired upon and suffered severe loss, and that accordingly he felt that the affront to the British flag could only be expiated by the destruction of the vessel. The explanation was not even plausible, for the British commander, elsewhere in his report, acknowledged that he was perfectly informed as to the identity of the vessel, and even had this not been the case, it is not customary to send four boats heavily laden with armed men, merely to discover the character of a ship in a friendly port. The withdrawal of the British boats gave Captain Reid time to complete the removal of his vessel to a point underneath the guns of the Portuguese battery. This gave him a position better fitted for defense, although his hope that the Portuguese would defend the neutrality of their port, was destined to disappointment, for not a shot was fired from the battery. [Illustration: "STRIVING TO REACH HER DECKS AT EVERY POINT"] Toward midnight the attack was resumed, and by this time the firing within the harbor had awakened the people of the town, who crowded down to the shore to see the battle. The British, in explanation of the reverse which they suffered, declared that all the Americans in Fayal armed themselves, and from the shore supplemented the fire from the "General Armstrong." Captain Reid, however, makes no reference to this assistance. In all, some four hundred men joined in the second attack. Twelve boats were in line, most of them with a howitzer mounted in the bow. The Americans used their artillery on these craft as they approached, and inflicted great damage before the enemy were in a position to board. The British vessels, though within easy gun-fire, dared not use their heavy cannon, lest they should injure their own men, and furthermore, for fear that the shot would fall into the town. The midnight struggle was a desperate one, the enemy fairly surrounding the "General Armstrong," and striving to reach her decks at every point. But though greatly outnumbered, the defenders were able to maintain their position, and not a boarder succeeded in reaching the decks. The struggle continued for nearly three-quarters of an hour, after which the British again drew off. Two boats filled with dead and dying men, were captured by the Americans, the unhurt survivors leaping overboard and swimming ashore. The British report showed, that in these two attacks there were about one hundred and forty of the enemy killed, and one hundred and thirty wounded. The Americans had lost only two killed and seven wounded, but the ship was left in no condition for future defense. Many of the guns were dismounted, and the Long Tom, which had been the mainstay of the defense, was capsized. Captain Reid and his officers worked with the utmost energy through the night, trying to fit the vessel for a renewal of the combat in the morning, but at three o'clock he was called ashore by a note from the American consul. Here he was informed that the Portuguese Governor had made a personal appeal to the British commander for a cessation of the attack, but that it had been refused, with the statement that the vessel would be destroyed by cannon-fire from the British ships in the morning. Against an attack of this sort it was, of course, futile for the "General Armstrong" to attempt to offer defense, and accordingly Captain Reid landed his men with their personal effects, and soon after the British began fire in the morning, scuttled the ship and abandoned her. He led his men into the interior, seized on an abandoned convent, and fortifying it, prepared to resist capture. No attempt, however, was made to pursue him, the British commander contenting himself with the destruction of the privateer. For nearly a week the British ships were delayed in the harbor, burying their dead and making repairs. When they reached New Orleans, the army which they had been sent to reenforce, had met Jackson on the plains of Chalmette, and had been defeated. The price paid for the "General Armstrong" was, perhaps, the heaviest of the war. The British commander seemed to appreciate this fact, for every effort was made to keep the news of the battle from becoming known in England, and when complete concealment was no longer possible, an official report was given out that minimized the British loss, magnified the number of the Americans, and totally mis-stated the facts bearing on the violation of the neutrality of the Portuguese port. Captain Reid, however, was made a hero by his countrymen. A Portuguese ship took him and his crew to Amelia Island, whence they made their way to New York. Poughkeepsie voted him a sword. Richmond citizens gave him a complimentary dinner, at which were drunk such toasts as: "The private cruisers of the United States--whose intrepidity has pierced the enemy's channels and bearded the lion in his den"; "Neutral Ports--whenever the tyrants of the ocean dare to invade these sanctuaries, may they meet with an 'Essex' and an 'Armstrong'"; and "Captain Reid--his valor has shed a blaze of renown upon the character of our seamen, and won for himself a laurel of eternal bloom." The newspapers of the times rang with eulogies of Reid, and anecdotes of his seafaring experiences. But after all, as McMaster finely says in his history: "The finest compliment of all was the effort made in England to keep the details of the battle from the public, and the false report of the British commander." In finally estimating the effect upon the American fortunes in the War of 1812, of the privateers and their work, many factors must be taken into consideration. At first sight it would seem that a system which gave the services of five hundred ships and their crews to the task of annoying the British, and inflicting damage upon their commerce without cost to the American Government, must be wholly advantageous. We have already seen the losses inflicted upon British commerce by our privateers reflected in the rapidly increasing cost of marine insurance. While the statistics in the possession of the Government are not complete, they show that twenty-five hundred vessels at least were captured during the War of 1812 by these privately-owned cruisers, and there can be no shadow of a doubt that the loss inflicted upon British merchants, and the constant state of apprehension for the safety of their vessels in which they were kept, very materially aided in extending among them a willingness to see peace made on almost any terms. But this is the other side of the story: The prime purpose of the privateer was to make money for its owners, its officers, and its crew. The whole design and spirit of the calling was mercenary. It inflicted damage on the enemy, but only incidentally to earning dividends for its participants. If Government cruisers had captured twenty-five hundred British vessels, those vessels would have been lost to the enemy forever. But the privateer, seeking gains, tried to send them into port, however dangerous such a voyage might be, and accordingly, rather more than a third of them were recaptured by the enemy. We may note here in passing, that one reason why the so-called Confederate privateers during our own Civil War, did an amount of damage so disproportionate to their numbers, was that they were not, in fact, privateers at all. They were commissioned by the Confederate Government to inflict the greatest possible amount of injury upon northern commerce, and accordingly, when Semmes or Maffitt captured a United States vessel, he burned it on the spot. There was no question of profit involved in the service of the "Alabama," the "Florida," or the "Shenandoah," and they have been called privateers in our histories, mainly because Northern writers have been loath to concede, to what they called a rebel government, the right to equip and commission regular men-of-war. But to return to the American privateers of 1812. While, as I have pointed out, there were many instances of enormous gains being made, it is probable that the business as a whole, like all gambling businesses as a whole, was not profitable. Some ships made lucky voyages, but there is on record in the Navy Department a list of three hundred vessels that took not one single prize in the whole year of 1813. The records of Congress show that, as a whole, the business was not remunerative, because there were constant appeals from people interested. In response to this importunity, Congress at one time paid a bounty of twenty-five dollars a head for all prisoners taken. At other times it reduced the import duties on cargoes captured and landed by privateers. Indeed, it is estimated by a careful student, that the losses to the Government in the way of direct expenditures and remission of revenues through the privateering system, amounted to a sum sufficient to have kept twenty sloops of war on the sea throughout the period of hostilities, and there is little doubt that such vessels could have actually accomplished more in the direction of harassing the enemy than the privateers. A very grave objection to the privateering system, however, was the fact that the promise of profit to sailors engaged in it was so great, that all adventurous men flocked into the service, so that it became almost impossible to maintain our army or to man our ships. I have already quoted George Washington's objections to the practise during the Revolution. During the War of 1812, some of our best frigates were compelled to sail half manned, while it is even declared that the loss of the "Chesapeake" to the "Shannon" was largely due to the fact that her crew were discontented and preparing, as their time of service was nearly up, to quit the Government service for privateering. In a history of Marblehead, one of the famous old seafaring towns of Massachusetts, it is declared that of nine hundred men of that town who took part in the war, fifty-seven served in the army, one hundred and twenty entered the navy, while seven hundred and twenty-six shipped on the privateers. These figures afford a fair indication of the way in which the regular branches of the service suffered by the competition of the system of legalized piracy. **Transcriber's Notes: Page 180: Punctuation in diary normalized. Page 184: change Washingon to Washington Page 185: changed dicover to discover Page 186: changed Portugese to Portuguese CHAPTER VI. THE ARCTIC TRAGEDY--AMERICAN SAILORS IN THE FROZEN DEEP--THE SEARCH FOR SIR JOHN FRANKLIN--REASONS FOR SEEKING THE NORTH POLE--TESTIMONY OF SCIENTISTS AND EXPLORERS--PERTINACITY OF POLAR VOYAGERS--DR. KANE AND DR. HAYES--CHARLES F. HALL, JOURNALIST AND EXPLORER--MIRACULOUS ESCAPE OF His PARTY--THE ILL-FATED "JEANNETTE" EXPEDITION--SUFFERING AND DEATH OF DE LONG AND HIS COMPANIONS--A PITIFUL DIARY--THE GREELY EXPEDITION--ITS CAREFUL PLAN AND COMPLETE DISASTER--RESCUE OF THE GREELY SURVIVORS--PEARY, WELLMAN, AND BALDWIN. A chapter in the story of the American sailor, which, though begun full an hundred years ago, is not yet complete, is that which tells the narrative of the search for the North Pole. It is a story of calm daring, of indomitable pertinacity, of patient endurance of the most cruel suffering, of heroic invitation to and acceptance of death. The story will be completed only when the goal is won. Even as these words are being written, American sailors are beleaguered in the frozen North, and others are preparing to follow them thither, so that the narrative here set forth must be accepted as only a partial story of a quest still being prosecuted. In the private office of the President of the United States at Washington, stands a massive oaken desk. It has been a passive factor in the making of history, for at it have eight presidents sat, and papers involving almost the life of the nation, have received the executive signature upon its smooth surface. The very timbers of which it is built were concerned in the making of history of another sort, for they were part of the frame of the stout British ship "Resolute," which, after a long search in the Polar regions for the hapless Sir John Franklin--of whom more hereafter--was deserted by her crew in the Arctic pack, drifted twelve hundred miles in the ice, and was then discovered and brought back home as good as new by Captain Buddington of the stanch American whaler, "George and Henry." The sympathies of all civilized peoples, and particularly of English-speaking races, were at that time strongly stirred by the fate of Franklin and his brave companions, and so Congress appropriated $40,000 for the purchase of the vessel from the salvors, and her repair. Refitted throughout, she was sent to England and presented to the Queen in 1856. Years later, when broken up, the desk was made from her timbers and presented by order of Victoria to the President of the United States, who at that time was Rutherford B. Hayes. It stands now in the executive mansion, an enduring memorial of one of the romances of a long quest full of romance--the search for the North Pole. In all ages, the minds of men of the exploring and colonizing nations, have turned toward the tropics as the region of fabulous wealth, the field for profitable adventure. "The wealth of the Ind," has passed into proverb. Though exploration has shown that, it is the flinty North that hides beneath its granite bosom the richest stores of mineral wealth, almost four centuries of failure and disappointment were needed to rid men's minds of the notion that the jungles and the tropical forests were the most abundant hiding-places of gold and precious stones. The wild beauty of the tropics, the cloudless skies, the tangled thickets, ever green and rustling with a restless animal life, the content and amiability of the natives, combined in a picture irresistibly attractive to the adventurer. Surely where there was so much beauty, so much of innocent joy in life, there must be the fountain of perpetual youth, there must be gold, and diamonds, and sapphires--all those gewgaws, the worship of which shows the lingering taint of barbarism in the civilized man, and for which the English, Spanish, and Portuguese adventurers of three centuries ago, were ready to sacrifice home and family, manhood, honor, and life. So it happened that in the early days of maritime adventure the course of the hardy voyagers was toward the tropics, and they made of the Spanish Main a sea of blood, while Pizzarro and Cortez, and after them the dreaded buccaneers, sacked towns, betrayed, murdered, and outraged, destroyed an ancient civilization and fairly blotted out a people, all in the mad search for gold. Men only could have been guilty of such crimes, for man along, among animals endowed with life, kills for the mere lust of slaughter. And yet, man alone stands ready to risk his life for an idea, to brave the most direful perils, to endure the most poignant suffering that the world's store of knowledge may be increased, that science may be advanced, that just one more fact may be added to the things actually known. If the record of man in the tropics has been stained by theft, rapine, and murder, the story of his long struggle with the Arctic ice, offers for his redemption a series of pictures of self-sacrifice, tenderness, honor, courage, and piety. No hope of profit drew the seamen of all maritime nations into the dismal and desolate ice-floes that guard the frozen North. No lust for gold impelled them to brave the darkness, the cold, and the terrifying silence of the six-months Arctic night. The men who have--thus far unsuccessfully--fought with ice-bound nature for access to the Pole, were impelled only by honorable emulation and scientific zeal. The earlier Arctic explorers were not, it is true, searchers for the North Pole. That quest--which has written in its history as many tales of heroism, self-sacrifice, and patient resignation to adversity, as the poets have woven about the story of chivalry and the search for the Holy Grail--was begun only in the middle of the last century, and by an American. But for three hundred years English, Dutch, and Portuguese explorers, and the stout-hearted American whalemen, had been pushing further and further into the frozen deep. The explorers sought the "Northwest Passage," or a water route around the northern end of North America, and so on to India and the riches of the East. Sir John Franklin, in the voyage that proved his last, demonstrated that such a passage could be made, but not for any practical or useful purpose. After him it was abandoned, and geographical research, and the struggle to reach the pole, became the motives that took men into the Arctic. "But why," many people ask, with some reason, "should there be this determined search for the North Pole. What good will come to the world with its discovery? Is it worth while to go on year after year, pouring out treasure and risking human lives, merely that any hardy explorer may stand at an imaginary point on the earth's surface which is already fixed geographically by scientists?" Let the scientists and the explorers answer, for to most of us the questions do not seem unreasonable. Naturally, with the explorers' love for adventure, eagerness to see any impressive manifestations of nature's powers, and the ambition to attain a spot for which men have been striving for half a century, are the animating purposes. So we find Fridjof Nansen, who for a time held the record of having attained the "Furthest North," writing on this subject to an enquiring editor: "When man ceases to wish to know and to conquer every foot of the earth, which was given him to live upon and to rule, then will the decadence of the race begin. Of itself, that mathematical point which marks the northern termination of the axis of our earth, is of no more importance than any other point within the unknown polar area; but it is of much more importance that this particular point be reached, because there clings about it in the imagination of all mankind, such fascination that, till the Pole is discovered, all Arctic research must be affected, if not overshadowed, by the yearning to attain it." George W. Melville, chief engineer of the United States Navy, who did such notable service in the Jeanette expedition of 1879, writes in words that stir the pulse: "Is there a better school of heroic endeavor than the Arctic zone? It is something to stand where the foot of man has never trod. It is something to do that which has defied the energy of the race for the last twenty years. It is something to have the consciousness that you are adding your modicum of knowledge to the world's store. It is worth a year of the life of a man with a soul larger than a turnip, to see a real iceberg in all its majesty and grandeur. It is worth some sacrifice to be alone, just once, amid the awful silence of the Arctic snows, there to communicate with the God of nature, whom the thoughtful man finds best in solitude and silence, far from the haunts of men--alone with the Creator." Thus the explorers. The scientists look less upon the picturesque and exciting side of Arctic exploration, and more upon its useful phases. "It helps to solve useful problems in the physics of the world," wrote Professor Todd of Amherst college. "The meteorology of the United States to-day; perfection of theories of the earth's magnetism, requisite in conducting surveys and navigating ships; the origin and development of terrestrial fauna and flora; secular variation of climate; behavior of ocean currents--all these are fields of practical investigation in which the phenomena of the Arctic and Antarctic worlds play a very significant role." Lieutenant Maury, whose eminent services in mapping the ocean won him international honors, writes of the polar regions: "There icebergs are launched and glaciers formed. There the tides have their cradle, the whales their nursery. There the winds complete their circuits, and the currents of the sea their round in the wonderful system of inter-oceanic circulation. There the aurora borealis is lighted up, and the trembling needle brought to rest, and there, too, in the mazes of that mystic circle, terrestrial forces of occult power, and vast influence upon the well-being of men, are continually at play.... Noble daring has made Arctic ice and waters classic ground. It is no feverish excitement nor vain ambition that leads man there. It is a higher feeling, a holier motive, a desire to look into the works of creation, to comprehend the economy of our planet, and to grow wiser and better by the knowledge." Nor can it be said fairly that the polar regions have failed to repay, in actual financial profit, their persistent invasion by man. It is estimated by competent statisticians, that in the last two centuries no less than two thousand million dollars' worth of furs, fish, whale-oil, whalebone, and minerals, have been taken out of the ice-bound seas. [Illustration: "THEY FELL DOWN AND DIED AS THEY WALKED"] The full story--at once sorrowful and stimulating--of Arctic exploration, can not be told here. That would require volumes rather than a single chapter. Even the part played in it by Americans can be sketched in outline only. But it is worth remembering that the systematic attack of our countrymen upon the Arctic fortress, began with an unselfish and humane incentive. In 1845 Sir John Franklin, a gallant English seaman, had set sail with two stout ships and 125 men, to seek the Northwest Passage. Thereafter no word was heard from him, until, years later, a searching party found a cairn of stones on a desolate, ice-bound headland, and in it a faintly written record, which told of the death of Sir John and twenty-four of his associates. We know now, that all who set out on this ill-fated expedition, perished. Struggling to the southward after abandoning their ships, they fell one by one, and their lives ebbed away on the cruel ice. "They fell down and died as they walked," said an old Esquimau woman to Lieutenant McClintock, of the British navy, who sought for tidings of them, and, indeed, her report found sorrowful verification in the skeletons discovered years afterward, lying face downward in the snow. To the last man they died. Think of the state of that last man--alone in the frozen wilderness! An eloquent writer, the correspondent McGahan, himself no stranger to Arctic pains and perils, has imagined that pitiful picture thus: "One sees this man after the death of his last remaining companion, all alone in that terrible world, gazing round him in mute despair, the sole, living thing in that dark frozen universe. The sky is somber, the earth whitened with a glittering whiteness that chills the heart. His clothing is covered with frozen snow, his face lean and haggard, his beard a cluster of icicles. The setting sun looks back to see the last victim die. He meets her sinister gaze with a steady eye, as though bidding her defiance. For a few minutes they glare at each other, then the curtain is drawn, and all is dark." As fears for Franklin's safety deepened into certainty of his loss with the passage of months and years, a multitude of searching expeditions were sent out, the earlier ones in the hope of rescuing him; the later ones with the purpose of discovering the records of his voyage, which all felt sure must have been cached at some accessible point. Americans took an active--almost a leading--part in these expeditions, braving in them the same perils which had overcome the stout English knight. By sea and by land they sought him. The story of the land expeditions, though full of interest, is foreign to the purpose of this work, and must be passed over with the mere note that Charles F. Hall, a Cincinnati journalist, in 1868-69, and Lieutenant Schwatka, and W.H. Gilder in 1878-79 fought their way northward to the path followed by the English explorer, found many relics of his expedition, and from the Esquimaux gathered indisputable evidence of his fate. By sea the United States was represented in the search for Franklin, by the ships "Advance" and "Rescue." They accomplished little of importance, but on the latter vessel was a young navy surgeon, Dr. Elisha Kent Kane, who was destined to make notable contributions to Arctic knowledge, both as explorer and writer. One who studies the enormous volume of literature in which the Arctic story is told, scarcely can fail to be impressed by the pertinacity with which men, after one experience in the polar regions, return again and again to the quest for adventure and honors in the ice-bound zone. The subaltern on the expedition of to-day, has no sooner returned than he sets about organizing a new expedition, of which he may be commander. The commander goes into the ice time and again until, perhaps, the time comes when he does not come out. The leader of a rescue party becomes the leader of an exploring expedition, which in its turn, usually comes to need rescue. So we find Dr. Kane, who was surgeon of an expedition for the rescue of Franklin, commanding four years later the brig "Advance," and voyaging northward through Baffin's Bay. Narrowly, indeed, he escaped the fate of the man in the search for whom he had gained his first Arctic experience. His ship, beset by ice, and sorely wounded, remained fixed and immovable for two years. At first the beleaguered men made sledge journeys in every direction for exploratory purposes, but the second year they sought rather by determined, though futile dashes across the rugged surface of the frozen sea, to find some place of refuge, some hope of emancipation from the thraldom of the ice. The second winter all of the brig except the hull, which served for shelter, was burned for fuel; two men had died, and many were sick of scurvy, the sledge dogs were all dead, and the end of the provisions was in sight. In May, 1855, a retreat in open boats, covering eighty-five days and over fifty miles of open sea, brought the survivors to safety. When men have looked into the jaws of death, it might be thought they would strenuously avoid such another view. But there is an Arctic fever as well as an Arctic chill, and, once in the blood, it drags its victim irresistibly to the frozen North, until perhaps he lays his bones among the icebergs, cured of all fevers forever. And so, a year or two after the narrow escape of Dr. Kane, the surgeon of his expedition, Dr. Isaac I. Hayes, was hard at work fitting out an expedition of which he was to be commander, to return to Baffin's Bay and Smith sound, and if possible, fight its way into that open sea, which Dr. Hayes long contended surrounded the North Pole. No man in the Kane expedition had encountered greater perils, or withstood more cruel suffering than Dr. Hayes. A boat trip which he made in search of succor, has passed into Arctic history as one of the most desperate expedients ever adopted by starving men. But at the first opportunity he returned again to the scenes of his peril and his pain. His expedition, though conducted with spirit and determination, was not of great scientific value, as he was greatly handicapped in his observations by the death of his astronomer, who slipped through thin ice into the sea, and froze to death in his water-soaked garments. [Illustration: "THE TREACHEROUS ICE-PACK"] A most extraordinary record of daring and suffering in Arctic exploration was made by Charles F. Hall, to whom I have already referred. Beginning life as an engraver in Cincinnati, he became engrossed in the study of Arctic problems, as the result of reading the stories of the early navigators. Every book bearing on the subject in the library of his native city, was eagerly read, and his enthusiasm infected some of the wealthy citizens, who gathered for his use a very considerable collection of volumes. Mastering all the literature of the Arctic, he determined to undertake himself the arduous work of the explorer. Taking passage on a whaler, he spent several years among the Esquimaux, living in their crowded and fetid _igloos_, devouring the blubber and uncooked fish that form their staple articles of diet, wearing their garb of furs, learning to navigate the treacherous kayak in tossing seas, to direct the yelping, quarreling team of dogs over fields of ice as rugged as the edge of some monstrous saw, studying the geography so far as known of the Arctic regions, perfecting himself in all the arts by which man has contested the supremacy of that land with the ice-king. In 1870, with the assistance of the American Geographical Society, Hall induced the United States Government to fit him out an expedition to seek the North Pole--the first exploring party ever sent out with that definite purpose. The steamer "Polaris," a converted navy tug, which General Greely says was wholly unfit for Arctic service, was given him, and a scientific staff supplied by the Government, for though Hall had by painstaking endeavor qualified himself to lead an expedition, he had not enjoyed a scientific education. Neither was he a sailor like DeLong, nor a man trained to the command of men like Greely. Enthusiasm and natural fitness with him took the place of systematic training. But with him, as with so many others in this world, the attainment of the threshold of his ambition proved to be but opening the door to death. By a sledge journey from his ship he reached Cape Brevoort, above latitude 82, at that time the farthest north yet attained, but the exertion proved too much for him, and he had scarcely regained his ship when he died. His name will live, however, in the annals of the Arctic, for his contributions to geographical knowledge were many and precious. [Illustration: THE SHIP WAS CAUGHT IN THE ICE PACK] The men who survived him determined to continue his work, and the next summer two fought their way northward a few miles beyond the point attained by Hall. But after this achievement the ship was caught in the ice-pack, and for two months drifted about, helpless in that unrelenting grasp. Out of this imprisonment the explorers escaped through a disaster, which for a time put all their lives in the gravest jeopardy, and the details of which seem almost incredible. In October, when the long twilight which precedes the polar night, had already set in, there came a fierce gale, accompanied by a tossing, roaring sea. The pack, racked by the surges, which now raised it with a mighty force, and then rolling on, left it to fall unsupported, began to go to pieces. The whistling wind accelerated its destruction, driving the floes far apart, heaping them up against the hull of the ship until the grinding and the prodigious pressure opened her seams and the water rushed in. The cry that the ship was sinking rung along the decks, and all hands turned with desperate energy to throwing out on the ice-floe to windward, sledges, provisions, arms, records--everything that could be saved against the sinking of the ship, which all thought was at hand. Nineteen of the ship's company were landed on the floe to carry the material away from its edge to a place of comparative safety. The peril seemed so imminent that the men in their panic performed prodigious feats of strength--lifting and handling alone huge boxes, which at ordinary times, would stagger two men. A driving, whirling snowstorm added to the gloom, confusion, and terror of the scene, shutting out almost completely those on the ice from the view of those still on the ship. In the midst of the work the cry was raised that the floes were parting, and with incredible rapidity the ice broke away from the ship on every side, so that communication between those on deck and those on the floe was instantly cut off by a broad interval of black and tossing water, while the dark and snow-laden air cut off vision on every side. The cries of those on the ice mingled with those from the fast vanishing ship, for each party thought itself in the more desperate case. The ice was fast going to pieces, and boats were plying in the lanes of water thus opened, picking up those clinging to smaller cakes of ice and transporting them to the main floe. On the ship the captain's call had summoned all hands to muster, and they gazed on each other in dumb despair as they saw how few of the ship's company remained. All were sent to the pumps, for the water in the hold was rising with ominous rapidity. The cry rang out that the steam-pumps must be started if the ship was to be saved, but long months had passed since any fire had blazed under those boilers, and to get up steam was a work of hours. With tar-soaked oakum and with dripping whale blubber the engineer strove to get the fires roaring, the while the men on deck toiled with desperate energy at the hand-pumps. But the water gained on them. The ship sunk lower and lower in the black ocean, until a glance over the side could tell all too plainly that she was going to her fate. Now the water begins to ooze through the cracks in the engine-room floor, and break in gentle ripples about the feet of the firemen. If it rises much higher it will flood the fire-boxes, and then all will be over, for there is not one boat left on the ship--all were landed on the now invisible floe. But just as all hope was lost there came a faint hissing of steam, the pumps began slowly moving, and then settled down into their monotonous "chug-chug," the sweetest sound, that day, those desperate mariners had ever heard. They were saved by the narrowest of chances. [Illustration: ADRIFT ON AN ICE-FLOE] We must pass hastily to the sequel of this seemingly irreparable disaster. The "Polaris" was beached, winter quarters established, and those who had clung to the ship spent the winter building boats, in which, the following spring, they made their way southward until picked up by a whaler. Those on the floe drifted at the mercy of the wind and tide 195 days, making over 1300 miles to the southward. As the more temperate latitudes were reached, and the warmer days of spring came on, the floe began going to pieces, and they were continually confronted with the probability of being forced to their boat for safety--one boat, built to hold eight, and now the sole reliance of nineteen people. It is hard to picture through the imagination the awful strain that day and night rested upon the minds of these hapless castaways. Never could they drop off to sleep except in dread that during the night the ice on which they slept, might split, even under their very pallets, and they be awakened by the deathly plunge into the icy water. Day and night they were startled and affrighted by the thunderous rumblings and cracking of the breaking floe--a sound that an experienced Arctic explorer says is the most terrifying ever heard by man, having in it something of the hoarse rumble of heavy artillery, the sharp and murderous crackle of machine guns, and a kind of titanic grinding, for which there is no counterpart in the world of tumult. Living thus in constant dread of death, the little company drifted on, seemingly miraculously preserved. Their floe was at last reduced from a great sheet of ice, perhaps a mile or more square, to a scant ten yards by seventy-five, and this rapidly breaking up. In two days four whalers passed near enough for them to see, yet failed to see them, but finally their frantic signals attracted attention, and they were picked up--not only the original nineteen who had begun the drift six months earlier, but one new and helpless passenger, for one of the Esquimau women had given birth to a child while on the ice. The next notable Arctic expedition from the United States had its beginning in journalistic enterprise. Mr. James Gordon Bennett, owner of the _New York Herald_, who had already manifested his interest in geographical work by sending Henry M. Stanley to find Livingston in the heart of the Dark Continent, fitted out the steam yacht "Pandora," which had already been used in Arctic service, and placed her at the disposal of Lieutenant DeLong, U.S.N., for an Arctic voyage. The name of the ship was changed to "Jeannette," and control of the expedition was vested in the United States Government, though Mr. Bennett's generosity defrayed all charges. The vessel was manned from the navy, and Engineer Melville, destined to bear a name great among Arctic men, together with two navy lieutenants, were assigned to her. The voyage planned was then unique among American Arctic expeditions, for instead of following the conventional route north through Baffin's Bay and Smith Sound, the "Jeannette" sailed from San Francisco and pushed northward through Bering Sea. In July, 1879, she weighed anchor. Two years after, no word having been heard of her meanwhile, the inevitable relief expedition was sent out--the steamer "Rodgers," which after making a gallant dash to a most northerly point, was caught in the ice-pack and there burned to the water's edge, her crew, with greatest difficulty, escaping, and reaching home without one ray of intelligence of DeLong's fate. That fate was bitter indeed, a trial by cold, starvation, and death, fit to stand for awesomeness beside Greely's later sorrowful story. From the very outset evil fortune had attended the "Jeannette." Planning to winter on Wrangle Land--then thought to be a continent--DeLong caught in the ice-pack, was carried past its northern end, thus proving it to be an island, indeed, but making the discovery at heavy cost. Winter in the pack was attended with severe hardships and grave perils. Under the influence of the ocean currents and the tides, the ice was continually breaking up and shifting, and each time the ship was in imminent danger of being crushed. In his journal DeLong tries to describe the terrifying clamor of a shifting pack. "I know of no sound on shore that can be compared with it," he writes. "A rumble, a shriek, a groan, and the crash of a falling house all combined, might serve to convey an idea of the noise with which this motion of the ice-floe is accompanied. Great masses from fifteen to twenty-five feet in height, when up-ended, are sliding along at various angles of elevation and jam, and between and among them are large and confused masses of débris, like a marble yard adrift. Occasionally a stoppage occurs; some piece has caught against or under our floe; there follows a groaning and crackling, our floe bends and humps up in places like domes. Crash! The dome splits, another yard of floe edge breaks off, the pressure is relieved, and on goes again the flowing mass of rumbles, shrieks, groans, etc., for another spell." [Illustration: DELONG'S MEN DRAGGING THEIR BOATS OVER THE ICE] Time and again this nerve-racking experience was encountered. More than once serious leaks were started in the ship, which had to be met by working the pumps and building false bulwarks in the hold; but by the exercise of every art known to sailors, she was kept afloat and tenable until June 11, 1881, when a fierce and unexpected nip broke her fairly in two, and she speedily sunk. There followed weeks and months of incessant and desperate struggling with sledge and boat against the forces of polar nature. The ship had sunk about 150 miles from what are known as the New Siberian Islands, for which DeLong then laid his course. The ice was rugged, covered with soft snow, which masked treacherous pitfalls, and full of chasms which had to be bridged. Five sleds and three boats were dragged by almost superhuman exertions, the sick feebly aiding the sturdy in the work. Imagine the disappointment, and despair of the leader, when, after a full week of this cruel labor, with provisions ever growing more scanty, an observation showed him they were actually twenty-eight miles further away from their destination than when they started! While they were toiling south, the ice-floe over which they were plodding was drifting more rapidly north. _Nil desperandum_ must ever be the watchword of Arctic expeditions, and DeLong, saying nothing to the others of his discovery, changed slightly the course of his march and labored on. July 19 they reached an island hitherto unknown, which was thereupon named Bennett Island. A curious feature of the toilsome march across the ice, was that, though the temperature seldom rose to the freezing point, the men complained bitterly of the heat and suffered severely from sun-burn. [Illustration: DELONG'S MEN DRAGGING THEIR BOATS OVER THE ICE] At Bennett Island they took to the boats, for now open water was everywhere visible. DeLong was making for the Lena River in Siberia, where there were known to be several settlements, but few of his party were destined to reach it. In a furious storm, on the 12th of September, the three boats were separated. One, commanded by Lieutenant Chipp, with eight men, must have foundered, for it was never again heard of. A second, commanded by George W. Melville, afterward chief engineer of the United States Navy, found one of the mouths of the Lena River, and ascending it reached a small Siberian village. Happy would it have been had DeLong and his men discovered the same pathway to safety, but the Lena is like our own Mississippi, a river with a broad delta and a multiplicity of mouths. Into an estuary, the banks of which were untrodden by man, and which itself was too shallow for navigation for any great distance, remorseless fate led DeLong. Forced soon to take to their sleds again, his companions toiled painfully along the river bank, with no known destination, but bearing ever to the south--the only way in which hope could possibly lie. Deserted huts and other signs of former human habitation were plenty, but nothing living crossed their path. At last, the food being at the point of exhaustion, and the men too weary and weak for rapid travel, DeLong chose two of the sturdiest, Nindemann and Noros, and sent them ahead in the hope that they might find and return with succor. The rest stumbled on behind, well pleased if they could advance three miles daily. Food gave out, then strength. Resignation took the place of determination. DeLong's journal for the last week of life is inexpressibly pitiful: "Sunday, October 23--133d Day: Everybody pretty weak. Slept or rested all day, and then managed to get in enough wood before dark. Read part of divine service. Suffering in our feet. No foot-gear. "Monday, October 24--134th Day: A hard night. "Tuesday, October 25--135th Day. "Wednesday, October 26--136th day. "Thursday, October 27--137th Day: Iverson broken down. "Friday, October 28--138th Day: Iverson died during early morning. "Saturday, October 29th--139th Day: Dressier died during the night. "Sunday, October 30--140th Day: Boyd and Cortz died during the night. Mr. Collins dying." This is the last entry. The hand that penned it, as the manuscript shows, was as firm and steady as though the writer were sitting in his library at home. Words are spelled out in full, punctuation carefully observed. How long after these words were set down DeLong too died, none may ever know; but when Melville, whom Nindemann and Noros had found after sore privations, reached the spot of the death camp, he came upon a sorrowful scene. "I came upon the bodies of three men partly buried in the snow," he writes, "one hand reaching out, with the left arm of the man reaching way above the surface of the snow--his whole left arm. I immediately recognized them as Captain DeLong, Dr. Ambler, and Ah Sam, the cook.... I found the journal about three or four feet in the rear of DeLong--that is, it looked as though he had been lying down, and with his left hand tossed the book over his shoulder to the rear, or to the eastward of him." How these few words bring the whole scene up before us! Last, perhaps, of all to die, lying by the smoldering fire, the ashes of which were in the middle of the group of bodies when found, DeLong puts down the final words which tell of the obliteration of his party, tosses the book wearily over his shoulder, and turns on his side to die. And then the snow, falling gently, pitifully covers the rigid forms and holds them in its pure embrace until loyal friends seek them out, and tell to the world that again brave lives have been sacrificed to the ogre of the Arctic. While DeLong and his gallant comrades of the United States Navy were dying slowly in the bleak desert of the Lena delta, another party of brave Americans were pushing their way into the Arctic circle on the Atlantic side of the North American continent. The story of that starvation camp in desolate Siberia was to be swiftly repeated on the shores of Smith Sound, and told this time with more pathetic detail, for of Greely's expedition, numbering twenty-five, seven were rescued after three years of Arctic suffering and starving, helpless, and within one day of death. They had seen their comrades die, destroyed by starvation and cold, and passing away in delirium, babbling of green fields and plenteous tables. From the doorway of the almost collapsed tent, in which the seven survivors were found, they could see the row of shallow graves in which their less fortunate comrades lay interred--all save two, whom they had been too weak to bury. No story of the Arctic which has come to us from the lips of survivors, has half the pathos, or a tithe of the pitiful interest, possessed by this story of Greely. Studying to-day the history of the Greely expedition, it seems almost as if a malign fate had determined to bring disaster upon him. His task was not so arduous as a determined search for the Pole, or the Northwest Passage. He was ordered by the United States Government to establish an observation station on Lady Franklin Bay, and remain there two years, conducting, meanwhile, scientific observations, and pressing exploratory work with all possible zeal. The enterprise was part of a great international plan, by which each of the great nations was to establish and maintain such an observation station within the Arctic circle, while observations were to be carried on in all at once. The United States agreed to maintain two such stations, and the one at Point Barrow, north of Alaska, was established, maintained, and its tenants brought home at the end of the allotted time without disaster. Greely was a lieutenant in the United States Army, and his expedition was under the immediate direction of the Secretary of War--at that time Robert Lincoln, son of the great war President. Some criticism was expressed at the time and, indeed, still lingers in the books of writers on the subject, concerning the fitness of an army officer to direct an Arctic voyage. But the purpose of the expedition was largely to collect scientific facts bear-on weather, currents of air and sea, the duration and extent of magnetic and electrical disturbances--in brief, data quite parallel to those which the United States signal service collects at home. So the Greely expedition was made an adjunct to the signal service, which in its turn is one of the bureaus of the War Department. Two army lieutenants, Lockwood and Klingsbury, and twenty men from the rank and file of the army and signal corps, were selected to form the party. An astronomer was needed, and Edward Israel, a young graduate of the University of Michigan, volunteered. George W. Rice volunteered as photographer. Both were enlisted in the army and given the rank of sergeant. It is doubtful if any polar expedition was ever more circumstantially planned--none has resulted more disastrously, save Sir John Franklin's last voyage. The instructions of the War Department were as explicit as human foresight and a genius for detail could make them. Greely was to proceed to some point on Lady Franklin Bay, which enters the mainland of North America at about 81° 44' north latitude, build his station, and prepare for a two-years' stay. Provisions for three years were supplied him. At the end of one year it was promised, a relief ship should be sent him, which failing for any cause to reach the station, would cache supplies and dispatches at specified points. A year later a second relief ship would be sent to bring the party home, and if for any reason this ship should fail to make the station, then Greely was to break camp and sledge to the southward, following the east coast of the mainland, until he met the vessel, or reached the point at which fresh supplies were to be cached. No plan could have been better devised--none ever failed more utterly. Arctic travel is an enigma, and it is an enigma never to be solved twice in the same way. Whalers, with the experience of a lifetime in the frozen waters, agree that the lessons of one voyage seldom prove infallible guides for the conduct of the next. Lieutenant Schwatka, a veteran Arctic explorer, said in an official document that the teachings of experience were often worse than useless in polar work. And so, though the Washington authorities planned for the safety of Greely according to the best guidance that the past could give them, their plans failed completely. The first relief ship did, indeed, land some stores--never, as the issue showed, to be reached by Greely--but the second expedition, composed of two ships, the "Proteus" and the "Yantic," accomplished nothing. The station was not reached, practically no supplies were landed, the "Proteus" was nipped by the ice and sunk, and the remnant of the expedition came supinely home, reporting utter failure. It is impossible to acquit the commanders of the two ships engaged in this abortive relief expedition of a lack of determination, a paucity of courage, complete incompetence. They simply left Greely to his fate while time still remained for his rescue, or at least for the convenient deposit of the vast store of provisions they brought home, leaving the abandoned explorers to starve. The history of the Greely expedition and its achievements may well be sketched hastily, before the story of the catastrophe which overwhelmed it is told. As it was the most tragic of expeditions save one, Sir John Franklin's, so, too, it was the most fruitful in results, of any American expedition to the time of the writing of this book. Proceeding by the whaler "Proteus" in August, 1881, to the waters of the Arctic zone, Greely reached his destination with but little trouble, and built a commodious and comfortable station on the shores of Discovery Bay, which he called Fort Conger after a United States Senator from Michigan. A month remained before the Arctic night would set in, but the labor of building the house left little time for explorations, which were deferred until the following summer. Life at the station was not disagreeable. The house, stoutly built, withstood the bitter cold. Within there were books and games, and through the long winter night the officers beguiled the time with lectures and reading. Music was there, too, in impressive quantity, if not quality. "An organette with about fifty yards of music," writes Lieutenant Greely, "afforded much amusement, being particularly fascinating to our Esquimau, who never wearied grinding out one tune after another." The rigid routine of Arctic winter life was followed day by day, and the returning sun, after five months' absence, found the party in perfect health and buoyant spirits. The work of exploration on all sides began, the explorers being somewhat handicapped by the death of many of the sledge dogs from disease. Lieutenant Greely, Dr. Pavy, and Lieutenant Lockwood each led a party, but to the last named belong the honors, for he, with Sergeant Brainard and an Esquimau, made his way northward over ice that looked like a choppy sea suddenly frozen into the rigidity of granite, until he reached latitude 83° 24' north--the most northerly point then attained by any man--and still the record marking Arctic journey for an American explorer. Winter came again under depressing circumstances. The first relief ship promised had not arrived, and the disappointment of the men deepened into apprehension lest the second, also, should fail them. Yet they went through the second winter in good health and unshaken morale, though one can not read such portions of Greely's diary as he has published, without seeing that the irritability and jealousy that seem to be the inevitable accompaniments of long imprisonment in an Arctic station, began to make their appearance. With the advent of spring the commander began to make his preparations for a retreat to the southward. If he had not then felt entire confidence in the promise of the War Department to relieve him without fail that summer, he would have begun his retreat early, and beyond doubt have brought all his men to safety before another winter set in or his provisions fell low. But as it was, he put off the start to the last moment, keeping up meanwhile the scientific work of the expedition, and sending out one party to cache supplies along the route of retreat. August 9, 1883, the march began--just two years after they had entered the frozen deep--Greely hoping to meet the relief ship oh the way. He did not know that three weeks before she had been nipped in the ice-pack, and sunk, and that her consort, the "Yantic," had gone impotently home, without even leaving food for the abandoned explorers. Over ice-fields and across icy and turbulent water, the party made its way for five hundred miles--four hundred miles of boating and one hundred of sledging--fifty-one days of heroic exertion that might well take the courage out of the stoutest heart. Sledging in the Arctic over "hummock" ice is, perhaps, the most wearing form of toil known to man, and with such heavy loads as Greely carried, every mile had to be gone over twice, and sometimes three times, as the men would be compelled to leave part of the load behind and go back after it. Yet the party was cheerful, singing and joking at their work, as one of the sergeants records. Finally they reached the vicinity of Cape Sabine, all in good health, with instruments and records saved, and with arms and ammunition enough to procure ample food in a land well stocked with game. But they did not worry very much about food, though their supply was by this time growing low. Was not Cape Sabine the spot at which the relief expeditions were to cache food, and could it be possible that the great United States Government would fail twice in an enterprise which any Yankee whaler would gladly take a contract to fulfill? And so the men looked upon the wilderness, and noted the coming on of the Arctic night again without fear, if with some disappointment. Less than forty days' rations remained. Eight months must elapse before any relief expedition could reach their camp, and far away in the United States the people were crying out in hot indignation that the authorities were basely leaving Greely and his devoted companions to their fate. Pluckily the men set about preparing for the long winter. Three huts of stone and snow were planned, and while they were building, the hunters of the party scoured the neighboring ice-floes and pools for game--foxes, ptarmigan, and seals. There were no mistaken ideas concerning their deadly peril. Every man knew that if game failed, or if the provisions they hoped had been cached by the relief expeditions somewhere in the vicinity, could not be found, they might never leave that spot alive. Day by day the size of the rations was reduced. October 2 enough for thirty-five days remained, and at the request of the men, Greely so changed the ration as to provide for forty-five days. October 5 Lieutenant Lockwood noted in his diary: "We have now three chances for our lives: First, finding American cache sufficient at Sabine or at Isabella; second, of crossing the straits when our present ration is gone; third, of shooting sufficient seal and walrus near by here to last during the winter." How delusive the first chance proved we shall see later. The second was impractical, for the current carried the ice through the strait so fast, that any party trying to cross the floe, would have been carried south to where the strait widened out into Baffin's Bay before they could possibly pass the twenty-five miles which separated Cape Sabine from Littleton Island. Moreover, there was no considerable cache at the latter point, as Greely thought. As for the hunting, it proved a desperate chance, though it did save the lives of such of the party as were rescued. All feathered game took flight for the milder regions of the south when the night set in. The walrus which the hunters shot--two, Greely said, would have supplied food for all winter--and the seal sunk in almost every instance before the game could be secured. The first, and most hopeful chance, was the discovery of cached provisions at Cape Sabine. To put this to the test, Rice, the photographer, who, though a civilian, proved to be one of the most determined and efficient men in the party, had already started for Sabine with Jens, the Esquimau. October 9 they returned, bringing the record of the sinking of the "Proteus," and the intelligence that there were about 1300 rations at, or near Cape Sabine. The record left at Cape Sabine by Garlington, the commander of the "Proteus" expedition, and which Rice brought back to the camp, read in part: "Depot landed ... 500 rations of bread, tea, and a lot of canned goods. Cache of 250 rations left by the English expedition of 1882 visited by me and found in good condition. Cache on Littleton Island. Boat at Isabella. U.S.S. 'Yantic' on way to Littleton Island with orders not to enter the ice. I will endeavor to communicate with these vessels at once.... Everything in the power of man will be done to rescue the (Greely's) brave men." This discovery changed Greely's plans again. It was hopeless to attempt hauling the ten or twelve thousand pounds of material believed to be at Cape Sabine, to the site of the winter camp, now almost done, so Greely determined to desert that station and make for Cape Sabine, taking with him all the provisions and material he could drag. In a few days his party was again on the march across the frozen sea. How inscrutable and imperative are the ways of fate! Looking backward now on the pitiful story of the Greely party, we see that the second relief expedition, intended to succor and to rescue these gallant men, was in fact the cause of their overwhelming disaster--and this not wholly because of errors committed in its direction, though they were many. When Greely abandoned the station at Fort Conger, he could have pressed straight to the southward without halt, and perhaps escaped with all his party--he could, indeed, have started earlier in the summer, and made escape for all certain. But he relied on the relief expedition, and held his ground until the last possible moment. Even after reaching Cape Sabine he might have taken to the boats and made his way southward to safety, for he says himself that open water was in sight; but the cheering news brought by Rice of a supply of provisions, and the promise left by Garlington, that all that men could do would be done for his rescue, led him to halt his journey at Cape Sabine, and go into winter quarters in the firm conviction that already another vessel was on the way to aid him. He did not know that Garlington had left but few provisions out of his great store, that the "Yantic" had fled without landing an ounce of food, and that the authorities at Washington had concluded that nothing more could be done that season--although whalers frequently entered the waters where Greely lay trapped, at a later date than that which saw the "Yantic's" precipitate retreat. Had he known these things, he says himself, "I should certainly have turned my back to Cape Sabine and starvation, to face a possible death on the perilous voyage along shore to the southward." But not knowing them, he built a hut, and prepared to face the winter. It is worth noting, as evidence that Arctic hardships themselves, when not accompanied by a lack of food, are not unbearable, that at this time, after two years in the region of perpetual ice, the whole twenty-five men were well, and even cheerful. Depression and death came only when the food gave out. The permanent camp, which for many of the party was to be a tomb, was fixed a few miles from Cape Sabine, by the side of a pool of fresh water--frozen, of course. Here a hut was built with stone walls three feet high, rafters made of oars with the blades cut off, and a canvas roof, except in the center, where an upturned whaleboat made a sort of a dome. Only under the whaleboat could a man get on his knees and hold himself erect; elsewhere the heads of the tall men touched the roof when they sat up in their sleeping bags on the dirt floor. With twenty-five men in sleeping bags, which they seldom left, two in each bag, packed around the sides of the hut, a stove fed with stearine burning in the center for the cooking of the insufficient food to which they were reduced, and all air from without excluded, the hut became a place as much of torture as of refuge. The problem of food and the grim certainty of starvation were forced upon them with the very first examination of the caches of which Garlington had left such encouraging reports. At Cape Isabella only 144 pounds of meat was found, in Garlington's cache only 100 rations instead of 500 as he had promised. Moldy bread and dog biscuits fairly green with mold, though condemned by Greely, were seized by the famished men, and devoured ravenously without a thought of their unwholesomeness. When November 1 came, the daily ration for each man was fixed at six ounces of bread, four ounces of meat, and four ounces of vegetables--about a quarter of what would be moderate sustenance for a healthy man. By keeping the daily issue of food down to this pitiful amount Greely calculated that he would have enough to sustain life until the first of March, when with ten days' double rations still remaining, he would make an effort to cross the strait to Littleton Island, where he thought--mistakenly--that Lieutenant Garlington awaited him with ample stores. Of course all game shot added to the size of the rations, and that the necessary work of hunting might be prosecuted, the hunters were from the first given extra rations to maintain, their strength. Fuel, too, offered a serious problem. Alcohol, stearine, and broken wood from a whaleboat and barrels, were all employed. In order to get the greatest heat from the wood it was broken up into pieces not much larger than matches. And yet packed into that noisome hovel, ill-fed and ill-clothed, with the Arctic wind roaring outside, the temperature within barely above freezing, and a wretched death staring each man in the face, these men were not without cheerfulness. Lying almost continually in their sleeping bags, they listened to one of their number reading aloud; such books as "Pickwick Papers," "A History of Our Own Times," and "Two on a Tower." Greely gave daily a lecture on geography of an hour or more; each man related, as best he could, the striking facts about his own State and city and, indeed, every device that ingenuity could suggest, was employed to divert their minds and wile away the lagging hours. Birthdays were celebrated by a little extra food--though toward the end a half a gill of rum for the celebrant, constituted the whole recognition of the day. The story of Christmas Day is inexpressibly touching as told in the simple language of Greely's diary: "Our breakfast was a thin pea-soup, with seal blubber, and a small quantity of preserved potatoes. Later two cans of cloudberries were served to each mess, and at half-past one o'clock Long and Frederick commenced cooking dinner, which consisted of a seal stew, containing seal blubber, preserved potatoes and bread, flavored with pickled onions; then came a kind of rice pudding, with raisins, seal blubber, and condensed milk. Afterward we had chocolate, followed later by a kind of punch made of a gill of rum and a quarter of a lemon to each man.... Everybody was required to sing a song or tell a story, and pleasant conversation with the expression of kindly feelings, was kept up until midnight." [Illustration: AN ARCTIC HOUSE] But that comparative plenty and good cheer did not last long. In a few weeks the unhappy men, or such as still clung to life, were living on a few shrimps, pieces of sealskin boots, lichens, and even more offensive food. The shortening of the ration, and the resulting hunger, broke down the moral sense of some, and by one device or another, food was stolen. Only two or three were guilty of this crime--an execrable one in such an emergency--and one of these, Private Henry, was shot by order of Lieutenant Greely toward the end of the winter. Even before Christmas, casualties which would have been avoided, had the party been well-nourished and strong, began. Ellison, in making a gallant dash for the cache at Isabella, was overcome by cold and fatigue, and froze both his hands and feet so that in time they dropped off. Only the tender care of Frederick, who was with him, and the swift rush of Lockwood and Brainard to his aid, saved him from death. It tells a fine story of the unselfish devotion of the men, that this poor wreck, maimed and helpless, so that he had to be fed, and incapable of performing one act in his own service, should have been nursed throughout the winter, fed with double portions, and actually saved living until the rescue party arrived, while many of those who cared for him yielded up their lives. The first to die was Cross, of scurvy and starvation, and he was buried in a shallow grave near the hut, all hands save Ellison turning out to honor his memory. Though the others clung to life with amazing tenacity, illness began to make inroads upon them, the gallant Lockwood, for example, spending weeks in Greely's sleeping bag, his mind wandering, his body utterly exhausted. But it was April before the second death occurred--one of the Esquimaux. "Action of water on the heart caused by insufficient nutrition," was the doctor's verdict--in a word, but a word all dreaded to hear, starvation. Thereafter the men went fast. In a day or two Christiansen, an Esquimau, died. Rice, the sharer of his sleeping bag, was forced to spend a night enveloped in a bag with the dead body. The next day he started on a sledging trip to seek some beef cached by the English years earlier. Before the errand was completed, he, too, died, freezing to death in the arms of his companion, Frederick, who held him tenderly until the last, and stripped himself to the shirtsleeves in the icy blast, to warm his dying comrade. Then Lockwood died--the hero of the Farthest North; then Jewell. Jens, the untiring Esquimau hunter, was drowned, his kayak being cut by the sharp edge of a piece of ice. Ellis, Whisler, Israel, the astronomer, and Dr. Pavy, the surgeon, one by one, passed away. But why continue the pitiful chronicle? To tell the story in detail is impossible here--to tell it baldly and hurriedly, means to omit from it all that makes the narrative of the last days of the Greely expedition worth reading; the unflagging courage of most of the men, the high sense of honor that characterized them, the tenderness shown to the sick and helpless, the pluck and endurance of Long and Brainard, the fierce determination of Greely, that come what might, the records of his expedition should be saved, and its honor bequeathed unblemished to the world. And so through suffering and death, despairing perhaps, but never neglecting through cowardice or lethargy, any expedient for winning the fight against death, the party, daily growing smaller, fought its way on through winter and spring, until that memorable day in June, when Colwell cut open the tent and saw, as the first act of the rescued sufferers, two haggard, weak, and starving men pouring all that was left of the brandy, down the throat of one a shade more haggard and weak than they. Men of English lineage are fond of telling the story of the meeting of Stanley and Dr. Livingston in the depths of the African jungle. For years Livingston had disappeared from the civilized world. Everywhere apprehension was felt lest he had fallen a victim to the ferocity of the savages, or to the pestilential climate. The world rung with speculations concerning his fate. Stanley, commissioned to solve the mystery, by the same America journalist who sent DeLong into the Arctic, had cut his path through the savages and the jungle, until at the door of a hut in a clearing, he saw a white man who could be none but him whom he sought, for in all that dark and gloomy forest there was none other of white skin. Then Anglo-Saxon stolidity asserted itself. Men of Latin race would have rushed into each others' arms with loud rejoicings. Not so these twain. "Dr. Livingston, I believe," said the newcomer, with the air of greeting an acquaintance on Fifth Avenue. "I am Mr. Stanley." "I am glad to see you," was the response, and it might have taken place in a drawing-room for all the emotion shown by either man. [Illustration: AN ESQUIMAU] That was a dramatic meeting in the tropical jungles, but history will not give second place to the encounter of the advance guard of the Greely relief expedition with the men they sought. The story is told with dramatic directness in Commander (now Admiral) Schley's book, "The Rescue of Greely." "It was half-past eight in the evening as the cutter steamed around the rocky bluff of Cape Sabine, and made her way to the cove, four miles further on, which Colwell remembered so well.... The storm which had been raging with only slight intervals since early the day before, still kept up, and the wind was driving in bitter gusts through the opening in the ridge that followed the coast to the westward. Although the sky was overcast it was broad daylight--the daylight of a dull winter afternoon.... At last the boat arrived at the site of the wreck cache, and the shore was eagerly scanned, but nothing could be seen. Rounding the next point, the cutter opened out the cove beyond. There on the top of a little ridge, fifty or sixty yards above the ice-foot, was plainly outlined the figure of a man. Instantly the coxswain caught up his boathook and waved his flag. The man on the ridge had seen them, for he stooped, picked up a signal flag, and waved it in reply. Then he was seen coming slowly and cautiously down the steep rocky slope. Twice he fell down before he reached the foot. As he approached, still walking slowly and with difficulty, Colwell hailed him from the bow of the boat. "'Who all are there left?' "'Seven left.' "As the cutter struck the ice Colwell jumped off, and went up to him. He was a ghastly sight. His cheeks were hollow, his eyes wild, his hair and beard long and matted. His army blouse, covering several thicknesses of shirts and jackets, was ragged and dirty. He wore a little fur cap and rough moccasins of untanned leather tied around the leg. As he spoke his utterance was thick and mumbling, and in his agitation his jaws worked in convulsive twitches. As the two met, the man, with a sudden impulse, took off his gloves and shook Colwell's hand. "'Where are they?' asked Colwell, briefly. "'In the tent,' said the man, pointing over his shoulder, 'over the hill--the tent's down.' "'Is Mr. Greely alive?' "'Yes, Greely's alive.' "'Any other officers?' "'No.' Then he repeated absently, 'The tent's down.' "'Who are you?' "'Long.' "Before this colloquy was over Lowe and Norman had started up the hill. Hastily filling his pockets with bread, and taking the two cans of pemmican, Colwell told the coxswain to take Long into the cutter, and started after the others with Ash. Reaching the crest of the ridge and looking southward, they saw spread out before them a desolate expanse of rocky ground, sloping gradually from a ridge on the east to the ice-bound shore, which on the west made in and formed a cove. Back of the level space was a range of hills rising up eight hundred feet with a precipitous face, broken in two by a gorge, through which the wind was blowing furiously. On a little elevation directly in front was the tent. Hurrying on across the intervening hollow, Colwell came up with Lowe and Norman just as they were greeting a soldierly-looking man who had come out of the tent. "As Colwell approached, Norman was saying to the man: 'There is the Lieutenant.' "And he added to Lieutenant Colwell: "'This is Sergeant Brainard.' "Brainard immediately drew himself up to the position of the soldier, and was about to salute, when Colwell took his hand. "At this moment there was a confused murmur within the tent, and a voice said: 'Who's there?' "Norman answered, 'It's Norman--Norman who was in the "Proteus."' "This was followed by cries of 'Oh, it's Norman,' and a sound like a feeble cheer. "Meanwhile one of the relief party, who in his agitation and excitement was crying like a child, was down on his knees trying to roll away the stones that held the flapping tent-cloth.... Colwell called for a knife, cut a slit in the tent-cover, and looked in. It was a sight horror. On one side, close to the opening, with his face toward the opening, lay what was apparently a dead man. His jaw had dropped, his eyes were open, but fixed and glassy, his limbs were motionless. On the opposite side was a poor fellow, alive to be sure, but without hands or feet, and with a spoon tied to the stump of his right arm. Two others, seated on the ground in the middle, had just got down a rubber bottle that hung on the tent pole, and were pouring from it into a tin can. Directly opposite, on his hands and knees, was a dark man, with a long matted beard, in a dirty and tattered dressing-gown, with a little red tattered skull-cap on his head, and brilliant, staring eyes. As Colwell appeared he raised himself a little and put on a pair of eye-glasses. "'Who are you?' asked Colwell. "The man made no reply, staring at him vacantly. "'Who are you?' again. "One of the men spoke up. 'That's the Major--Major Greely." "Colwell crawled in and took him by the hand, saying: 'Greely, is this you?' "'Yes,' said Greely in a faint voice, hesitating and shuffling with his words, 'yes--seven of us left--here we are--dying--like men. Did what I came to do--beat the best record.' "Then he fell back exhausted." Slowly and cautiously the men were nursed back to life and health--all save poor Ellison, whose enfeebled constitution could not stand the shock of the necessary amputation of his mutilated limbs. The nine bodies buried in the shallow graves were exhumed and taken to the ship, Private Henry's body being found lying where it fell at the moment of his execution. At that time the castaways were too feeble to give even hasty sepulture to their dead. A horrible circumstance, reported by Commander Schley himself, was that the flesh of many of the bodies was cut from the bones--by whom, and for what end of cannibalism, can only be conjectured. Following the disaster to the Greely expedition, came a period of lethargy in polar exploration, and when the work was taken up again, it was in ways foreign to the purpose of this book. Foreigners for a time led in activity, and in 1895 Fridjof Nansen in his drifting ship, the "Fram," attained the then farthest North, latitude 86° 14', while Rudolph Andree, in 1897, put to the test the desperate expedient of setting out for the Pole in a balloon from Dane's Island, Spitzbergen; but the wind that bore him swiftly out of sight, has never brought back again tidings of his achievement or his fate. Nansen's laurels were wrested from him in 1900 by the Duke of Abruzzi, who reached 86° 33' north. The stories of these brave men are fascinating and instructive, but they are no part of the story of the American sailor. Indeed, the sailor is losing his importance as an explorer in the Arctic. It has become clear enough to all that it is not to be a struggle between stout ships and crushing ice, but rather a test of the endurance of men and dogs, pushing forward over solid floes of heaped and corrugated ice, toward the long-sought goal. Two Americans in late years have made substantial progress toward the conquest of the polar regions. Mr. Walter Wellman, an eminent journalist, has made two efforts to reach the Pole, but met with ill-luck and disaster in each, though in the first he attained to latitude 81° to the northeast of Spitzbergen, and in the second he discovered and named many new islands about Franz Josef Land. Most pertinacious of all the American explorers, however, has been Lieutenant Robert E. Peary, U.S.N., who since 1886, has been going into the frozen regions whenever the opportunity offered--and when none offered he made one. His services in exploration and in mapping out the land and seas to the north of Greenland have been of the greatest value to geographical science, and at the moment of writing this book he is wintering at Cape Sabine, where the Greely survivors were found, awaiting the coming of summer to make a desperate dash for the goal, sought for a century, but still secure in its wintry fortifications, the geographical Pole. Nor is he wholly alone, either in his ambition or his patience. Evelyn B. Baldwin, a native of Illinois, with an expedition equipped by William Zeigler, of New York, and made up of Americans, is wintering at Alger Island, near Franz Josef Land, awaiting the return of the sun to press on to the northward. It is within the bounds of possibility that before this volume is fairly in the hands of its readers, the fight may be won and the Stars and Stripes wave over that mysterious spot that has awakened the imagination and stimulated the daring of brave men of all nations. CHAPTER VII. THE GREAT LAKES--THEIR SHARE IN THE MARITIME TRAFFIC OF THE UNITED STATES--THE EARLIEST RECORDED VOYAGERS--INDIANS AND FUR TRADERS--THE PIGMY CANAL AT THE SAULT STE. MARIE--BEGINNINGS OF NAVIGATION BY SAILS--DE LA SALLE AND THE "GRIFFIN"--RECOLLECTIONS OF EARLY LAKE SEAMEN--THE LAKES AS A HIGHWAY FOR WESTWARD EMIGRATION--THE FIRST STEAMBOAT--EFFECT OF MINERAL DISCOVERIES ON LAKE SUPERIOR--THE ORE-CARRYING FLEET--THE WHALEBACKS--THE SEAMEN OF THE LAKES--THE GREAT CANAL AT THE "SOO"--THE CHANNEL TO BUFFALO--BARRED OUT FROM THE OCEAN. In the heart of the North American Continent, forming in part the boundary line between the United States and the British possessions to the north, lies that chain of great freshwater lakes bordered by busy and rapidly growing commonwealths, washing the water-fronts of rich and populous cities, and bearing upon their steely blue bosoms a commerce which outdoes that of the Mediterranean in the days of its greatest glory. The old salt, the able seaman who has rounded the Horn, the skipper who has stood unflinchingly at the helm while the green seas towered over the stern, looks with contempt upon the fresh-water sailor and his craft. Not so the man of business or the statesman. The growth of lake traffic has been one of the most marvelous and the most influential factors in the industrial development of the United States. By it has been systematized and brought to the highest form of organization the most economical form of freight carriage in the world. Through it has been made possible the enormous reduction in the price of American steel that has enabled us to invade foreign markets, and promises to so reduce the cost of our ships, that we may be able to compete again in ship-building, with the yards of the Clyde and the Tyne. Along the shores of these unsalted seas, great shipyards are springing up, that already build ships more cheaply than can be done anywhere else in the world, and despite the obstacles of shallow canals, and the treacherous channels of the St. Lawrence, have been able to build and send to tidewater, ocean ships in competition with the seacoast builders. The present of the lake marine is secure; its future is full of promise. Its story, if lacking in the elements of romance that attend upon the ocean's story, is well worth telling. A decade more than two centuries ago a band of Iroquois Indians made their way in bark canoes from Lake Ontario up Lake Erie to the Detroit River, across Lake St. Clair, and thence through Lake Huron to Point Iroquois. They were the first navigators of the Great Lakes, and that they were not peace-loving boatmen, is certain from the fact that they traveled all these miles of primeval waterway for the express purpose of battle. History records that they had no difficulty in bringing on a combat with the Illinois tribes, and in an attempt to displace the latter from Point Iroquois, the invaders were destroyed after a six-days' battle. It is still a matter of debate among philosophical historians, whether war, trade, or missionary effort has done the more toward opening the strange, wild places of the world. Each, doubtless, has done its part, but we shall find in the story of the Great Lakes, that the war canoes of the savages were followed by the Jesuit missionaries, and these in turn by the bateaux of the voyageurs employed by the Hudson Bay Company. After the Iroquois had learned the way, trips of war canoes up and down the lakes, were annual occurrences, and warfare was almost perpetual. In 1680 the Iroquois, 700 strong, invaded Illinois, killed 1200 of the tribe there established, and drove the rest beyond the Mississippi. For years after the Iroquois nation were the rulers of the water-front between Lake Erie and Lake Huron. While this tribe was in undisputed possession, commerce had little to do with the navigation of the Great Lakes. The Indians went up and down the shores on long hunting trips, but war was the principal business, and every canoe was equipped for a fray at any time. A story is told of a great naval battle that was fought on Lake Erie, nearly two centuries before the first steamer made its appearance on that placid water. A Wyandot prince, so the tale goes, fell in love with a beautiful princess of the Seneca tribe, who was the promised bride of a chief of her own nation. The warrior failed to win the heart of the dusky maiden, and goaded to desperation, entered the Senecas country by night, and carried off the lady. War immediately followed, and was prosecuted with great cruelty and slaughter for a long time. At last a final battle was fought, in which the Wyandots were worsted and forced to flee in great haste. The fugitives planned to cross the ice of the Straits (Detroit) River, but found it broken up and floating down stream. Their only alternative was to throw themselves on the floating ice and leap from cake to cake; they thus made their escape to the Canadian shore, and joined the tribes of the Pottawatomies, Ottawas, and Chippewas. A year later the Wyandots, equipped with light birch canoes, set out to defeat the Senecas, and succeeded in inducing them to give combat on the water. The Senecas made a fatal mistake and came out to meet the enemy in their clumsily-constructed boats hollowed out of the trunks of trees. After much maneuvering the birch canoe fleet proceeded down Lake Erie to the head of Long Point, with the Senecas in hot pursuit. In the center of the lake the Wyandots turned and gave the Senecas so hot a reception that they were forced to flee, but could not make good their escape in their clumsy craft, and were all slain but one man, who was allowed to return and report the catastrophe to his own nation. This closed the war. Legends are preserved that lead to the belief that there may have been navigators of the Great Lakes before the Indians, and it is generally believed that the latter were not the first occupants of the Lake Superior region. It is said that the Lake Superior country was frequently visited by a barbaric race, for the purpose of obtaining copper, and it is quite possible that these people may have been skilled navigators. [Illustration: THE WOODEN BATEAUX OF THE FUR TRADERS ] Commercial navigation of the Great Lakes, curiously enough, first assumed importance in the least accessible portion. The Hudson Bay Company, always extending its territory toward the northwest, sent its bateaux and canoes into Lake Superior early in the seventeenth century. To accommodate this traffic the company dug a canal around the falls of the St. Marie River, at the point we now call "the Soo." In time this pigmy progenitor of the busiest canal in the world, became filled with débris, and its very existence forgotten; but some years ago a student in the thriving town of Sault Ste. Marie, poring over some old books of the Hudson Bay Company, noticed several references to the company's canal. What canal could it be? His curiosity was aroused, and with the aid of the United States engineers in charge of the new improvements, he began a painstaking investigation. In time the line of the old ditch was discovered, and, indeed, it was no more than a ditch, two and a half feet deep, by eight or nine wide. One lock was built, thirty-eight feet long, with a lift of nine feet. The floor and sills of this lock were discovered, and the United States Government has since rebuilt it in stone, that visitors to the Soo may turn from the massive new locks, through which steel steamships of eight thousand tons pass all day long through the summer months, to gaze on the strait and narrow gate which once opened the way for all the commerce of Lake Superior. But through that gate there passed a picturesque and historic procession. Canoes spurred along by tufted Indians with black-robed Jesuit missionaries for passengers; the wooden bateaux of the fur traders, built of wood and propelled by oars, and carrying gangs of turbulent trappers and voyageurs; the company's chief factors in swift private craft, making for the west to extend the influence of the great corporation still further into the wilderness, all passed through the little canal and avoided the roaring waters of the Ste. Marie. It was but a narrow gate, but it played its part in the opening of the West. War, which is responsible for most of the checks to civilization, whether or not it may in some instances advance the skirmish line of civilized peoples, destroyed the pioneer canal. For in 1812 some Americans being in that part of the country, thought it would be a helpful contribution to their national defense if they blew up the lock and shattered the canal, as it was on Canadian soil. Accordingly this was done, of course without the slightest effect on the conflict then raging, but much to the discomfort and loss of the honest voyageurs and trappers of the Lake Superior region, whose interest in the war could hardly have been very serious. So far as history records the first sailing vessel to spread its wings on the Great Lakes beyond Niagara Falls, was the "Griffin," built by the Chevalier de la Salle in 1679, near the point where Buffalo now stands. La Salle had brought to this point French ship-builders and carpenters, together with sailors, to navigate the craft when completed. It was his purpose to proceed in this vessel to the farthest corners of the Great Lakes, establish trading and trapping stations, and take possession of the country in the name of France. He was himself conciliatory with the Indians and liked by them, but jealousies among the French themselves, stirred up savage antagonism to him, and his ship narrowly escaped burning while still on the stocks. In August of 1679, however, she was launched, a brigantine of sixty tons burden, mounting five small cannon and three arquebuses. Her model is said to have been not unlike that of the caravels in which Columbus made his famous voyage, and copies of which were exhibited at the Columbian Exposition. Bow and stern were high and almost alike. Yet in this clumsy craft La Salle voyaged the whole length of Lake Erie, passed through the Detroit River, and St. Clair River and lake; proceeded north to Mackinaw, and thence south in Lake Michigan and into Green Bay. It was the first time any vessel under sail had entered those waters. Maps and charts there were none. The swift rushing waters of the Detroit River flowed smoothly over limestone reefs, which the steamers of to-day pass cautiously, despite the Government channels, cut deep and plainly lighted. The flats, that broad expanse of marsh permeated by a maze of false channels above Detroit, had to be threaded with no chart or guide. Yet the "Griffin" made St. Ignace in twenty days from having set sail, a record which is often not equaled by lumber schooners of the present time. From Green Bay, La Salle sent the vessel back with a cargo of furs that would have made him rich for life, had it ever reached a market. But the vessel disappeared, and for years nothing was heard of her. Finally La Salle learned that a half-breed pilot, who had shown signs of treachery on the outward trip, had persuaded the crew to run her ashore in the Detroit River, and themselves to take the valuable cargo. But the traitors had reckoned without the savage Indians of the neighborhood, who also coveted the furs and pelts. While the crew were trying to dispose of these the red men set upon them and slew them all. The "Griffin" never again floated on the lakes. It is difficult to determine the time when sailing vessels next appeared upon the lakes, but it was certainly not for nearly seventy-five years. Captain Jonathan Carver reported a French schooner on Lake Superior about 1766, and in 1772 Alexander Harvey built a forty-ton sloop on the same lake, in which he sought the site of a famous copper mine. But it was long before Lake Superior showed more than an infrequent sail, though on Lake Erie small vessels soon became common. Even in 1820 the furs of Lake Superior were sent down to Chicago in bateaux. Two small sailing vessels, the "Beaver" and the "Gladwin," which proved very valuable to the besieged garrison at Detroit in 1763, were the next sailing vessels on the lakes, and are supposed to have been built by the English the year previous. It is said, that through the refusal of her captain to take ballast aboard, the "Gladwin" was capsized on Lake Erie and lost, and the entire crew drowned. The "Royal Charlotte," the "Boston," and the "Victory" appeared on the lakes a few years later, and went into commission between Fort Erie (Buffalo) and Detroit, carrying the first year 1,464 bales of fur to Fort Erie, and practically establishing commercial navigation. It is hard to look clearly into the future. If the recommendations of one J. Collins, deputy surveyor-general of the British Government, had governed the destiny of the Great Lakes, the traffic between Buffalo and the Soo by water, would to-day be in boats of fifteen tons or less. Under orders of the English Government, Collins in 1788 made a survey of all the lakes and harbors from Kingston to Mackinac, and in his report, expressing his views as to the size of vessels that should be built for service on the lakes, he said he thought that for service on Lake Ontario vessels should be seventy-five or eighty tons burden, and on Lake Erie, if expected to run to Lake Huron, they should be not more than fifteen tons. What a stretch of imagination is necessary to conceive of the great volume of traffic of the present time, passing Detroit in little schooners not much larger than catboats that skim around the lakes! Imagine such a corporation as the Northern Steamship Company, with its big fleet of steel steamers, attempting to handle its freight business in sailing vessels of a size that the average wharf-rat of the present time would disdain to pilot. What a rush of business there would be at the Marine Post-Office in Detroit, if some day this company would decide to cut off three of its large steamers and send out enough schooners of the size recommended by the English officer, to take their place! The fleet would comprise at least 318 vessels, and would require not fewer than 1500 seamen to navigate. It is sometimes said that there is a continual panorama of vessels passing up and down the rivers of the Great Lakes, but what if the Englishman had guessed right? Happily he did not, and vessels of 1500 tons can navigate the connecting waters of Lake Huron and Lake Erie much better than those of fifteen tons could in his time. That the early ship-builders did not pay much attention to J. Collins, is evident from the fact that, when the Detroit was surrendered to the Americans in 1796, twelve merchant vessels were owned there of from fifty to one hundred tons each. [Illustration: "THE RED-MEN SET UPON THEM AND SLEW THEM ALL"] At the close of the eighteenth century the American sailor had hardly superseded the red men as a navigator, and lake vessels were not much more plentiful than airships are nowadays. Indeed, the entire fleet in 1799, so far as can be learned, was as follows: The schooners "Nancy," "Swan," and "Naegel;" the sloops "Sagina," "Detroit," "Beaver," "Industry," "Speedwell," and "Arabaska." This was the fleet, complete, of Lakes Huron, Erie, and Michigan. "A wild-looking set were the first white sailors of the lakes," says Hubbard in his "Memorials of Half a Century." "Their weirdness was often enhanced by the dash of Indian blood, and they are better described as rangers of the woods and waters. Picturesque, too, they were in their red flannel or leather shirts and cloth caps of some gay color, finished to a point which hung over on one side with a depending tassel. They had a genuine love for their occupation, and muscles that never seemed to tire at the paddle and oar. These were not the men who wanted steamboats and fast sailing vessels. These men had a real love for canoeing, and from dawn to sunset, with only a short interval, and sometimes no midday rest, they would ply the oars, causing the canoe or barge to shoot through the water like a thing of life, but often contending against head winds and gaining little progress in a day's rowing." [Illustration: ONE OF THE FIRST LAKE SAILORS] One of the earliest American sailors on a lake ship bigger than a bateau, was "Uncle Dacy" Johnson, of Cleveland, who sailed for fifty years, beginning about 1850. "When I was a chunk of a boy," says the old Captain in a letter to a New York paper, "I put a thirty-two pound bundle on my back and started on foot to Buffalo. I made the journey to Albany, N.Y., from Bridgeport, Conn., in sixteen days, which was nothing remarkable, as I had $3 in money, and a bundle of food. Many a poor fellow I knew started on the same journey with nothing but an axe. When I arrived at Buffalo I found a very small town--Cleveland, Sandusky, and Erie, were all larger. There were only two lighthouses on the lakes, one at Buffalo, which was the first one built, and the other one at Erie. Buffalo was then called Fort Erie, and was a struggling little town. My first trip as a sailor was made from Buffalo to Erie, which was then considered quite a voyage. From Buffalo to Detroit was looked upon as a long voyage, and a vessel of thirty-two tons was the largest ship on the lakes. In 1813 I was one of a crew of four who left Buffalo on the sloop 'Commencement' with a cargo of whisky for Erie. While beating along shore the English frigate 'Charlotte' captured us and two boatloads of red-coats boarded our vessel and took us prisoners. We were paroled on shipboard the same day, and before night concocted a scheme to get the Englishmen drunk on our whisky. One of our fellows got drunk first, and told of our intentions, the plot was frustrated, and we narrowly escaped being hung." [Illustration: "TWO BOAT-LOADS OF REDCOATS BOARDED US AND TOOK US PRISONERS"] Once begun, the conquest of the lakes as a highway for trade was rapid. We who live in the days of railroads can hardly appreciate how tremendous was the impetus given to the upbuilding of a region if it possessed practicable waterways. The whole history of the settlement of the Middle West is told in the story of its rivers and lakes. The tide of immigration, avoiding the dense forests haunted by Indians, the rugged mountains, and the broad prairies into which the wheel of the heavy-laden wagon cut deep, followed the course of the Potomac and the Ohio, the Hudson, Mohawk, and the Great Lakes. Streams that have long since ceased to be thought navigable for a boy's canoe were made to carry the settlers' few household goods heaped on a flatboat. The flood of families going West created a demand that soon covered the lakes with schooners and brigs. Landed on the lake shore near some little stream, the immigrants would build flatboats, and painfully pole their way into the interior to some spot that took their fancy. Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Illinois thus filled up, towns growing by the side of streams now used only to turn mill-wheels, but which in their day determined where the prosperous settlement should be. The steamboat was not slow in making its appearance on the lakes. In 1818, while it was still an experiment on the seaboard, one of these craft appeared on Lake Erie. The "Walk-in-the-Water" was her name, suggestive of Indian nomenclature and, withal, exceedingly descriptive. She made the trip from Buffalo to Detroit, not infrequently taking thirteen days. She was a side-wheeler, a model which still holds favor on the lower lakes, though virtually abandoned on the ocean and on Lake Superior. An oil painting of this little craft, still preserved, shows her without a pilot-house, steered by a curious tiller at the stern, with a smokestack like six lengths of stovepipe, and huge unboxed wheels. She is said to have been a profitable craft, often carrying as many as fifty passengers on the voyage, for which eighteen dollars was charged. For four years she held a monopoly of the business. Probably the efforts of Fulton and Livingstone to protect the monopoly which had been granted them by the State of New York, and the determination of James Roosevelt to maintain what he claimed to be his exclusive right to the vertical paddle-wheel, delayed the extension of steam navigation on the lakes as it did on the great rivers. After four years of solitary service on Lake Erie, the "Walk-in-the-Water" was wrecked in an October storm. Crowded with passengers, she rode out a heavy gale through a long night. At daybreak the cables parted and she went ashore, but no lives were lost. Her loss was considered an irreparable calamity by the settlers at the western end of the lake. "This accident," wrote an eminent citizen of Detroit, "may be considered one of the greatest misfortunes which has ever befallen Michigan, for, in addition to its having deprived us of all certain and speedy communication with the civilized world, I am fearful it will greatly check the progress of immigration and improvement." It is scarcely necessary to note now that the apprehensions of the worthy citizen of Michigan were unfounded. Steam navigation on the lakes was no more killed by the loss of the pioneer craft than was transatlantic steam navigation ended by the disapproving verdict of the scientists. Nowhere in the world is there such a spectacle of maritime activity, nowhere such a continuous procession of busy cargo-ships as in the Detroit River, and through the colossal locks of the "Soo" canals. In 1827 the first steamboat reached the Sault Ste. Marie, bearing among her passengers General Winfield Scott, on a visit of inspection to the military post there, but she made no effort to enter the great lake. About five years later, the first "smoke boat," as the Indians called the steamers, reached Chicago, the pigmy forerunner of the fleet of huge leviathans that all the summer long, nowadays, blacken Chicago's sky with their torrents of smoke, and keep the hurrying citizens fuming at the open draw of a bridge. All side-wheelers were these pioneers, wooden of course, and but sorry specimens of marine architecture, but they opened the way for great things. For some years longer the rushing torrent of the Ste. Marie's kept Lake Superior tightly closed to steamboats, but about 1840 the richness of the copper mines bordering upon that lake began to attract capital, and the need of steam navigation became crying. In 1845 men determined to put some sort of a craft upon the lake that would not be dependent upon the whims of wind and sails for propulsion. Accordingly, the sloop "Ocean," a little craft of fifteen tons, was fitted out with an engine and wheels at Detroit and towed to the "Soo." There she was dragged out of the water and made the passage between the two lakes on rollers. The "Independence," a boat of about the same size, was treated in the same way later in the year. Scarcely anything in the history of navigation, unless it be the first successful application of steam to the propulsion of boats is of equal importance with the first appearance of steamboats in Lake Superior. It may be worth while to abandon for a moment the orderly historical sequence of this narrative, to emphasize the wonderful contrast between the commerce of Lake Superior in the days of the "Independence" and now--periods separated by scarcely sixty years. To-day the commerce of that lake is more than half of all the great lakes combined. It is conducted in steel vessels, ranging from 1500 to 8500 tons, and every year sees an increase in their size. In 1901 more than 27,000,000 tons of freight were carried in Lake Superior vessels, a gain of nearly 3,000,000 over the year before. The locks in the "Soo" canal, of which more later, have twice had to be enlarged, while the Canadian Government has built a canal of its own on the other side of the river. The discovery and development of the wonderful deposits of iron ore at the head of the lake have proved the greatest factors in the upbuilding of its commerce, and the necessity for getting this ore to the mills in Illinois, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, has resulted in the creation of a class of colossal cargo-carriers on the lake that for efficiency and results, though not for beauty, outdo any vessel known to maritime circles. [Illustration: A VANISHING TYPE ON THE LAKES] At the present time, when the project of a canal to connect the Atlantic and Pacific oceans at the Central American Isthmus has almost passed out of the sphere of discussion and into that of action, there is suggestiveness in the part that the canal at the "Soo" played in stimulating lake commerce. Until it was dug, the lake fleets grew but slowly, and the steamers were but few and far between. Freight rates were high, and the schooners and sloops made but slow passages. From an old bill, of about 1835, we learn that freight rates between Detroit and Cleveland, or Lake Erie points and Buffalo, were about as follows: Flour, thirty cents a barrel; all grain, ten cents a bushel; beef, pork, ashes, and whisky, thirteen cents a hundred pounds; skins and furs, thirty-one cents a hundred weight; staves, from Detroit to Buffalo, $6.25 a thousand. In 1831 there were but 111 vessels of all sorts on the lakes. In five years, the fleet had grown to 262, and in 1845, the year when the first steamer entered Lake Superior, to 493. In 1855, the year the "Soo" canal was opened, there were in commission 1196 vessels, steam and sail, on the unsalted seas. Then began the era of prodigious development, due chiefly to that canal which Henry Clay, great apostle as he was of internal improvements, said would be beyond the remotest range of settlements in the United States or in the moon. At the head of Lake Superior are almost illimitable beds of iron ore which looks like rich red earth, and is scooped up by the carload with steam shovels. Tens of thousands of men are employed in digging this ore and transporting it to the nearest lake port--Duluth and West Superior being the largest shipping points. Railroads built and equipped for the single purpose of carrying the ore are crowded with rumbling cars day and night, and at the wharves during the eight or nine months of the year when navigation is open lie great steel ships, five hundred feet long, with a capacity of from six thousand to nine thousand tons of ore. Perhaps in no branch of marine architecture has the type best fitted to the need been so scientifically determined as in planning these ore boats. They are cargo carriers only, and all considerations of grace or beauty are rigidly eliminated from their design. The bows are high to meet and part the heavy billows of the tempestuous lakes, for they are run as late into the stormy fall and early winter season as the ice will permit. From the forward quarter the bulwarks are cut away, the high bow sheltering the forecastle with the crews, while back of it rises a deck-house of steel, containing the officers' rooms, and bearing aloft the bridge and wheel-house. Three hundred feet further aft rises another steel deck-house, above the engine, and between extends the long, flat deck, broken only by hatches every few feet, battened down almost level with the deck floor. During the summer, all too short for the work the busy iron carriers have to do, these boats are run at the top of their speed, and on schedules that make the economy of each minute essential. So they are built in such fashion as to make loading as easy and as rapid as possible. Sometimes there are as many as fourteen or sixteen hatches in one of these great ships, into each of which while loading the ore chutes will be pouring their red flood, and out of each of which the automatic unloaders at Cleveland or Erie will take ten-ton bites of the cargo, until six or seven thousand tons of iron ore may be unloaded in eight hours. The hold is all one great store-room, no deck above the vessel's floor except the main deck. No water-tight compartments or bulkheads divide it as in ocean ships, and all the machinery is placed far in the stern. The vessel is simply a great steel packing-box, with rounded ends, made strong to resist the shock of waves and the impact of thousands of tons of iron poured in from a bin as high above the floor as the roof of a three-story building. With vessels such as these, the cost of carrying ore has been reduced below the level of freight charges in any part of the world. Yet comfort and speed are by no means overlooked. The quarters of the officers and men are superior to those provided on most of the ocean liners, and vastly better than anything offered by the "ocean tramps." Many of the ships have special guest-cabins fitted up for their owners, rivalling the cabins _de luxe_ of the ocean greyhounds. The speed of the newer ships will average from fourteen to sixteen knots, and one of them in a season will make as many as twenty round trips between Duluth and Cleveland. Often one will tow two great steel barges almost as large as herself, great ore tanks without machinery of any kind and mounting two slender masts chiefly for signaling purposes, but also for use in case of being cut adrift. For a time, the use of these barges, with their great stowage capacity in proportion to their total displacement, was thought to offer the cheapest way of carrying ore. One mining company went very heavily into building these craft, figuring that every steamer could tow two or three of them, giving thus for each engine and crew a load of perhaps twenty-four thousand tons. But, seemingly, this expectation has been disappointed, for while the barges already constructed are in active use, most of the companies have discontinued building them. Indeed, at the moment of the preparation of this book, there were but two steel barges building in all the shipyards of the great lakes. Another form of lake vessel of which great things were expected, but which disappointed its promotors, is the "whaleback," commonly called by the sailors "pigs." These are cigar-shaped craft, built of steel, their decks, from the bridge aft to the engine-house, rounded like the back of a whale, and carried only a few feet above the water. In a sea, the greater part of the deck is all awash, and a trip from the bridge to the engine-house means not only repeated duckings, but a fair chance of being swept overboard. The first of these boats, called the "101," was built in sections, the plates being forged at Cleveland, and the bow and stern built at Wilmington, Del. The completed structure was launched at Duluth. In after years she was taken to the ocean, went round Cape Horn, and was finally wrecked on the north Pacific coast. At the time of the Columbian Exposition, a large passenger-carrying whaleback, the "Christopher Columbus," was built, which still plies on Lake Michigan, though there is nothing discernible in the way of practical advantage in this design for passenger vessels. For cargo carrying there would seem to be much in the claims of their inventor, Alexander McDougall, for their superior capacity and stability, yet they have not been generally adopted. The largest whaleback now on the lakes is named after Mr. McDougall, is four hundred and thirty feet over all, fifty feet beam, and of eight thousand tons capacity. She differs from the older models in having a straight stem instead of the "pig's nose." [Illustration: THE "WHALEBACK"] The iron traffic which has grown to such monster proportions, and created so noble a fleet of ships, began in 1856, when the steamer "Ontonagon" shipped two hundred and ninety-six tons of ore at Duluth. To-day, one ship of a fleet numbering hundreds will carry nine thousand tons, and make twenty trips a season. Mr. Waldon Fawcett, who has published in the "Century Magazine" a careful study of this industry, estimates the total ore cargoes for a year at about 20,000,000 tons. The ships of the ore fleet will range from three hundred and fifty to five hundred feet in length, with a draft of about eighteen feet--at which figure it must stop until harbors and channels are deepened. Their cost will average $350,000. The cargoes are worth upward of $100,000,000 annually, and the cost of transportation has been so reduced that in some instances a ton is carried twenty miles for one cent. The seamen, both on quarterdeck and forecastle, will bear comparison with their salt-water brethren for all qualities of manhood. Indeed, the lot of the sailor on the lakes naturally tends more to the development of his better qualities than does that of the salt-water jack, for he is engaged by the month, or season, rather than by the trip; he is never in danger of being turned adrift in a foreign port, nor of being "shanghaied" in a home one. He has at least three months in winter to fit himself for shore work if he desires to leave the water, and during the season he is reasonably sure of seeing his family every fortnight. A strong trades-union among the lake seamen keeps wages up and regulates conditions of employment. At the best, however, seafaring on either lake or ocean is but an ill-paid calling, and the earnings of the men who command and man the great ore-carriers are sorely out of proportion to the profits of the employing corporations. Mr. Fawcett asserts that $11,250 net earnings for a single trip was not unusual in one season, and that this sum might have been increased by $4500 had the owners taken a return cargo of coal instead of rushing back light for more ore. As the vessels of the ore fleet are owned in the main by the steel trust, their earnings are a consideration second to their efficiency in keeping the mills supplied with ore. The great canal at Sault Ste. Marie which has caused this prodigious development of the lake shipping has been under constant construction and reconstruction for almost half a century. It had its origin in a gift of 750,000 acres of public lands from the United States Government to the State of Michigan. The State, in its turn, passed the lands on to a private company which built the canal. This work was wholly unsatisfactory, and very wisely the Government took the control of this artificial waterway out of private hands and assumed its management itself. At once it expended about $8,000,000 upon the enlargement and improvement of the canal. Scarcely was it opened before the ratio at which the traffic increased showed that it would not long be sufficient. Enlarged in 1881, it gave a capacity of from fourteen feet, nine inches to fifteen feet in depth, and with locks only four hundred feet in length. Even a ditch of this size proved of inestimable value in helping vessels to avoid the eighteen feet drop between Lake Superior and Lake Huron. By 1886 the tonnage which passed through the canal each year exceeded 9,000,000, and then for the first time this great waterway with a season limited to eight or nine months, exceeded in the volume of its traffic the great Suez canal. But shippers at once began to complain of its dimensions. Vessels were constantly increasing both in length and in draught, and the development of the great iron fields gave assurance that a new and prodigious industry would add largely to the size of the fleet, which up to that time had mainly been employed in carrying grain. Accordingly the Government rebuilt the locks until they now are one hundred feet in width, twenty-one feet deep, and twelve hundred feet long. Immediately vessels were built of a size which tests even this great capacity, and while the traffic through De Lessep's famous canal at Suez has for a decade remained almost stationary, being 9,308,152 tons, in 1900, the traffic through the "Soo" has increased in almost arithmetical proportion every year, attaining in 1901, 24,696,736 tons, or more than the combined tonnage of the Suez, Kiel, and Manchester canals, though the "Soo" is closed four months in the year. In 1887 the value of the iron ore shipments through the canal was $8,744,995. Ten years later it exceeded $30,000,000. Meanwhile it must be remembered that the Canadian Government has built on its own side of the river very commodious canals which themselves carry no small share of the Lake Superior shipments. An illustration of the fashion in which superior facilities at one end of a great line of travel compel improvements all along the line is afforded by the fact that since the canal at the "Soo" has been deepened so as to take vessels of twenty-one feet draught with practically no limit upon their length, the cry has gone up among shippers and vessel men for a twenty-foot channel from Duluth to the sea. At present there are several points in the lower lakes, notably at what is called the Lime Kiln Crossing, below Detroit, where twenty-foot craft are put to some hazard, while beyond Buffalo the shallow Welland Canal, with its short locks, and the shallow canals of the St. Lawrence River have practically stopped all effort to establish direct and profitable communication between the great lakes and the ocean. Such efforts have been made and the expedients adopted to get around natural obstacles have sometimes been almost pathetic in the story they tell of the eagerness of the lake marine to find an outlet to salt-water. Ships are cut in two at Cleveland or at Erie and sent, thus disjointed, through the canals to be patched together again at Quebec or Montreal. One body of Chicago capitalists built four steel steamers of about 2500 tons capacity each, and of dimensions suited to the locks in the Welland Canal, in the hopes of maintaining a regular freight line between that city and Liverpool. The vessels were loaded with full cargo as far as Buffalo, there discharged half their freight, and went on thus half-laden through the Canadian canals. But the loss in time and space, and the expense of reshipment of cargo made the experiment an unprofitable one. Scarcely a year has passed that some such effort has not been made, and constantly the wonderful development of the ship-building business on the Great Lakes greatly increases the vigor of the demand for an outlet. Steel ships can be built on the lakes at a materially smaller cost than anywhere along the seaboard. In the report of the Commissioner of Navigation for 1901 it is noted that more than double the tonnage of steel construction on the Atlantic coast was reported from the lakes. If lake builders could send their vessels easily and safely to the ocean, we should not need subsidies and special legislation to reestablish the American flag abroad. By the report already quoted, it is shown that thirty-nine steel steamers were built in lake yards of a tonnage ranging from 1089 tons to 5125. Wooden ship-building is practically dead on the lakes. In June of that year twenty-six more steel steamers, with an aggregate tonnage of 81,000 were on the stocks in the lake yards. Two of these are being built for ocean service, but both will have to be cut in two before they can get through the Canadian canals. It is not surprising that there appears among the people living in the commonwealths which border on the Great Lakes a certain doubt as to whether the expenditure by the United States Government of $200,000,000 for a canal at the Isthmus will afford so great a measure of encouragement to American shipping and be of as immediate advantage to the American exporter, as a twenty-foot channel from Duluth to tide-water. Though the old salt may sneer at the freshwater sailor who scarcely need know how to box the compass, to whom the art of navigation is in the main the simple practise of steering from port to port guided by headlands and lights, who is seldom long out of sight of land, and never far from aid, yet the perils of the lakes are quite as real as those which confront the ocean seaman, and the skill and courage necessary for withstanding them quite as great as his. The sailor's greatest safeguard in time of tempest is plenty of searoom. This the lake navigator never has. For him there is always the dreaded lee shore only a few miles away. Anchorage on the sandy bottom of the lakes is treacherous, and harbors are but few and most difficult of access. Where the ocean sailor finds a great bay, perhaps miles in extent, entered by a gateway thousands of yards across, offering a harbor of refuge in time of storm, the lake navigator has to run into the narrow mouth of a river, or round under the lee of a government breakwater hidden from sight under the crested waves and offering but a precarious shelter at best. Chicago, Cleveland, Milwaukee--most of the lake ports have witnessed such scenes of shipwreck and death right at the doorway of the harbor, as no ocean port could tell. At Chicago great schooners have been cast far up upon the boulevard that skirts a waterside park, or thrown bodily athwart the railroad tracks that on the south side of the city border the lake. The writer has seen from a city street, crowded with shoppers on a bright but windy day, vessels break to pieces on the breakwater, half a mile away but in plain sight, and men go down to their death in the raging seas. On all the lakes, but particularly on the smaller ones, an ugly sea is tossed up by the wind in a time so short as to seem miraculous to the practised navigator of the ocean. The shallow water curls into breakers under the force of even a moderate wind, and the vessels are put to such a strain, in their struggles, as perhaps only the craft built especially for the English channel have to undergo. Some of the most fatal disasters the lakes have known resulted from iron vessels, thus racked and tossed, sawing off, as the phrase goes, the rivets that bound their plates together, and foundering. Fire, too, has numbered its scores of victims on lake steamers, though this danger, like indeed most others, is greatly decreased by the increased use of steel as a structural material and the great improvement in the model of the lake craft. Even ten years ago the lake boats were ridiculous in their clumsiness, their sluggishness, and their lack of any of the charm and comfort that attend ocean-going vessels, but progress toward higher types has been rapid, and there are ships on the lakes to-day that equal any of their size afloat. For forty years it has been possible to say annually, "This is the greatest year in the history of the lake marine." For essentially it is a new and a growing factor in the industrial development of the United States. So far, from having been killed by the prodigious development of our railroad system, it has kept pace with that system, and the years that have seen the greatest number of miles of railroad built, have witnessed the launching of the biggest lake vessels. There is every reason to believe that this growth will for a long time be persistent, that the climax has not yet been reached. For it is incredible that the Government will permit the barrier at Niagara to the commerce of these great inland seas to remain long unbroken. Either by the Mohawk valley route, now followed by the Erie canal, or by the route down the St. Lawrence, with a deepening and widening of the present Canadian canals, and a new canal down from the St. Lawrence to Lake Champlain, a waterway will yet be provided. The richest coast in the world is that bordering on the lakes. The cheapest ships in the world can there be built. Already the Government has spent its tens and scores of millions in providing waterways from the extreme northwest end to the southeastern extremity of this water system, and it is unbelievable that it shall long remain violently stopped there. New devices for digging canals; such as those employed in the Chicago drainage channel, and the new pneumatic lock, the power and capacity of which seem to be practically unlimited, have vastly decreased the cost of canal building, and multiplied amazingly the value of artificial waterways. As it is admitted that the greatness and the wealth of New York State are much to be credited to the Erie canal, so the prosperity and populousness of the whole lake region will be enhanced when lake sailors and the lake ship-builders are given a free waterway to the ocean. **Transcriber's note: Page 256: changed estopped to stopped. CHAPTER VIII THE MISSISSIPPI AND TRIBUTARY RIVERS--THE CHANGING PHASES OF THEIR SHIPPING--RIVER NAVIGATION AS A NATION-BUILDING FORCE--THE VALUE OF SMALL STREAMS--WORK OF THE OHIO COMPANY--AN EARLY PROPELLER--THE FRENCH FIRST ON THE MISSISSIPPI--THE SPANIARDS AT NEW ORLEANS--EARLY METHODS OF NAVIGATION--THE FLATBOAT, THE BROADHORN, AND THE KEELBOAT--LIFE OF THE RIVERMEN--PIRATES AND BUCCANEERS--LAFITTE AND THE BARATARIANS--THE GENESIS OF THE STEAMBOATS--CAPRICIOUS RIVER--FLUSH TIMES IN NEW ORLEANS--RAPID MULTIPLICATION OF STEAMBOATS--RECENT FIGURES ON RIVER SHIPPING--COMMODORE WHIPPLE'S EXPLOIT--THE MEN WHO STEERED THE STEAMBOATS--THEIR TECHNICAL EDUCATION--THE SHIPS THEY STEERED--FIRES AND EXPLOSIONS--HEROISM OF THE PILOTS--THE RACERS. It is the ordinary opinion, and one expressed too often in publications which might be expected to speak with some degree of accuracy, that river transportation in the United States is a dying industry. We read every now and then of the disappearance of the magnificent Mississippi River steamers, and the magazines not infrequently treat their readers to glowing stories of what is called the "flush" times on the Mississippi, when the gorgeousness of the passenger accommodations, the lavishness of the table, the prodigality of the gambling, and the mingled magnificence and outlawry of life on the great packets made up a picturesque and romantic phase of American life. It is true that much of the picturesqueness and the romance has departed long since. The great river no longer bears on its turbid bosom many of the towering castellated boats built to run, as the saying was, on a heavy dew, but still carrying their tiers upon tiers of ivory-white cabins high in air. The time is past when the river was the great passenger thoroughfare from St. Louis to New Orleans. Some few packets still ply upon its surface, but in the main the passenger traffic has been diverted to the railroads which closely parallel its channel on either side. The American travels much, but he likes to travel fast, and for passenger traffic, except on a few routes where special conditions obtain, the steamboat has long since been outclassed by the railroads. Yet despite the disappearance of its spectacular conditions the water traffic on the rivers of the Mississippi Valley is greater now than at any time in its history. Its methods only have changed. Instead of gorgeous packets crowded with a gay and prodigal throng of travelers for pleasure, we now find most often one dingy, puffing steamboat, probably with no passenger accommodations at all, but which pushes before her from Pittsburg to New Orleans more than a score of flatbottomed, square-nosed scows, aggregating perhaps more than an acre of surface, and heavy laden with coal. Such a tow--for "tow" it is in the river vernacular, although it is pushed--will transport more in one trip than would suffice to load six heavy freight trains. Not infrequently the barges or scows will number more than thirty, carrying more than 1000 tons each, or a cargo exceeding in value $100,000. During the season when navigation is open on the Ohio and its tributaries, this traffic is pursued without interruption. Through it and through the local business on the lower Mississippi, and the streams which flow into it, there is built up a tonnage which shows the freight movement, at least, on the great rivers, to exceed, even in these days of railroads, anything recorded in their history. No physical characteristic of the United States has contributed so greatly to the nationalization of the country and its people, as the topography of its rivers. From the very earliest days they have been the pathways along which proceeded exploration and settlement. Our forefathers, when they found the narrow strip of land along the Atlantic coast which they had at first occupied, becoming crowded, according to their ideas at the time, began working westward, following the river gaps. Up the Hudson and westward by the Mohawk, up the Susquehanna and the Potomac, carrying around the falls that impeded the course of those streams, trudging over the mountains, and building flatboats at the headwaters of the Ohio, they made their way west. Some of the most puny streams were utilized for water-carriers, and the traveler of to-day on certain of the railroads through western New York and Pennsylvania, will be amazed to see the remnants of canals, painfully built in the beds of brawling streams, that now would hardly float an Indian birch-bark canoe. In their time these canals served useful purposes. The stream was dammed and locked every few hundred yards, and so converted into a placid waterway with a flight of mechanical steps, by which the boats were let down to, or raised up from tidewater. To-day nothing remains of most of these works of engineering, except masses of shattered masonry. For the railroads, using the river's bank, and sometimes even part of the retaining walls of the canals for their roadbeds, have shrewdly obtained and swiftly employed authority to destroy all the fittings of these waterways which might, perhaps, at some time, offer to their business a certain rivalry. The corporation known as the Ohio Company, with a great purchase of land from Congress in 1787, by keen advertising, and the methods of the modern real-estate boomer, started the tide of emigration and the fleet of boats down the Ohio. The first craft sent out by this corporation was named, appropriately enough, the "Mayflower." She drifted from Pittsburg to a spot near the mouth of the Muskingum river. Soon the immigrants began to follow by scores, and then by thousands. Mr. McMaster has collected some contemporary evidence of their numbers. One man at Fort Pitt saw fifty flatboats set forth between the first of March and the middle of April, 1787. Between October, 1786, and May, 1787--the frozen season when boats were necessarily infrequent--the adjutant at Fort Harmer counted one hundred and seventy-seven flat-boats, and estimated they carried twenty-seven hundred settlers. A shabby and clumsy fleet it was, indeed, with only enough seamanship involved to push off a sand-bar, but it was a great factor in the upbuilding of the nation. And a curious fact is that the voyagers on one of these river craft hit upon the principle of the screw-propeller, and put it to effective use. The story is told in the diary of Manasseh Cutler, a member of the Ohio Company, who writes: "Assisted by a number of people, we went to work and constructed a machine in the form of a screw, with short blades, and placed it in the stern of the boat, which we turned with a crank. It succeeded to perfection, and I think it a very useful discovery." But the discovery was forgotten for nearly three-quarters of a century, until John Ericsson rediscovered and utilized it. Once across the divide, the early stream of immigration took its way down the Ohio River to the Mississippi. There it met the outposts of French power, for the French burst open that great river, following their missionaries, Marquette and Joliet, down from its headwaters in Wisconsin, or pressing up from their early settlements at New Orleans. Doubtless, if it had not been that the Mississippi afforded the most practicable, and the most useful highway from north to south, the young American people would have had a French State to the westward of them until they had gone much further on the path toward national manhood. But the navigation of the Mississippi and its tributaries was so rich a prize, that it stimulated alike considerations of individual self-interest and national ambition. From the day when the first flatboat made its way from the falls of the Ohio to New Orleans, it was the fixed determination of all people living by the great river, or using it as a highway for commerce, that from its headwaters to its mouth it should be a purely American stream. It was in this way that the Mississippi and its tributaries proved to be, as I have said, a great influence in developing the spirit of coherent nationality among the people of the young nation. Indeed, no national Government could be of much value to the farmers and trappers of Kentucky and Tennessee that did not assure them the right to navigate the Mississippi to its mouth, and find there a place to trans-ship their goods into ocean-going vessels. From the Atlantic seaboard they were shut off by a wall, that for all purpose of export trade was impenetrable. The swift current of the rivers beat back their vessels, the towering ranges of the Alleghanies mocked at their efforts at road building. From their hills flowed the water that filled the Father of Waters and his tributaries. Nature had clearly designed this for their outlet. As James Madison wrote: "The Mississippi is to them everything. It is the Hudson, the Delaware, the Potomac, and all the navigable waters of the Atlantic coast formed into one stream." Yet, when the first trader, in 1786, drifted with his flatboat from Ohio down to New Orleans, thus entering the confines of Spanish territory, he was seized and imprisoned, his goods were taken from him, and at last he was turned loose, penniless, to plod on foot the long way back to his home, telling the story of his hardships as he went along. The name of that man was Thomas Amis, and after his case became known in the great valley, it ceased to be a matter of doubt that the Americans would control the Mississippi. He was in a sense the forerunner of Jefferson and Jackson, for after his time no intelligent statesman could doubt that New Orleans must be ours, nor any soldier question the need for defending it desperately against any foreign power. The story of the way in which Gen. James Wilkinson, by intrigue and trickery, some years later secured a partial relaxation of Spanish vigilance, can not be told here, though his plot had much to do with opening the great river. [Illustration: FLATBOATS MANNED WITH RIFLEMEN] The story of navigation on the Mississippi River, is not without its elements of romance, though it does not approach in world interest the story of the achievements of the New England mariners on all the oceans of the globe. Little danger from tempest was encountered here. The natural perils to navigation were but an ignoble and unromantic kind--the shifting sand-bar and the treacherous snag. Yet, in the early days, when the flatboats were built at Cincinnati or Pittsburg, with high parapets of logs or heavy timber about their sides, and manned not only with men to work the sweeps and hold the steering oar, but with riflemen, alert of eye, and unerring of aim, to watch for the lurking savage on the banks, there was peril in the voyage that might even affect the stout nerves of the hardy navigator from New Bedford or Nantucket. For many long years in the early days of our country's history, the savages of the Mississippi Valley were always hostile, continually enraged. The French and the English, bent upon stirring up antagonism to the growing young nation, had their agents persistently at work awakening Indian hostility, and, indeed, it is probable that had this not been the case, the rough and lawless character of the American pioneers, and their entire indifference to the rights of the Indians, whom they were bent on displacing, would have furnished sufficient cause for conflict. First of the craft to follow the Indian canoes and the bateaux of the French missionaries down the great rivers, was the flatboat--a homely and ungraceful vessel, but yet one to which the people of the United States owe, perhaps, more of real service in the direction of building up a great nation than they do to Dewey's "Olympia," or Schley's "Brooklyn." A typical flatboat of the early days of river navigation was about fifty-five feet long by sixteen broad. It was without a keel, as its name would indicate, and drew about three feet of water. Amidships was built a rough deck-house or cabin, from the roof of which extended on either side, two long oars, used for directing the course of the craft rather than for propulsion, since her way was ever downward with the current, and dependent upon it. These great oars seemed to the fancy of the early flatboat men, to resemble horns, hence the name "broadhorns," sometimes applied to the boats. Such a boat the settler would fill with household goods and farm stock, and commit himself to the current at Pittsburg. From the roof of the cabin that housed his family, cocks crew and hens cackled, while the stolid eyes of cattle peered over the high parapet of logs built about the edge for protection against the arrow or bullet of the wandering redskin. Sometimes several families would combine to build one ark. Drifting slowly down the river--the voyage from Pittsburg to the falls of the Ohio, where Louisville now stands, requiring with the best luck, a week or ten days--the shore on either hand would be closely scanned for signs of unusual fertility, or for the opening of some small stream suggesting a good place to "settle." When a spot was picked out the boat would be run aground, the boards of the cabin erected skilfully into a hut, and a new outpost of civilization would be established. As these settlements multiplied, and the course of emigration to the west and southwest increased, river life became full of variety and gaiety. In some years more than a thousand boats were counted passing Marietta. Several boats would lash together and make the voyage to New Orleans, which sometimes occupied months, in company. There would be frolics and dances, the notes of the violin--an almost universal instrument among the flatboat men--sounded across the waters by night to the lonely cabins on the shores, and the settlers not infrequently would put off in their skiffs to meet the unknown voyagers, ask for the news from the east, and share in their revels. Floating shops were established on the Ohio and its tributaries--flatboats, with great cabins fitted with shelves and stocked with cloth, ammunition, tools, agricultural implements, and the ever-present whisky, which formed a principal staple of trade along the rivers. Approaching a clump of houses on the bank, the amphibious shopkeeper would blow lustily upon a horn, and thereupon all the inhabitants would flock down to the banks to bargain for the goods that attracted them. As the population increased the floating saloon and the floating gambling house were added to the civilized advantages the river bore on its bosom. Trade was long a mere matter of barter, for currency was seldom seen in these outlying settlements. Skins and agricultural products were all the purchasers had to give, and the merchant starting from Pittsburg with a cargo of manufactured goods, would arrive at New Orleans, perhaps three months later, with a cabin filled with furs and a deck piled high with the products of the farm. Here he would dispose of his cargo, perhaps for shipment to Europe, sell his flatboat for the lumber in it, and begin his painful way back again to the head of navigation. The flatboat never attempted to return against the stream. For this purpose keel-boats or barges were used, great hulks about the size of a small schooner, and requiring twenty-five men at the poles to push one painfully up stream. Three methods of propulsion were employed. The "shoulder pole," which rested on the bottom, and which the boatman pushed, walking from bow to stern as he did so; tow-lines, called cordelles, and finally the boat was drawn along by pulling on overhanging branches. The last method was called "bushwhacking." These became in time the regular packets of the rivers, since they were not broken up at the end of the voyage and required trained crews for their navigation. The bargemen were at once the envy and terror of the simple folk along the shores. A wild, turbulent class, ready to fight and to dance, equally enraptured with the rough scraping of a fiddle by one of their number, or the sound of the war-whoop, which promised the only less joyous diversion of a fight, they aroused all the inborn vagrant tendencies of the riverside boys, and to run away with a flatboat became, for the Ohio or Indiana lad, as much of an ambition as to run away to sea was for the boy of New England. It will be remembered that Abraham Lincoln for a time followed the calling of a flatboatman, and made a voyage to New Orleans, on which he first saw slaves, and later invented a device for lifting flatboats over sand-bars, the model for which is still preserved at Washington, though the industry it was designed to aid is dead. Pigs, flour, and bacon, planks and shingles, ploughs, hoes, and spades, cider and whisky, were among the simple articles dealt in by the owners of the barges. Their biggest market was New Orleans, and thither most of their food staples were carried, but for agricultural implements and whisky there was a ready sale all along the route. Tying up to trade, or to avoid the danger of night navigation, the boatmen became the heroes of the neighborhood. Often they invited all hands down to their boat for a dance, and by flaring torches to the notes of accordion and fiddle, the evening would pass in rude and harmless jollity, unless too many tin cups or gourds of fiery liquor excited the always ready pugnacity of the men. They were ready to brag of their valor, and to put their boasts to the test. They were "half horse, half alligator," according to their own favorite expression, equally prepared with knife or pistol, fist, or the trained thumb that gouged out an antagonist's eye, unless he speedily called for mercy. "I'm a Salt River roarer!" bawled one in the presence of a foreign diarist. "I can outrun, outjump, throw down, drag out and lick any man on the river! I love wimmen, and I'm chock full of fight!" In every crew the "best" man was entitled to wear a feather or other badge, and the word "best" had no reference to moral worth, but merely expressed his demonstrated ability to whip any of his shipmates. They had their songs, too, usually sentimental, as the songs of rough men are, that they bawled out as they toiled at the sweeps or the pushpoles. Some have been preserved in history: "It's oh! As I was walking out, One morning in July, I met a maid who axed my trade. 'A flatboatman,' says I. "And it's oh! She was so neat a maid That her stockings and her shoes She toted in her lily-white hands, For to keep them from the dews." [Illustration: "THE EVENING WOULD PASS IN RUDE AND HARMLESS JOLLITY."] Just below the mouth of the Wabash on the Ohio was the site of Shawneetown, which marked the line of division between the Ohio and the Mississippi trade. Here goods and passengers were debarked for Illinois, and here the Ohio boatmen stopped before beginning their return trip. Because of the revels of the boatmen, who were paid off there, the place acquired a reputation akin to that which Port Said, at the northern entrance to the Suez Canal, now holds. It held a high place in river song and story. "Some row up, but we row down, All the way to Shawneetown. Pull away, pull away," was a favorite chorus. Natchez, Tennessee, held a like unsavory reputation among the Mississippi River boatmen, for there was the great market in which were exchanged northern products for the cotton, yams, and sugar of the rich lands of the South. For food on the long voyage, the boatmen relied mostly on their rifles, but somewhat on the fish that might be brought up from the depths of the turbid stream, and the poultry and mutton which they could secure from the settlers by barter, or not infrequently, by theft. Wild geese were occasionally shot from the decks, while a few hours' hunt on shore would almost certainly bring reward in the shape of wild turkey or deer. A somewhat archaic story among river boatmen tells of the way in which "Mike Fink," a famous character among them, secured a supply of mutton. Seeing a flock of sheep grazing near the shore, he ran his boat near them, and rubbed the noses of several with Scotch snuff. When the poor brutes began to caper and sneeze in dire discomfort, the owner arrived on the scene, and asked anxiously what could ail them. The bargeman, as a traveled person, was guide, philosopher, and friend to all along the river, and so, when informed that his sheep were suffering from black murrain, and that all would be infected unless those already afflicted were killed, the farmer unquestioningly shot those that showed the strange symptoms, and threw the bodies into the river, whence they were presently collected by the astute "Mike," and turned into fair mutton for himself and passengers. Such exploits as these added mightily to the repute of the rivermen for shrewdness, and the farmer who suffered received scant sympathy from his neighbors. But the boatmen themselves had dangers to meet, and robbers to evade or to outwit. At any time the lurking Indian on the banks might send a death-dealing arrow or bullet from some thicket, for pure love of slaughter. For a time it was a favorite ruse of hostiles, who had secured a white captive, to send him alone to the river's edge, under threat of torture, there to plead with outstretched hands for aid from the passing raft. But woe to the mariner who was moved by the appeal, for back of the unfortunate, hidden in the bushes, lay ambushed savages, ready to leap upon any who came ashore on the errand of mercy, and in the end neither victim nor decoy escaped the fullest infliction of redskin barbarity. There were white outlaws along the rivers, too; land pirates ready to rob and murder when opportunity offered, and as the Spanish territory about New Orleans was entered, the dangers multiplied. The advertisement of a line of packets sets forth: "No danger need be apprehended from the enemy, as every person whatever will be under cover, made proof against rifle or musket balls, and convenient portholes for firing out of. Each of the boats are armed with six pieces, carrying a pound ball, also a number of muskets, and amply supplied with ammunition, strongly manned with choice hands, and masters of approved knowledge." The English of the advertisement is not of the most luminous character, yet it suffices to tell clearly enough to any one of imagination, the story of some of the dangers that beset those who drifted from Ohio to New Orleans. The lower reaches of the Mississippi River bore among rivermen, during the early days of the century, very much such a reputation as the Spanish Main bore among the peaceful mariners of the Atlantic trade. They were the haunts of pirates and buccaneers, mostly ordinary cheap freebooters, operating from the shore with a few skiffs, or a lugger, perhaps, who would dash out upon a passing vessel, loot it, and turn it adrift. But one gang of these river pirates so grew in power and audacity, and its leaders so ramified their associations and their business relations, as for a time to become a really influential factor in the government of New Orleans, while for a term of years they even put the authority of the United States at nought. The story of the brothers Lafitte and their nest of criminals at Barataria, is one of the most picturesque in American annals. On a group of those small islands crowned with live-oaks and with fronded palms, in that strange waterlogged country to the southwest of the Crescent City, where the sea, the bayou, and the marsh fade one into the other until the line of demarkation can scarcely be traced, the Lafittes established their colony. There they built cabins and storehouses, threw up-earthworks, and armed them with stolen cannon. In time the plunder of scores of vessels filled the warehouses with the goods of all nations, and as the wealth of the colony grew its numbers increased. To it were attracted the adventurous spirits of the creole city. Men of Spanish and of French descent, negroes, and quadroons, West Indians from all the islands scattered between North and South America, birds of prey, and fugitives from justice of all sorts and kinds, made that a place of refuge. They brought their women and children, and their slaves, and the place became a small principality, knowing no law save Lafitte's will. With a fleet of small schooners the pirates would sally out into the Gulf and plunder vessels of whatever sort they might encounter. The road to their hiding-place was difficult to follow, either in boats or afoot, for the tortuous bayous that led to it were intertwined in an almost inextricable maze, through which, indeed, the trained pilots of the colony picked their way with ease, but along which no untrained helmsman could follow them. If attack were made by land, the marching force was confronted by impassable rivers and swamps; if by boats, the invaders pressing up a channel which seemed to promise success, would find themselves suddenly in a blind alley, with nothing to do save to retrace their course. Meanwhile, for the greater convenience of the pirates, a system of lagoons, well known to them, and easily navigated in luggers, led to the very back door of New Orleans, the market for their plunder. Of the brothers Lafitte, one held state in the city as a successful merchant, a man not without influence with the city government, of high standing in the business community, and in thoroughly good repute. Yet he was, in fact, the agent for the pirate colony, and the goods he dealt in were those which the picturesque ruffians of Barataria had stolen from the vessels about the mouth of the Mississippi River. The situation persisted for nearly half a score of years. If there were merchants, importers and shipowners in New Orleans who suffered by it, there were others who profited by it, and it has usually been the case that a crime or an injustice by which any considerable number of people profit, becomes a sort of vested right, hard to disturb. And, indeed, the Baratarians were not without a certain rude sense of patriotism and loyalty to the United States, whose laws they persistently violated. For when the second war with Great Britain was declared and Packenham was dispatched to take New Orleans, the commander of the British fleet made overtures to Lafitte and his men, promising them a liberal subsidy and full pardon for all past offenses, if they would but act as his allies and guide the British invaders to the most vulnerable point in the defenses of the Crescent City. The offer was refused, and instead, the chief men of the pirate colony went straightway to New Orleans to put Jackson on his guard, and when the opposing forces met on the plains of Chalmette, the very center of the American line was held by Dominique Yon, with a band of his swarthy Baratarians, with howitzers which they themselves had dragged from their pirate stronghold to train upon the British. Many of us, however law-abiding, will feel a certain sense that the romance of history would have been better served, if after this act of patriotism, the pirates had been at least peacefully dispersed. But they were wedded to their predatory life, returned with renewed zeal to their piracies, and were finally destroyed by the State forces and a United States naval expedition, which burned their settlement, freed their slaves, razed their fortifications, confiscated their cannon, killed many of their people, and dispersed the rest among the swamps and forests of southern Louisiana. In 1809 a New York man, by name Nicholas J. Roosevelt, set out from Pittsburg in a flatboat of the usual type, to make the voyage to New Orleans. He carried no cargo of goods for sale, nor did he convey any band of intended settlers, yet his journey was only second in importance to the ill-fated one, in which the luckless Amis proved that New Orleans must be United States territory, or the wealth of the great interior plateau would be effectively bottled up. For Roosevelt was the partner of Fulton and Livingston in their new steamboat enterprise, having himself suggested the vertical paddle-wheel, which for more than a half a century was the favorite means of utilizing steam power for the propulsion of boats. He was firm in the belief that the greatest future for the steamboat was on the great rivers that tied together the rapidly growing commonwealths of the middle west, and he undertook this voyage for the purpose of studying the channel and the current of the rivers, with the view to putting a steamer on them. Wise men assured him that on the upper river his scheme was destined to failure. Could a boat laden with a heavy engine be made of so light a draught as to pass over the shallows of the Ohio? Could it run the falls at Louisville, or be dragged around them as the flatboats often were? Clearly not. The only really serviceable type of river craft was the flatboat, for it would go where there was water enough for a muskrat to swim in, would glide unscathed over the concealed snag or, thrusting its corner into the soft mud of some protruding bank, swing around and go on as well stern first as before. The flatboat was the sum of human ingenuity applied to river navigation. Even barges were proving failures and passing into disuse, as the cost of poling them upstream was greater than any profit to be reaped from the voyage. Could a boat laden with thousands of pounds of machinery make her way northward against that swift current? And if not, could steamboat men be continually taking expensive engines down to New Orleans and abandoning them there, as the old-time river men did their rafts and scows? Clearly not. So Roosevelt's appearance on the river did not in any way disquiet the flatboatmen, though it portended their disappearance as a class. Roosevelt, however, was in no wise discouraged. Week after week he drifted along the Ohio and Mississippi, taking detailed soundings, studying the course of the current, noting the supply of fuel along the banks, observing the course of the rafts and flatboats as they drifted along at the mercy of the tide. Nothing escaped his attention, and yet it may well be doubted whether the mass of data he collected was in fact of any practical value, for the great river is the least understandable of streams. Its channel is as shifting as the mists above Niagara. Where yesterday the biggest boat on the river, deep laden with cotton, might pass with safety, there may be to-day a sand-bar scarcely hidden beneath the tide. Its banks change over night in form and in appearance. In time of flood it cuts new channels for itself, leaving in a few days river towns far in the interior, and suddenly giving a water frontage to some plantation whose owner had for years mourned over his distance from the river bank. Capricious and irresistible, working insidiously night and day, seldom showing the progress of its endeavors until some huge slice of land, acres in extent, crumbles into the flood, or some gully or cut-off all at once appears as the main channel, the Mississippi, even now when the Government is at all times on the alert to hold it in bounds, is not to be lightly learned nor long trusted. In Roosevelt's time, before the days of the river commission, it must have been still more difficult to comprehend. Nevertheless, the information he collected, satisfied him that the stream was navigable for steamers, and his report determined his partners to build the pioneer craft at Pittsburg. She was completed, "built after the fashion of a ship with portholes in her side," says a writer of the time, dubbed the "Orleans," and in 1812 reached the city on the sodden prairies near the mouth of the Mississippi, whose name we now take as a synonym for quaintness, but which at that time had seemingly the best chance to become a rival of London and Liverpool, of any American town. For just then the great possibilities of the river highway were becoming apparent. The valley was filling up with farmers, and their produce sought the shortest way to tide-water. The streets of the city were crowded with flatboatmen, from Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky, and with sailors speaking strange tongues, and gathered from all the ports of the world. At the broad levee floated the ships of all nations. All manual work was done by the negro slaves, and already the planters were beginning to show signs of that prodigal prosperity, which, in the flush times, made New Orleans the gayest city in the United States. In 1813 Jackson put the final seal on the title-deeds to New Orleans, and made the Mississippi forever an American river by defeating the British just outside the city's walls, and then river commerce grew apace. In 1817 fifteen hundred flatboats and five hundred barges tied up to the levee. By that time the steamboat had proved her case, for the "New Orleans" had run for years between Natchez and the Louisiana city, charging a fare of eighteen dollars for the down, and twenty-five dollars for the up trip, and earning for her owners twenty thousand dollars profits in one year. She was snagged and lost in 1814, but by that time others were in the field, first of all the "Comet," a stern-wheeler of twenty-five tons, built at Pittsburg, and entering the New Orleans-Natchez trade in 1814. The "Vesuvius," and the "Ætna."--volcanic names which suggested the explosive end of too many of the early boats--were next in the field, and the latter won fame by being the first boat to make the up trip from New Orleans to Louisville. Another steamboat, the "Enterprise," carried a cargo of, powder and ball from Pittsburg to General Jackson at New Orleans, and after some service on southern waters, made the return trip to Louisville in twenty-five days. This was a great achievement, and hailed by the people of the Kentucky town as the certain forerunner of commercial greatness, for at one time there were tied to the bank the "Enterprise" from New Orleans, the "Despatch" from Pittsburg, and the "Kentucky Elizabeth" from the upper Kentucky River. Never had the settlement seemed to be so thoroughly in the heart of the continent. Thereafter river steamboating grew so fast that by 1819 sixty-three steamers, of varying tonnage from twenty to three hundred tons, were plying on the western rivers. Four had been built at New Orleans, one each at Philadelphia, New York, and Providence, and fifty-six on the Ohio. The upper reaches of the Mississippi still lagged in the race, for most of the boats turned off up the Ohio River, into the more populous territory toward the east. It was not until August, 1817, that the "General Pike," the first steamer ever to ascend the Mississippi River above the mouth of the Ohio, reached St. Louis. No pictures, and but scant descriptions of this pioneer craft, are obtainable at the present time. From old letters it is learned that she was built on the model of a barge, with her cabin situated on the lower deck, so that its top scarcely showed above the bulwarks. She had a low-pressure engine, which at times proved inadequate to stem the current, and in such a crisis the crew got out their shoulder poles and pushed her painfully up stream, as had been the practice so many years with the barges. At night she tied up to the bank. Only one other steamer reached St. Louis in the same twelve months. By way of contrast to this picture of the early beginnings of river navigation on the upper Mississippi, we may set over some facts drawn from recent official publications concerning the volume of river traffic, of which St. Louis is now the admitted center. In 1890 11,000,000 passengers were carried in steamboats on rivers of the Mississippi system. The Ohio and its tributaries, according to the census of that year, carried over 15,000,000 tons of freight annually, mainly coal, grain, lumber, iron, and steel. The Mississippi carries about the same amount of freight, though on its turbid tide, cotton and sugar, in no small degree, take the place of grain and the products of the furnaces and mills. But it was a long time before steam navigation approached anything like these figures, and indeed, many years passed before the flatboat and the barge saw their doom, and disappeared. In 1821, ten years after the first steamboat arrived at New Orleans, there was still recorded in the annals of the town, the arrival of four hundred and forty-one flatboats, and one hundred and seventy-four barges. But two hundred and eighty-seven steamboats also tied up to the levee that year, and the end of the flatboat days was in sight. Ninety-five of the new type of vessels were in service on the Mississippi and its tributaries, and five were at Mobile making short voyages on the Mississippi Sound and out into the Gulf. They were but poor types of vessels at best. At first the shortest voyage up the river from New Orleans to Shippingport--then a famous landing, now vanished from the map--was twenty-two days, and it took ten days to come down. Within six years the models of the boats and the power of the engines had been so greatly improved that the up trip was made in twelve days, and the down in six. Even the towns on the smaller streams tributary to the great river, had their own fleets. Sixteen vessels plied between Nashville and New Orleans. The Red River, and even the Missouri, began to echo to the puffing of the exhaust and the shriek of the steam-whistle. Indeed, it was not very long before the Missouri River became as important a pathway for the troops of emigrants making for the great western plains and in time for the gold fields of California, as the Ohio had been in the opening days of the century for the pioneers bent upon opening up the Mississippi Valley. The story of the Missouri River voyage, the landing place at Westport, now transformed into the great bustling city of Kansas City, and all the attendant incidents which led up to the contest in Kansas and Nebraska, forms one of the most interesting, and not the least important chapters in the history of our national development. The decade during which the steamboats and the flatboats still struggled for the mastery, was the most picturesque period of Mississippi River life. Then the river towns throve most, and waxed turbulent, noisy, and big, according to the standards of the times. Places which now are mere names on the map, or have even disappeared from the map altogether, were great trans-shipping points for goods on the way to the sea. New Madrid, for example, which nowadays we remember chiefly as being one of the stubborn obstacles in the way of the Union opening of the river in the dark days of the Civil War, was in 1826 like a seaport. Flatboats in groups and fleets came drifting to its levees heavy laden with the products of the west and south, the output of the northern farms and mills, and the southern plantations. On the crowded river bank would be disembarked goods drawn from far-off New England, which had been dragged over the mountains and sent down the Ohio to the Mississippi; furs from northern Minnesota or Wisconsin; lumber in the rough, or shaped into planks, from the mills along the Ohio; whisky from Kentucky, pork and flour from Illinois, cattle, horses, hemp, fabrics, tobacco, everything that men at home or abroad, could need or crave, was gathered up by enterprising traders along three thousand miles of waterway, and brought hither by clumsy rafts and flatboats, and scarcely less clumsy steamboats, for distribution up and down other rivers, and shipment to foreign lands. At New Orleans there was a like deposit of all the products of that rich valley, an empire in itself. There grain, cotton, lumber, live stock, furs, the output of the farms and the spoils of the chase, were transferred to ocean-going ships and sent to foreign markets. Speculative spirits planned for the day, when this rehandling of cargoes at the Crescent City would be no longer necessary, but ships would clear from Louisville or St. Louis to Liverpool or Hamburg direct. A fine type of the American sailor, Commodore Whipple, who had won his title by good sea-fighting in the Revolutionary War, gave great encouragement to this hope, in 1800, by taking the full-rigged ship "St. Clair," with a cargo of pork and flour, from Marietta, Ohio, down the Ohio, over the falls at Louisville, thence down the Mississippi, and round by sea to Havana, and so on to Philadelphia. This really notable exploit--to the success of which good luck contributed almost as much as good seamanship--aroused the greatest enthusiasm. The Commodore returned home overland, from Philadelphia. His progress, slow enough, at best, was checked by ovations, complimentary addresses, and extemporized banquets. He was _the_ man of the moment. The poetasters, who were quite as numerous in the early days of the republic, as the true poets were scarce, signalized his exploit in verse. "The Triton crieth, 'Who cometh now from shore?' Neptune replieth, ''Tis the old Commodore. Long has it been since I saw him before. In the year '75 from Columbia he came, The pride of the Briton, on ocean to tame. * * * * * "'But now he comes from western woods, Descending slow, with gentle floods, The pioneer of a mighty train, Which commerce brings to my domain.'" But Neptune and the Triton had no further occasion to exchange notes of astonishment upon the appearance of river-built ships on the ocean. The "St. Clair" was the first and last experiment of the sort. Late in the nineties, the United States Government tried building a torpedo-boat at Dubuque for ocean service, but the result was not encouraging. Year after year the steamboats multiplied, not only on the rivers of the West, but on those leading from the Atlantic seaboard into the interior. It may be said justly that the application of steam to purposes of navigation made the American people face fairly about. Long they had stood, looking outward, gazing across the sea to Europe, their sole market, both for buying and for selling. But now the rich lands beyond the mountains, inviting settlers, and cut up by streams which offered paths for the most rapid and comfortable method of transportation then known, commanded their attention. Immigrants no longer stopped in stony New England, or in Virginia, already dominated by an aristocratic land-owning class, but pressed on to Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee, and Illinois. As the lands filled up, the little steamers pushed their noses up new streams, seeking new markets. The Cumberland, and the Tennessee, the Missouri, the Arkansas, the Red, the Tombigbee, and the Chattahoochee were stirred by the churning wheels, and over-their forests floated the mournful sough of the high-pressure exhaust. In 1840, a count kept at Cairo, showed 4566 vessels had passed that point during the year. By 1848, a "banner" year, in the history of navigation on the Mississippi, traffic was recorded thus: 25 vessels plying between Louisville, New Orleans and Cincinnati 8,484 tons 7 between Nashville and New Orleans 2,585 tons 4 between Florence and New Orleans 1,617 tons 4 in St. Louis local trade 1,001 tons 7 in local cotton trade 2,016 tons River "tramps" and unclassified 23,206 tons It may be noted that in all the years of the development of the Mississippi shipping, there was comparatively little increase in the size of the individual boats. The "Vesuvius," built in 1814, was 480 tons burthen, 160 feet long, 28.6 feet beam, and drew from five to six feet. The biggest boats of later years were but little larger. [Illustration: THE MISSISSIPPI PILOT] The aristocrat of the Mississippi River steamboat was the pilot. To him all men deferred. So far as the river service furnished a parallel to the autocratic authority of the sea-going captain or master, he was it. All matters pertaining to the navigation of the boat were in his domain, and right zealously he guarded his authority and his dignity. The captain might determine such trivial matters as hiring or discharging men, buying fuel, or contracting for freight; the clerk might lord it over the passengers, and the mate domineer over the black roustabouts; but the pilot moved along in a sort of isolated grandeur, the true monarch of all he surveyed. If, in his judgment the course of wisdom was to tie up to an old sycamore tree on the bank and remain motionless all night, the boat tied up. The grumblings of passengers and the disapproval of the captain availed naught, nor did the captain often venture upon either criticism or suggestion to the lordly pilot, who was prone to resent such invasion of his dignity in ways that made trouble. Indeed, during the flush times on the Mississippi, the pilots were a body of men possessing painfully acquired knowledge and skill, and so organized as to protect all the privileges which their attainments should win for them. The ability to "run" the great river from St. Louis to New Orleans was not lightly won, nor, for that matter, easily retained, for the Mississippi is ever a fickle flood, with changing landmarks and shifting channel. In all the great volume of literature bearing on the story of the river, the difficulties of its conquest are nowhere so truly recounted as in Mark Twain's _Life on the Mississippi_, the humorous quality of which does not obscure, but rather enhances its value as a picturesque and truthful story of the old-time pilot's life. The pilot began his work in boyhood as a "cub" to a licensed pilot. His duties ranged from bringing refreshments up to the pilot-house, to holding the wheel when some straight stretch or clear, deep channel offered his master a chance to leave his post for a few minutes. For strain on the memory, his education is comparable only to the Chinese system of liberal culture, which comprehends learning by rote some tens of thousands of verses from the works of Confucius and other philosophers of the far East. Beginning at New Orleans, he had to commit to memory the name and appearance of every point of land, inlet, river or bayou mouth, "cut-off," light, plantation and hamlet on either bank of the river all the way to St. Louis. Then, he had to learn them all in their opposite order, quite an independent task, as all of us who learned the multiplication table backward in the days of our youth, will readily understand. These landmarks it was needful for him to recognize by day and by night, through fog or driving rain, when the river was swollen by spring floods, or shrunk in summer to a yellow ribbon meandering through a Sahara of sand. He had need to recognize at a glance the ripple on the water that told of a lurking sand-bar and distinguish it from the almost identical ripple that a brisk breeze would raise. Most perplexing of the perils that beset river navigation are the "snags," or sunken logs that often obstruct the channel. Some towering oak or pine, growing in lusty strength for its half-century or more by the brink of the upper reaches of one of the Mississippi system would, in time, be undermined by the flood and fall into the rushing tide. For weeks it would be rolled along the shallows; its leaves and twigs rotting off, its smaller branches breaking short, until at last, hundreds of miles, perhaps, below the scene of its fall, it would lodge fair in the channel. The gnarled and matted mass of boughs would ordinarily cling like an anchor to the sandy bottom, while the buoyant trunk, as though struggling to break away, would strain upward obliquely to within a few inches of the surface of the muddy water, which--too thick to drink and too thin to plough, as the old saying went--gave no hint of this concealed peril; but the boat running fairly upon it, would have her bows stove in and go quickly to the bottom. After the United States took control of the river and began spending its millions annually in improving it for navigation and protecting the surrounding country against its overflows, "snag-boats" were put on the river, equipped with special machinery for dragging these fallen forest giants from the channel, so that of late years accidents from this cause have been rare. But for many years the riverman's chief reliance was that curious instinct or second sight which enabled the trained pilot to pick his way along the most tortuous channel in the densest fog, or to find the landing of some obscure plantation on a night blacker than the blackest of the roustabouts, who moved lively to the incessant cursing of the mate. The Mississippi River steamboat of the golden age on the river--the type, indeed, which still persists--was a triumph of adaptability to the service for which she was designed. More than this--she was an egregious architectural sham. She was a success in her light draught, six to eight feet, at most, and in her prodigious carrying capacity. It was said of one of these boats, when skilfully loaded by a gang of practical roustabouts, under the direction of an experienced mate, that the freight she carried, if unloaded on the bank, would make a pile bigger than the boat herself. The hull of the vessel was invariably of wood, broad of beam, light of draught, built "to run on a heavy dew," and with only the rudiments of a keel. Some freight was stowed in the hold, but the engines were not placed there, but on the main deck, built almost flush with the water, and extending unbroken from stem to stern. Often the engines were in pairs, so that the great paddle-wheels could be worked independently of each other. The finest and fastest boats were side-wheelers, but a large wheel at the stern, or two stern wheels, side by side, capable of independent action, were common modes of propulsion. The escape-pipes of the engine were carried high aloft, above the topmost of the tiers of decks, and from each one alternately, when the boat was under way, would burst a gush of steam, with a sound like a dull puff, followed by a prolonged sigh, which could be heard far away beyond the dense forests that bordered the river. A row of posts, always in appearance, too slender for the load they bore, supported the saloon deck some fifteen feet above the main deck. When business was good on the river, the space within was packed tight with freight, leaving barely room enough for passenger gangways, and for the men feeding the roaring furnaces with pine slabs. A great steamer coming down to New Orleans from the cotton country about the Red River, loaded to the water's edge with cotton bales, so that, from the shore, she looked herself like a monster cotton bale, surmounted by tiers of snowy cabins and pouring forth steam and smoke from towering pipes, was a sight long to be remembered. It is a sight, too, that is still common on the lower river, where the business of gathering up the planter's crop and getting it to market has not yet passed wholly into the hands of the railroads. [Illustration: A DECK LOAD OF COTTON] Above the cargo and the roaring furnaces rose the cabins, two or three tiers, one atop the other, the topmost one extending only about one-third of the length of the boat, and called the "Texas." The main saloon extending the whole length of the boat, save for a bit of open deck at bow and stern, was in comparison with the average house of the time, palatial. On either side it was lined by rows of doors, each opening into a two-berthed stateroom. The decoration was usually ivory white, and on the main panel of each door was an oil painting of some romantic landscape. There Chillon brooded over the placid azure of the lake, there storms broke with jagged lightning in the Andes, there buxom girls trod out the purple grapes of some Italian vineyard. The builders of each new steamer strove to eclipse all earlier ones in the brilliancy of these works of art, and discussion of the relative merits of the paintings on the "Natchez" and those on the "Baton Rouge" came to be the chief theme of art criticism along the river. Bright crimson carpet usually covered the floor of the long, tunnel-like cabin. Down the center were ranged the tables, about which, thrice a day, the hungry passengers gathered to be fed, while from the ceiling depended chandeliers, from which hung prismatic pendants, tinkling pleasantly as the boat vibrated with the throb of her engines. At one end of the main saloon was the ladies' cabin, discreetly cut off by crimson curtains; at the other, the bar, which, in a period when copious libations of alcoholic drinks were at least as customary for men as the cigar to-day, was usually a rallying point for the male passengers. Far up above the yellow river, perched on top of the "Texas," or topmost tier of cabins, was the pilot-house, that honorable eminence of glass and painted wood which it was the ambition of every boy along the river some day to occupy. This was a great square box, walled in mainly with glass. Square across the front of it rose the huge wheel, eight feet in diameter, sometimes half-sunken beneath the floor, so that the pilot, in moments of stress, might not only grip it with his hands, but stand on its spokes, as well. Easy chairs and a long bench made up the furniture of this sacred apartment. In front of it rose the two towering iron chimneys, joined, near the top by an iron grating that usually carried some gaudily colored or gilded device indicative of the line to which the boat belonged. Amidships, and aft of the pilot-house, rose the two escape pipes, from which the hoarse, prolonged s-o-o-ugh of the high pressure exhaust burst at half-minute intervals, carrying to listeners miles away, the news that a boat was coming. All this edifice above the hull of the boat, was of the flimsiest construction, built of pine scantling, liberally decorated with scroll-saw work, and lavishly covered with paint mixed with linseed oil. Beneath it were two, four, or six roaring furnaces fed with rich pitch-pine, and open on every side to drafts and gusts. From the top of the great chimneys poured volcanic showers of sparks, deluging the inflammable pile with a fiery rain. The marvel is not that every year saw its quotum of steamers burned to the water's edge, but, rather, that the quota were proportionately so small. At midnight this apparent inflammability was even more striking. Lights shone from the windows of the long row of cabins, and wherever there was a chink, or a bit of glass, or a latticed blind, the radiance streamed forth as though within were a great mass of fire, struggling, in every way, to escape. Below, the boiler deck was dully illumined by smoky lanterns; but when one of the great doors of the roaring furnace was thrown open, that the half-naked black firemen might throw in more pitch-pine slabs, there shone forth such a fiery glare, that the boat and the machinery--working in the open, and plain to view--seemed wrapped in a Vesuvius of flame, and the sturdy stokers and lounging roustabouts looked like the fiends in a fiery inferno. The danger was not merely apparent, but very real. During the early days of steamboating, fires and boiler explosions were of frequent occurrence. A river boat, once ablaze, could never be saved, and the one hope for the passengers was that it might be beached before the flames drove them overboard. The endeavor to do this brought out some examples of magnificent heroism among captains, pilots, and engineers, who, time and again, stood manfully at their posts, though scorched by flames, and cut off from any hope of escape, until the boat's prow was thrust well into the bank, and the passengers were all saved. The pilots, in the presence of such disaster, were in the sorest straits, and were, moreover, the ones of the boat's company upon whom most depended the fate of those on board. Perched at the very top of a large tinder-box, all avenues of escape except a direct plunge overboard were quickly closed to them. If they left the wheel the current would inevitably swing the boat's head downstream, and she would drift, aimlessly, a flaming funeral pyre for all on board. Many a pilot stood, with clenched teeth, and eyes firm set upon the distant shore, while the fire roared below and behind him, and the terrified passengers edged further and further forward as the flames pressed their way toward the bow, until at last came the grinding sound under the hull, and the sudden shock that told of shoal water and safety. Then, those on the lower deck might drop over the side, or swarm along the windward gangplank to safety, but the pilot too often was hemmed in by the flames, and perished with his vessel. [Illustration: FEEDING THE FURNACE] In the year 1840 alone there were 109 steamboat disasters chronicled, with a loss of fifty-nine vessels and 205 lives. The high-pressure boilers used on the river, cheaply built, and for many years not subjected to any official inspection, contributed more than their share to the list of accidents. Boiler explosions were so common as to be reckoned upon every time a voyage was begun. Passengers were advised to secure staterooms aft when possible, as the forward part of the boat was the more apt to be shattered if the boiler "went up." Every river town had its citizens who had survived an explosion, and the stock form into which to put the humorous quip or story of the time was to have it told by the clerk going up as he met the captain in the air coming down, with the débris of the boat flying all about them. As the river boats improved in character, disasters of this sort became less frequent, and the United States, by establishing a rigid system of boiler inspection, and compelling engineers to undergo a searching examination into their fitness before receiving a license, has done much to guard against them. Yet to-day, we hear all too frequently of river steamers blown to bits, and all on board lost, though it is a form of disaster almost unknown on Eastern waters where crowded steamboats ply the Sound, the Hudson, the Connecticut, and the Potomac, year after year, with never a disaster. The cheaper material of Western boats has something to do with this difference, but a certain happy-go-lucky, devil-may-care spirit, which has characterized the Western riverman since the days of the broadhorns, is chiefly responsible. Most often an explosion is the result of gross carelessness--a sleepy engineer, and a safety-valve "out of kilter," as too many of them often are, have killed their hundreds on the Western rivers. Sometimes, however, the almost criminal rashness, of which captains were guilty, in a mad rush for a little cheap glory, ended in a deafening crash, the annihilation of a good boat, and the death of scores of her people by drowning, or the awful torture of inhaling scalding steam. Rivalry between the different boats was fierce, and now and then at the sight of a competitor making for a landing where freight and passengers awaited the first boat to land her gangplank, the alert captain would not unnaturally take some risks to get there first. Those were the moments that resulted in methods in the engine room picturesquely described as "feeding the fires with fat bacon and resin, and having a nigger sit on the safety valve." To such impromptu races might be charged the most terrifying accidents in the history of the river. But the great races, extending sometimes for more than a thousand miles up the river, and carefully planned for months in advance, were seldom, if ever, marred by an accident. For then every man on both boats was on the alert, from pilot down to fuel passer. The boat was trimmed by guidance of a spirit level until she rode the water at precisely the draft that assured the best speed. Her hull was scraped and oiled, her machinery overhauled, and her fuel carefully selected. Picked men made up her crew, and all the upper works that could be disposed of were landed before the race, in order to decrease air resistance. It was the current pleasantry to describe the captain as shaving off his whiskers lest they catch the breeze, and parting his hair in the middle, that the boat might be the better trimmed. Few passengers were taken, for they could not be relied upon to "trim ship," but would be sure to crowd to one side or the other at a critical moment. Only through freight was shipped--and little of that--for there would be no stops made from starting-point to goal. Of course, neither boat could carry all the fuel--pine-wood slabs--needed for a long voyage, but by careful prearrangement, great "flats" loaded with wood, awaited them at specified points in midstream. The steamers slowed to half-speed, the flats were made fast alongside by cables, and nimble negroes transferred the wood, while the race went on. At every riverside town the wharves and roofs would be black with people, awaiting the two rivals, whose appearance could be foretold almost as exactly as that of a railway train running on schedule time. The firing of rifles and cannon, the blowing of horns, the waving of flags, greeted the racers from the shores by day, and great bonfires saluted them by night. At some of the larger towns they would touch for a moment to throw off mail, or to let a passenger leap ashore. Then every nerve of captain, pilot, and crew was on edge with the effort to tie up and get away first. Up in the pilot-house the great man of the wheel took shrewd advantage of every eddy and back current; out on the guards the humblest roustabout stood ready for a life-risking leap to get the hawser to the dock at the earliest instant. All the operations of the boat had been reduced to an exact science, so that when the crack packets were pitted against each other in a long race, their maneuvers would be as exactly matched in point of time consumed as those of two yachts sailing for the "America's" cup. Side by side, they would steam for hundreds of miles, jockeying all the way for the most favorable course. It was a fact that often such boats were so evenly matched that victory would hang almost entirely on the skill of the pilot, and where of two pilots on one boat one was markedly inferior, his watch at the wheel could be detected by the way the rival boat forged ahead. During the golden days on the river, there were many of these races, but the most famous of them all was that between the "Robert E. Lee" and the "Natchez," in 1870. These boats, the pride of all who lived along the river at that time, raced from New Orleans to St. Louis. At Natchez, 268 miles, they were six minutes apart; at Cairo, 1024 miles, the "Lee" was three hours and thirty-four minutes ahead. She came in winner by six hours and thirty-six minutes, but the officers of the "Natchez" claimed that this was not a fair test of the relative speed of the boats, as they had been delayed by fog and for repairs to machinery for about seven hours. Spectacular and picturesque was the riverside life of the great Mississippi towns in the steamboat days. Mark Twain has described the scenes along the levee at New Orleans at "steamboat time" in a bit of word-painting, which brings all the rush and bustle, the confusion, turmoil and din, clearly to the eye: "It was always the custom for boats to leave New Orleans between four and five o'clock in the afternoon. From three o'clock onward, they would be burning resin and pitch-pine (the sign of preparation) and so one had the spectacle of a rank, some two or three miles long, of tall, ascending columns of coal-black smoke, a colonnade which supported a roof of the same smoke, blending together and spreading abroad over the city. Every outward-bound boat had its flag flying at the jack-staff, and sometimes a duplicate on the verge-staff astern. Two or three miles of mates were commanding and swearing with more than usual emphasis. Countless processions of freight, barrels, and boxes, were spinning athwart the levee, and flying aboard the stage-planks. Belated passengers were dodging and skipping among these frantic things, hoping to reach the forecastle companion-way alive, but having their doubts about it. Women with reticules and bandboxes were trying to keep up with husbands freighted with carpet sacks and crying babies, and making a failure of it by losing their heads in the whirl and roar and general distraction. Drays and baggage-vans were clattering hither and thither in a wild hurry, every now and then getting blocked and jammed together, and then, during ten seconds, one could not see them for the profanity, except vaguely and dimly. Every windlass connected with every forehatch from one end of that long array of steamboats to the other, was keeping up a deafening whiz and whir, lowering freight into the hold, and the half-naked crews of perspiring negroes that worked them were roaring such songs as 'De las' sack! De las' sack!!' inspired to unimaginable exaltation by the chaos of turmoil and racket that was driving everybody else mad. By this time the hurricane and boiler decks of the packets would be packed and black with passengers, the last bells would begin to clang all down the line, and then the pow-wows seemed to double. In a moment or two the final warning came, a simultaneous din of Chinese gongs with the cry, 'All dat aint going, please to get ashore,' and, behold, the pow-wow quadrupled. People came swarming ashore, overturning excited stragglers that were trying to swarm aboard. One moment later, a long array of stage-planks was being hauled in, each with its customary latest passenger clinging to the end of it, with teeth, nails, and everything else, and the customary latest procrastinator making a wild spring ashore over his head. "Now a number of the boats slide backward into the stream, leaving wide gaps in the serried rank of steamers. Citizens crowd on the decks of boats that were not to go, in order to see the sight. Steamer after steamer straightens herself up, gathers all her strength, and presently comes swinging by, under a tremendous head of steam, with flags flying, smoke rolling, and her entire crew of firemen and deck hands (usually swarthy negroes) massed together on the forecastle, the best voice in the lot towering in their midst (being mounted on the capstan) waving his hat or a flag, all roaring in a mighty chorus, while the parting cannons boom, and the multitudinous spectators swing their hats and huzza. Steamer after steamer pulls into the line, and the stately procession goes winging its flight up the river." Until 1865 the steamboats controlled the transportation business of all the territory drained by the Mississippi and its tributaries. But two causes for their undoing had already begun to work. The long and fiercely-fought war had put a serious check to the navigation of the rivers. For long months the Mississippi was barricaded by the Confederate works at Island Number 10, at New Madrid and at Vicksburg. Even after Grant and Farragut had burst these shackles navigation was attended with danger from guerrillas on the banks and trade was dead. When peace brought the promise of better things, the railroads were there to take advantage of it. From every side they were pushing their way into New Orleans, building roadways across the "trembling prairies," and crossing the water-logged country about the Rigolets on long trestles. They penetrated the cotton country and the mineral country. They paralleled the Ohio, the Tennessee, and the Cumberland, as well as the Father of Waters, and the steamboat lines began to feel the heavy hand of competition. Captains and clerks found it prudent to abate something of their dignity. Instead of shippers pleading for deck-room on the boats, the boats' agents had to do the pleading. Instead of levees crowded with freight awaiting carriage there were broad, empty spaces by the river's bank, while the railroad freight-houses up town held the bales of cotton, the bundles of staves, the hogsheads of sugar, the shingles and lumber. On long hauls the railroads quickly secured all the North and South business, though indeed, the hauling of freight down the river for shipment to Europe was ended for both railroads and steamboats, so far as the products raised north of the Tennessee line was concerned. For a new water route to the sea had been opened and wondrously developed. The Great Lakes were the shortest waterway to the Atlantic, and New York dug its Erie Canal which afforded an outlet--pinched and straitened, it is true, but still an outlet--for the cargoes of the lake schooners and the early steamers of the unsalted seas. Even the commonwealths forming the north bank of the Ohio River turned their faces away from the stream that had started them on the pathway to wealth and greatness, and dug canals to Lake Erie, that their wheat, corn, and other products might reach tidewater by the shortest route. The great cargoes from Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Louisville, began to be legends of the past, and the larger boats were put on routes in Louisiana, or on the Mississippi, from Natchez south, while others were reduced to mere local voyages, gathering up freight from points tributary to St. Louis. The glory of the river faded fast, and the final stroke was dealt it when some man of inventive mind discovered that a little, puffing tug, costing one-tenth as much as a fine steamboat, could push broad acres of flatboats, loaded with coal, lumber, or cotton, down the tortuous stream, and return alone at one-tenth the expense of a heavy steamer. That was the final stroke to the picturesqueness and the romance of river life. The volume of freight carried still grows apace, but the glory of Mississippi steamboat life is gone forever. **Transcriber's Note: Page 268: change infreqently to infrequently CHAPTER IX THE NEW ENGLAND FISHERIES--THEIR PART IN EFFECTING THE SETTLEMENT OF AMERICA--THEIR RAPID DEVELOPMENT--WIDE EXTENT OF THE TRADE--EFFORT OF LORD NORTH TO DESTROY IT--THE FISHERMEN IN THE REVOLUTION--EFFORTS TO ENCOURAGE THE INDUSTRY--ITS PART IN POLITICS AND DIPLOMACY--THE FISHING BANKS--TYPES OF BOATS--GROWTH OF THE FISHING COMMUNITIES--FARMERS AND SAILORS BY TURNS--THE EDUCATION OF THE FISHERMEN--METHODS OF TAKING MACKEREL--THE SEINE AND THE TRAWL--SCANT PROFITS OF THE INDUSTRY--PERILS OF THE BANKS--SOME PERSONAL EXPERIENCES--THE FOG AND THE FAST LINERS--THE TRIBUTE OF HUMAN LIFE. The summer yachtsman whiling away an idle month in cruises up and down that New England coast which, once stern and rock-bound, has come to be the smiling home of midsummer pleasures, encounters at each little port into which he may run, moldering and decrepit wharves, crowned with weatherbeaten and leaky structures, waterside streets lined with shingled fish-houses in an advanced stage of decay, and acres of those low platforms known as flakes, on which at an earlier day the product of the New England fisheries was spread out to dry in the sun, but which now are rapidly disintegrating and mingling again with the soil from which the wood of their structures sprung. Every harbor on the New England coast, from New Bedford around to the Canadian line, bears these dumb memorials to the gradual decadence of what was once our foremost national industry. For the fisheries which once nursed for us a school of the hardiest seamen, which aroused the jealousy of England and France, which built up our seaport towns, and carried our flag to the furthest corners of the globe, and which in the records both of diplomacy and war fill a prominent place have been for the last twenty years appreciably tending to disappear. Many causes are assigned for this. The growing scarcity of certain kinds of fish, the repeal of encouraging legislation, a change in the taste of certain peoples to whom we shipped large quantities of the finny game, the competition of Canadians and Frenchmen, the great development of the salmon fisheries and salmon canning on the Pacific coast, all have contributed to this decay. It is proper, however, to note that the decadence of the fisheries is to some extent more apparent than real. True, there are fewer towns supported by this industry, fewer boats and men engaged in it; but in part this is due to the fact that the steam fishing boat carrying a large fleet of dories accomplishes in one season with fewer hands eight or ten times the work that the old-fashioned pink or schooner did. And, moreover, as the population of the seaport towns has grown, the apparent prominence of the fishing industry has decreased, as that industry has not grown in proportion to the population. Forty years ago Marblehead and Nantucket were simply fishing villages, and nothing else. To-day the remnants of the fishing industry attract but little attention, in the face of the vastly more profitable and important calling of entertaining the summer visitor. New Bedford has become a great factory town, Lynn and Hull are great centers for the shoemaking industries. When the Pilgrim Fathers first concluded to make their journey to the New England coast and sought of the English king a charter, they were asked by the thrifty James, what profit might arise. "Fishing," was the answer. Whereupon, according to the narrative of Edward Winslow, the king replied, "So, God have my soul; 'tis an honest trade; 'twas the apostles' own calling." The redoubtable Captain John Smith, making his way to the New England coast from Virginia, happened to drop a fishline over what is known now as George's Bank. The miraculous draught of fishes which followed did not awaken in his mind the same pious reflections to which King James gave expression. Rather was he moved to exultation over the profit which he saw there. "Truly," he said, in a letter to his correspondent in London, "It is a pleasant thing to drop a line and pull up threepence, fivepence, and sixpence as fast as one may haul in." The gallant soldier of fortune was evidently quite awake to the possibilities of profit upon which he had stumbled. Yet, probably even he would have been amazed could he have known that within fifty years not all the land in the colony of Massachusetts Bay, nor in the Providence and Rhode Island plantations produced so much of value as the annual crop the fishermen harvested on the shallow banks off Cape Cod. As early as 1633 fish began to be exported from Boston, and very shortly thereafter the industry had assumed so important a position that the general court adopted laws for its encouragement, exempting vessels, and stock from taxation, and granting to fishermen immunity from military duty. At the close of the seventeenth century, Massachusetts was exporting over $400,000 worth of fish annually. From that time until well into the middle of the last century the fisheries were so thoroughly the leading industry of Massachusetts that the gilded codfish which crowns the dome of the State House at Boston, only fitly typifies by its prominence above the city the part which its natural prototypes played in building up the commonwealth. In the Revolution and the early wars of the United States, the fishermen suffered severely. Crowded together on the banks, they were easy prey for the British cruisers, who, in time of peace or in time of war, treated them about as they chose, impressing such sailors as seemed useful, and seizing such of their cargo as the whim of the captain of the cruiser might suggest. And even before the colonies had attained the status of a nation, the jealousy and hostility of Great Britain bore heavily on the fortunes of the New England fishermen. It was then, as it has been until the present day, the policy of Great Britain to build up in every possible way its navy, and to encourage by all imaginable devices the development of a large body of able seamen, by whom the naval vessels might be manned. Accordingly parliament undertook to discourage the American fisherman by hostile legislation, so that a body of deep-sea fishermen might be created claiming English ports for their home. At first the effort was made to prohibit the colonies from exporting fish. The great Roman Catholic countries of France, Spain, and Portugal took by far the greater share of the fish sent out, though the poorer qualities were shipped to the West Indies and there exchanged for sugar and molasses. Against this trade Lord North leveled some of his most offensive measures, proposing bills, indeed, so unjust and tyrannical that outcries were raised against them even in the British House of Lords. To cut off intercourse with the foreign peoples who took the fish of the Yankees by hundreds and thousands of quintals, and gave in return rum, molasses, and bills of exchange on England, to destroy the calling in which every little New England seacoast village was interested above all things, Lord North first proposed to prohibit the colonies trading in fish with any country save the "mother" country, and secondly, to refuse to the people of New England the right to fish on the Great Banks of Newfoundland, thus confining them to the off-shore banks, which already began to show signs of being fished out. Even a hostile parliament was shocked by these measures. Every witness who appeared before the House of Commons testified that they would work irreparable injury to New England, would rob six thousand of her able-bodied men of their means of livelihood, and would drive ten thousand more into other vocations. But the power of the ministry forced the bills through, though twenty-one peers joined in a solemn protest. "We dissent," said they, "because the attempt to coerce, by famine, the whole body of the inhabitants of great and populous provinces, is without example in the history of this, or, perhaps, of any civilized nations." This was in 1775, and the revolution in America had already begun. It was the policy of Lord North to force the colonists to stop their opposition to unjust and offensive laws by imposing upon them other laws more unjust and more offensive still--a sort of homeopathic treatment, not infrequently applied by tyrants, but which seldom proves effective. In this case it aligned the New England fishermen to a man with the Revolutionists. A Tory fisherman would have fared as hard as "Old Floyd Ireson for his hard heart Tarr'd and feathered and carried in a cart, By the woman of Marblehead." Nor was this any inconsiderable or puny element which Lord North had deliberately forced into revolt. Massachusetts alone had at the outbreak of the Revolution five hundred fishing vessels, and the town of Marblehead one hundred and fifty sea-going fishing schooners. Gloucester had nearly as many, and all along the coast, from Maine to New York, there were thrifty settlers, farmers and fishermen, by turns, as the season served. New England was preeminently a maritime state. Its people had early discovered that a livelihood could more easily be plucked from the green surges of ocean, white-capped as they sometimes were, than wrested from the green and boulder-crowned hills. Upon the fisheries rested practically all the foreign commerce. They were the foundation upon which were built the superstructure of comfort and even luxury, the evidences of which are impressive even in the richer New England of to-day. Therefore, when the British ministry attacked this calling, it roused against the crown not merely the fisherman and the sailor, but the merchants as well--not only the denizens of the stuffy forecastles of pinks and schooners, but the owners of the fair great houses in Boston and New Bedford. Lord North's edicts stopped some thousands of sturdy sailors from catching cod and selling them to foreign peoples. They accordingly became privateers, and preyed upon British commerce until it became easier for a mackerel to slip through the meshes of a seine than for a British ship to make its usual voyages. The edicts touched the commercial Bostonians in their pockets, and stimulated them to give to the Revolution that countenance and support of the "business classes" which revolutionary movements are apt to lack, and lacking which, are apt to fail. The war, of course, left the fisheries crippled and almost destroyed. It had been a struggle between the greatest naval power of the world, and a loose coalition of independent colonies, without a navy and without a centralized power to build and maintain one. Massachusetts did, indeed, equip an armed ship to protect her fishermen, but partly because the protection was inadequate, and partly as a result of the superior attractions of privateering, the fishing boats were gradually laid up, until scarcely enough remained in commission to supply the demands of the home merchant for fish. Where there had been prosperity and bustle about wharves, and fish-houses, there succeeded idleness and squalor. Shipbuilding was prostrate, commerce was dead. The sailors returned to the farms, shipped on the privateers, or went into Washington's army. But when peace was declared, they flocked to their boats, and began to rebuild their shattered industry. Marblehead, which went into the war with 12,000 tons of shipping, came out with 1500. Her able-bodied male citizens had decreased in numbers from 1200 to 500. Six hundred of her sons, used to hauling the seine and baiting the trawl, were in British prisons. How many from this and other fishing ports were pressed against their will into service on British men-of-war, history has no figures to show; but there were hundreds. Yet, prostrate as the industry was, it quickly revived, and soon again attained those noble proportions that had enabled Edmund Burke to say of it, in defending the colonies before the House of Commons: "No ocean but what is vexed with their fisheries; no climate that is not witness of their toils. Neither the perseverance of Holland, nor the activity of France, nor the dextrous and firm sagacity of English enterprise ever carried this perilous mode of hardy enterprise to the extent to which it has been pushed by this recent people--a people who are still, as it were, in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood." In 1789, immediately upon the formation of the Government under which we now live, the system of giving bounties to the deep-sea fishermen was inaugurated and was continued down to the middle of the last century, when a treaty with England led to its discontinuance. The wisest statesmen and publicists differ sharply concerning the effect of bounties and special governmental favors, like tariffs and rebates, upon the favored industry, and so, as long as the fishing bounty was continued, its needfulness was sharply questioned by one school, while ever since its withdrawal the opposing school has ascribed to that act all the later ills of the industry. Indeed, as this chapter is being written, a subsidy measure before Congress for the encouragement of American shipping, contains a proviso for a direct payment from the national treasury to fishing vessels, proportioned to their size and the numbers of their crews. It is not my purpose to discuss the merits, either of the measure now pending, or of the many which have, from time to time, encouraged or depressed our fishermen. It would be hard, however, for any one to read the history of the fisheries without being impressed by the fact that the hardy and gallant men who have risked their lives in this most arduous of pursuits, have suffered from too much government, often being sorely injured by a measure intended solely for their good, as in the case of the Treaty of 1818. That instrument was negotiated for the purpose of maintaining the rights of American fishermen on the banks off Newfoundland, Labrador, and Nova Scotia. The American commissioners failed to insist upon the right of the fishermen to land for bait, and this omission, together with an ambiguity in defining the "three-mile limit," enabled the British government to harass, harry, and even confiscate American fishermen for years. American fleets were sent into the disputed waters, and two nations were brought to the point of war over the question which should control the taking of fish in waters that belonged to neither, and that held more than enough for all peoples. To settle the dispute the United States finally entered into another treaty which secured the fishermen the rights ignored in the treaty of 1818, but threw American markets open to Canadian fishermen. This the men of Gloucester and Marblehead, nurtured in the school of protection, declared made their last state worse than the first. So the tinkering of statutes and treaties went on, even to the present day, the fisheries languishing meanwhile, not in our country alone, but in all engaged in the effort to get special privileges on the fishing grounds. Whenever man tries thus to monopolize, by sharp practise or exclusive laws, the bounty which God has provided in abundance for all, the end is confusion, distress, disaster, and too often war. But the story of what the politicians, and those postgraduates of politics, the statesmen, have done for and against the fishermen of New England, is not that which I have to tell. Rather, it is my purpose to tell something of the lives of the fishermen, the style of their vessels, the portions of the rolling Atlantic which they visit in search of their prey, their dire perils, their rough pleasures, and their puny profits. First, then, as to their prey, and its haunts. The New England fishermen, in the main, seek three sorts of fish--the mackerel, the cod, and the halibut. These they find on the shallow banks which border the coast from the southern end of Delaware to the very entrance of Baffin's Bay. The mackerel is a summer fish, coming and going with the regularity of the equinoxes themselves. Early in March, they appear off the coast, and all summer work their way northward, until, in early November, they disappear off the coast of Labrador, as suddenly as though some titanic seine had swept the ocean clear of them. What becomes of the mackerel in winter, neither the inquisitive fisherman nor the investigating scientist has ever been able to determine. They do not, like migratory birds, reappear in more temperate southern climes, but vanish utterly from sight. Eight months, therefore, is the term of the mackerel fishing, and the men engaged in it escape the bitterest rigors of the winter fisheries on the Newfoundland Banks, where the cod is taken from January to January. Yet it has dangers of its own--dangers of a sort that, to the sailor, are more menacing than the icebergs or even the swift-rushing ocean liners of the Great Banks. For mackerel fishing is pursued close in shore, in shallow water, where the sand lies a scant two fathoms below the surface, and a north-east wind will, in a few minutes, raise, a roaring sea that will pound the stoutest vessel to bits against the bottom. With plenty of sea-room, and water enough under the keel, the sailor cares little for wind or waves; but in the shallows, with the beach only a few miles to the leeward, and the breakers showing white through the darkness, like the fangs of a beast of prey, the captain of a fishing schooner on George's banks has need of every resource of the sailor, if he is to beat his way off, and not feed the fishes that he came to take. Nowhere is the barometer watched more carefully than on the boats cruising about on George's. When its warning column falls, the whole fleet makes for the open sea, however good the fishing may be. But, with all possible caution, the losses are so many that George's, early in its history, came to have the ghoulish nickname of "Dead Men's Bank." North of George's Bank--which lies directly east of Cape Cod--are found, in order, Brown's Bank, La Have, Western Bank--in the center of which lies Sable Island, famed as an ocean graveyard, whose shifting sands are as thickly strewn with the bleaching ribs of stout ships as an old green churchyard is set with mossy marbles--St. Peter's Bank, and the Grand Bank of Newfoundland. All of these lie further out to sea than George's, and are tenanted only by cod and halibut, though in the waters near the shore the fishermen pursue the mackerel, the herring--which, in cottonseed oil masquerades as American sardines--and the menhaden, used chiefly for fertilizer. The boats used in the fisheries are virtually of the same model, whatever the fish they may seek--except in the case of the menhaden fishery, which more and more is being prosecuted in slow-going steamers, with machines for hauling seines, and trawl nets. But the typical fishing boat engaged in the food fisheries is a trim, swift schooner, built almost on the lines of a yacht, and modeled after a type designed by Edward Burgess, one of New England's most famous yacht designers. Seaworthy and speedy both are these fishing boats of to-day, fit almost to sail for the "America's" cup, modeled, as they are, from a craft built by the designer of a successful cup defender. That the fishermen ply their calling in vessels so perfectly fitted to their needs is due to a notable exhibition of common sense and enterprise on the part of the United States Fish Commission. Some years ago almost anything that would float was thought good enough for the bank fishermen. In the earliest days of the industry, small sloops were used. These gave way to the "Chebacco boat," a boat taking its name from the town of Chebacco, Massachusetts, where its rig was first tested. This was a fifteen to twenty ton boat almost as sharp at the stern as in the bow, carrying two masts, both cat-rigged. A perfect marvel of crankiness a boat so rigged would seem; but the New England seamen became so expert in handling them that they took them to all of the fishing banks, and even made cruises to the West Indies with cargoes of fish, bringing back molasses and rum. A development of the Chebacco boat was the pink, differing only in its rig, which was of the schooner model. But in time the regular schooner crowded out all other types of fishing vessels. In 1882, the members of the Fish Commission, studying the frightful record of wrecks and drownings among the Gloucester and Marblehead fishermen, reached the conclusion that an improved model fishing boat might be the means of saving scores of lives. The old model was seen to be too heavily rigged, with too square a counter, and insufficient draught. Accordingly, a model boat, the "Grampus," was designed, the style of which has been pretty generally followed in the fishing fleet. [Illustration: ON THE BANKS.] Such a typical craft is a schooner of about eighty tons, clean-cut about the bows, and with a long overhang at the stern that would give her a rakish, yacht-like air, except for the evidences of her trade, with which her deck is piled. Her hull is of the cutter model, sharp and deep, affording ample storage room. She has a cabin aft, and a roomy forecastle, though such are the democratic conditions of the fishing trade that part of the crew bunks aft with the skipper. The galley, a little box of a place, is directly abaft the foremast, and back of it to the cabin, are the fishbins for storing fish, after they are cleaned and salted or iced. Nowadays, when the great cities, within a few hours' sail of the banks, offer a quick market for fresh fish, many of the fishing boats bring in their catch alive--a deep well, always filled with sea-water, taking the place of the fishbins. The deck, forward of the trunk cabin, is flush, and provided with "knockdown" partitions, so that hundreds of flapping fish may be confined to any desired portion. Amidships of the bankers rises a pile of five or six dories, the presence of which tells the story of the schooner's purpose, for fishing on the Grand Banks for cod is mainly done with trawls which must be tended from dories--a method which has resulted in countless cruel tragedies. The lives of the men who go down to the sea in ships are always full of romance, the literary value of which has been fully exploited by such writers of sea stories as Cooper and Clark Russell. But the romance of the typical sailor's life is that which grows out of a ceaseless struggle with the winds and waves, out of world-wide wanderings, and encounters with savages and pirates. It is the romance which makes up melodrama, rather than that of the normal life. The early New England fishermen, however, were something more than vagrants on the surface of the seas. In their lives were often combined the peaceful vocations of the farmer or woodsman, with the adventurous calling of the sailor. For months out of the year, the Maine fisherman would be working in the forests, felling great trees, guiding the tugging ox-teams to the frozen rivers, which with spring would float the timber down to tidewater. When winter's grip was loosened, he, like the sturdy logs his axe had shaped, would find his way to where the air was full of salt, and the owners of pinks and schooners were painting their craft, running over the rigging, and bargaining with the outfitters for stores for the spring cruise. From Massachusetts and Rhode Island farms men would flock to the little ports, leaving behind the wife and younger boys to take care of the homestead, until the husband and father returned from the banks in the fall, with his summer's earnings. His luck at fishing, her luck with corn and calves and pigs, determined the scale of the winter's living. Some of the fishermen were not only farmers, as well, but ship-builders and ship-owners, too. If the farm happened to front on some little cove, the frame of a schooner would be set up there on the beach, and all winter long the fisherman-farmer-builder would work away with adze and saw and hammer, putting together the stout hull that would defend him in time against the shock of the north-east sea. His own forest land supplied the oak trees, keelson, ribs, and stem. The neighboring sawmill shaped his planks. One lucky cruise as a hand on a fishing boat owned by a friend would earn him enough to pay for the paint and cordage. With Yankee ingenuity he shaped the iron work at his own forge--evading in its time the stupid British law that forbade the colonists to make nails or bolts. Two winters' labor would often give the thrifty builder a staunch boat of his own, to be christened the "Polly Ann," or the "Mary Jane"--more loyal to family ties than to poetic euphony were the Yankee fishermen--with which he would drive into the teeth of the north-east gale, breaking through the waves as calmly as in early spring at home he forced his plough through the stubble. There was, too, in those early days of the fisheries, a certain patriarchal relation maintained between owner and crew that finds no parallel in modern times. The first step upward of the fisherman was to the quarter-deck. As captain, he had a larger responsibility, and received a somewhat larger share of the catch, than any of his crew. Then, if thrifty, or if possessed of a shipyard at home, such as I have described, he soon became an owner. In time, perhaps, he would add one or two schooners to his fleet, and then stay ashore as owner and outfitter, sending out his boats on shares. Fishermen who had attained to this dignity, built those fine, old, great houses, which we see on the water-front in some parts of New England--square, simple, shingled to the ground, a deck perched on the ridge-pole of the hipped roof, the frame built of oak shaped like a ship's timbers, with axe and adze. The lawns before the houses sloped down to the water where, in the days of the old prosperity, the owner's schooner might be seen, resting lightly at anchor, or tied up to one of the long, frail wharves, discharging cargo--wharves black and rotting now, and long unused to the sailor's cheery cry. There, too, would be the flakes for drying fish, the houses on the wharves for storing supplies, and the packed product, and the little store in which the outfitter kept the simple stock of necessaries from which all who shipped on his fleet were welcome to draw for themselves and their families, until their "ship came in." To such a fishing port would flock the men from farm and forest, as the season for mackerel drew nigh. The first order at the store would include a pair of buck (red leather) or rubber boots, ten or fifteen pounds of tobacco, clay pipe, sou'-westers, a jack-knife, and oil-clothes. If the sailor was single, the account would stop there, until his schooner came back to port. If he had a family, a long list of groceries, pork and beans, molasses, coffee, flour, and coarse cloth, would be bought on credit, for the folks at home. It came about naturally that these folks preferred to be near the store at which the family had credit, and so the sailors would, in time, buy little plots of land in the neighborhood, and build thereon their snug shingled cottages. So sprung up the fishing villages of New England. The boys who grew up in these villages were able to swim as soon as they could walk; rowed and sailed boats before they could guide a plow; could give the location of every bank, the sort of fish that frequented it, and the season for taking them. They could name every rope and clew, every brace and stay on a pink or Chebacco boat before they reached words of two syllables in Webster's blue-backed spelling-book; the mysteries of trawls and handlines, of baits and hooks were unraveled to them while still in the nursery, and the songs that lulled them to sleep were often doleful ditties of castaways on George's Bank. Often they were shipped as early as their tenth year, going as a rule in schooners owned or commanded by relatives. It was no easy life that the youngster entered upon when first he attained the dignity of being a "cut-tail," but such as it was, it was the life he had looked forward to ever since he was old enough to consider the future. He lived in a little forecastle, heated by a stuffy stove, which it was his business to keep supplied with fuel. The bunks on either side held rough men, not over nice of language or of act, smoking and playing cards through most of their hours of leisure. From time immemorial it has been a maxim of the forecastle that the way to educate a boy is to "harden" him, and the hardening process has usually taken the form of persistent brutality of usage--the rope's end, the heavy hand, the hard-flung boot followed swift upon transgression of the laws or customs of ship or forecastle. The "cut-tail" was everybody's drudge, yet gloried in it, and a boy of Gloucester or Marblehead, who had lived his twelve years without at least one voyage to his credit, was in as sorry a state among his fellow urchins as a "Little Lord Fauntleroy" would be in the company of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. The intimacies of the village streets were continued on the ocean. Fish supplanted marbles as objects of prime importance in the urchin's mind. The smallest fishing village would have two or three boats out on the banks, and the larger town several hundred. Between the crews of these vessels existed always the keenest rivalry, which had abundant opportunity for its exhibition, since the conditions of the fishery were such that the schooners cruised for weeks, perhaps, in fleets of several hundred. Every maneuver was made under the eyes of the whole fleet, and each captain and sailor felt that among the critics were probably some of his near neighbors at home. Charles Nordhoff, who followed a youth spent at sea with a long life of honorable and brilliant activity in journalism, describes the watchfulness of the fleet as he had often seen it: "The fleet is the aggregate of all the vessels engaged in the mackerel fishery. Experience has taught fishermen that the surest way to find mackerel is to cruise in one vast body, whose line of search will then extend over an area of many miles. When, as sometimes happens, a single vessel falls in with a large 'school,' the catch is, of course, much greater. But vessels cruising separately or in small squads are much less likely to fall in with fish than is the large fleet. 'The fleet' is therefore the aim of every mackerel fisherman. The best vessels generally maintain a position to the windward. Mackerel mostly work to windward slowly, and those vessels furthest to windward in the fleet are therefore most likely to fall in with fish first, while from their position they can quickly run down should mackerel be raised to leeward. "Thus, in a collection of from six hundred to a thousand vessels, cruising in one vast body, and spreading over many miles of water, is kept up a constant, though silent and imperceptible communication, by means of incessant watching with good spy-glasses. This is so thorough that a vessel at one end of the fleet cannot have mackerel 'alongside,' technically speaking, five minutes, before every vessel in a circle, the diameter of which may be ten miles, will be aware of the fact, and every man of the ten thousand composing their crews will be engaged in spreading to the wind every available stitch of canvas to force each little bark as quickly as possible into close proximity to the coveted prize." To come upon the mackerel fleet suddenly, perhaps with the lifting of the fog's gray curtain, or just as the faint dawn above the tossing horizon line to the east began to drive away the dark, was a sight to stir the blood of a lad born to the sea. Sometimes nearly a thousand vessels would be huddled together in a space hardly more than a mile square. At night, their red and green lights would swing rhythmically up and down as the little craft were tossed by the long rollers of old Atlantic, in whose black bosom the gay colors were reflected in subdued hues. From this floating city, with a population of perhaps ten thousand souls, no sound arises except the occasional roar of a breaking swell, the creaking of cordage, and the "chug-chug" of the vessel's bows as they drop into the trough of the sea. All sails are furled, the bare poles showing black against the starlit sky, and, with one man on watch on the deck, each drifts idly before the breeze. Below, in stuffy cabins and fetid forecastles, the men are sleeping the deep and dreamless sleep that hard work in the open air brings as one of its rewards. All is as quiet as though a mystic spell were laid on all the fleet. But when the sky to the eastward begins to turn gray, signs of life reappear. Here and there in the fleet a sail will be seen climbing jerkily to the masthead, and hoarse voices sound across the waters. It is only a minute or two after the first evidence of activity before the whole fleet is tensely active. Blocks and cordage are creaking, captains and mates shouting. Where there was a forest of bare poles are soon hundreds of jibs and mainsails, rosy in the first rays of the rising sun. The schooners that have been drifting idly, are, as by magic, under weigh, cutting across each other's bows, slipping out of menacing entanglements, avoiding collisions by a series of nautical miracles. From a thousand galleys rise a thousand slender wreaths of smoke, and the odors of coffee and of the bean dear to New England fishermen, mingle with the saline zephyrs of the sea. The fleet is awake. They who have sailed with the fleet say that one of the marvels of the fisherman's mind is the unerring skill with which he will identify vessels in the distant fleet, To the landsman all are alike--a group of somewhat dingy schooners, not over trig, and apt to be in need of paint. But the trained fisherman, pursing his eyes against the sun's glitter on the waves, points them out one by one, with names, port-of-hail, name of captain, and bits of gossip about the craft. As the mountaineer identifies the most distant peak, or the plainsman picks his way by the trail indistinguishable to the untrained eye, so the fisherman, raised from boyhood among the vessels that make up the fleet, finds in each characteristics so striking, so individual, as to identify the vessel displaying them as far as a keen eye can reach. [Illustration: "THE BOYS MARKED THEIR FISH BY CUTTING OFF THEIR TAILS"] The fishing schooners, like the whalers, were managed upon principles of profit-sharing. The methods of dividing the proceeds of the catch differed, but in no sense did the wage system exist, except for one man on board--the cook, who was paid from $40 to $60 a month, besides being allowed to fish in return for caring for the vessel when all the men were out in dories. Sometimes the gross catch of the boat was divided into two parts, the owners who outfitted the boat, supplying all provisions, equipment, and salt, taking one part, the other being divided among the fishermen in proportion to the catch of each. Every fish caught was carefully tallied, the customary method being to cut the tongues, which at the lose of the day's work were counted by the captain, and each man's catch credited. The boys, of whom each schooner carried one or two, marked their fish by cutting off the tails, wherefore these hardy urchins, who generally took the sea at the age of ten, were called "cut-tails." The captain, for his more responsible part in the management of the boat, was not always expected to keep tally of his fish, but was allowed an average catch, plus from three to five per cent. of the gross value of the cargo. Not infrequently the captain was owner of the boat, and his crew, thrifty neighbors of his, owning their own houses by the waterside, and able to outfit the craft and provide for the sustenance of their wives and children at home without calling upon the capitalist for aid. In such a case, the whole value of the catch was divided among the men who made it. At best, these shares were not of a sort to open the doors of a financial paradise to the men. The fisheries have always afforded impressive illustrations of the iron rule of the business world that the more arduous and more dangerous an occupation is, the less it pays. It was for the merest pittance that the fishermen risked their lives, and those who had families at home drawing their weekly provender from the outfitter were lucky if, at the end of the cruise they found themselves with the bill at the store paid, and a few dollars over for necessaries during the winter. In 1799, when the spokesmen of the fishery interests appeared before Congress to plead for aid, they brought papers from the town of Marblehead showing that the average earnings of the fishing vessels hailing from that port were, in 1787, $483; in 1788, $456; and in 1789, $273. The expenses of each vessel averaged $275. In the best of the three years, then, there was a scant $200 to be divided among the captain, the crew, and the owner. This was, of course, one of the leanest of the lean years that the fishermen encountered; but with all the encouragement in the way of bounties and protected markets that Congress could give them, they never were able to earn in a life, as much as a successful promoter of trusts nowadays will make in half an hour. The census figures of 1890--the latest complete figures on occupations and earnings--give the total value of American fisheries as $44,500,000; the number of men employed in them, 132,000, and the average earnings $337 a man. The New England fisheries alone were then valued at $14,270,000. In the gross total of the value of American fisheries are included many methods foreign to the subject of this book, as for example, the system of fishing from shore with pound nets, the salmon fisheries of the Columbia River, and the fisheries of the Great Lakes. Mackerel are taken both with the hook and in nets--taken in such prodigious numbers that the dories which go out to draw the seine are loaded until their gunwales are almost flush with the sea, and each haul seems indeed a miraculous draught of fishes. It is the safest and pleasantest form of fishing known to the New Englander, for its season is in summer only; the most frequented banks are out of the foggy latitude, and the habit of the fish of going about in monster schools keeps the fishing fleet together, conducing thus to safety and sociability both. In one respect, too, it is the most picturesque form of fishing. The mackerel is not unlike his enemy, man, in his curiosity concerning the significance of a bright light in the dark. Shrewd shopkeepers, who are after gudgeons of the human sort, have worked on this failing of the human family so that by night some of our city streets blaze with every variety of electric fire. The mackerel fisherman gets after his prey in much the same fashion. When at night the lookout catches sight of the phosphorescent gleams in the water that tells of the restless activity beneath of a great school of fish the schooner is headed straightway for the spot. Perhaps forty or fifty other schooners will be turning their prows the same way, their red and green lights glimmering through the black night on either side, the white waves under the bows showing faintly, and the creaking of the cordage sounding over the waters. It is a race for first chance at the school, and a race conducted with all the dash and desperation of a steeple-chase. The skipper of each craft is at his own helm, roaring out orders, and eagerly watchful of the lights of his encroaching neighbors. With the schooner heeled over to leeward, and rushing along through the blackness, the boats are launched, and the men tumble over the side into them, until perhaps the cook, the boy, and the skipper are alone on deck. One big boat, propelled by ten stout oarsmen, carries the seine, and with one dory is towed astern the schooner until the school is overhauled, then casts off and leaps through the water under the vigorous tugs of its oarsmen. In the stern a man stands throwing over the seine by armsful. It is the plan of campaign for the long boat and the dory, each carrying one end of the net, to make a circuit of the school, and envelope as much of it as possible in the folds of the seine. Perhaps at one time boats from twenty or thirty schooners will be undertaking the same task, their torches blazing, their helmsmen shouting, the oars tossing phosphorescent spray into the air. In and out among the boats the schooners pick their way--a delicate task, for each skipper wishes to keep as near as possible to his men, yet must run over neither boats or nets belonging to his rival. Wonderfully expert helmsmen they become after years of this sort of work--more trying to the nerves and exacting quite as much skill as the "jockeying" for place at the start of an international yacht race. When the slow task of drawing together the ends of the seine until the fish are fairly enclosed in a sort of marine canal, a signal brings the schooner down to the side of the boats. The mackerel are fairly trapped, but the glare of the torches blinds them to their situation, and they would scarcely escape if they could. One side of the net is taken up on the schooner's deck, and there clamped firmly, the fish thus lying in the bunt, or pocket between the schooners, and the two boats which lie off eight or ten feet, rising and falling with the sea. There, huddled together in the shallow water, growing ever shallower as the net is raised, the shining fish, hundreds and thousands of them, bushels, barrels, hogsheads of them, flash and flap, as the men prepare to swing them aboard in the dip net. This great pocket of cord, fit to hold perhaps a bushel or more, is swung from the boom above, and lowered into the midst of the catch. Two men in the boat seize its iron rim, and with a twist and shove scoop it full of mackerel. "Yo-heave-oh" sing out the men at the halliards, and the net rises into the air, and swings over the deck of the schooner. Two men perched on the rail seize the collar and, turning it inside out, drop the whole finny load upon the deck. "Fine, fat, fi-i-ish!" cry out the crew in unison, and the net dips back again into the corral for another load. So, by the light of smoky torches, fastened to the rigging, the work goes on, the men singing and shouting, the tackle creaking, the waves splashing, the wind singing in the shrouds, the boat's bow bumping dully on the waves as she falls. To all these sounds of the sea comes soon to be added one that is peculiar to the banks, a sound rising from the deck of the vessel, a multitude of little taps, rhythmical, muffled, soft as though a corps of clog-dancers were dancing a lively jig in rubber-soled shoes. It is the dance of death of the hapless mackerel. All about the deck they flap and beat their little lives away. Scales fly in every direction, and the rigging, almost to the masthead, is plastered with them. When the deck is nearly full--and sometimes a single haul of the seine will more than fill it twice--the labor of dipping is interrupted and all hands turn to with a will to dress and pack the fish. Not pretty work, this, and as little pleasing to perform. Barrels, boards, and sharp knives are in requisition. Torches are set up about the deck. The men divide up into gangs of four each and group themselves about the "keelers," or square, shallow boxes into which the fish to be dressed are bailed from the deck. Two men in each gang are "splitters"; two "gibbers." The first, with a dextrous slash of a sharp knife splits the fish down the back, and throws it to the "gibber," who, with a twist of his thumb--armed with a mitt--extracts the entrails and throws the fish into a barrel of brine. By long practise the men become exceedingly expert in the work, and rivalry among the gangs keeps the pace of all up to the highest possible point. All through the night they work until the deck is cleaned of fish, and slimy with blood and scales. The men, themselves, are ghastly, besmeared as they are from top to toe with the gore of the mackerel. From time to time, full barrels are rolled away, and lowered into the hold, and fresh fish raised from the slowly emptying seine alongside. Until the last fish has been sliced, cleaned, plunged into brine, and packed away there can be little respite from the muscle grinding work. From time to time, the pail of tepid water is passed about; once at least during the night, the cook goes from gang to gang with steaming coffee, and now and then some man whose wrist is wearied beyond endurance, knocks off, and with contortions of pain, rubs his arm from wrist to elbow. But save for these momentary interruptions, there is little break in the work. Meanwhile the boat is plunging along through the water, the helm lashed or in beckets, and the skipper hard at work with a knife or gibbing mitt. A score of other boats in a radius of half a mile or so, will be in like case, so there is always danger of collision. Many narrow escapes and not a few accidents have resulted from the practice of cleaning up while under sail. [Illustration: FISHING FROM THE RAIL] The mackerel, however, is not caught solely in nets, but readily takes that oldest of man's predatory instruments, the hook. To attract them to the side of the vessel, a mixture of clams and little fish called "porgies," ground together in a mill, is thrown into the sea, which, sinking to the depths at which the fish commonly lie, attract them to the surface and among the enticing hooks. Every fisherman handles two lines, and when the fishing is good he is kept busy hauling in and striking off the fish until his arms ache, and the tough skin on his hands is nearly chafed through. Sometimes the hooks are baited with bits of clam or porgy, though usually the mackerel, when biting at all, will snap with avidity at a naked hook, if tinned so as to shine in the water. Mr. Nordhoff, whose reminiscences of life on a fishing boat I have already quoted, describes this method of fishing and its results graphically: "At midnight, when I am called up out of my warm bed to stand an hour's watch, I find the vessel pitching uneasily, and hear the breeze blowing fretfully through the naked rigging. Going on deck, I perceive that both wind and sea have 'got up' since we retired to rest. The sky looks lowering, and the clouds are evidently surcharged with rain. In fine the weather, as my predecessor on watch informs me, bears every sign of an excellent fishday on the morrow. I accordingly grind some bait, sharpen up my hooks once more, see my lines clear, and my heaviest jigs (the technical term for hooks with pewter on them) on the rail ready for use, and at one o'clock return to my comfortable bunk. I am soon again asleep, and dreaming of hearing fire-bells ringing, and seeing men rush to the fire, and just as I see 'the machine' round the corner of the street, am startled out of my propriety, my dream, sleep, and all by the loud cry of 'Fish!' "I start up desperately in my narrow bunk, bringing my cranium in violent contact with a beam overhead, which has the effect of knocking me flat down in my berth again. After recovering as much consciousness as is necessary to appreciate my position, I roll out of bed, jerk savagely at my boots, and snatching up my cap and pea-jacket, make a rush _at_ the companion-way, _up_ which I manage to fall in my haste, and then spring into the hold for a strike-barrel. "And now the mainsail is up, the jib down, and the captain is throwing bait. It is not yet quite light, but we hear other mainsails going up all round us. A cool drizzle makes the morning unmistakably uncomfortable, and we stand around half asleep, with our sore hands in our pockets, wishing we were at home. The skipper, however, is holding his lines over the rail with an air which clearly intimates that the slightest kind of a nibble will be quite sufficient this morning to seal the doom of a mackerel. "'There, by Jove!' the captain hauls back--'there, I told you so! Skipper's got him--no--aha, captain, you haul back too savagely!' "With the first movement of the captain's arm, indicating the presence of fish, everybody rushes madly to the rail. Jigs are heard on all sides plashing into the water, and eager hands and arms are stretched at their full length over the side, feeling anxiously for a nibble. "'Sh--hish--there's something just passed my fly--I felt him,' says an old man standing alongside of me. "'Yes, and I've got him,' triumphantly shouts out the next man on the other side of him, hauling in as he speaks, a fine mackerel, and striking him off into his barrel in the most approved style. "Z-z-zip goes my line through and deep into my poor fingers, as a huge mackerel rushes savagely away with what he finds not so great a prize as he thought it was. I get confoundedly flurried, miss stroke half a dozen times in hauling in as many fathoms of line, and at length succeed in landing my first fish safely in my barrel, where he flounders away 'most melodiously,' as my neighbor says. "And now it is fairly daylight, and the rain, which has been threatening all night, begins to pour down in right earnest. As the heavy drops patter on the sea the fish begin to bite fast and furiously. "'Shorten up,' says the skipper, and we shorten in our lines to about eight feet from the rail to the hooks, when we can jerk them in just as fast as we can move our hands and arms. 'Keep your lines clear,' is now the word, as the doomed fish slip faster and faster into the barrels standing to receive them. Here is one greedy fellow already casting furtive glances behind him, and calculating in his mind how many fish he will have to lose in the operation of getting his second strike-barrel. "Now you hear no sound except the steady flip of fish into the barrels. Every face wears an expression of anxious determination; everybody moves as though by springs; every heart beats loud with excitement, and every hand hauls in fish and throws out hooks with a methodical precision, a kind of slow haste, which unites the greatest speed with the utmost security against fouling lines. "And now the rain increases. We hear jibs rattling down; and glancing up hastily, I am surprised to find our vessel surrounded on all sides by the fleet, which has already become aware that we have got fish alongside. Meantime the wind rises, and the sea struggles against the rain, which is endeavoring with its steady patter to subdue the turmoil of old ocean. We are already on our third barrel each, and still the fish come in as fast as ever, and the business (sport it has ceased to be some time since), continues with vigor undiminished. Thick beads of perspiration chase each other down our faces. Jackets, caps, and even over-shirts, are thrown off, to give more freedom to the limbs that are worked to their utmost. "'Hillo! Where are the fish?' All gone. Every line is felt eagerly for a bite, but not the faintest nibble is perceptible. The mackerel, which but a moment ago were fairly rushing on board, have in that moment disappeared so completely that not a sign of one is left. The vessel next under our lee holds them a little longer than we, but they finally also disappear from her side. And so on all around us. "And now we have time to look about us--to compare notes on each other's successes--to straighten our backbones, nearly broken and aching horribly with the constant reaching over; to examine our fingers, cut to pieces and grown sensationless with the perpetual dragging of small lines across them--to--'There, the skipper's got a bite! Here they are again, boys, and big fellows, too!' Everybody rushes once more to the rail, and business commences again, but not at so fast a rate as before. By-and-by there is another cessation, and we hoist our jib and run off a little way, into a new berth. "While running across, I take the first good look at the state of affairs in general. We lie, as before said, nearly in the center of the whole fleet, which from originally covering an area of perhaps fifteen miles each way, has 'knotted up' into a little space, not above two miles square. In many places, although the sea is tolerably rough, the vessels lie so closely together that one could almost jump from one to the other. The greatest skill and care are necessary on such occasions to keep them apart, and prevent the inevitable consequences of a collision, a general smash-up of masts, booms, bulwarks, etc. Yet a great fish-day like this rarely passes off without some vessel sustaining serious damage. We thread our way among the vessels with as much care and as daintily as a man would walk over ground covered with eggs; and finally get into a berth under the lee of a vessel which seems to hold the fish pretty well. Here we fish away by spells, for they have become 'spirty,' that is, they are capricious, and appear and disappear suddenly." [Illustration: TRAWLING FROM A DORY] Three causes make the occupation of those fishermen who go for cod and halibut to the Newfoundland Banks extra hazardous--the almost continual fog, the swift steel Atlantic liners always plowing their way at high speed across the fishing grounds, heedless of fog or darkness, and the custom of fishing with trawls which must be tended from dories. The trawl, which is really only an extension of hand-lines, is a French device adopted by American fishermen early in the last century. One long hand-line, supported by floats, is set at some distance from the schooner. From it depend a number of short lines with baited hooks, set at brief intervals. The fisherman, in his dory, goes from one to the other of these lines pulling them in, throwing the fish in the bottom of the boat and rebaiting his hooks. When his dory is full he returns with his load to the schooner--if he can find her. That is the peril ever present to the minds of the men in the dory--the danger of losing the schooner. On the Banks the sea is always running moderately high, and the great surges, even on the clearest days, will often shut out the dories from the vision of the lookout. The winds and the currents tend to sweep the little fishing-boats away, and though a schooner with five or six dories out hovers about them like a hen guarding her chickens, sailing a triangular beat planned to include all the smaller boats, yet it too often happens that night falls with one boat missing. Then on the schooner all is watchfulness. Cruising slowly about, burning flares and blowing the hoarse fog-horn, those on board search for the missing ones until day dawns or the lost are found. Sometimes day comes in a fog, a dense, dripping, gray curtain, more impenetrable than the blackest night, for through it no flare will shine, and even the sound of the braying horn or tolling bell is so curiously distorted, that it is difficult to tell from what quarter it comes. No one who has not seen a fog on the Banks can quite imagine its dense opaqueness. When it settles down on a large fleet of fishermen, with hundreds of dories out, the peril and perplexity of the skippers are extreme. In one instant after the dull gray curtain falls over the ocean, each vessel is apparently as isolated as though alone on the Banks. A dory forty feet away is invisible. The great fleet of busy schooners, tacking back and forth, watching their boats, is suddenly, obliterated. Hoarse cries, the tooting of horns and the clanging of bells, sound through the misty air, and now and then a ghostly schooner glides by, perhaps scraping the very gunwale and carrying away bits of rail and rigging to the accompaniment of New England profanity. This is the dangerous moment for every one on the Banks, for right through the center of the fishing ground lies the pathway of the great steel ocean steamships plying between England and the United States. Colossal engines force these great masses of steel through sea and fog. Each captain is eager to break a record; each one knows that a reputation for fast trips will make his ship popular and increase his usefulness to the company. In theory he is supposed to slow down in crossing the Banks; in fact his great 12,000-ton ship rushes through at eighteen miles an hour. If she hits a dory and sends two men to their long rest, no one aboard the ocean leviathan will ever know it. If she strikes a schooner and shears through her like a knife through cheese, there will be a slight vibration of the steel fabric, but not enough to alarm the passengers; the lookout will have caught a hasty glimpse of a ghostly craft, and heard plaintive cries for help, then the fog shuts down on all, like the curtain on the last act of a tragedy. Even if the great steamship were stopped at once, her momentum would carry her a mile beyond the spot before a boat could be lowered, and then it would be almost impossible to find the floating wreckage in the fog. So, usually, the steamships press on with unchecked speed, their officers perhaps breathing a sigh of pity for the victims, but reflecting that it is a sailor's peril to which those on the biggest and staunchest of ships are exposed almost equally with the fishermen. For was it not on the Banks and in a fog that the blow was struck which sent "La Bourgogne" to the bottom with more than four hundred souls? [Illustration: STRIKES A SCHOONER AND SHEARS THROUGH HER LIKE A KNIFE] Ordinarily there is but short shrift for the helpless folks on a fishing vessel when struck by a liner. The keen prow cuts right through planking and stout oak frame, and the dissevered portions of the hull are tossed to starboard and to port, to sink before the white foam has faded from the wake of the destroying monster. They tell ghoulish tales of bodies sliced in twain as neatly as the boat itself; of men asleep in their bunks being decapitated, or waking, to find themselves struggling in the water with an arm or leg shorn off. And again, there are stories of escapes that were almost miraculous; of men thrown by the shock of collision out of the foretop of the schooner onto the deck of the steamship, and carried abroad in safety, while their partners mourned them as dead; of men, dozing in their bunks, startled suddenly by the grinding crash of steel and timbers, and left gazing wide-eyed at the gray sea lapping the side of their berths, where an instant before the tough oak skin of the schooner had been; of men stunned by some flying bit of wood, who, all unconscious, floated on the top of the hungry waves, until as by Divine direction, their inert bodies touched the side of a vagrant dory and were dragged aboard to life again. The Banks can perform their miracles of humanity as well as of cruelty. Few forms of manual work are more exacting, involve more physical suffering and actual peril to life, than fishing with trawls. Under the happiest circumstances, with the sky clear, the sea moderately calm, and the air warm, it is arduous, muscle-trying, nerve-racking work. Pulling up half a mile of line, with hooks catching on the bottom, big fish floundering and fighting for freedom, and the dory dancing on the waves like mad, is no easy task. The line cuts the fingers, and the long, hard pull wearies the wrists until they ache, as though with inflammatory rheumatism. But when all this had to be done in a wet, chilling fog, or in a nipping winter's wind that freezes the spray in beard and hair, while the frost bites the fingers that the line lacerates, then the fisherman's lot is a bitter one. The method of setting and hauling the trawls has been well described by Mr. John Z. Rogers, in "Outing," and some extracts from his story will be of interest to readers: "The trawls were of cod-line, and tied to them at distances of six feet were smaller lines three feet in length, with a hook attached to the end. Each dory had six trawls, each one eighteen hundred feet long. The trawls were neatly coiled in tubs made by sawing flour barrels in two, and as fast as they were baited with pieces of herring they were carefully coiled into another tub, that they might run out quickly without snarling when being set. "The last trawl was finished just before supper, at five o'clock. After supper the men enjoyed a Half-hour smoke, then preparations were made to set the gear, as the trawls are called. The schooner got well to windward of the place where the set was to be made, and the first dory was lowered by a block and tackle. One of the men jumped into it, and his partner handed him the tubs of gear and then jumped in himself. The dory was made fast to the schooner by her painter as she drifted astern, and the other dories were put over in the same manner. When all the dories were disposed of the first one was cast off. One of the men rowed the boat before the wind while the other ran out the gear. First, he threw over a keg for a buoy, which could be seen from some distance. Fastened to the buoy-line at some sixty fathoms, or three hundred and sixty feet from the keg, was the trawl with a small anchor attached to sink it to the bottom. When this was dropped overboard the trawl was rapidly run out, and as fast as the end of one was reached it was tied to the next one, thus making a line of trawl ten thousand eight hundred feet long, with eighteen hundred hooks attached. After the schooner had sailed on a straight course a few hundred yards, the captain cast off the second dory, then along a little farther the third one, and so on till the five boats were all setting gear in parallel lines to each other. When all set this gear practically represented a fishing line over _ten miles_ long with nine _thousand hooks_ tied to it." The trawls thus set were left out over night, the schooner picking up the dories and anchoring near the buoy of the first trawl. At daybreak the work of hauling in was begun: "All the dories were made fast astern and left at the head of their respective trawls as the schooner sailed along. One of the men in each dory, after pulling up the anchor, put the trawl in the roller--a grooved wooden wheel eight inches in diameter. This was fastened to one side of the dory. The trawl was hauled in hand over hand, the heavy strain necessarily working the dory slowly along. The fish were taken off as fast as they appeared. A gaff--a stick about the size and length of a broom handle with a large, sharp hook attached--lay near at hand, and was frequently used in landing a fish over the side. Occasionally a fish would free itself from the trawl hook as it reached the surface, but the fisherman, with remarkable dexterity, would grab the gaff, and hook the victim before it could swim out of reach. What would be on the next hook was always an interesting uncertainty, for it seemed that all kinds of fish were represented. Cod and haddock were, of course, numerous, but hake and pollock struggled on many a hook. Besides these, there was the brim, a small, red fish, which is excellent fried; the cat fish, also a good pan fish; the cusk, which is best baked; the whiting, the eel, the repulsive-looking skate, the monk, of which it can almost be said that his mouth is bigger than himself, and last, but not least, that ubiquitous fish, the curse of amateur harbor fishers, the much-abused sculpin. Nor were fish alone caught on the hooks, for stones were frequently pulled up, and one dory brought in a lobster, which had been hooked by his tail. Some of the captives showed where large chunks had been bitten out of them by larger fish, and sometimes, when a hook appeared above water, there would be nothing on it but a fish head. This was certainly a case of one fish taking a mean advantage of another." Such is the routine of trawling when weather and all the fates are propitious. But the Banks have other stories to tell--stories of men lost in the fog, drifting for long days and nights until the little keg of fresh water and the scanty store of biscuit are exhausted, and then slowly dying of starvation, alone on the trackless sea; of boats picked up in winter with frozen bodies curled together on the floor, huddled close in a vain endeavor to keep warm; of trawlers looking up from their work to see towering high above them the keen prow of an ocean grayhound, and thereafter seeing nothing that their dumb lips could tell to mortal ears. Many a story of suffering and death the men skilled in the lore of the Banks could tell, but most eloquent of all stories are those told by the figures of the men lost from the fishing ports of New England. From Gloucester alone, in 1879, two hundred and fifty fishermen were lost. In one storm in 1846 Marblehead lost twelve vessels and sixty-six men and boys. In 1894, and the first month of 1895, one hundred and twenty-two men sailing out of Gloucester, were drowned. In fifty years this little town gave to the hungry sea two thousand two hundred men, and vessels valued at nearly two million, dollars. Full of significance is the fact that every fishing-boat sets aside part of the proceeds of its catch for the widows' and orphans' fund before making the final division among the men. One of the many New England poets who have felt and voiced the pathos of life in the fishing villages, Mr. Frank H. Sweet, has told the story of the old and oft-repeated tragedy of the sea in these verses: "THE WIVES OF THE FISHERS "The boats of the fishers met the wind And spread their canvas wide, And with bows low set and taffrails wet Skim onward side by side; The wives of the fishers watch from shore, And though the sky be blue, They breathe a prayer into the air As the boats go from view. "The wives of the fishers wait on shore With faces full of fright, And the waves roll in with deafening din Through the tempestuous night; The boats of the fishers meet the wind Cast up by a scornful sea; But the fishermen come not again, Though the wives watch ceaselessly." **Transcriber's Notes: Page 317: changed cherry to cheery. Page 329: page ends "cry of 'Fish"; next page begins with a new paragraph, punctuation added to read 'Fish!' Page 330: changed volent to violent changed trumphantly to triumphantly CHAPTER X THE SAILOR'S SAFEGUARDS--IMPROVEMENTS IN MARINE ARCHITECTURE--THE MAPPING OF THE SEAS--THE LIGHTHOUSE SYSTEM--BUILDING A LIGHTHOUSE--MINOT'S LEDGE AND SPECTACLE REEF--LIFE IN A LIGHTHOUSE--LIGHTSHIPS AND OTHER BEACONS--THE REVENUE MARINE SERVICE--ITS FUNCTION AS A SAFEGUARD TO SAILORS--ITS WORK IN THE NORTH PACIFIC--THE LIFE-SAVING SERVICE--ITS RECORD FOR ONE YEAR--ITS ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT--THE PILOTS OF NEW YORK--THEIR HARDSHIPS AND SLENDER EARNINGS--JACK ASHORE--THE SAILORS' SNUG HARBOR. Into the long struggle between men and the ocean the last half century has witnessed the entrance of System, Science and Cooperation on the side of man. They are three elements of strength which ordinarily assure victory to the combatant who enlists them, but complete victory over the ocean is a thing never to be fully won. Build his ships as he may, man them as he will, map out the ocean highways never so precisely, and mark as he may with flaring beacons each danger point, yet in some moment of wrath the winds and the waves will rise unconquerable and sweep all the barriers, and all the edifices erected by man out of their path. To-day all civilized governments join in devices and expedients for the protection and safeguard of the mariner. Steel vessels are made unsinkable with water-tight compartments, and officially marked with a Plimsoll load line beneath which they must not be submerged. Charts of every ocean are prepared under governmental supervision by trained scientists. Myriads of lights twinkle from headland to reef all round the world. Pilots are taught to find the way into the narrowest harbors, though they can scarce see beyond the ship's jibboom, and electric-lighted buoys mark the channel, while foghorns and sirens shriek their warnings through flying scud and mist. Revenue cutters ply up and down the coast specially charged to go swiftly to the rescue of vessels in distress, and life-saving stations dot the beaches, fitted with every device for cheating the breakers of their prey. The skill of marine architects, and all the resources of Government are taxed to the utmost to defeat the wrath of Ocean, yet withal his toll of life and property is a heavy one. Now and again men discuss the nature of courage, and try to fix upon the bravest deed of history. Doubtless _the_ bravest deed has no place in history, for it must have been the act of some unknown man committed with none to observe and recount the deed. Gallantry under the stimulus of onlookers ready to cheer on the adventurer and to make history out of his exploit, is not the supremest type. Surely first among the brave, though unknown men, we must rank that navigator, who, ignorant of the compass and even of the art of steering by the stars, pressed his shallop out beyond sight of land, into the trackless sea after the fall of night. Such a one braved, beside the ordinary dangers of the deep, the uncouth and mythical terrors with which world-wide ignorance and superstition had invested it. The sea was thought to be the domain of fierce and ravenous monsters, and of gods quite as dangerous to men. Prodigious whirlpools, rapids, and cataracts, quite without any physical reason for existence, were thought to roar and roll just beyond the horizon. It is only within a few decades that the geographies have abandoned the pleasing fiction of the maelstrom, and a few centuries ago the sudden downpour of the waters at the "end of the world" was a thoroughly accepted tenet of physical geography. Yet men, adventurous and inquisitive, kept ever pushing forward into the unknown, until now there remain no strange seas and few uncharted and unlighted. The mariner of these days has literally plain sailing in comparison with his forbears of one hundred and fifty years ago. Easily first among the sailor's safeguards is the lighthouse system. That of the United States is under the direct control of the Light House Board, which in turn is subject to the authority of the Secretary of the Treasury. It is the practice of every nation to light its own coast; though foreign vessels enjoy equal advantages thereby with the ships of the home country. But the United States goes farther. Not only does it furnish the beacons to guide foreign ships to its ports; but, unlike Great Britain and some other nations, it levies no charge upon the beneficiaries. In order that American vessels might not be hampered by the light dues imposed by foreign nations, the United States years ago bought freedom from several states for a lump sum; but Great Britain still exacts dues, a penny a ton, from every vessel passing a British light and entering a British port. The history of the lighthouses of the world is a long one, beginning with the story of the famous Pharos, at Alexandria, 400 feet high, whose light, according to Ptolemy, could be seen for 40 miles. Pharos long since disappeared, overthrown, it is thought, by an earthquake. France possesses to-day the oldest and the most impressive lighthouse--the Corduan tower, at the mouth of the Gironde, begun in the fifteenth century. In the United States, the lighthouse system dates only from 1715, when the first edifice of this character was begun at the entrance to Boston harbor. It was only an iron basket perched on a beacon, in which were burned "fier bales of pitch and ocum," as the colonial records express it Sometimes tallow candles illuminated this pioneer light of the establishment of which announcement was made in the Boston _News_, of September 17, 1716, in this wise: "Boston. By Vertue of an Act of Assembly made in the First Year of His Majesty's Reign, For Building & Maintaining a Light House upon the Great Brewster (called Beacon Island) at the Entrance of the Harbor of Boston, in order to prevent the loss of the Lives & Estates of His Majesty's Subjects; the said Light House has been built; And on Fryday last the 14th Currant the Light was kindled; which will be very useful for all Vessels going out and coming in to the Harbor of Boston for which all Masters shall pay to the Receiver of Impost, One Peny per Ton Inwards, and another Peny Outwards, except Coasters, who are to pay Two Shillings each at their clearance Out. And all Fishing Vessels, Wood Sloops, &c. Five Shillings each by the Year." When the United States Government was formed, with the adoption of the Constitution in 1789, there were just eight lights on the coast, namely, Portsmouth Light, N.H.; the Boston Light, mentioned above; Guerney Light, near Plymouth, Mass.; Brand Point Light, on Nantucket; Beaver Tail Light, R.I.; Sandy Hook Light; Cape Henlopen Light, Del.; and Charleston Main Light, on Morris Island, S.C. The Pacific coast, of course, was dark. So, too, was the Gulf of Mexico, though already a considerable shipping was finding its way thither. Of the multitudes of lights that gleam and sparkle in Long Island Sound or on the banks of the navigable rivers that open pathways into the interior, not one was then established. But as soon as a national government took the duty in hand, the task of lighting the mariner's pathway was pressed with vigor. By 1820 the eight lights had increased to fifty-five. To-day there are 1306 lighthouses and lighted beacons, and forty-five lightships. As for buoys, foghorns, day beacons, etc., they are almost uncounted. The board which directs this service was organized in 1852. It consists of two officers of high rank in the navy, two engineer officers of the army, and two civilians of high scientific attainments. One officer of the army and one of the navy are detailed as secretaries. The Secretary of the Treasury is _ex officio_ president of the board. Each of the sixteen districts into which the country is divided is inspected by an army and a navy officer, and a small navy of lighthouse tenders perform the duty of carrying supplies and relief to the lighthouses up and down our three coasts. [Illustration: MINOT'S LEDGE LIGHT] The planning of a lighthouse to stand on a submerged reef, in a stormy sea, is an engineering problem which requires extraordinary qualities of technical skill and scientific daring for its solution, while to raise the edifice, to seize the infrequent moments of low calm water for thrusting in the steel anchors and laying the heavy granite substructure on which shall rise the slender stone column that shall defy the assaults of wind and wave, demands coolness, determination, and reckless courage. Many lights have been built at such points on our coast, but the ponderous tower of Minot's Ledge, at the entrance to Boston Harbor, may well be taken as a type. Minot's Ledge is three miles off the mouth of Boston Bay, a jagged reef of granite, wholly submerged at high tide, and showing a scant hundred yards of rock above the water at the tide's lowest stage. It lies directly in the pathway of ships bound into Boston, and over it, on even calm days, the breakers crash in an incessant chorus. Two lighthouses have reared their heads here to warn away the mariner. The first was completed in 1848, an octagonal tower, set on wrought-iron piles extending five feet into the rock. The skeleton structure was expected to offer little surface to the shock of the waves, and the wrought iron of which it was built surely seemed tough enough to resist any combined force of wind and water; but in an April gale in 1851 all was washed away, and two brave keepers, who kept the lamp burning until the tower fell, went with it. Late at night, the watchers on the shore at Cohasset, three miles away, heard the tolling of the lighthouse bell, and through the flying scud caught occasional glimpses of the light; but morning showed nothing left of the structure except twisted stumps of iron piles, bent and gnarled, as though the waves which tore them to pieces had been harder than they. Then, for a time, a lightship tossed and tugged at its cables to warn shipping away from Minot's Ledge. Old Bostonians may still remember the gallant Newfoundland dog that lived on the ship, and, when excursion boats passed, would plunge into the sea and swim about, barking, until the excursionists would throw him tightly rolled newspapers, which he would gather in his jaws, and deliver to the lightship keepers to be dried for the day's reading. But, while the lightship served for a temporary beacon, a new tower was needed that might send the warning pencil of light far out to sea. Minot's was too treacherous a reef and too near a populous ocean highway to be left without the best guardian that science could devise. Accordingly, the present stone tower was planned and its construction begun in 1855. The problem before the designer was no easy one. The famous Eddystone and Skerryvore lighthouses, whose triumphs over the sea are related in English verse and story, were easier far to build, for there the foundation rock is above water at every low tide, while at Minot's Ledge the bedrock on which the base of the tower rests is below the level of low tide most of the year. The working season could only be from April 1 to September 15. Nominally, that is almost six months; but in the first season the sea permitted exactly 130 hours' work; in the second season 157, and in the third season, 130 hours and 21 minutes. The rest of the time the roaring surf held Minot's Ledge for its own. Nor was this all. After two years' work, the piles and débris of the old lighthouse had been cleared away, and a new iron framework, intended to be anchored in solid masonry, had been set, when up came a savage gale from the northeast; and when it cleared all was swept away. Then the spirit of the builder wavered, and he began to doubt that any structure built by men could withstand the powers of nature at Minot's Ledge. But, in time, the truth appeared. A bark, the _New Eagle_, heavy laden with cotton, had been swept right over the reef, and grounded at Cohasset. Examination showed that she had carried away in her hull the framework of the new tower. Three years' heart-trying work were necessary before the first cut stone could be laid upon the rock. In the meantime, on a great table at Cohasset, a precise model of the new tower was built, each stone cut to the exact shape, on a scale of one inch to the foot, and laid in mortar. This model completed, the soil on the hillside near by was scraped away. The granite rock thus laid bare was smoothed and leveled off into a great flat circle, and there, stone by stone, the tower was built exactly as in time it should rise in the midst of the seething cauldron of foam three miles out at sea. While the masons ashore worked at the tower, the men at the reef watched their chance, and the moment a square yard of ledge was out of water at the fall of the tide, they would leap from their boats, and begin cutting it. A circle thirty feet in diameter had to be leveled, and iron rods sunk into it as anchorages for the masonry. To do that took just three years of time, though actually less than twenty-five days of working time. From the time the first cut stone was laid until the completion of the tower, was three years and three months, though in all there were but 1102 working hours. One keeper and three assistants guard the light over Minot's Ledge. Three miles away across the sea, now blue and smiling, now black and wrathful, they can see the little group of dwellings on the Cohasset shore which the Government provides for them, and which shelter their families. The term of duty on the rocks is two weeks; at the end of each fortnight two happy men go ashore and two grumpy ones come off; that is, if the weather permits a landing, for keepers have been stormbound for as long as seven weeks. The routine of duty is much the same in all of the lighthouses. By night there must be unceasing watch kept of the great revolving light; and, if there be other lights within reach of the keeper's glass, a watch must be kept on them as well, and any eclipse, however brief, must be noted in the lighthouse log. By day the lens must be rubbed laboriously with a dry cloth until it shines like the facets of a diamond. Not at all like the lens we are familiar with in telescopes and cameras is this scientifically contrived device. It is built up of planes and prisms of the finest flint glass, cut and assembled according to abtruse mathematical calculations so as to gather the rays of light from the great sperm-oil lamp into parallel rays, a solid beam, which, in the case of Minot's Ledge light, pierces the night to a distance of fifteen miles. On foggy days, too, the keepers must toll the fog-bell, or, if the light be on the mainland, operate the steam siren which sends its hoarse bellow booming through the gray mist to the alert ears of the sailor miles away. The regulations do not prescribe that the keeper of a light shall hold himself ready to go to the assistance of castaways or of wrecked vessels; but, as a matter of fact, not a few of the most heroic rescues in the history of the coast have been performed by light-keepers. In the number of lives saved a woman--Ida Lewis, the keeper of the Limerock Light in Newport Harbor--leads all the rest. But there is hardly any light so placed that a boat can be launched that has not a story to tell of brave men putting out in frail boats in the teeth of a roaring gale to bring in some exhausted castaways, to carry a line to some stranded ship, or to guide some imperiled pleasure-seekers to safety. While the building of the Minot's Ledge light had in it more of the picturesque element than attaches to the record of construction of the other beacons along the coast of the United States, there are but few erected on exposed points about which the builders could not tell some curious stories of difficult problems surmounted, or dire perils met and conquered. The Great Lakes, on which there are more than 600 light stations, offer problems of their own to the engineer. Because of the shallowness of their waters, a gale speedily kicks up a sea which old Ocean itself can hardly outdo, and they have an added danger in that during the winter they are frozen to such a depth that navigation is entirely abandoned. The lights, too, are abandoned during this season, the Lighthouse Board fixing a period in the early winter for extinguishing them and another in spring for reilluminating them. But between these dates the structures stand exposed to the tremendous pressure of such shifting floes of ice as are not found on the ocean outside of the Arctic regions. The lake lighthouse, the builders of which had most to apprehend from this sort of attack, is that at Spectacle Reef, in Lake Huron, near the Straits of Mackinaw. It is ten miles from land, standing on a limestone reef, and in the part of the lakes where the ice persists longest and moves out with the most resistless crush. To protect this lighthouse, it was necessary to build a rampart all about it, against which the ice floes in the spring, as the current moves them down into Lake Huron, are piled up in tumultuous disorder. In order to get a foundation for the lighthouse, a huge coffer-dam was built, which was launched like a ship, towed out to the reef and there grounded. When it was pumped out the men worked inside with the water surrounding them twelve to fourteen feet above their heads. Twenty months of work, or three years in time, were occupied in erecting this light. Once in the spring, when the keepers returned after the closed season to prepare for the summer's navigation, they found the ice piled thirty feet against the tower, and seventy feet above the doorway, so that they were compelled, in order to enter the lighthouse, to cut through a huge iceberg of which it was the core. The Spectacle Reef light, like that at Minot's Ledge, is a simple tower of massive masonry, and this is the approved design for lighthouses exposed to very heavy strain from waves or ice. A simpler structure, used in tranquil bays and in the less turbulent waters of the Gulf, is the "screw-pile" lighthouse, built upon a skeleton framework of iron piling, the piles having been so designed that they bore into the bed of the ocean like augers on being turned. The "bug-light" in Boston Harbor, and the light at the entrance to Hampton Roads are familiar instances of this sort of construction. For all their apparent lightness of construction, they are stout and seaworthy, and in their erection the builders have often had to overcome obstacles and perils offered by the sea scarcely less savage than those overcome at Minot's Ledge. Indeed, a lighthouse standing in its strength, perhaps rising out of a placid summer sea, or towering from a crest of rock which it seems incredible the sea should have ever swept, gives little hint to the casual observer of the struggle that brave and skilful men had to go through with before it could be erected. The light at Tillamook Rock, near the mouth of the Columbia River, offers a striking illustration of this. It is no slender shaft rising from a tumultuous sea, but a spacious dwelling from which springs a square tower supporting the light, the whole perched on the crest of a small rock rising precipitously from the sea to the height of some forty feet. Yet, sturdy and secure as the lighthouse now looks, its erection was one of the hardest tasks that the board ever undertook. So steep are the sides of Tillamook Rock that to land upon it, even in calm weather, is perilous, and the foreman of the first party that went to prepare the ground for the light was drowned in the attempt. Only after repeated efforts were nine men successfully landed with tools and provisions. Though only one mile from shore they made provision for a prolonged stay, built a heavy timber hut, bolting it to the rock, and began blasting away the crest of the island to prepare foundations for the new lighthouse. High as they were above the water, the sea swept over the rock in a torrent when the storms raged. In one tempest the hut was swept away and the men were barely able to cling to the rock until the waves moderated. That same night an English bark went to pieces under the rock, so near that the workmen above, clinging for dear life to their precarious perch, could hear the shouts of her officers giving their commands. A bonfire was kindled, in hope of warning the doomed sailors of their peril, but it was too late, for the ship could not be extricated from her position, and became a total wreck, with the loss of the lives of twenty of her company. To-day a clear beam of light shines out to sea, eighteen miles from the top of Tillamook, and only the criminally careless captain can come near enough to be in any danger whatsoever. Such is one bit of progress made in safeguarding the sea. More wearing even than life in a lighthouse is that aboard the lightships, of which the United States Government now has forty-five in commission. The lightship is regarded by the Government as merely a makeshift, though some of them have been in use for more than a quarter of a century. They are used to mark shoals and reefs where it has thus far been impossible to construct a lighthouse, or obstructions to navigation which may be but temporary. While costing less than lighthouses, they are not in favor with the Lighthouse Board, because the very conditions which make a light most necessary, are likely to cause these vessels to break from their moorings and drift away, leaving their post unguarded. Their keepers suffer all the discomforts of a sailor's life and most of its dangers, while enjoying none of its novelty and freedom. The ships are usually anchored in shoal water, where the sea is sure to run high, and the tossing and rolling of the craft makes life upon it insupportable. They are always farther out to sea than the lighthouses, and the opportunities for the keepers to get ashore to their families are correspondingly fewer. In heavy storms their decks are awash, and their cabins dripping; the lights, which must be watched, instead of being at the top of a firm, dry tower, are perched on reeling masts over which the spray flies thick with every wave, and on which is no shelter for the watcher. During long weeks in the stormy season there is no possible way of escaping from the ship, or of bringing supplies or letters aboard, and the keepers are as thoroughly shut off from their kind as though on a desert island, although all day they may see the great ocean liners steaming by, and through their glasses may be able to pick out the roofs of their cottages against the green fields far across the waves. [Illustration: WHISTLING BUOY] Less picturesque than lighthouses and lightships, and with far less of human interest about them, are the buoys of various sorts of which the Lighthouse Board has more than one thousand in place, and under constant supervision. Yet, among the sailor's safeguards, they rank near the head. They point out for him the tortuous pathway into different harbors; with clanging bell or dismal whistle, they warn him away from menacing shallows and sunken wrecks. The resources of science and inventive genius have been drawn upon to devise ways for making them more effective. At night they shine with electric lights fed from a submarine cable, or with steady gas drawn from a reservoir that needs refilling only three or four times a year. If sound is to be trusted rather than light, recourse is had to a bell-buoy which tolls mournfully as the waves toss it about above the danger spot, or to a whistling buoy which toots unceasingly a locomotive whistle, with air compressed by the action of the waves. The whistling buoy is the giant of his family, for the necessity for providing a heavy charge of compressed air compels the attachment to the buoy of a tube thirty-two feet or more deep, which reaches straight down into the water. The sea rising and falling in this, as the buoy tosses on the waves, acts as a sort of piston, driving out the air through the whistle, as the water rises, admitting more air as it falls. Serving a purpose akin to the lighthouses, are the post and range-lights on the great rivers of the West. Very humble devices, these, in many instances, but of prodigious importance to traffic on the interior waterways. A lens lantern, hanging from the arm of a post eight or ten feet high, and kept lighted by some neighboring farmer at a cost of $160 a year, lacks the romantic quality of a lighthouse towering above a hungry sea, but it is because there are nearly two thousand such lights on our shallow and crooked rivers that we have an interior shipping doing a carrying trade of millions a year, and giving employment to thousands of men. Chief among the sailors' safeguards is the service performed by the United States revenue cutters. The revenue cutter service, like the lighthouse system, was established very shortly after the United States became a nation by the adoption of the Constitution. Its primary purpose, of course, is to aid in the enforcement of the revenue laws and to suppress smuggling. The service, therefore, is a branch of the Treasury Department, and is directly under the charge of the Secretary of the Treasury. In the course of years, however, the revenue cutter service has extended its functions. In time of war, the cutters have acted as adjuncts to the navy, and some of the very best armed service on the high seas has been performed by them. Piracy in the Gulf of Mexico was largely suppressed by officers of revenue cutters, and pitched battles have more than once been fought between small revenue cutters and the pirates of the Louisiana and the Central American coasts. But the feature of the service which is of particular pertinence to our story of American ships and sailors, is the part that it has taken in aiding vessels that were wrecked, or in danger of being wrecked. Many years ago, the Secretary of the Treasury directed the officers of the revenue marine to give all possible aid to vessels in distress wherever encountered. Perhaps the order was hardly necessary. It is the chiefest glory of the sailor, whether in the official service, or in the merchant marine, that he has never permitted a stranger ship to go unaided to destruction, if by any heroic endeavor he could save either the ship or her crew. The annals of the sea are full of stories of captains who risked their own vessels, their own lives, and the lives of their people, in order to take castaways from wrecked or foundering vessels in a high sea. But the records of the revenue marine service are peculiarly fruitful of such incidents, because it was determined some thirty years ago that cutters should be kept cruising constantly throughout the turbulent winter seasons for the one sole purpose of rendering aid to vessels in distress. In these late years, when harbors are thoroughly policed, and when steam navigation has come to dominate the ocean, there is little use for the revenue cutter in its primary quality of a foe to smugglers. People who smuggle come over in the cabins of the finest ocean liners, and the old-time contraband importer, of the sort we read of in "Cast Up By The Sea," who brings a little lugger into some obscure port under cover of a black night, has entirely disappeared. A duty which at times has come very near to true war service, has been the enforcement of the _modus vivendi_ agreed upon by Great Britain and the United States, as a temporary solution of the problem of the threatened extinction of the fur-bearing seals. This story of the seal "fishery," and the cruel and wholesale slaughter which for years attended it, is one of the most revolting chapters in the long history of civilized man's warfare on dumb animals. It is to be noted that it is only the civilized man who pursues animals to the point of extinction. The word "savage" has come to mean murderous, bloodthirsty, but the savages of North America hunted up and down the forests and plains for uncounted centuries, living wholly on animal food, finding at once their livelihood and their sport in the chase, dressing in furs and skins, and decking themselves with feathers, but never making such inroads upon wild animal life as to affect the herds and flocks. Civilized man came with his rifles and shot-guns, his eagerness to kill for the sake of killing, his cupidity, which led him to ignore breeding-seasons, and seek the immediate profit which might accrue from a big kill, even though thereby that particular form of animal life should be rendered extinct. In less than forty years after his coming to the great western plains, the huge herds of buffalo had disappeared. The prairie chicken and the grouse became scarce, and fled to the more remote regions. Of lesser animal life, the woods and fields in our well-settled states are practically stripped bare. A few years ago, it became apparent that for the seals of the North Pacific ocean and Bering Sea, early extinction was in store. These gentle and beautiful animals are easily taken by hunters who land on the ice floes, where they bask by the thousands, and slaughter them right and left with heavy clubs. The eager demand of fashionable women the world over for garments made of their soft, warm fur, stimulated pot-hunters to prodigious efforts of murder. No attention was given to the breeding season, mothers with young cubs were slain as ruthlessly as any. Schooners and small steamers manned by as savage and lawless men as have sailed the seas since the days of the slave-trade, put out from scores of ports, each captain eager only to make the biggest catch of the year, and heedless whether after him there should be any more seals left for the future. This sort of hunting soon began to tell on the numbers of the hapless animals, and the United States Government sent out a party of scientific men in the revenue cutter "Lincoln," to investigate conditions, particularly in the Pribylof Islands, which had long been the favorite sealing ground. As a result of this investigation, the United States and Great Britain entered into a treaty prohibiting the taking of seals within sixty miles of these islands, thus establishing for the animals a safe breeding-place. The enforcement of the provisions of this treaty has fallen upon the vessels of the revenue service, which are kept constantly patrolling the waters about the islands, boarding vessels, counting the skins, and investigating the vessel's movements. It has been a duty requiring much tact and firmness, for many of the sealers are British, and the gravest international dissension might have arisen from any unwarrantable or arbitrary interference with their acts. The extent of the duty devolving upon the cutters is indicated by some figures of their work in a single year. The territory they patrolled covered sixty degrees of longitude and twenty-five of latitude, and the cruising distance of the fleet was 77,461 miles. Ninety-four vessels were boarded and examined, over 31,000 skins counted, and four vessels were seized for violation of the treaty. In the course of this work, the cutters engaged in it have performed many useful and picturesque services. On one occasion it fell to one of them to go to the rescue of a fleet of American whalers who, nipped by an unusually early winter in the polar regions, were caught in a great ice floe, and in grave danger of starving to death. The men from the cutters hauled food across the broad expanse of ice, and aided the imprisoned sailors to win their freedom. The revenue officers, furthermore, have been to the people of Alaska the respected representatives of law and order, and in many cases the arbiters and enforcers of justice. Along the coast of Alaska live tribes of simple and ignorant Indians, who were for years the prey of conscienceless whites, many of whom turned from the business of sealing, when the two Governments undertook its regulation, to take up the easier trade of fleecing the Indians. The natives were all practised trappers and hunters, and as the limitations upon sealing did not apply to them, they had pelts to sell that were well worth the buying. Ignorant of the values of goods, eager for guns and glittering knives, and always easily stupefied with whisky, the Indians were easy prey to the sea traders. For a gun of doubtful utility, or a jug of fiery whisky, the Indian would not infrequently barter away the proceeds of a whole year of hunting and fishing, and be left to face the winter with his family penniless. It has been the duty of the officers of the revenue cutters serving on the North Pacific station to suppress this illicit trade, and to protect the Indians, as far as possible, from fraud and extortion. The task has been no easy one, but it has been discharged so far as human capacity would permit, so that the Alaska Indians have come to look upon the men wearing the revenue uniform as friends and counselors, while to a great extent the semi-piratical sailors who infested the coast have been driven into other lines of dishonest endeavor. Perhaps not since the days of Lafitte and the pirates of Barataria has any part of the coast of the United States been cursed with so criminal and abandoned a lot of sea marauders as have for a decade frequented the waters off Alaska, the Pribylof Islands, and the sealing regions. The outlawry of a great part of the seal trade, and the consequent heavy profits of those who are able to make one or two successful cruises uncaught by officers of the law, have attracted thither the reckless and desperate characters of every sea, and with these the revenue cutters have to cope. Yet so diversified are the duties of this service that the revenue officers may turn from chasing an illicit sealer to go to the rescue of whalers nipped in the ice, or may make a cruise along the coast to deliver supplies from the Department of Education to mission schools along Bering Sea and the Arctic Ocean, or to carry succor to a party of miners known to be in distress. The rapid development of Alaska since the discoveries of gold has greatly added to the duties of this fleet. [Illustration: REVENUE CUTTER] The revenue service stands midway between the merchant service and the navy. It may almost be said that the officers engaged in it suffer the disadvantages of both forms of sea service without enjoying the advantages of either. Unlike navy officers, they do not have a "retired list" to look forward to, against the time when they shall be old, decrepit, and unfit for duty. Congress has, indeed, made provision for placing certain specified officers on a roll called "permanent waiting orders," but this has been but a temporary makeshift, and no officer can feel assured that this provision will be made for him. Promotion, too, while quite as slow as in the navy, is limited. The highest officer in the service is a captain, his pay $2500 a year--but a sorry reward for a lifetime of arduous labor at sea, during which the officer may have been in frequent peril of his life, knowing all the time that for death in the discharge of duty, the Government will pay no pension to his heirs unless the disaster occurred while he was "cooperating with the navy." In one single year the records of the revenue service show more than one hundred lives saved by its activity, without taking into consideration those on vessels warned away from dangerous points by cutters. Yet neither in pay, in provision for their old age, or for their families in case of death met in the discharge of duty, are the revenue officers rewarded by the Government as are navy officers, while public knowledge and admiration for the service is vastly less than for the navy. It is a curious phenomenon, and yet one as old at least as the records of man, that the professional killer--that is to say, the officer of the army or navy--has always been held in higher esteem socially, and more lavishly rewarded, than the man whose calling it is to save life. To a very considerable degree the life-saving service of the United States is an outgrowth of the revenue marine. To sojourners by the waterside, on the shores of either ocean or lake, the trim little life-saving stations are a familiar sight, and summer pleasure-seekers are entertained with the exhibition drills of the crews in the surf. It is the holiday side of this service as a rule that the people chiefly know, but its records show how far from being all holiday pleasure it is. In 1901 the men of the life-saving corps were called to give aid to 377 wrecked ships. Of property in jeopardy valued at $7,354,000, they saved $6,405,035 worth. Of 93,792 human beings in peril of death in the waters, all save 979 were saved. These are the figures relating only to considerable shipwrecks, but as life-saving stations are established at nearly every harbor's mouth, and are plentiful about the pleasure cruising grounds of yachts and small sailboats, hundreds of lives are annually saved by the crews in ways that attract little attention. In 1901 the records show 117 such rescues. The idea of the life-saving service originated with a distinguished citizen of New Jersey, a State whose sandy coast has been the scene of hundreds of fatal shipwrecks. In the summer of 1839 William A. Newell, a young citizen of that State, destined later to be its Governor, stood on the beach near Barnegat in a raging tempest, and watched the Austrian brig "Count Perasto" drift onto the shoals. Three hundred yards from shore she struck, and lay helpless with the breakers foaming over her. The crew clung to the rigging for a time, but at last, fearing that she was about to go to pieces, flung themselves into the raging sea, and strove to swim ashore. All were drowned, and when the storm went down, the dead bodies of thirteen sailors lay strewn along the beach, while the ship itself was stranded high and dry, but practically unhurt, far above the water line. "The bow of the brig being elevated and close to the shore after the storm had ceased," wrote Mr. Newell, in describing the event long years after, "the idea was forced quickly upon my mind that those unfortunate sailors might have been saved if a line could have been thrown to them across the fatal chasm. It was only a short distance to the bar, and they could have been hauled ashore in their small boat through, or in, the surf.... I instituted experiments by throwing light lines with bows and arrows, by rockets, and by a shortened blunderbuss with ball and line. My idea culminated in complete success, however, by the use of a mortar, or a carronade, and a ball and line. Then I found, to my great delight, that it was an easy matter to carry out my desired purpose." Shortly after interesting himself in this matter Mr. Newell was elected to Congress, and there worked untiringly to persuade the national Government to lend its aid to the life-saving system of which he had conceived the fundamental idea. In 1848 he secured the first appropriation for a service to cover only the coast of New Jersey. Since then it has been continually extended until in 1901 the life-saving establishment embraced 270 stations on the Atlantic, Pacific, and lake coasts. The appropriation for the year was $1,640,000. For many years the service was a branch of the revenue marine, and when in 1878 it was made a separate bureau, the former chief of the revenue marine bureau was put at its head. The drill-masters for the crews are chosen from the revenue service, as also are the inspectors. [Illustration: LAUNCHING A LIFEBOAT THROUGH THE SURF] The methods of work in the life-saving service have long been familiar, partly because at each of the recurring expositions of late years, the service has been represented by a model station and a crew which went daily through all the operations of shooting a line over a stranded ship, bringing a sailor ashore in the breeches-buoy or the life-car, and drilling in the non-sinkable, self-righting surf-boat. Along the Atlantic coast the stations are so thickly distributed that practically the whole coast from Sandy Hook to Hatteras is continually under patrol by watchful sentries. Night and day, if the weather be stormy or threatening, patrolmen set out from each station, walking down the beach and keeping a sharp eye out for any vessel in the offing. Midway between the stations they meet, then each returns to his own post. In the bitter nights of winter, with an icy northeaster blowing and the flying spray, half-frozen, from the surf, driven by the gale until it cuts like a knife, the patrolman's task is no easy one. Indeed, there is perhaps no form of human endeavor about which there is more constant discomfort and positive danger than the life-saving service. It is the duty of the men to defy danger, to risk their lives whenever occasion demands, and the long records of the service show uncounted cases of magnificent heroism, and none of failure in the face of duty. A form of seafaring which still retains many of the characteristics of the time when Yankee sailors braved all seas and all weather in trig little wooden schooners, is the pilot service at American ports, and notably at New York. Even here, however, the inroads of steam are beginning to rob the life of its old-time picturesqueness, though as they tend to make it more certain that the pilot shall survive the perils of his calling, they are naturally welcomed. Under the law every foreign vessel entering an American port must take a pilot. If the captain thinks himself able to thread the channel himself, he may do so; but nevertheless he has to pay the regular pilot fee, and if the vessel is lost, he alone is responsible, and his owners will have trouble with the insurance companies. So the law is acquiesced in, perhaps not very cheerfully, and there have grown up at each American port men who from boyhood have studied the channels until they can thread them with the biggest steamship in the densest fog and never touch bottom. New York as the chief port has the largest body of pilots, and in the old days, before the triumph of steam, had a fleet of some thirty boats, trim little schooners of about eighty tons, rigged like yachts, and often outsailing the best of them. In those days the rivalry between the pilots for ships was keen and the pilot-boats would not infrequently cruise as far east as Sable Island to lay in wait for their game. That was in the era of sailing ships and infrequent steamers, and it was the period of the greatest mortality among the pilots; for staunch as their little boats were, and consummate as was their seamanship, they were not fitted for such long cruises. The marine underwriters in those days used to reckon on a loss of at least one pilot-boat annually. Since 1838 forty-six have been lost, thirteen going down with all on board. In late years, however, changes in the methods of pilotage have greatly decreased the risks run by the boats. When the great ocean liners began trying to make "record trips" between their European ports and Sandy Hook, their captains became unwilling to slow up five hundred miles from New York to take a pilot. They want to drive their vessels for every bit of speed that is in them, at least until reported from Fire Island. The slower boats, the ocean tramps, too, look with disfavor on shipping a pilot far out at sea, for it meant only an idler aboard, to be fed until the mouth of the harbor was reached. So the rivalry between the pilots gave way to cooperation. A steamer was built to serve as a station-boat, which keeps its position just outside New York harbor, and supplies pilots for the eight boats of the fleet that cruise over fixed beats a few score miles away. But this change in the system has not so greatly reduced the individual pilot's chance of giving up his life in tribute to Neptune, for the great peril of his calling--that involved in getting from his pilot-boat to the deck of the steamer he is to take in--remains unabated. [Illustration: THE EXCITING MOMENT IN THE PILOT'S TRADE] Professional pride no less than hope of profit makes the pilot take every imaginable risk to get to his ship. He draws no regular salary, but his fee is graduated by the draft of the vessel he pilots. When a ship is sighted coming into port, the pilot-boat makes for her. If she has a blue flag in her rigging, half way up, by day, she has a pilot aboard. At night, the pilot-boats show a blue flare, by way of query. If the ship makes no answer, she is known to be supplied, and passes without slowing up; but if in response to signal she indicates that she is in need of a pilot, the exciting moment in the pilot's trade is at hand. Perhaps the night is pitchy dark, with a gale blowing and a heavy sea on: but the pilot slips on his shore clothes and his derby hat--it is considered unprofessional to wear anything more nautical--and makes ready to board. The little schooner runs up to leeward of where the great liner, with her long rows of gleaming portholes, lies rolling heavily in the sea. Sharp up into the wind comes the midget, and almost before she has lost steerage way a yawl is slid over the side, the pilot and two oarsmen tumble into it, and make for the side of the steamship. To climb a rope-ladder up the perpendicular face of a precipice thirty feet high on an icy night is no easy task at best; but if your start is from a boat that is being tossed up and down on a rolling sea, if your precipice has a way of varying from a strict perpendicular to an overhanging cliff, and then in an instant thrusting out its base so that the climber's knees and knuckles come with a sharp bang against it, while the next moment he is dropped to his shoulders in icy sea-water, the difficulties of the task are naturally increased. The instant the pilot puts his feet on the ladder he must run up it for dear life if he would escape a ducking, and lucky he is if the upward roll does not hurl him against the side of the ship with force enough to break his hold and drop him overboard. Sometimes in the dead of winter the ship is iced from the water-line to the rail, and the task of boarding is about equivalent to climbing a rolling iceberg. But whatever the difficulty, the pilot meets and conquers it--or else dies trying. It is all in the day's work for them. Accidents come in the form of boats run down by careless steamers, pilots crushed against the side or thrown into the sea by the roll of the vessel, the foundering of the pilot-boat or its loss on a lee shore; but still the ranks of the pilots are kept full by the admission to a long apprenticeship of boys who are ready to enter this adventurous and arduous calling. Few occupations require a more assiduous preparation, and the members of but few callings are able to guard themselves so well against the danger of over-competition. Nevertheless the earnings of the pilots are not great. They come under the operation of the rule already noted, that the more dangerous a calling is, the less are its rewards. Three thousand dollars a year is a high income for a pilot sailing out of New York harbor, and even this is decreasing as the ships grow bigger and fewer. Nor can he be at all certain as to what his income will be at any time, for the element of luck enters into it almost as much as into gambling. For weeks he may catch only small ships, or, the worst ill-luck that can befall a pilot, he may get caught on an outbound ship and be carried away for a six weeks' voyage, during which time he can earn nothing. But the pilot, like the typical sailor of whatever grade, is inured to hard luck and accustomed to danger. Such are some of the safeguards which modern science and organization have provided for the sailor in pursuit of his always hazardous calling. Many others of course could be enumerated. The service of the weather bureau, by which warning of impending storms is given to mariners, is already of the highest utility. The new invention of wireless telegraphy, by which a ship at sea may call for aid from ashore, perhaps a thousand miles away, has great possibilities. Modern marine architecture is making steamships almost unsinkable, more quickly responsive to their helms, more seaworthy in every way. Perhaps with the perfection of the submarine boat, ships, instead of being tossed on the boisterous surface of the waves, may go straight to their destination through the placid depths of ocean. But whatever the future may bring, the history of the American sailor will always bear evidence that he did not wait for the perfection of safety devices to wrest from the ocean all that there was of value in the conquest; that no peril daunted him, nor was any sea, however distant, a stranger to his adventurous sail. Much has been said and written of the improvidence of the sailor, of his profligacy when in port, his childlike helplessness when in the hands of the landsharks who haunt the waterside streets, his blind reliance upon luck to get him out of difficulties, and his utter indifference to all precautionary provisions for the proverbial rainy day. Perhaps the sailor has been getting a shade the worse of it in the literature on this subject, for he, himself, is hardly literary in his habits, and has not been able to tell his own story. The world has heard much of the jolly Jack Tars who spend in a few days' revel in waterside dives the whole proceeds of a year's cruise; but it has heard less of the shrewd schemes which are devised for fleecing poor Jack, and applied by every one with whom he comes in contact, from the prosperous owner who pays him off in orders that can only be conveniently cashed at some outfitter's, who charges usurious rates for the accommodation, down to the tawdry drab who collects advance money on account of half a dozen sailor husbands. The seaman landing with money in his pocket in any large town is like the hapless fish in some of our much-angled streams. It is not enough to avoid the tempting bait displayed on every side. So thick are the hooks and snares that merely to swim along, intent on his own business, is likely to result sooner or later in his being impaled on some cruel barb. Not enough has been said, either, of the hundreds of American lads who shipped before the mast, made their voyages around Cape Horn and through all the Seven Seas, resisted the temptations of the sailors' quarters in a score of ports, kept themselves clean morally and physically, and came, in time, to the command and even the ownership of vessels. Among sailors, as in other callings, there are the idle and the industrious apprentices, and the lesson taught by Hogarth's famous pictures is as applicable to them that go down to the sea in ships as to the workers at the loom. It is doubtful, too, whether the sailor is either more gullible or more dissolute when in port than the cowboy when in town for a day's frolic, or the miner just in camp with a pocket full of dust, after months of solitude on his claim. Men are much of a sort, whatever their calling. After weeks of monotonous and wearing toil, they are apt to go to extremes when the time for relaxation comes. Men whose physical natures only are fully developed seek physical pleasures, and the sailor's life is not one to cultivate a taste for the quieter forms of recreation. But the romance that has always surrounded the sailor's character, his real improvidence, and his supposedly unique simplicity have, in some slight degree, redounded to his advantage. They have led people in all lands to form organizations for his aid, protection, and guidance, hospitals to care for him in illness, asylums and homes to provide for the days of his old age and decrepitude. Best known of all these charitable institutions for the good of Jack Tar is the Sailor's Snug Harbor, whose dignified buildings on Staten Island look out across the finest harbor in the world to where New York's tall buildings tower high above the maintop-gallant mast of the biggest ship ever built. This institution, founded just one hundred years ago by the will of Captain Robert R. Randall, himself an American sailor of the old type, who amassed his fortune trading to all the countries on the globe, now has an income of $400,000 annually, and cares for 900 old sailors, each of whom must have sailed for at least five years under the American flag. * * * * * A new chapter in the story of the American sailor is opening as this book is closed. The period of the decadence of the American merchant marine is clearly ended, and everything gives assurance that the first quarter of this new century will do as much toward re-establishing the United States flag on the high seas as the first quarter of the nineteenth century did toward first putting it there. As these words are being written, every shipyard in the United States is busy, and some have orders that will tax their capacity for three years to come. New yards are being planned and small establishments, designed only to build pleasure craft, are reaching out after greater things. The two biggest steamships ever planned are building near New London, where four years ago was no sign of shipyard or factory. The Great Lakes and the Pacific coast ring with the sound of the steel ship-builder's hammer. But will the American sailor share in the new life of the American ship? The question is no easy one to answer. Modern shipping methods offer little opportunity for ambitious lads to make their way from the forecastle to the owner's desk. The methods by which the Cleavelands, Crowninshields, Lows, and their fellows in the early shipping trade won their success, have no place in modern economy. As I write, the actual head of the greatest shipping concern the world has ever known, is a Wall Street banker, whose knowledge of the sea was gained from the deck of a private steam yacht or the cabin _de luxe_ of a fast liner, and who has applied to the shipping business only the same methods of stock manipulating that made him the greatest railroad director in the world before he thought to control the ocean as well. With steam, the sailor has become a mere deckhand; the captain a man of business and a disciplinarian, who may not know the names of the ropes on a real ship; the owner a corporation; the voyages mere trips to and fro between designated ports made with the regularity and the monotony of a sleeping-car's trips between Chicago and San Francisco. Until these conditions shall materially change, there is little likelihood that the sea will again attract restless, energetic, and ambitious young Americans. Men of the type that we have described in earlier chapters of this book do not adopt a life calling that will forever keep them in subordinate positions, subject to the whims and domination of an employing corporation. A genial satirist, writing of the sort of men who became First Lords of the Admiralty in England, said: "Mind your own business and never go to sea, And you'll come to be the ruler of the Queen's navee." Perhaps a like situation confronts the American merchant marine in its new development. 
40958	----	generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) THE SEAMAN'S FRIEND; CONTAINING A TREATISE ON PRACTICAL SEAMANSHIP, WITH PLATES, A DICTIONARY OF SEA TERMS; CUSTOMS AND USAGES OF THE MERCHANT SERVICE; LAWS RELATING TO THE PRACTICAL DUTIES OF MASTER AND MARINERS. BY R. H. DANA, JR., AUTHOR OF "TWO YEARS BEFORE THE MAST." FIFTH EDITION. BOSTON: PUBLISHED BY THOMAS GROOM. 1847. Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1841, BY R. H. DANA, JR., in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of Massachusetts. STEREOTYPED BY GEO. A. & J. CURTIS, NEW-ENGLAND TYPE AND STEREOTYPE FOUNDRY. Transcriber's Note: Minor typographical errors have been corrected without note. Irregularities and inconsistencies in the text have been retained as printed. The cover of this book was created by the transcriber and is hereby placed in the public domain. To all sea-faring persons, and especially to those commencing the sea life;--to owners and insurers of vessels;--to judges and practitioners in maritime law;--and to all persons interested in acquainting themselves with the laws, customs, and duties of Seamen;--this work is respectfully dedicated by THE AUTHOR. CONTENTS. PART I. A PLAIN TREATISE ON PRACTICAL SEAMANSHIP. CHAP. I.--GENERAL RULES AND OBSERVATIONS, pages 13--18. Construction of vessels, 13. Tonnage and carriage of merchant vessels, 14. Proportions of spars, 14. Placing the masts, 16. Size of anchors and cables, 16. Lead-lines, 17. Log-line, 17. Ballast and lading, 18. CHAP. II.--CUTTING AND FITTING STANDING RIGGING, 19--25. Cutting lower rigging, 19. Fitting lower rigging, 20. Cutting and fitting topmast rigging, 21. Jib, topgallant and royal rigging, 21. Ratling, 23. Standing rigging of the yards, 23. Breast-backstays, 25. CHAP. III.--FITTING AND REEVING RUNNING RIGGING, 26--29. To reeve a brace, 26. Fore, main, and cross-jack braces, 26. Fore and main topsail braces, 26. Mizzen topsail braces, 27. Fore, main, and mizzen topgallant and royal braces, 27. Halyards, 27. Spanker brails, 28. Tacks, sheets, and clewlines, 28. Reef-tackles, clew-garnets, buntlines, leechlines, bowlines, and slablines, 29. CHAP. IV.--TO RIG MASTS AND YARDS, 30--36. Taking in lower masts and bowsprit, 30. To rig a bowsprit, 31. To get the tops over the mast-heads, 31. To send up a topmast, 31. To get on a topmast cap, 32. To rig out a jib-boom, 32. To cross a lower yard, 33. To cross a topsail yard, 33. To send up a topgallant mast, 34. Long, short, and stump topgallant masts, 34. To rig out a flying jib-boom, 34. To cross a topgallant yard, 35. To cross a royal yard, 35. Skysail yards, 35. CHAP. V.--TO SEND DOWN MASTS AND YARDS, 36--38. To send down a royal yard, 36. To send down a topgallant yard, 37. To send down a topgallant mast, 37. To house a topgallant mast, 37. To send down a topmast, 37. To rig in a jib-boom, 38. CHAP. VI.--BENDING AND UNBENDING SAILS, 38--42. To bend a course, 38. To bend a topsail by the halyards, 39;--by the buntlines, 40. To bend topgallant sails and royals, 40. To bend a jib, 40. To bend a spanker, 41. To bend a spencer, 41. To unbend a course, 41. To unbend a topsail, 41. To unbend a topgallant sail or royal, 41. To unbend a jib, 41. To send down a topsail or course in a gale of wind, 42. To bend a topsail in a gale of wind, 42. To bend one topsail or course and send down the other at the same time, 42. CHAP. VII.--WORK UPON RIGGING. ROPE, KNOTS, SPLICES, BENDS, HITCHES, 43--53. Yarns, strands, 43. Kinds of rope--cable-laid, hawser-laid, 43. Spunyarn, 44. Worming, parcelling, and service, 44. Short splice, 44. Long splice, 45. Eye splice, 45. Flemish eye, 45. Artificial eye, 46. Cut splice, 46. Grommet, 46. Single and double walls, 46. Matthew Walker, 47. Single and double diamonds, 47. Spritsail sheet knot, 47. Stopper knot, 47. Shroud and French shroud knots, 48. Buoy-rope knot, 48. Turk's head, 48. Two half-hitches, clove hitch, overhand knot, and figure-of-eight, 48. Standing and running bowlines, and bowline upon a bight, 49. Square knot, 49. Timber hitch, rolling hitch, and blackwall hitch, 49. Cat's paw, 50. Sheet bend, fisherman's bend, carrick bend, and bowline bend, 50. Sheep-shank, 50. Selvagee, 50. Marlinspike hitch, 50. To pass a round seizing, 51. Throat seizing, 51. Stopping and nippering, 51. Pointing, 51. Snaking and grafting, 52. Foxes, Spanish foxes, sennit, French sennit, gaskets, 52. To bend a buoy-rope, 52. To pass a shear-lashing, 52. CHAP. VIII.--BLOCKS AND PURCHASES, 53--55. Parts of a block, made and morticed blocks, 53. Bull's-eye, dead-eye, sister-block, 53. Snatch-block, tail-blocks, 54. Tackles--whip, gun-tackle, luff-tackle, luff-upon-luff, runner-tackle, watch-tackle, tail-tackle, and burtons, 54. CHAP. IX.--MAKING AND TAKING IN SAIL, 55--67. To loose a sail, 55. To set a course, 55. To set a topsail, 56. To set a topgallant sail or royal, 56. To set a skysail, 56. To set a jib, flying jib, or fore topmast staysail, 56. To set a spanker, 57. To set a spencer, 57. To take in a course, 57. To take in a topsail, 57. To take in a topgallant sail or royal, 58. To take in a skysail, 58. To take in a jib, 58. To take in a spanker, 58. To furl a royal, 59. To furl a topgallant sail, 60. To furl a topsail or course, 60. To furl a jib, 60. To stow a jib in cloth, 61. To reef a topsail, 61. To reef a course, 62. To turn out reefs, 63. To set a topgallant studdingsail, 63. To take in a topgallant studdingsail, 64. To set a topmast studdingsail, 65. To take in a topmast studdingsail, 66. To set a lower studdingsail, 66. To take in a lower studdingsail, 67. CHAP. X.--GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF WORKING A SHIP, 68--71. Action of the water upon the rudder; headway, sternway, 68. Action of the wind upon the sails; head sails, after sails, 69. Centre of gravity or rotation, 70. Turning a ship to or from the wind, 70. CHAP. XI.--TACKING, WEARING, BOXING, &C., 71--77. To tack a ship, 71. To tack without fore-reaching, 73. Tacking against a heavy head sea, 73. Tacking by hauling off all, 73. To trim the yards when close-hauled, 73. Missing stays, 74. Wearing, 74. To wear under courses, under a mainsail, under bare poles, 75. Box-hauling, 75. Short-round, 76. Club-hauling, 76. Drifting in a tide way, 76. Backing and filling in a tide-way, 77. Clubbing in a tide-way, 77. CHAP. XII.--GALES OF WIND, LYING-TO, GETTING ABACK, BY THE LEE, &C., 78--81. Lying-to, 78. Scudding, 79. To heave-to after scudding, 79. Taken aback, 79. Chappelling, 80. Broaching-to, 80. Brought by the lee, 80. CHAP. XIII.--ACCIDENTS, 81--84. On beam-ends, 81. Losing a rudder, 82. A squall, 83. A man overboard, 83. Collision, 84. CHAP. XIV.--HEAVING-TO BY COUNTER-BRACING, SPEAKING, SOUNDING, HEAVING THE LOG, 84--87. Counter-bracing, 84. Speaking, 85. Sounding, 85. Heaving the log, 86. CHAP. XV.--COMING TO ANCHOR, 87--90. Getting ready for port, 87. Mooring, 88. A flying moor, 89. Clearing hawse, 89. To anchor with a slip-rope, 89. To slip a cable, 90. Coming-to at a slipped cable, 90. CHAP. XVI.--GETTING UNDER WAY, 91--95. Unmoor, 91. To get under way from a single anchor, 91. To cat and fish an anchor, 92. To get under way with the wind blowing directly out and riding head to it, 92. To get under way, riding head to the wind, with a rock or shoal close astern, 93. To get under way riding head to wind and tide, and to stand out close-hauled, 93. To get under way wind-rode, with a weather tide, 94. To get under way tide-rode, casting to windward, 94. To get under way tide-rode, wearing round, 94. A DICTIONARY OF SEA TERMS, 96--130. PART II. CUSTOMS AND USAGES OF THE MERCHANT SERVICE. CHAP. I.--THE MASTER, 131--138. Beginning of the voyage, 131. Shipping the crew, 132. Outfit, provisions, 132. Watches, 133. Navigation, 134. Log-book, observations, 134. Working ship, 135. Day's work, 136. Discipline, 137. CHAP. II.--THE CHIEF MATE, 138--146. Care of rigging and ship's furniture, 138. Day's work, 139. Working ship, 139. Getting under way, 139. Coming to anchor, 140. Reefing and furling, 140. Duties in port, account of cargo, stowage, 141. Station, watch, and all-hands duties, 142. Log-book, navigation, 145. CHAP. III.--SECOND AND THIRD MATES, 146--153. Second Mate.--Navigation, 146. Station; watch duties, 147. Day's work, 147, 149. Working ship, 148, 150. Reefing, furling, and duties aloft, 148. Care of ship's furniture, 151. Stores, 151. Duties in port, 152. Third Mate, 152, 153. CHAP. IV.--CARPENTER, COOK, STEWARD, &C., 153--158. Carpenter.--Working ship, 153. Seaman's work, helm, duty aloft, station, 154. Work at his trade, 154. Berth and mess, 154. Standing watch, 154. Sailmaker 155. Steward.--Duty in passenger-ships, 156. In other vessels, 156. Relation to master and mate; duty aloft and about decks; working ship, 156. Cook.--Berth, watch and all-hands duty; care of galley; duty aloft, 157. Idlers, 157. CHAP V.--ABLE SEAMEN, 158--163. Grades, 158. Rating, 158. Requisites of an able seaman, 159. Hand, reef, and steer, 159. Work upon rigging, 160. Sailmaking, 160. Day's work, 160. Working ship; reefing; furling, 161. Watch duty, 162. Coasters and small vessels, 162. CHAP. VI.--ORDINARY SEAMEN, 163--165. Requisites, 163. Hand, reef, and steer; loose, furl, and set sails; reeve rigging, 163. Work upon rigging, 164. Watch duty, 164. CHAP. VII.--BOYS, 165--167. Requisites, wages, 165. Day's work; working ship; duties aloft and about decks, 166. CHAP. VIII.--MISCELLANEOUS, 167--174. Watches, 167. Calling the watch, 168. Bells, 169. Helm, 170. Answering, 171, (at helm, 170.) Discipline, 172. Stations, 173. Food, sleep, &c., 173. PART III. LAWS RELATING TO THE PRACTICAL DUTIES OF MASTER AND MARINERS. CHAP. I.--THE VESSEL, pages 175--179. Title, 175. Registry, enrolment and license, 175. Certificate of registry or enrolment, 177. Passport, 177. Sea letter, list of crew, bill of health, clearance, manifest, invoice, bill of lading, charter-party, log-book, list of passengers and crew, list of sea-stores, 178. Medicine-chest, 178. National character of crew, 178. Provisions, 178. Passengers, 179. CHAP. II.--MASTER'S RELATION TO VESSEL AND CARGO, 179--187. Revenue duties and obligations, 179. List of crew, 179. Certified copy, 180. Certified copy of shipping articles, 180. Sea-letter, passport, list of passengers, manifest, sea-stores, 180, 181. Unloading, 180, 181. Post-office, 181. Forfeitures, 180, 181, 182. Report, 182. Coasting license, 182. Power to sell and pledge, 182. Keeping and delivering cargo, 185. Deviation, 185. Collision, 186. Pilot, 187. Wages and advances, 187. CHAP. III.--MASTER'S RELATION TO PASSENGERS AND OFFICERS, 187, 188. Treatment of passengers, 187. Removal of officers, 188. CHAP. IV.--MASTER'S RELATION TO THE CREW, 189--195. Shipment, 189. Shipping articles, 189. Discharge, 190. Imprisonment, 191. Punishment, 192. Power of consuls as to punishment, 192, 193, 194. CHAP. V.--PASSENGERS, 195, 196. Provisions, 195. Treatment, 195. Passage-money, 196. Deportment, 196. Services, 196. CHAP. VI.--MATES AND SUBORDINATES, 197--201. Mates included in 'crew,' 197. Removal, 197. Succession, 198. Log-book; wages; sickness, 198. Punishment, 199. Subordinates, 200. Pilots, 200. CHAP. VII.--SEAMEN. SHIPPING CONTRACT, 201--203. Shipping contract, 201. Erasures and interlineations, 202. Unusual stipulations, 202. Violation of contract, 202. CHAP. VIII.--SEAMEN--CONTINUED, 204--206. Rendering on board, 204. Refusal to proceed, 204. Desertion or absence during the voyage, 205. Discharge, 206. CHAP. IX.--SEAMEN--CONTINUED, 207--210. Provisions, 207. Sickness, medicine-chest, 208. Hospital money, 209. Relief in foreign ports, 209. Protection, 210. CHAP. X.--SEAMEN--CONTINUED, 210--214. Punishment, 210. Revolt and mutiny, 211. Embezzlement, 213. Piracy, 214. CHAP. XI.--SEAMEN'S WAGES, 214--220. Wages affected by desertion or absence, 214;--by misconduct, 216;--by imprisonment, 217;--by capture, 218;--by loss of vessel or interruption of voyage, 218. Wages on an illegal voyage, 220. CHAP. XII.--SEAMEN--CONCLUDED, 220--223. Recovery of wages, 220. Remedies, 221. Time for commencing suits, 222. Interest on wages, 222. Salvage, 222. [Illustration: Plate I.] PLATE I. THE SPARS AND RIGGING OF A SHIP. INDEX OF REFERENCES. 1 Head. 2 Head-boards. 3 Stem. 4 Bows. 5 Forecastle. 6 Waist. 7 Quarter-deck. 8 Gangway. 9 Counter. 10 Stern. 11 Tafferel. 12 Fore chains. 13 Main chains. 14 Mizzen chains. 15 Bowsprit. 16 Jib-boom. 17 Flying jib-boom. 18 Spritsail yard. 19 Martingale. 20 Bowsprit cap. 21 Foremast. 22 Fore topmast. 23 Fore topgallant mast. 24 Fore royal mast. 25 Fore skysail mast. 26 Main mast. 27 Main topmast. 28 Main topgallant mast. 29 Main royal mast. 30 Main skysail mast. 31 Mizzen mast. 32 Mizzen topmast. 33 Mizzen topgallant mast. 34 Mizzen royal mast. 35 Mizzen skysail mast. 36 Fore spencer gaff. 37 Main spencer gaff. 38 Spanker gaff. 39 Spanker boom. 40 Fore top. 41 Foremast cap. 42 Fore topmast cross-trees. 43 Main top. 44 Mainmast cap. 45 Main topmast cross-trees. 46 Mizzen top. 47 Mizzenmast cap. 48 Mizzen topmast cross-trees. 49 Fore yard. 50 Fore topsail yard. 51 Fore topgallant yard. 52 Fore royal yard. 53 Main yard. 54 Main topsail yard. 55 Main topgallant yard. 56 Main royal yard. 57 Cross-jack yard. 58 Mizzen topsail yard. 59 Mizzen topgallant yard. 60 Mizzen royal yard. 61 Fore truck. 62 Main truck. 63 Mizzen truck. 64 Fore stay. 65 Fore topmast stay. 66 Jib stay. 67 Fore topgallant stay. 68 Flying-jib stay. 69 Fore royal stay. 70 Fore skysail stay. 71 Jib guys. 72 Flying-jib guys. 73 Fore lifts. 74 Fore braces. 75 Fore topsail lifts. 76 Fore topsail braces. 77 Fore topgallant lifts. 78 Fore topgallant braces. 79 Fore royal lifts. 80 Fore royal braces. 81 Fore rigging. 82 Fore topmast rigging. 83 Fore topgallant shrouds. 84 Fore topmast backstays. 85 Fore topgallant backstays. 86 Fore royal backstays. 87 Main stay. 88 Main topmast stay. 89 Main topgallant stay. 90 Main royal stay. 91 Main lifts. 92 Main braces. 93 Main topsail lifts. 94 Main topsail braces. 95 Main topgallant lifts. 96 Main topgallant braces. 97 Main royal lifts. 98 Main royal braces. 99 Main rigging. 100 Main topmast rigging. 101 Main topgallant rigging. 102 Main topmast backstays. 103 Main topgallant backstays. 104 Main royal backstays. 105 Cross-jack lifts. 106 Cross-jack braces. 107 Mizzen topsail lifts. 108 Mizzen topsail braces. 109 Mizzen topgallant lifts. 110 Mizzen topgal't braces. 111 Mizzen royal lifts. 112 Mizzen royal braces. 113 Mizzen stay. 114 Mizzen topmast stay. 115 Mizzen topgallant stay. 116 Mizzen royal stay. 117 Mizzen skysail stay. 118 Mizzen rigging. 119 Mizzen topmast rigging. 120 Mizzen topgal. shrouds. 121 Mizzen topmast backstays. 122 Mizzen topgal'nt backstays. 123 Mizzen royal backstays. 124 Fore spencer vangs. 125 Main spencer vangs. 126 Spanker vangs. 127 Ensign halyards. 128 Spanker peak halyards. 129 Foot-rope to fore yard. 130 Foot-rope to main yard. 131 Foot-rope to cross-jack yard. [Illustration: Plate II.] PLATE II. A SHIP'S SAILS. INDEX OF REFERENCES. 1 Fore topmast staysail. 2 Jib. 3 Flying jib. 4 Fore spencer. 5 Main spencer. 6 Spanker. 7 Foresail. 8 Fore topsail. 9 Fore topgallant sail. 10 Fore royal. 11 Fore skysail. 12 Mainsail. 13 Main topsail. 14 Main topgallant sail. 15 Main royal. 16 Main skysail. 17 Mizzen topsail. 18 Mizzen topgallant sail. 19 Mizzen royal. 20 Mizzen skysail. 21 Lower studdingsail. 21a Lee ditto. 22 Fore topmast studdingsail. 22a Lee ditto. 23 Fore topgallant studdingsail. 23a Lee ditto. 24 Fore royal studdingsail. 24a Lee ditto. 25 Main topmast studdingsail. 25a Lee ditto. 26 Main topgallant studdingsail. 26a Lee ditto. 27 Main royal studdingsail. 27a Lee ditto. [Illustration: Plate III.] PLATE III. THE FRAME OF A SHIP. INDEX OF REFERENCES. A. THE OUTSIDE. 1 Upper stem-piece. 2 Lower stem-piece. 3 Gripe. 4 Forward keel-piece. 5 Middle keel-piece. 6 After keel-piece. 7 False keel. 8 Stern knee. 9 Stern-post. 10 Rudder. 11 Bilge streaks. 12 First streak under the wales. 13 Apron. 14 Lower apron. 15 Fore frame. 16 After frame. 17 Wales. 18 Waist. 19 Plank-shear. 20 Timber-heads. 21 Stanchions. 22 Rail. 23 Knight-heads. 24 Cathead. 25 Fashion timbers. 26 Transoms. 27 Quarter pieces. B. THE INSIDE OF THE STERN. 1 Keelson. 2 Pointers. 3 Chock. 4 Transoms. 5 Half transoms. 6 Main transom. 7 Quarter timbers. 8 Transom knees. 9 Horn timbers. 10 Counter-timber knee. 11 Stern-post. 12 Rudder-head. 13 Counter timbers. 14 Upper-deck clamp. C. THE INSIDE OF THE BOWS. 1 Keelson. 2 Pointers. 3 Step for the mast. 4 Breast-hook. 5 Lower-deck breast-hook. 6 Forward beam. 7 Upper-deck clamp. 8 Knight-heads. 9 Hawse timbers. 10 Bow timbers. 11 Apron of the stem. D. THE TIMBERS. 1 Keelson. 2 Floor timbers. 3 Naval timbers or ground futtocks. 4 Lower futtocks. 5 Middle futtocks. 6 Upper futtocks. 7 Top timbers. 8 Half timbers, or half top-timbers. PLATE IV. EXPLANATIONS. SHIP.--A ship is square-rigged throughout; that is, she has tops, and carries square sails on all three of her masts. BARK.--A bark is square-rigged at her fore and main masts, and differs from a ship in having no top, and carrying only fore-and-aft sails at her mizzenmast. BRIG.--A full-rigged brig is square-rigged at both her masts. HERMAPHRODITE BRIG.--An hermaphrodite brig is square-rigged at her foremast; but has no top, and only fore-and-aft sails at her main mast. TOPSAIL SCHOONER.--A topsail schooner has no tops at her foremast, and is fore-and-aft rigged at her mainmast. She differs from an hermaphrodite brig in that she is not properly square-rigged at her foremast, having no top, and carrying a fore-and-aft foresail, in stead of a square foresail and a spencer. FORE-AND-AFT SCHOONER.--A fore-and-aft schooner is fore-and-aft rigged throughout, differing from a topsail schooner in that the latter carries small square sails aloft at the fore. SLOOP.--A sloop has one mast, fore-and-aft rigged. HERMAPHRODITE BRIGS sometimes carry small square sails aloft at the main; in which case they are called BRIGANTINES, and differ from a FULL-RIGGED BRIG in that they have no top at the mainmast, and carry a fore-and-aft mainsail instead of a square mainsail and trysail. Some TOPSAIL SCHOONERS carry small square sails aloft at the main as well as the fore; being in other respects fore-and-aft rigged. They are then called MAIN TOPSAIL SCHOONERS. [Illustration: Plate IV. Ship Bark Full-rigged Brig Hermaphrodite Brig Top-sail Schooner Fore & aft Schooner Sloop] PART I. CHAPTER I. GENERAL RULES AND OBSERVATIONS. Construction of vessels. Tonnage and carriage of merchant vessels. Proportions of the spars. Placing the masts. Size of anchors and cables. Lead-lines. Log-line. Ballast and lading. CONSTRUCTION OF VESSELS.--As merchant vessels of the larger class are now built in the United States, the extreme length of deck, from the after part of the stern-post to the fore part of the stem, is from four and a half to four and three fourths that of the beam, at its widest part. The Damascus, of 700 tons' measurement, built at Boston in 1839, and considered a fair specimen of our best freighting vessels, had 150 feet from stem to stern-post, and 32 feet 6 inches extreme breadth. The Rajah, of 530 tons, built at Boston in 1837, had 140 feet length, and 30 feet beam;--being each in length about four and six tenths their beam. A great contrast to this proportion is exhibited in the most recent statistics (1841) of vessels of the same tonnage in the English navy; as the following table will show. Tons. Deck. Beam. Proportion. {Dido 734 120 ft. 37 ft. 6 in. 3.20 English {Pilot 492 105 33 6 3.13 Navy. {Alert 358 95 30 4 3.16 American {Damascus 694 150 32 6 4.60 Merchantmen. {Rajah 531 140 30 0 4.66 These may, perhaps, be considered the extremes of ship-building; and between these there is every grade of difference. TONNAGE AND CARRIAGE OF MERCHANT VESSELS.--The amount a vessel will carry in proportion to her tonnage, depends upon whether, and to what extent, she is full or sharp built. A sharp-built vessel of 300 tons' measurement, will carry just about her tonnage of measurement goods. A sharp-built vessel of 200 tons or under would probably carry less than her measurement; if over 400 tons, she would increase gradually to fifty per cent. above her measurement. A sharp-built vessel of 600 tons, is generally rated at 900 tons carriage. A full-built vessel of 300 tons, after the latest model of American freighting vessels, will carry 525 tons, or seventy-five per cent. above her measurement; and one of 500 tons would carry full double her measurement. The following table may give a pretty fair average. TONS OF MEASUREMENT GOODS. Tonnage. Full built. Sharp built. 300 (.75) 525 (.00) 300 400 (.80) 725 (.40) 560 500 (1.00) 1000 (.50) 750 600 (1.33) 1400 (.50) 900 PROPORTIONS OF SPARS.--There is no particular rule for sparring merchant vessels; some being light, and others heavy sparred; and some having long topmasts and short lower masts, and others the reverse. The prevailing custom now is, to spar them lightly; the main yard being a little less than double the beam; and the others proportioned by the main. Most merchant vessels now have the yards at the fore and main of the same size, for convenience in shifting sails; so that the same topsail may be bent on either yard. The following table, taken from the "Seamen's Manual," will show the average proportions of the spars of merchant vessels of the largest class, as formerly built. Main-mast, two and a half times the ship's beam. Fore-mast, eight ninths of the main-mast. Mizzen-mast, five sixths of the main-mast. Bowsprit, two thirds of the main-mast. Topmasts, three fifths of the lower masts. Topgallant masts, one half the length of their topmasts. Jib-boom, the length of the bowsprit. Main-yard, twice the beam. Fore-yard, seven eighths of the main-yard. Maintopsail-yard, two thirds of the main-yard. Foretopsail-yard, two thirds of the fore-yard. Crossjack-yard, the length of the maintopsail-yard. Topgallant-yards, two thirds of the topsail-yards. Mizzentopsail-yard, the length of the maintopgallant-yard. Royal-yards, two thirds of the topgallant-yards. Spritsail-yard, five sixths of the foretopsail-yard. Spanker-boom, the length of the maintopsail-yard. Spanker-gaff, two thirds of the boom. For the thickness of the spars, the same book allows for the lower masts one inch and a quarter diameter at the partners, for every three feet of length; and nine tenths in the middle and two thirds under the hounds, for every inch at the partners. For the yards, one inch at the slings, and half an inch at the yard-arms, within the squares, for every four feet of the length. For the breadth of the maintop, one half of the beam, and of the foretop, eight ninths of the maintop. The following are the proportions of the spars of the ship Damascus, before mentioned, built in 1839. Main-mast 74 ft. Head 11 ft. 6 in. Size 26 in. Fore-mast 70 ft. Head 11 ft. 6 in. Size 25 in. Mizzen-mast 68 ft. Head 8 ft. 6 in. Size 18 in. Main and fore topmasts 41 ft. Head 6 ft. 6 in. Size 14-1/2 in. Mizzen topmast 32 ft. Head 5 ft. Size 9-1/2 in. Main topgallant-mast 23 ft. (15 ft. with 2 feet head.) Size 9-1/2 in. Fore topgallant-mast 21 ft. 14 ft. with 2 feet head.) Size 9-1/2 in. Mizzen topgallant-mast 17 ft. 11 ft. with 18 in. with 2 feet head.) Main and fore yards 60 ft. yard-arms 2 ft. 6 in. Main and fore topsail yards 48 ft. yard-arms 3 ft. 6 in. Main topgallant yard 37 ft. yard-arms 2 ft. Fore topgallant yard 34 ft. yard-arms 2 ft. Main royal yard 27 ft. yard-arms 1 ft. 6 in. Fore royal yard 24 ft. yard-arms 1 ft. 6 in. Main skysail yard 17 ft. Fore skysail yard 15 ft. Cross-jack yard 44 ft. yard-arms 2 ft. Mizzen topsail yard 35 ft. yard-arms 2 ft. 9 in. Mizzen topgallant yard 25 ft. yard-arms 1 ft. 6 in. Mizzen royal yard 16 ft. Mizzen skysail yard 10 ft. Bowsprit, out-board 27 ft. Size 26 in. Jib-boom 42 ft. Head 3 ft. Size 14-1/2 in. Flying jib-boom 40 ft. Head 3 ft. 6 in. Main pole 12 ft., 10 above royal-mast, 5 in. in cap. Fore pole 11 ft., 9 above royal-mast, 4-1/2 in. in cap. Mizzen pole 9 ft., 7 above royal-mast Spanker-boom 40 ft. Spanker-gaff 30 ft. Swinging-booms 40 ft. Topmast studdingsail-booms 34 ft. Topgallant studdingsail-booms 27 ft., yards for do. 17 ft. PLACING THE MASTS.--For a full-built ship, take the ship's extreme length and divide it into sevenths. Place the foremast one seventh of this length from the stem; the mainmast three sevenths from the foremast, and the mizzenmast two sevenths from the mainmast. If a vessel is sharp-built, and her stem and stern-post rake, her foremast should be further aft, and her mizzenmast further forward, than the rule of sevenths would give. A common rule for placing the foremast, is to deduct three fifths of a ship's beam from her length, for the curvature of the keel forward, which is called the _keel-stroke_, and place the mast next abaft the keel-stroke. SIZE OF ANCHORS AND CABLES.--Various rules have been adopted for the weight of a ship's anchors. A vessel of 100 tons will generally have a best bower of 6 cwt. and a small bower of 5 cwt.; the weight of both being eleven pounds to a ton of the vessel. As a vessel increases in size, the proportion diminishes. A vessel of 700 tons will usually carry a best bower of 27 cwt. and a small bower of 24 cwt.; the weight of both being seven and a half pounds to a ton of the vessel. The _stream_ should be a little more than one third the weight of the best bower. The anchor-stock should be the length of the shank; its diameter should be half that of the ring, and its thickness one inch at the middle and half an inch at each end for every foot in length. Chain cables are usually ninety fathoms in length, for large-sized vessels, and sixty for small vessels, as schooners and sloops. The regulation of the United States Navy for chain cables, is one inch and a half for a sloop of war, and one and a quarter for brigs and schooners. In the merchant service, a ship of 400 tons would probably have a best bower cable of one and five sixths, and a working bower of one and a quarter inches. A ship of 700 tons would have a best bower of one and five eighths, and a working bower of one and a half inches. Chain cables have a shackle at every fifteen fathoms, and one swivel at the first shackle. Some have two swivels; and formerly they were made with a swivel between each shackle. LEAD-LINES.--The _hand-lead_ weighs usually seven pounds, and the hand-line is from twenty to thirty fathoms in length. The _deep-sea-lead_ (pro. dipsey) weighs from fourteen to eighteen or twenty pounds; and the deep-sea-line is from ninety to one hundred and ten fathoms. The proper way to mark a hand-line is, black leather at 2 and 3 fathoms; white rag at 5; red rag at 7; wide strip of leather, with a hole in it, at 10; and 13, 15 and 17 marked like 3, 5 and 7; two knots at 20; 3 at 30; and 4 at 40; with single pieces of cord at 25 and 35. The deep-sea-line has one knot at 20 fathoms, and an additional knot at every 10 fathoms, with single knots at each intermediate 5 fathoms. It sometimes has a strip of leather at 10 fathoms, and from 3 to 10 is marked like the hand-line. LOG-LINE.--The rate of a ship's sailing is measured by a log-line and a half-minute glass. The line is marked with a knot for each mile; the real distance between each knot being, however, 1/120 of a mile, since a half-minute is 1/120 of an hour. A knot being thus the same portion of a mile that a half-minute is of an hour, the number of knots carried off while the glass is running out will show the number of miles the vessel goes in an hour. Many glasses, however, are made for twenty-eight seconds, which, of course, reduces the number of feet for a knot to forty-seven and six tenths. But as the line is liable to stretch and the glass to be affected by the weather, in order to avoid all danger of a vessel's overrunning her reckoning, and to be on the safe side, it is recommended to mark forty-five feet to a knot for a twenty-eight second glass. About ten fathoms is left unmarked next the chip, called _stray-line_. The object of this is that the chip may get out of the eddy under the stern, before the measuring begins. The end of the stray-line is marked by a white rag, and the first knot is forty-five or forty-seven feet from the rag. A single piece of cord or twine is put into the line for the first knot, one knot for the second, two for the fourth, three for the sixth, and so on, a single piece of cord being put in at the intermediate knots. BALLAST AND LADING.--A ship's behavior, as the phrase is, depends as much upon the manner in which she is loaded and ballasted, as upon her model. It is said that a vessel may be prevented from rolling heavily, if, when the ballast is iron, it is stowed up to the floor-heads; because this will bring the ship back, after she has inclined, with less violence, and will act upon a point but little distant from the centre of gravity, and not interfere with her stiff carrying of sail. The cargo should be stowed with the weightier materials as near as possible to the centre of gravity, and high or low, according to the build of the vessel. If the vessel is full and low built, the heavy articles should be stowed high up, that the centre of gravity may be raised and the vessel kept from rolling too much, and from being too laborsome. But a narrow, high-built vessel should have the heavy articles stowed low and near the keelson, which will tend to keep her from being crank, and enable her to carry sail to more advantage. CHAPTER II. CUTTING AND FITTING STANDING RIGGING. Measuring and cutting lower rigging and lower fore-and-aft stays. Fitting the same. Measuring, cutting, and fitting topmast rigging, stays, and backstays. Jib, topgallant, and royal stays. Rattling down rigging. Cutting and fitting lifts, foot-ropes, brace-block straps, and pennants. Breast-backstays. CUTTING LOWER RIGGING.--Draw a line from the side of the partners abreast of the mast, on the deck, parallel to the channels, and to extend as far aft as they do. On this line mark the places of each dead-eye, corresponding to their places against the channels. Send a line up to the mast-head, and fasten it to the mast by a nail above the bibbs, in a range with the centre of the mast, and opposite to the side the channel line is drawn upon. Then take the bight of the line around the forward part of the mast, and fasten it to the mast by a nail, opposite the first nail, so that the part between the nails will be half the circumference of the mast-head; then take the line down to the mark on the channel line for the forward dead-eye, and mark it as before; and so on, until you have got the distance between the mast and each mark on the channel line. Now cast off the line from the mast-head, and the distance between the end of the line and each mark will give you the length of each shroud from the lower part of the mast-head. And, to make an allowance for one pair of shrouds overlaying another, you may increase the length of the pair put on second, that is, the larboard forward ones, by twice the diameter of the rigging; the third pair by four times; and so on. The size of the lower rigging should be as much as eight and a half inches for vessels of seven or eight hundred tons, and from seven and a half to eight for smaller vessels, over three hundred tons. For the length of the fore, main, and mizzen stays and spring-stays, take the distance from the after part of the mast-head to their hearts, or to the place where they are set up, adding once the length of the mast-head for the collar. The standing stays should be once and half the circumference of the shrouds. FITTING LOWER RIGGING.--Get it on a stretch, and divide each pair of shrouds into thirds, and mark the centre of the middle third. Tar, worm, parcel and serve the middle third. Parcel _with_ the lay of the rope, working toward the centre; and serve _against_ the lay, beginning where you left off parcelling. Serve as taut as possible. In some vessels the outer thirds of the swifters are served; but matting and battens are neater and more generally used. Formerly the middle third was parcelled over the service, below the wake of the futtock staff. Mark an eye at the centre of the middle third, by seizing the parts together with a round seizing. The eye of the pair of shrouds that goes on first should be once and a quarter the circumference of the mast-head; and make each of the others in succession the breadth of a seizing larger than the one below it. Parcel the score of the dead-eye, and heave the shroud taut round it, turning in _with_ the sun, if right-hand-laid rope, and _against_ the sun, if hawser-laid; then pass the throat seizing with nine or ten turns, the outer turns being slacker than the middle ones. Pass the quarter seizings half way to the end, and then the end seizings, and cap the shroud, well tarred under the cap. Make a Matthew Walker knot in one end of the lanyard, reeve the other end _out_ through the dead-eye of the shroud, beginning at the side of the dead-eye upon which the end of the shroud comes, and _in_ through the dead-eye in the channels, so that the hauling part of the lanyard may come in-board and on the same side with the standing part of the shroud. If the shroud is right-hand-laid rope, the standing part of the shroud will be aft on the starboard, and forward on the larboard side; and the reverse, if hawser-laid. The neatest way of setting up the lower fore-and-aft stays, is by reeving them _down_ through a bull's eye, with tarred parcelling upon the thimble, and setting them up on their ends, with three or four seizings. The collar of the stay is the length of the mast-head, and is leathered over the service. The service should go beyond the wake of the foot of the topsail, and the main-stay should be served in the wake of the foremast. The main and spring stays usually pass on different sides of the foremast, and set up at the hawse-pieces. The bolsters under the eyes of the rigging should always be covered with tarred parcelling, marled on. The starboard forward shroud goes on first; then the larboard; and so on. The fore stay and spring stay go over the shrouds; and the head stays always go over the backstays. CUTTING AND FITTING TOPMAST RIGGING.--For the forward shroud, measure from the hounds of the topmast down to the after part of the lower trestle-trees, and add to that length half the circumference of the mast-head at the hounds. The eye is once and a quarter the circumference of the mast-head. The topmast rigging in size should be three fifths of the lower rigging. For the topmast backstays, measure the distance from the hounds of the mast down to the centre of the deck, abreast of their dead-eyes in the channels, and add to this length one half the circumference of the mast-head. Add to the length of the larboard pair, which goes on last, twice the diameter of the rope. The size of the fore and main topmast backstays is generally one quarter less than that of the lower rigging; and that of the mizzen topmast backstays the same as that of the main topmast rigging. The size of the topmast stays should be once and a quarter that of the rigging. The topmast rigging is fitted in the same manner as the lower. The backstays should be leathered in the wake of the tops and lower yards. The breast-backstays are turned in upon blocks instead of dead-eyes, and set up with a luff purchase. The fore topmast stay sets up on the starboard, and the spring stay on the larboard side of the bowsprit. All the fore-and-aft stays are now set up on their ends, and should be leathered in their nips, as well as in their eyes. The main topmast stay goes through a heart or thimble at the foremast-head, or through a hole in the cap, and sets up on deck or in the top; and the mizzen topmast stay sets up at the mainmast-head, above the rigging. JIB, TOPGALLANT, AND ROYAL RIGGING.--The jib stay sets up on its end on the larboard side of the head, and is served ten feet from the boom, and its collar is leathered like that of the topmast stay. The gaub lines or back ropes go from the martingale in-board. The guys are fitted in pairs, rove through straps or snatches on the spritsail yard, and set up to eye-bolts inside of or abaft the cat-heads. The foot-ropes are three quarters the length of the whole boom, and go over the boom-end with a cut splice. Overhand knots or Turks-heads should be taken in them at equal distances, to prevent the men from slipping, when laying out upon them. The most usual method of fitting topgallant rigging in merchantmen, is to reeve it through holes in the horns of the cross-trees, then pass it between the topmast shrouds over the futtock staff, and set it up at an iron band round the topmast, just below the sheave-hole; or else down into the top, and set it up there. To get the length of the starboard forward shroud, measure from the topgallant mast-head to the heel of the topmast, and add one half the circumference of the topgallant mast-head. Its size should be about five sevenths of the topmast rigging. Each pair of shrouds should be served below the futtock staves. They are fitted like the topmast shrouds. The fore-and-aft stays of long topgallant masts go with eyes, and are served and leathered in the wake of the foot of the sails. The fore topgallant stay leads in on the starboard side of the bowsprit, and sets up to a bolt at the hawse-piece; the main leads through a chock on the after part of the fore topmast cross-trees, and sets up in the top; and the mizzen usually through a thimble on the main cap, and sets up on its end. The topgallant backstays set up on their end, or with lanyards in the channels; and for their length, measure from the mast-head to the centre of the deck, abreast the bolt in the channels. The royal shrouds, backstays, and fore-and-aft stays, are fitted like those of the topgallant masts, and bear the same proportion to them that the topgallant bear to the topmast. The fore royal stay reeves through the outer sheave-hole of the flying jib-boom, and comes in on the larboard side; the main through a thimble at the fore jack-cross-trees; and the mizzen through a thimble at the maintopmast cap. The flying jib-stay goes in on the starboard side, and sets up like the jib-stay. The gear of the flying jib-boom is fitted like that of the jib-boom. RATLING.--Swift the rigging well in, and lash handspikes or boat's oars outside at convenient distances, parallel with the shear-pole. Splice a small eye in the end of the ratlin, and seize it with yarns to the after shroud on the starboard side and to the forward on the larboard, so that the hitches may go _with_ the sun. Take a clove hitch round each shroud, hauling well taut, and seize the eye of the other end to the shroud. The ratlins of the lower rigging should be thirteen, and of the topmast rigging eleven inches apart, and all square with the shear-pole. STANDING RIGGING OF THE YARDS.--The first thing to go upon the lower yard-arm, next the shoulder, is the head-earing strap; the next, the foot-ropes; next, the brace-block; and lastly, the lift. The foot-ropes go with an eye over the yard-arm, are rove through thimbles in the end of the stirrups, (sometimes with Turks-heads, to prevent their slipping,) and are lashed to bolts or thimbles, but now usually to the iron trusses. The stirrups fit to staples in the yard, with an eye-splice. The lifts should be single, and fitted with an eye over the yard-arm, and lead through a single block at the mast-head, and set up by a gun or luff tackle purchase, with the double block hooked to a thimble or turned in at the end, and the lower block to an eye-bolt in the deck. Instead of brace-blocks on the fore and main yards, brace-pennants fitted over the yard-arm with an eye are neater. The latest and neatest style of rigging lower yards is to have a strong iron band with eyes and thimbles round each yard-arm, close to the shoulder; and then fit the lift, foot-rope, and brace-pennant, each to one of these eyes, with an eye-splice round the thimble or with a hook. The lower lifts now, for the most part, cross each other over a saddle upon the cap, instead of going through blocks. The inner ends of the foot-ropes to the topsail, topgallant and royal yards, cross each other at the slings; and on the topsail yard there are Flemish-horses, spliced round thimbles on the boom-iron, and the other end seized to the yard, crossing the foot-rope. A neater mode is to hook the outer end of the Flemish-horse, so that it may be unhooked and furled in with the sails when in port. Next to the foot-ropes go on the brace-blocks, and lastly, the lifts. The rigging to the topgallant and royal yards is fitted similarly to that upon the topsail, except that there is nothing over the yard-arms but foot-rope, brace and lift. The brace to the royal yard fits with an eye. The reef-tackle, studding-sail halyard, and other temporary blocks, are seized to the lower and topsail yard-arms by open straps, so that they may be removed without taking off the lift. The topgallant studding-sail halyard block is often hooked to the boom-iron, under the yard. The foot-ropes to the spanker-boom should be half the length of the boom, going over the end with a splice, covered with canvass, and coming in one third of the way to the jaws, and seized to the boom by a rose-seizing through an eye-splice. The next to go over the boom-end are the guys, which are fitted with a cut-splice covered with canvass, and have a single block turned in at their other ends. To these single blocks are luff or gun-tackle purchases, going to the main brace-bumpkin. Their length should be two fifths that of the boom. The topping-lifts are usually hooked into a band or spliced into bolts about one quarter the distance from the outer end of the boom, and reeve through single blocks under the top, with a double or single block at their lower ends. All the splices and seizings of the standing rigging should be covered with canvass, if possible, except in the channels and about the head, where they are too much exposed to the washing of water. A vessel looks much neater for having the ends of the rigging, where eyes are spliced, or where they are set up on their ends aloft or on deck, covered with canvass, and painted white or black, according to the place where they are. The lanyards and dead-eyes of the smaller rigging which sets up in the top may also be covered with canvass. The lanyards, dead-eyes, and turnings-in of the rigging in the channels, should always be protected by scotchmen when at sea, and the forward shroud should be matted or battened all the way up to the futtock staves. In some smaller merchantmen the lower rigging is not infrequently set up upon its end to bolts in the rail. This is very inconvenient on many accounts, especially as all the seizings have to be come up with, and the nip of the shroud altered, whenever it is at all necessary to set them taut. This soon defaces and wears out the ends; while, with dead-eyes, only the lanyards have to be come up with. Some vessels set up their lower rigging with dead-eyes upon the rail. This is convenient in setting them up in bad weather, but does not give so much spread as when set up in the channels, and presents a more complicated surface to the eye. If the rigging is fitted in this way, you must deduct the height of the rail above the deck from the measure before given for cutting it. BREAST-BACKSTAYS.--It is not usual, now, for merchant vessels to carry topmast breast-backstays. If they are carried, they are spread by out-riggers from the top. Topgallant and royal breast-backstays are used, and are of great assistance in sailing on the wind. There are various ways of rigging them out, of which the following is suggested as a neat and convenient one. Have a spar fitted for an out-rigger, about the size of one of the horns of the cross-trees, with three holes bored in it, two near to one end, and the third a little the other side of the middle. Place it upon the after horn of the cross-tree, with the last-mentioned hole over the hole in the end of the horn of the cross-tree, and let the after topgallant shroud reeve through it. Reeve the topgallant and royal breast-backstays through the outer holes, and set them up by a gun-tackle purchase, in the channels.[1] The inner end of the out-rigger should fit to a cleat, and be lashed to the cross-tree by a lanyard. When the breast-backstays are to be rigged in, cast off the lanyard, and let the out-rigger slue round the topgallant shroud for a pivot, the inner end going aft, and the outer end, with the backstays, resting against the forward shroud. One of these out-riggers should be fitted on each side, and all trouble of shifting over, and rigging out by purchase, will be avoided. [1] The royal breast-backstay may be used as the fall of the purchase. CHAPTER III. FITTING AND REEVING RUNNING RIGGING. Fore braces. Main braces. Cross-jack braces. Fore, main, and mizzen topsail braces. Fore, main, and mizzen topgallant and royal braces. Trusses. Topsail tyes and halyards. Topgallant and royal halyards. Peak and throat halyards. Spanker brails. Fore and main tacks and sheets. Topsail, topgallant and royal sheets and clewlines. Reef-tackles. Clew-garnets. Fore and main buntlines, leechlines, and slablines. Topsail clewlines and buntlines. Bowlines. To reeve a brace, begin on deck, and reeve to where the standing part is made fast. The _fore braces_ reeve _up_ through a block on the mainmast just below the rigging, _down_ or _in_ through the brace-block on the yard or at the end of the pennant, and the standing part is brought through the cheeks of the mast with a knot inside. The neatest way for reeving the _main brace_ is _out_ through a single block on the brace-bumpkin, _out_ through the brace-pennant-block, _in_ through an outer block on the bumpkin, and seized to the strap of the pennant. Another way is _out_ through the bumpkin block, _out_ or _down_ through the pennant block, and secure the end to the bumpkin or to the fashion-piece below. The _cross-jack braces_ reeve _up_ through blocks on the after shroud of the main rigging, _up_ through blocks on the yard, one third of the way in from the yard-arm, and are seized to a bolt in the mainmast, or to the after shroud again. The _fore topsail braces_ reeve _up_ through the blocks secured to the bibbs at the mainmast-head, _in_ through the span-block at the collar of the main stay, _up_ through the block on the yard, and are seized to the main topmast-head; or else _up_ through a block at the topmast-head, down through the brace-block on the yard, and are seized to the collar of the main stay. The last way is the best. The _main topsail braces_ are rove through span-blocks at the mizzen-mast, below the top, _up_ through the blocks on the yard, and are seized to the mizzen topmast-head; or else _up_ through a block at the mizzen-mast-head, _down_ through the block on the yard, and secured to the mizzen-mast. The first way is the best. The _mizzen topsail braces_ reeve _up_ through the leading blocks or fair-leaders on the main rigging, _up_ through blocks at the mainmast-head, or at the after part of the top, _up_ through the yard blocks, and are seized to the cap. The _fore_ and _main topgallant braces_ are rove _up_ through blocks under the topmast cross-trees, _in_ through span-blocks on the topmast stays, just below their collars, _up_ through the blocks on the yards, and the main are usually seized to the head of the mizzen topgallant mast, and the fore to the topmast stay, by the span-block. The _mizzen topgallant braces_ generally go single, through a block at the after part of the main top-mast cross-trees. The _royal braces_ go single: the _fore_, through a block at the main topgallant mast-head; the _main_, through one at the mizzen topgallant mast-head; and the _mizzen_, through a block at the after part of the main topmast cross-trees. HALYARDS.--The _lower yards_ are now hung by patent iron trusses, which allow the yard to be moved in any direction; topped up or braced. The _topsail yards_ have chain tyes, which are hooked to the slings of the yard, and rove through the sheave-hole at the mast-head. The other end of the tye hooks to a block. Through this block a chain runner leads, with its standing part hooked to an eye-bolt in the trestle-tree, and with the upper halyard-block hooked to its other end. The halyards should be a luff purchase, the fly-block being the double block, and the single block being hooked in the channels. Sometimes they are a gun-tackle purchase, with two large single blocks. The lower block of the mizzen topsail halyards is usually in the mizzen-top, the fall coming down on deck. The _fore_ and _mizzen topsail halyards_ come down to port, and the main to the starboard. The _topgallant halyards_ come down on opposite sides from the topsail halyards; though the fore and main usually come down by the side of the masts. The fore and main topgallant halyards sometimes hoist with a gun-tackle purchase, but the mizzen and all the royal halyards are single. The _throat and peak halyards_ of the spanker are fitted in the following manner. The outer peak halyard block is put on the gaff, one third of its length from the outer end, or a very little, if any, within the leech of the sail; and the inner one, two thirds in. The blocks are fitted round the gaff with grommet straps, and are kept in their places by cleats. The double block of the peak halyards is strapped to the bolt in the after part of the mizzen cap, and the halyards are rove _up_ through this, _in_ through the blocks on the gaff, the inner one first, the standing part made fast to the double block, and the fall coming on deck. The upper block of the throat halyards is secured under the cap, and the lower block is hooked to an eye-bolt on the jaws of the gaff. This is a two-fold tackle. THE SPANKER BRAILS.--The _peak brails_ reeve through single blocks on the gaff, two on each side, generally span-blocks, and then through the throat brail blocks, as leaders, to the deck. The _throat brails_ reeve through two triple blocks strapped to eye-bolts under the jaws of the gaff, one on each side, through the two other sheaves of which the peak brails lead. Each brail is a single rope, middled at the leech of the sail. TACKS, SHEETS, CLEWLINES, &C.--It is much more convenient to have the tack and sheet blocks of the courses fastened to the clews of the courses by hooks. Then they can be unhooked when the sail is furled, and, in light weather, a single rope with a hook, called a _lazy sheet_, can be used, instead of the heavy tacks and sheets with their blocks. This is also much more convenient in clewing up. The _main tack_ is rove _aft_ through the block in the waterways, _forward_ through the block on the sail, and the standing part hooks to the block on deck. The _fore tack_ goes through a block on the bumpkin. The _sheets_ of the courses have the after block hooked to an eye-bolt in the side, abaft the channels, and the forward one hooked to the clew of the sail, the running part reeving through a sheave-hole in the rail. The sheets of all the square sails but the courses run from the clew of the sail, through sheave-holes in the yard-arms, through the quarter blocks, down on deck. The _topsail sheets_ are chain, are clasped to the clews of the sail, and are fitted with a gun-tackle purchase at the foot of the mast. The _topgallant_ and _royal sheets_ are single. The _topsail_ and _topgallant clewlines_ reeve through the quarter-blocks. The _royal clewlines_ are single, and the topsail and topgallant are a gun-tackle purchase. The _reef-tackles_ of the topsails reeve _up_ through blocks on the lower rigging, or futtock shrouds, _down_ through the block on the yard, down the leech of the sail and through the block on the leech, and are made fast to the yard on their own parts, with a clinch, outside of everything. The _clew-garnets_ reeve _out_ through blocks under the quarters of the yard, then _up_ through blocks at the clew, and the standing part is made fast to the yard, to the block, or to a strap. The _buntlines_ of the courses reeve through double or triple blocks under the forward part of the top, down forward of the sail, sometimes through thimbles in the first reef-band, and are clinched to the foot of the sail. The _leechlines_ reeve through single blocks on the yard, and are clinched to the leech of the sail. The _slabline_ is a small rope rove through a block under the slings of the yard, and clinched to the foot of the sail. This is not much used in merchant vessels. The _topsail clewlines_ lead like the clew-garnets of the courses. The _topsail buntlines_ reeve forward through single blocks at the topmast-head, down through the thimbles of a lizard seized to the tye, just above the yard, and are clinched to the foot of the sail. The handiest way of reeving the _main bowline_ is to have a single rope with the standing part hooked near the foremast, and reeve it _out_ through a heart in the bridle. This will answer for both sides. The _fore bowline_ may be rove through a single block at the heel of the jib-boom and hooked to the bridle. The bowlines to the other sails are toggled to the bridles and lead forward. Many vessels now dispense with all the bowlines except to the courses. This saves trouble, makes a ship look neater, and, if the sails are well cut, they will set taut enough in the leach, without bowlines. CHAPTER IV. TO RIG MASTS AND YARDS. Rigging the shears. Taking in lower masts and bowsprit. To rig a bowsprit. Getting the tops over the mast-heads. To send up a top-mast. To get on a top-mast cap. To rig a jib-boom. To cross a lower yard. To cross a topgallant yard. To send up a topgallant mast. Long, short, and stump topgallant masts. To rig out a flying jib-boom. To cross topgallant and royal yards. Skysail yards. TAKING IN LOWER MASTS AND BOWSPRIT.--Shore up the beams upon which the heels of the shears will rest, if necessary, from the keelson. Parbuckle the shears aboard, with their heads aft. Raise their heads upon the taffrail, cross them, and pass the shear-lashing. Lash the upper block of a three-fold tackle under the cross, and secure the lower block to the breast-hooks, or to a toggle in the hawse-hole. You may also reeve and secure, in the same manner, a smaller purchase, which shall work clear of the first. Have two forward and two after guys clove-hitched to the shear-head, with cleats to prevent their slipping. Get a girt-line on one shear-head and a small tackle on the other, to slue and cant the mast. Let the fall of the main tackle come through the middle sheave, to prevent the block's sluing in its strap. Reeve large heel tackles to rouse the shears aft with. Put long oak plank shoes under the heels; and, if it be necessary, clap a thwart-ship tackle upon the two heels, or reeve a lashing, and put a stout plank between them, and bowse taut; which will prevent too great a strain coming upon the water-ways. Take the main tackle fall to the capstan; heave round, haul on the forward guy and after heel tackles, and raise the shear to an angle of about eighty degrees with the deck, and so that the main purchase will hang plumb with the partners of the mizzen-mast. Lash a garland to the forward part of the mast, above the centre, and toggle the purchase to it. Heave the mast in over the bulwarks; fit the trestle-trees and after chock; reeve girt-lines by which men may be hoisted when the mast is in; point the mast in, and lower away. Always take in the mizzen-mast first. Get in the main and then the foremast in the same manner, rousing the shears forward, with their shoes, by means of the heel tackles. Having stepped and secured the foremast, carry the forward guys aft and rake the shears over the bows; toggle the lower block of the main tackle to a garland lashed to the upper part of the bowsprit inside of the centre. Put on the cap, and carry tackles or guys from the bowsprit-head to each cat-head, and clap on a heel tackle or guy. Heave the bowsprit, and direct it by the small tackles and guys. TO RIG A BOWSPRIT.--Lash collars for the fore stay, bobstays, and bowsprit shrouds, then for the spring stay, and put on the bees for the topmast stays; fit the man-ropes, pass the gammoning, and set up bobstays and shrouds. TO GET THE TOPS OVER THE MAST-HEADS.--Place the top on deck abaft the mast; get a girt-line on each side of the mast-head, and pass the end of each under the top, through the holes in the after part; clinch them to their own parts, and stop them to the fore part of the top with slip-stops. Have a guy to the fore and another to the after part of the top. Make the ends of a span fast to the after corners of the top, and bend a girt-line from the mast-head to the bight of the span, and stop it to the forward part of the top. Sway away on the girt-lines. When the fore part of the top is above the trestle-trees, cut the span-stops, and when the after part is above them, cast off the slip-stops. When the lubber-hole is high enough to clear the mast-head, haul on the forward guy, and let the top hang horizontally by the girt-lines. Lower away, place and bolt it. The fore and main tops are sent up from abaft, and the mizzen from forward. The tops may be got over without the span and girt-line, by stopping the two girt-lines first rove to the middle as well as to the fore part of the top, and cutting the upper stops first. TO SEND UP A TOPMAST.--Get the topmast alongside, with its head forward. Lash a top-block to the head of the lower-mast; reeve a mast-rope through it, from aft forward, and bring the end down and reeve it through the sheave-hole of the topmast, hitching it to its own part a little below the topmast-head, and stopping both parts to the mast, at intervals. Snatch the rope and sway away. As soon as the head is through the lower cap, cast off the end of the mast-rope, letting the mast hang by the stops, and hitch it to the staple in the other end of the cap. Cast off the stops and sway away. Point the head of the mast between the trestle-trees and through the hole in the lower cap, the round hole of which must be put over the square hole of the trestle-trees. Lash the cap to the mast, hoist away, and when high enough, lower a little and secure the cap to the lower mast-head. (This is when it cannot be put on by hand.) If the cross-trees are heavy, they may be placed in the following manner. Sway away until the topmast-head is a few feet above the lower cap. Send up the cross-trees by girt-lines, and let the after part rest on the lower cap and the forward part against the topmast. Lower away the topmast until the cross-trees fall into their place, and then hoist until they rest on the shoulders. Lash on the bolsters, get girt-lines on the cross-trees to send up the rigging, and then put it over the mast-head, first the shrouds, then the backstays, and lastly the head-stays. Sway the topmast on end, fid it, and set up the rigging. TO GET ON A TOPMAST-CAP.--In vessels of the largest class, it may be necessary to send up the cap in the following manner, but it can usually be got up by hand. Or it may be fitted and the rigging put on over it. Send the cap up to the cross-trees by girt-lines, and place the round hole of the cap over the forward hole of the cross-trees; send aloft a topgallant studdingsail boom, and point its upper end through the holes in the cross-trees and cap, and lash the cap to it. Hook a tackle or girt-line to a strap on the lower end of the spar, and sway away until the cap is over the mast-head. Slue the spar so that the cap may come fair, lower away, and place the cap upon the mast-head. Unlash the spar and send it down. TO RIG OUT A JIB-BOOM.--Point the outer end through the collars of the stays. Reeve the heel-rope through a block at the bowsprit cap, through the sheave-hole at the heel of the boom, and secure the end to an eye-bolt in the cap on the opposite side. Rig the boom out until the inner sheave-hole is clear of the cap. Tar the boom-end, put on the foot-ropes and guys, and reeve the jib stay. Hoist up the martingale and rig it, and reeve the martingale stay and gaub-line. Rig the boom out to its place, and set up the jib and martingale stays. TO CROSS A LOWER YARD.--If the yard is alongside, reeve the yard rope through the jear block at the mast-head, make it fast to the slings of the yard, and stop it out to the yard-arm. Sway away, and cast off the stops as the yard comes over the side, and get the yard across the bulwarks. Lower yards are rigged now with iron trusses and quarter-blocks, which would be fitted before rigging the yard. Seize on the clew-garnet block, and put the rigging over the yard-arm; first the straps for the head-earings, then the foot-ropes, then the brace blocks or pennants, and last the eye of the lift. (The lifts, brace pennants, and foot-ropes are now spliced or hooked into rings with thimbles on an iron band, round the yard-arm, next the shoulders. In this way, there is no rope of any kind round the yard-arm.) Reeve the lifts and braces, get two large tackles from the mast-head to the quarters of the yard, and sway away on them and on the lifts, bearing off and sluing the yard by means of guys. Secure the yard by the iron trusses, and haul taut lifts and braces. TO CROSS A TOPSAIL YARD.--As topsail yards now have chain tyes, there are no tye-blocks to seize on. The quarter-blocks are first seized on, and the parral secured at one end, ready to be passed. A single parral has an eye in each end, and one end is passed under the yard and over, and the eye seized to the standing part, close to the yard. After the yard is crossed, the other end is passed round the mast, then round the yard, and seized in the same manner. To pass a double parral, proceed in the same manner, except that the seizings are passed so as to leave the eyes clear and above the standing part, and then take a short rope with an eye in each end, pass it round the mast, and seize the eyes to the eyes of the first long rope. The parral is wormed, served and leathered. The parral being seized at one end, put on the head-earing straps, the foot-ropes, Flemish horses, and brace blocks. Bend the yard-rope to the slings, stop it out to the yard-arm, and sway away until the yard is up and down; then put on the upper lift in the top and the lower lift on deck, and reeve the braces. Sway away, cast off the stops, and take in upon the lower lift as the yard rises, till the yard is square; then haul taut lifts and braces and pass the parral. TO SEND UP A TOPGALLANT MAST.--Most merchantmen carry _long topgallant masts_. In these, the topgallant, royal and skysail masts are all one stick. _A short topgallant mast_ is one which has cross-trees, and above which a fidded royal-mast may be rigged. _A stump topgallant mast_ has no cross-trees, or means for setting a mast above it, and is carried only in bad weather. Some short topgallant masts are rigged with a _withe_ on the after part of the mast-head, through which a sliding-gunter royal-mast is run up, with its heel resting in a step on the topmast cap. To send up a long topgallant mast, put the jack over the topmast cap, with a grommet upon its funnel for the eyes of the rigging to rest upon; send up the rigging by girtlines, and put the eyes over the jack, first the topgallant shrouds, backstays and stays, then the royal rigging in the same order, with a grommet, then the skysail stay and backstay, and lastly the truck. Reeve a top-rope forward through a block at the topmast-head, through the hole in the cross-trees; through the sheave-hole at the foot of the topgallant mast; carry it up the other side, and make it fast to its own part at the mast-head; stop it along the mast, and bend a guy to the heel. Sway away, and point through the jack; put on the truck, and the skysail, royal and topgallant rigging in their order; slue the mast so as to bring the sheaves of the tyes fore-and-aft; cast off the end of the top-rope, the mast hanging by the stops; make it fast to an eye-bolt on the starboard side of the cap, and sway away. When high enough, fid the mast and set up the rigging. A short topgallant mast is sent up like a topmast, the cross-trees got over in the same manner; and the fidded royal-mast is sent up like a long topgallant mast. TO RIG OUT A FLYING JIB-BOOM.--Ship the withe on the jib-boom end, reeve a heel-rope through a block at the jib-boom end, and bend it to the heel of the flying jib-boom, and stop it along, out to the end. Haul out on the heel-rope, point through the withe, put on the rigging, in the same order with that of the jib-boom; reeve the guys, martingale, flying jib, royal and skysail stays; rig out, and set up the rigging. The heel of the boom rests against the bowsprit cap, and is lashed to the jib-boom. The flying jib-boom should be rigged fully out before the fore topgallant mast is swayed on end. TO CROSS A TOPGALLANT YARD.--Seize on the parral and quarter-blocks; reeve the yard-rope through the sheave-hole of the topgallant mast, make it fast to the slings of the yard, and stop it out to the upper end. Sway away, and when the upper yard-arm has reached the topmast-head, put on the upper lift and brace; sway away again, put on the lower lift and brace, cast off all the stops, settle the yard down square by lifts and braces, and pass the parral lashing. TO CROSS ROYAL YARDS.--The royal yards are crossed in the same manner as the topgallant yards, except that in most merchantmen they would be sent up by the halyards instead of a yard-rope. If there is not a standing skysail, the quarter-blocks on the royal yard will be single. SKYSAIL YARDS.--If the skysail is a standing sail, the yard is rigged like the royal yard, with lifts and braces, and the sail is fitted with sheets and clewlines; but if it is a flying skysail, the yard has neither lifts nor braces, and the clews of the sail are seized out to the royal yard-arms. There are various ways of rigging a flying skysail, of which the following is believed to be as convenient as any. Let the royal stay go round the mast-head, with a traveller, above the yard, so that the stay may travel up and down the skysail mast. Seize a thimble into the stay, close against the forward part of the grommet; lead the skysail halyards through the thimble, and make them fast to the centre of the yard, which will need no parral, underneath the royal stay. Make fast the ends of two small ropes for downhauls, to the skysail yard, about half way out on each yard-arm, and reeve them through small cleats on the after part of the royal yard, the same distance out on each yard-arm. These may be spliced into a single rope below the yard, which will go through a fair-leader in the cross-trees to the deck. By this means the skysail may be taken in or set without the necessity of sending a man aloft. Let go the halyards and haul on the downhaul, and the yard will be brought close down to the royal yard. To hoist it, let go the downhaul and royal stay, and haul on the halyards. When the royal is taken in, haul the skysail yard down with the royal yard, and furl the sail in with the royal. CHAPTER V. TO SEND DOWN MASTS AND YARDS. To send down a royal yard--a topgallant yard--a topgallant mast. To house a topgallant mast. To send down a topmast. To rig in a jib boom. TO SEND DOWN A ROYAL YARD.--If the sail is bent to the yard, furl it, making the gaskets fast to the tye. Cast off the sheets and clewlines, and make them fast to the jack. Be careful to unreeve the clewlines through the quarter-blocks. Cast off the parral-lashing. Overhaul the tye a little, and stop it to the yard, just outside of the quarter-block. If stopped too far out, the yard will not hoist high enough to get the lower lift off. Sway away on the halyards, which will cant the yard and hoist it. When high enough, cast off the lower lift and brace, (being careful not to let the brace go,) and make them fast to the jack. Lower away, and as the upper yard-arm comes abreast of the jack, clap a stop round the yard and tye, near the yard-arm, and cast off the lift and brace, making them fast to the jack. Lower away to the deck. If the halyards are not single, the yard must be sent down by a yard-rope, like the topgallant yard. In some vessels, instead of making the sheets and clewlines fast to the jack, overhand knots are taken in their ends, and they are let go. The sheets will run out to the topgallant yard-arms, and the clewlines will run to the fair-leaders in the cross-trees. In port, the main royal yard is sent down on the starboard side, and the fore and mizzen on the larboard; but at sea, the tye is stopped out on the lee side, and the yard sent down in any way that is the most convenient. TO SEND DOWN A TOPGALLANT YARD.--Cast off the sheets, bowlines, buntlines and clewlines, and make them fast to the cross-trees. Reeve a yard-rope through a jack-block at the mast-head, unhook the tye, cast off the parral-lashing, bend the yard-rope to the slings of the yard by a fisherman's bend, and stop it to the quarters of the yard. Sway away, and take off the lifts and braces, as with the royal yard. TO SEND DOWN A TOPGALLANT MAST.--Hook the top-block to the eye-bolt at the larboard side of the topmast cap; reeve the mast-rope through it, then through the sheave-hole in the foot of the topgallant mast, and hitch its end to the eye-bolt on the starboard side of the cap. Come up the rigging, stays and backstays, and guy the mast-head by them. Hoist a little on the mast-rope, and take out the fid. (The fid should always be fastened to the cross-trees or trestle-trees, by a lanyard.) Lower away until the mast is a little short of being through the cap. Then seize or rack together both parts of the mast-rope just above the sheave-hole; cast off the end of the mast-rope, letting the mast hang by the stops, and hitch it round the mast-head to its own part, below the cap. Then lower away to the deck. If the rigging is to come on deck, round up the mast-rope for a girtline; if it is to remain aloft, lash it to the topmast cap, render the shrouds through the cross-trees, and stop them up and down the topgallant rigging. Sheep-shank the stays and backstays, and set them hand-taut. If the top-mast is also to be sent down, take off the topmast cap and send it on deck. TO HOUSE A TOPGALLANT MAST.--Proceed in the same manner, except that when the mast is low enough, belay the mast-rope, pass a heel-lashing through the fid-hole and round the topmast. TO SEND DOWN A TOPMAST.--Hook the top-block, reeve the mast-rope through it and through the sheave-hole in the foot of the mast, and hitch it to the staple at the other side of the cap. Lead the fall through a snatch-block, to the capstan. Sling the lower yard, if it is to remain aloft, and unshackle the trusses, if they are of iron. Come up the rigging, stays and backstays, weigh the mast, take out the fid, and lower away. If the rigging is to remain aloft, lash the cross-trees to the lower cap. The rigging should be stowed away snugly in the top, and the backstays be snaked up and down the lower rigging. TO RIG IN A JIB-BOOM.--Reeve the heel-rope (if necessary,) come up the stay, martingale stay and guys; unreeve the jib-stay, station hands at each guy, clear away the heel-lashing, haul in upon the guys, and light the boom on board. In most cases the boom will come in without a heel-rope. Make fast the eyes of the rigging to the bowsprit cap, and haul all taut. CHAPTER VI. BENDING AND UNBENDING SAILS. To bend a course. To send up a topsail by the halyards--by the bunt-lines. To bend a topgallant sail--a royal--a jib--a spanker--a spencer. To unbend a course--a topsail--a topgallant sail or royal--a jib. To send down a topsail or course in a gale of wind. To bend a topsail in a gale of wind. To bend one topsail or course, and send down the other at the same time. TO BEND A COURSE.--Stretch the sail across the deck, forward of the mast and under the yard; being careful to have the after part of the sail aft. Seize the clew-garnet blocks to the clews; also the tack and sheet blocks, unless they go with hooks or clasps. Reeve the buntlines through the thimbles of the first reef-band forward, if they are made to go so, and toggle their ends to the foot of the sail, or carry them through the eyelet-holes and clinch them to their own parts. Reeve the clew-garnets and leechlines; carry the bights of the buntlines under the sail, and rack them to their own parts; stop the head of the sail to the buntlines below the rackings; put robands to each eyelet-hole in the head of the sail; fasten the head and reef earings to their cringles, reeving the end of the reef-earings through the head-cringle and taking a bowline with them to their standing parts, and hitching the head-earings to the buntlines. Sway away on the buntlines, leechlines and clew-garnets; when the sail is up, pass the head-earings, reeving _aft_ through the straps on the yard, and _forward_ through the head cringle. Haul out on the earings, making the sail square by the glut, and pass the earings round the yard, over and under, through the head-cringle at each turn, and make the end fast around the first turns. If the sail is new, ride down the head rope on the yard, and freshen the earings. Make fast the head of the sail to the jack-stay by robands, and cast the stops off the buntlines. TO BEND A TOPSAIL.--Make fast the head and reef-earings to their cringles, passing the end of each reef-earing through the cringle above its own and making it fast by a bowline to its own part. Put robands to each eyelet-hole in the head. If the sail is to be sent up by the topsail halyards, lay it on deck abaft the foot of the mast, make it up with its head and foot together, having the head and first reef cringles together and out, and also the bowline cringle and the clews out. Bight the sail in three parts on a pair of slings, having the end of the sail that belongs on the opposite yard-arm on top. Have the fly-block of the topsail halyards above the top, and rack the runner to the topmast backstay or after shroud. Hook the lower block to the slings around the sail, hoist the sail up into the top, cast off the slings, unhook the halyards, and pass the upper end of the sail round forward of the mast, ready for bending. (If the vessel is rolling or pitching, with a stiff breeze, the sail may be guyed and steadied as it goes up, by hooking a snatch-block, moused, to the slings around the sail, passing the hauling part of the halyards through it, and through another snatch-block on deck.) Get the clewlines, buntlines, sheets, bowlines, and reef-tackles ready for bending, the clove hooks of the sheets being stopped to the topmast rigging. Hook or clasp the sheets to the clews, reeve the clewlines and reef-tackles, toggle the bowlines, clinch or toggle the buntlines to the foot of the sail, and stop the head to the buntlines. Hoist on the buntlines and haul out on the reef-tackles, bringing the sail to the yard, and then pass the head-earings and make fast the robands as for a course. If the sail is to be sent up by the buntlines, lay the sail on the deck and forward of the mast, overhaul the buntlines down forward of the yard, on each side of the topmast stay and on the same side of the lower stay. Clinch the ends to the foot of the sail, bight them around under the sail and rack the bights to their standing parts, and stop the head of the sail to the standing parts below the rackings. Bend one bowline to the centre of the sail, to guy it in going aloft. Have the earings bent and secured as before described, and the bights of the head-earings hitched to the buntlines. Sway it up to the top, and haul the ends in on each side of the mast; reeve the clewlines and reef-tackles, make fast the bowlines and sheets, the ends of which, if chain, should be racked to the topmast rigging, ready to be made fast to the clews. The gear being bent, hoist on the buntlines, haul out on the reef-tackles, pass the head-earings, cut the stops of the buntlines, and make fast the robands. Middle the sail on the yard by the glut, or by the centre cringle. TO BEND TOPGALLANT SAILS AND ROYALS.--These are generally bent to their yards on deck; the royals always. After being bent to the yard, they are furled, with their clews out, ready for sending aloft. If the topgallant sail is to be bent aloft, send it up to the topmast cross-trees by the clewlines, or by the royal halyards; and there bend on the sheets, clewlines, buntlines and bowlines, and bring the sail to the yard as with a topsail. TO BEND A JIB.--Bend the jib halyards round the body of the sail, and the downhaul to the tack. Haul out on the downhaul, hoisting and lowering on the halyards. Seize the tack to the boom, the hanks to the luff of the sail, and the halyards to its head. Reeve the downhaul up through the hanks and make it fast to the head of the sail. Seize the middle of the sheet-pennant to the clew. In some vessels the hanks are first seized to the sail, and the jib-stay unrove, brought in-board, and passed down through the hanks, as the sail is sent out, rove in its place and set up. This is more troublesome, and wears out the jib-stay. TO BEND A SPANKER.--Lower the gaff, and reeve the throat-rope through the hole in the gaff under the jaws, and secure it. Sometimes the head of the luff fits with a hook. Then haul out the head of the sail by the peak-earing, which is passed like the head-earing of a topsail. When the head-rope is taut, pass the lacings through the eyelet-holes, and round the jack-stay. Seize the bights of the throat and peak brails to the leech, at distances from the peak which will admit of the sail's being brailed up taut along the gaff, and reeve them through their blocks on the gaff, and at the jaws, on each side of the sail. The foot brail is seized to the leech just above the clew. Seize the luff of the sail to the hoops or hanks around the spanker mast, beginning with the upper hoop and hoisting the gaff as they are secured. The tack is hooked or seized to the boom or to the mast. Hook on the outhaul tackle. This is usually fitted with an eye round the boom, rove through a single block at the clew, and then through a sheave-hole in the boom. Some spankers are bent with a peak outhaul; the head traversing on the jack-stay of the gaff. THE FORE AND MAIN SPENCERS are bent like the spanker, except that they have no boom, the clew being hauled aft by a sheet, which is generally a gun-tackle purchase, hooked to an eye-bolt in the deck. TO UNBEND A COURSE.--Haul it up, cast off the robands, and make the buntlines fast round the sail. Ease the earings off together, and lower away by the buntlines and clew-garnets. At sea, the lee earing is cast off first, rousing in the lee body of the sail, and securing it by the earing to the buntlines. TO UNBEND A TOPSAIL.--Clew it up, cast off the robands, secure the buntlines round the sail, unhook the sheets, and unreeve the clewlines and reef-tackles; ease off the earings, and lower by the buntlines. A _top gallant sail_ is unbent in the same manner, and sent down by the buntlines. A _royal_ is usually sent down with the yard. TO UNBEND A JIB.--Haul it down, cast off the hank seizings and the tack-lashing, cast off and unreeve the downhaul and make it fast round the sail, and cast off the sheet-pennant lashings. Haul aboard by the downhaul, hoisting clear by the halyards. The rules above given are for a vessel in port, with squared yards. If you are at sea and it is blowing fresh, and the topsail or course is reefed, to send it down, you must cast off a few robands and reef-points, and pass good stops around the sail; then secure the buntlines also around it, and cast off all the robands, reef-points and reef-earings. Bend a line to the lee head-earing and let it go, haul the sail well up to windward, and make fast the lee earing to the buntlines. Get a hauling line to the deck, forward; ease off the weather earing, and lower away. To bend a new topsail in a gale of wind, it has been found convenient to make the sail up with the reef-bands together, the points all being out fair, to pass several good stops round the sail, and send up as before. This will present less surface to the wind. One course may be sent up as the other goes down, by unbending the buntlines from the foot of the old sail, passing them down between the head of the sail and the yard, bending them to the foot of the new sail, and making the new sail up to be sent aloft by them, as before directed. Run the new sail up to the yard abaft the old one, and send the old one down by the leechlines and the head-earings, bent to the topmast studdingsail halyards, or some other convenient rope. One topsail may be sent up by the topsail halyards, got ready for bending, and brought to the yard, while the old one is sent down by the buntlines. [Illustration: PLATE V.] CHAPTER VII. WORK UPON RIGGING.--ROPE, KNOTS, SPLICES, BENDS AND HITCHES. Kinds of rope. Spunyarn. Worming. Parcelling. Service. Short splice. Long splice. Eye splice. Flemish eye. Spindle eye. Cut splice. Grommet. Single and double wall. Matthew Walker. Single and double diamond. Spritsail sheet knot. Stopper knot. Shroud knot. French shroud knot. Buoy-rope knot. Half-hitches. Clove hitch. Overhand knot. Figure-of-eight. Bowline. Running bowline. Bowline-upon-a-bight. Square knot. Timber hitch. Rolling hitch. Blackwall hitch. Cat's paw. Sheet bend. Fisherman's bend. Carrick bend. Bowline bend. Sheep-shank. Selvagee. Marlin-spike hitch. Round seizing. Throat seizing. Stopping. Nippering. Racking. Pointing. Snaking. Grafting. Foxes. Spanish foxes. Gaskets. Sennit. To bend a buoy-rope. To pass a shear-lashing. Those ropes in a ship which are stationary are called _standing rigging_, as shrouds, stays, backstays, &c. Those which reeve through blocks or sheave-holes, and are hauled and let go, are called the _running rigging_, as braces, halyards, buntlines, clewlines, &c. A rope is composed of threads of hemp, or other stuff. These threads are called _yarns_. A number of these yarns twisted together form a _strand_, and three or more strands twisted together form the rope. The ropes in ordinary use on board a vessel are composed of three strands, laid RIGHT HANDED, (1.) or, as it is called, _with the sun_. Occasionally a piece of large rope will be found laid up in four strands, also _with_ the sun. This is generally used for standing rigging, tacks, sheets, &c., and is sometimes called _shroud-laid_. A CABLE-LAID ROPE (2.) is composed of nine strands, and is made by first laying them into three ropes of three strands each, _with_ the sun, and then laying the three ropes up together into one, left-handed, or _against_ the sun. Thus, cable-laid rope is like three small common ropes laid up into one large one. Formerly, the ordinary three-stranded right-hand rope was called _hawser-laid_, and the latter _cable-laid_, and they will be found so distinguished in the books; but among sea-faring men now, the terms _hawser-laid_ and _cable-laid_ are applied indiscriminately to nine-strand rope, and the three stranded, being the usual and ordinary kind of rope, has no particular name, or is called right-hand rope. Right-hand rope must be coiled _with_ the sun, and cable-laid rope _against_ the sun. SPUNYARN is made by twisting together two or more yarns taken from old standing rigging, and is called two-yarn or three-yarn spunyarn, according to the number of yarns of which it is composed. Junk, or old rigging, is first unlaid into strands, and then into yarns, and the best of these yarns made up into spunyarn, which is used for worming, serving, seizing, &c. Every merchant vessel carries a spunyarn-winch, for the manufacturing of this stuff, and in making it, the wheel is turned _against_ the sun, which lays the stuff up with the sun. WORMING a rope, is filling up the divisions between the strands, by passing spunyarn along them, to render the surface smooth for parcelling and serving. PARCELLING a rope is wrapping narrow strips of canvass about it, well tarred, in order to secure it from being injured by rain-water lodging between the parts of the service when worn. The parcelling is put on _with_ the lay of the rope. SERVICE is the laying on of spunyarn, or other small stuff, in turns round the rope, close together, and hove taut by the use of a serving-board for small rope, and serving-mallet for large rope. Small ropes are sometimes served without being wormed, as the crevices between the strands are not large enough to make the surface very uneven; but a large rope is always wormed and parcelled before being served. The service is put on _against_ the lay of the rope. SPLICING, is putting the ends of ropes together by opening the strands and placing them into one another, or by putting the strands of the ends of a rope between those of the bight. A SHORT SPLICE. (3.) Unlay the strands for a convenient length; then take an end in each hand, place them one within the other, and draw them close. Hold the end of one rope and the three strands which come from the opposite rope fast in the left hand, or, if the rope be large, stop them down to it with a rope-yarn. Take the middle strand, which is free, pass it _over_ the strand which is first next to it, and through _under_ the second, and out between the second and third from it, and haul it taut. Pass each of the six strands in the same manner; first those on one side, and then those on the other. The same operation may be repeated with each strand, passing each _over_ the third from it, and _under_ the fourth, and through; or, as is more usual, after the ends have been stuck once, untwist each strand, divide the yarns, pass one half as above described, and cut off the other half. This tapers the splice. A LONG SPLICE. (4.) Unlay the ends of two ropes to a distance three or four times greater than for a short splice, and place them within one another as for a short splice. Unlay one strand for a considerable distance, and fill up the interval which it leaves with the opposite strand from the other rope, and twist the ends of these two together. Then do the same with two more strands. The two remaining strands are twisted together in the place where they were first crossed. Open the two last named strands, divide in two, take an overhand knot with the opposite halves, and lead the ends over the next strand and through the second, as the whole strands were passed for the short splice. Cut off the other two halves. Do the same with the others that are placed together, dividing, knotting, and passing them in the same manner. Before cutting off any of the half strands, the rope should be got well upon a stretch. Sometimes the whole strands are knotted then divided, and the half strands passed as above described. AN EYE SPLICE. (5.) Unlay the end of a rope for a short distance, and lay the three strands upon the standing part, so as to form an eye. Put one end through the strand next to it. Put the next end over that strand and through the second; and put the remaining end through the third strand, on the other side of the rope. Taper them, as in the short splice, by dividing the strands and sticking them again. A FLEMISH EYE. (6.) Take the end of a rope and unlay one strand. Form an eye by placing the two remaining ends against the standing part. Pass the strand which has been unlaid over the end and in the intervals round the eye, until it returns down the standing part, and lies under the eye with the strands. The ends are then scraped down, tapered, marled, and served over with spunyarn. AN ARTIFICIAL OR SPINDLE EYE.--Unlay the end of a rope and open the strands, separating each rope yarn. Take a piece of wood, the size of the intended eye, and hitch the yarns round it. Scrape them down, marl, parcel, and serve them. This is now usually called a FLEMISH EYE. A CUT SPLICE. (7.) Cut a rope in two, unlay each end as for a short splice, and place the ends of each rope against the standing part of the other, forming an oblong eye, of the size you wish. Then pass the ends through the strands of the standing parts, as for a short splice. A GROMMET. (8.) Take a strand just unlaid from a rope, with all its turns in it, and form a ring of the size you wish, by putting the end over the standing part. Then take the long end and carry it twice round the ring, in the crevices, following the lay, until the ring is complete. Then take an overhand knot with the two ends, divide the yarns, and stick them as in a long splice. A SINGLE WALL KNOT. (9.) Unlay the end of a rope. Form a bight with one strand, holding its end down to the standing part in your left hand. Pass the end of the next strand round this strand. Pass the remaining strand round the end of the second strand, and up through the bight which was made by the first strand. Haul the ends taut carefully, one by one. A SINGLE WALL, CROWNED. (10.) Make the single wall as before, and lay one end over the top of the knot. Lay the second end over the first, and the third over the second and through the bight of the first. A DOUBLE WALL. (11.) Make the single wall slack, and crown it, as above. Then take one end, bring it underneath the part of the first walling next to it, and push it up through the same bight. Do the same with the other strands, pushing them up through two bights. Thus made, it has a double wall and a single crown. A DOUBLE WALL, DOUBLE CROWNED. (12.) Make the double wall, single crowned, as above. Then lay the strands by the sides of those in the single crown, pushing them through the same bight in the single crown, and down through the double walling. This is sometimes called a TACK KNOT, or a TOPSAIL SHEET KNOT. A MATTHEW WALKER KNOT. (13.) Unlay the end of a rope. Take one strand round the rope and through its own bight; then the next strand underneath, through the bight of the first, and through its own bight; and the third strand underneath, through both the other bights, and through its own bight. A SINGLE DIAMOND KNOT. (14.) Unlay the end of a rope for a considerable distance, and with the strands form three bights down the side of the rope, holding them fast with the left hand. Take the end of one strand and pass it with the lay of the rope over the strand next to it, and up through the bight of the third. Take the end of the second strand over the third and up through the bight of the first. Take the end of the third strand over the first and up through the bight of the second. Haul taut, and lay the ends up together. A DOUBLE DIAMOND KNOT. (15.) Make a single diamond, as above, without laying the ends up. Follow the lead of the single knot through two single bights, the ends coming out at the top of the knot. Lead the last strand through two double bights. Haul taut, and lay the ends up. A SPRITSAIL SHEET KNOT. (16.) Unlay two ends of a rope, and place the two parts together. Make a bight with one strand. Wall the six strands together, like a single walling made with three strands; putting the second over the first, and the third over the second, and so on, the sixth being passed over the fifth and through the bight of the first. Then haul taut. It may be _crowned_ by taking two strands and laying them over the top of the knot, and passing the other strands alternately over and under those two, hauling them taut. It may be _double walled_ by next passing the strands under the wallings on the left of them, and through the small bights, when the ends will come up for the second crowning; which is done by following the lead of the single crowning, and pushing the ends through the single walling, as with three strands, before described. This is often used for a _stopper knot_. A STOPPER KNOT.--Single wall and double wall, without crowning, and stop the ends together. A SHROUD KNOT.--Unlay the ends of two ropes, and place the strands in one another, as for a short splice. Single wall the strands of one rope round the standing part of the other, against the lay. Open the ends, taper, marl, and serve them. A FRENCH SHROUD KNOT.--Place the ends of two ropes as before. Lay the ends of one rope back upon their own part, and single wall the other three strands round the bights of the first three and the standing part. Taper the ends, as before. A BUOY-ROPE KNOT.--Unlay the strands of a cable-laid rope, and also the small strands of each large strand. Lay the large ones again as before, leaving the small ones out. Single and double wall the small strands (as for a stopper knot) round the rope, worm them along the divisions, and stop their ends with spunyarn. A TURKS-HEAD. (17.) This is worked upon a rope with a piece of small line. Take a clove-hitch slack with the line round the rope. Then take one of the bights formed by the clove-hitch and put it over the other. Pass the end under, and up through the bight which is underneath. Then cross the bights again, and put the end round again, under, and up through the bight which is underneath. After this, follow the lead, and it will make a turban, of three parts to each cross. TWO HALF-HITCHES. (18.) Pass the end of a rope round the standing part and bring it up through the bight. This is a half-hitch. Take it round again in the same manner for two half-hitches. A CLOVE-HITCH (19.) is made by passing the end of a rope round a spar, over, and bringing it under and round behind its standing part, over the spar again, and up through its own part. It may then, if necessary, be stopped or hitched to its own part: the only difference between two half-hitches and a clove-hitch being that one is hitched round its own standing part, and the other is hitched round a spar or another rope. AN OVERHAND KNOT. (20.) Pass the end of a rope over the standing part, and through the bight. A FIGURE-OF-EIGHT. (21.) Pass the end of a rope over and round the standing part, up over its own part, and down through the bight. A BOWLINE KNOT. (22.) Take the end of a rope in your right hand, and the standing part in your left. Lay the end over the standing part, and with the left hand make a bight of the standing part over it. Take the end under the lower standing part, up over the cross, and down through the bight. A RUNNING BOWLINE.--Take the end round the standing part, and make a bowline upon its own part. A BOWLINE UPON A BIGHT. (23.) Middle a rope, taking the two ends in your left hand, and the bight in your right. Lay the bight over the ends, and proceed as in making a bowline, making a small bight with your left hand of the ends, which are kept together, over the bight which you hold in your right hand. Pass the bight in your right hand round under the ends and up over the cross. So far, it is like a common bowline, only made with double rope instead of single. Then open the bight in your right hand and carry it over the large bights, letting them go through it, and bring it up to the cross and haul taut. A SQUARE KNOT. (24.) Take an overhand knot round a spar. Take an end in each hand and cross them on the same side of the standing part upon which they came up. Pass one end round the other, and bring it up through the bight. This is sometimes called a REEF-KNOT. If the ends are crossed the wrong way, sailors call it a GRANNY-KNOT. A TIMBER HITCH. (25.) Take the end of a rope round a spar, lead it under and over the standing part, and pass two or more round-turns round its own part. A ROLLING HITCH.--Pass the end of a rope round a spar. Take it round a second time, nearer to the standing part. Then carry it across the standing part, over and round the spar, and up through the bight. A strap or a tail-block is fastened to a rope by this hitch. A bend, sometimes called a _rolling hitch_, is made by two round-turns round a spar and two half-hitches round the standing part; but the name is commonly applied to the former hitch. A BLACKWALL HITCH. (26.) Form a bight by putting the end of a rope across and under the standing part. Put the bight over the hook of a tackle, letting the hook go through it, the centre of the bight resting against the back of the hook, and the end jammed in the bight of the hook, by the standing part of the rope. A CAT'S PAW. (27.) Make a large bight in a rope, and spread it open, putting one hand at one part of the bight and the other at the other, and letting the standing part and end come together. Turn the bight over from you, three times, and a small bight will be formed in each hand. Bring the two small bights together, and put the hook of a tackle through them both. A SHEET BEND. (28.) Pass the end of a rope up through the bight of another, round both parts of the other, and under its own part. A FISHERMAN'S BEND. (29.) Used for bending studdingsail halyards to the yard. Take two turns round the yard with the end. Hitch it round the standing part and both the turns. Then hitch it round the standing part alone. A CARRICK BEND. (30.) Form a bight by putting the end of a rope over its standing part. Take the end of a second rope and pass it _under_ the standing part of the first, _over_ the end, and _up_ through the bight, _over_ its own standing part, and _down_ through the bight again. A BOWLINE BEND.--This is the most usual mode of bending warps, and other long ropes or cables, together. Take a bowline in the end of one rope, pass the end of the other through the bight, and take a bowline with it upon its own standing part. Long lines are sometimes bent together with half-hitches on their own standing parts, instead of bowlines, and the ends seized strongly down. A SHEEP-SHANK. (31.) Make two long bights in a rope, which shall overlay one another. Take a half-hitch over the end of each bight with the standing part which is next to it. A SELVAGEE.--Lay rope yarns round and round in a bight, and marl them down with spunyarn. These are used for neat block-straps, and as straps to go round a spar for a tackle to hook into, for hoisting. A MARLINSPIKE HITCH--Lay the marlinspike upon the seizing-stuff, and bring the end over the standing part so as to form a bight. Lay this bight back over the standing part, putting the marlinspike down through the bight, under the standing part, and up through the bight again. TO PASS A ROUND SEIZING.--Splice a small eye in the end of the stuff, take the other end round both parts of the rope, and reeve it through the eye. Pass a couple of turns, then take a marlinspike-hitch, and heave them taut. Pass six, eight or ten turns in the same manner, and heave them taut. Put the end through under these turns and bring it out between the two last turns, or through the eye, and pass five, seven or nine turns (one less than the lower ones) directly over these, as riders. The riders are not hove so taut. Pass the end up through the seizings, and take two cross turns round the whole seizing between the two, passing the end through the last turn, and heaving taut. If the seizing is small cordage, take a wall-knot in the end; if spunyarn, an overhand knot. The cross turns are given up now in nearly all vessels. After the riding turns are passed, the end is carried under the turns, brought out at the other end, and made fast snugly to the standing part of the rigging. A THROAT SEIZING, where rigging is turned in, is passed and made fast like the preceding, there being no cross turns. A neat way to pass a throat seizing is to pass the turns rather slack, put a strap upon the end of the rigging, take a handspike or heaver to it and bear it down, driving home the seizing with a mallet and small fid. STOPPING, is fastening two parts of a rope together as for a round seizing, without a crossing. NIPPERING, is fastening them by taking turns crosswise between the parts, to jam them; and sometimes with a round turn before each cross. These are called _racking turns_. Pass _riders_ over these and fasten the end. POINTING.--Unlay the end of a rope and stop it. Take out as many yarns as are necessary, and split each yarn in two, and take two parts of different yarns and twist them up taut into _nettles_. The rest of the yarns are combed down with a knife. Lay half the nettles down upon the scraped part, the rest back upon the rope, and pass three turns of twine taut round the part where the nettles separate, and hitch the twine, which is called the _warp_. Lay the nettles backwards and forwards as before, passing the warp, each time. The ends may be whipped and snaked with twine, or the nettles hitched over the warp and hauled taut. The upper seizing must be snaked. If the upper part is too weak for pointing, put in a piece of stick. SNAKING a seizing, is done by taking the end under and over the outer turns of the seizing alternately, passing over the whole. There should be a marline-hitch at each turn. GRAFTING.--Unlay the ends of two ropes and put them together as for a short splice. Make nettles of the strands as before. Pass the warp and nettles belonging to the lower strands along the rope, as in pointing; then the nettles of the upper strands in the same manner. Snake the seizing at each end. FOXES are made by twisting together three or more rope-yarns by hand, and rubbing them hard with tarred canvass. _Spanish foxes_ are made of one rope-yarn, by unlaying it and laying it up the other way. GASKETS.--Take three or four foxes, middle them, and plait them together into _sennit_. This is done by bringing the two outside foxes alternately over to the middle. The outside ones are laid with the right hand, and the remainder are held and steadied with the left. Having plaited enough for an eye, bring all the parts together, and work them all into one piece, in the same manner. Take out foxes at proper intervals. When finished, one end must be laid up, the other plaited, and the first hauled through. The name _sennit_ is generally given to rope yarns plaited in the same manner with these foxes. Sennit made in this way must have an odd number of parts. FRENCH SENNIT is made with an even number, taken over and under every other time. TO BEND A BUOY-ROPE. Reeve the end through the eye in the other end, put it over one arm of the anchor, and haul taut. Take a hitch over the other arm. Or, take a clove-hitch over the crown, stopping the end to its own part, or to the shank. TO PASS A SHEAR-LASHING.--Middle the lashing and take a good turn round both legs, at the cross. Pass one end up and the other down, around and over the cross, until half of the lashing is expended. Then ride both ends back again on their own parts and knot them in the middle. Frap the first and riding turns together on each side with sennit. CHAPTER VIII. BLOCKS AND PURCHASES. Parts of a block. Made and morticed blocks. Bull's-eye. Dead-eye. Sister-block. Snatch-block. Tail-block. Whip. Gun-tackle. Luff-tackle. Whip-upon-whip. Luff-upon-luff. Watch or tail-tackle. Runner-tackle. Blocks are of two kinds, _made_ and _morticed_. A _made block_ consists of four parts,--the _shell_, or outside; the _sheave_, or wheel on which the rope turns; the _pin_, or axle on which the wheel turns; and the _strap_, either of rope or iron, which encircles the whole, and keeps it in its place. The sheave is generally strengthened by letting in a piece of iron or brass at the centre, called a _bush_. A MORTICED BLOCK is made of a single block of wood, morticed out to receive a sheave. All blocks are single, double, or three-fold, according to the number of sheaves in them. There are some blocks that have no sheaves; as follows: a _bull's-eye_, which is a wooden thimble without a sheave, having a hole through the centre and a groove round it; and a _dead-eye_, which is a solid block of wood made in a circular form, with a groove round it, and three holes bored through it, for the lanyards to reeve through. A SISTER-BLOCK is formed of one solid piece of wood, with two sheaves, one above the other, and between the sheaves a score for the middle seizing. These are oftener without sheaves than with. SNATCH-BLOCKS are single blocks, with a notch cut in one cheek, just below the sheave, so as to receive the bight of a fall, without the trouble of reeving and unreeving the whole. They are generally iron-bound, and have a hook at one end. A TAIL-BLOCK is a single block, strapped with an eye-splice, and having a long end left, by which to make the block fast temporarily to the rigging. This tail is usually selvageed, or else the strands are opened and laid up into sennit, as for a gasket. A TACKLE is a purchase formed by reeving a rope through two or more blocks, for the purpose of hoisting. A WHIP is the smallest purchase, and is made by a rope rove through one single block. A GUN-TACKLE PURCHASE is a rope rove through two single blocks and made fast to the strap of the upper block. The parts of all tackles between the fasts and a sheave, are called the _standing parts_; the parts between sheaves are called _running parts_; and the part upon which you take hold in hoisting is called the _fall_. A WHIP-UPON-WHIP is where the block of one whip is made fast to the fall of another. A LUFF-TACKLE PURCHASE is a single and a double block; the end of the rope being fast to the upper part of the single block, and the fall coming from the double block. A luff-tackle upon the fall of another luff-tackle is called _luff-upon-luff_. A WATCH-TACKLE or TAIL-TACKLE is a luff-tackle purchase, with a hook in the end of the single block, and a tail to the upper end of the double block. One of these purchases, with a short fall, is kept on deck, at hand, in merchant vessels, and is used to clap upon standing and running rigging, and to get a strain upon ropes. A RUNNER-TACKLE is a luff applied to a runner, which is a single rope rove through a single block, hooked to a thimble in the eye of a pennant. A SINGLE BURTON is composed of two single blocks, with a hook in the bight of the running part. Reeve the end of your rope through the upper block, and make it fast to the strap of the fly-block. Then make fast your hook to the bight of the rope, and reeve the other end through the fly-block for a fall. The hook is made fast by passing the bight of the rope through the eye of the hook and over the whole. CHAPTER IX. MAKING AND TAKING IN SAIL. To loose a sail. To set a course--Topsail--Topgallant sail--Royal--Skysail--Jib--Spanker--Spencer. To take in a course--Topsail--Topgallant sail or royal--Skysail--Jib--Spanker. To furl a royal--Topgallant sail--Topsail--Course--Jib. To stow a jib in cloth. To reef a topsail--Course. To turn out reefs. To set a topgallant studdingsail. To take in do. To set a topmast studdingsail. To take in do. To set a lower studdingsail. To take in do. TO LOOSE A SAIL.--Lay out to the yard-arms and cast off the gaskets, beginning at the outermost and coming in.[2] When the gaskets are cast off from both yard-arms, then let go the bunt gasket, (and jigger, if there be one,) and overhaul the buntlines and leechlines. In loosing a topsail in a gale of wind, it is better to cast off the quarter-gaskets, (except the one which confines the clew,) before those at the yard-arms. Royals and topgallant sails generally have one long gasket to each yard-arm; in which case it is not necessary to go out upon the yard, but the gaskets, after being cast off, should be fastened to the tye by a bowline. [2] If only one yard-arm is loosed at a time, let the lee one be loosed first. TO SET A COURSE.--Loose the sail and overhaul the buntlines and leechlines. Let go the clew-garnets and overhaul them, and haul down on the sheets and tacks. If the ship is close-hauled, ease off the lee brace, slack the weather lift and clew-garnet, and get the tack well down to the water-ways. If it is blowing fresh and the ship light-handed, take it to the windlass. When the tack is well down, sharpen the yard up again by the brace, top it well up by the lift, reeve and haul out the bowline, and haul the sheet aft. If the wind is quartering, the mainsail is carried with the weather clew hauled up and the sheet taken aft. With yards squared, the mainsail is never carried, but the foresail may be to advantage, especially if the swinging booms are out; in which case the heavy tack and sheet-blocks may be unhooked, and the _lazy sheets_ hooked on and rove through a single tail-block, made fast out on the boom. This serves to extend the clews, and is called a _pazaree_ to the foresail. TO SET A TOPSAIL.--Loose the sail, and keep one hand in the top to overhaul the rigging. Overhaul well the buntlines, clewlines, and reef-tackles, let go the topgallant sheets and topsail braces, and haul home on the sheets. Merchant vessels usually hoist a little on the halyards, so as to clear the sail from the top, then belay them and get the lee sheet chock home; then haul home the weather sheet, shivering the sail by the braces to help it home, and hoist on the halyards until the leeches are well taut, taking a turn with the braces, if the wind is fresh, and slacking them as the yard goes up. After the sail is set, it is sometimes necessary to get the sheets closer home. Slack the halyards, lee brace, and weather bowline, clap the watch-tackle upon the lee sheet first, and then the weather one, shivering the sail by the braces if necessary. Overhaul the clewlines and reef-tackles, slack the topgallant sheets, and hoist the sail up, taut leech, by the halyards. TO SET A TOPGALLANT SAIL OR ROYAL.--Haul home the lee sheet, having one hand aloft to overhaul the clewlines, then the weather sheet, and hoist up, taut leech, by the halyards. While hauling the sheets home, if on the wind, brace up a little to shake the sail, take a turn with the weather brace, and let go the lee one; if before the wind, let go both braces; and if the wind is quartering, the lee one. TO SET A FLYING SKYSAIL.--If bent in the manner described in this book, let go the brails and royal stay, and hoist on the halyards. TO SET A JIB, FLYING-JIB, OR FORE TOPMAST STAYSAIL.--Cast off the gasket, hoist on the halyards, and trim down the sheet. TO SET A SPANKER.--Hoist on the topping-lifts, make fast the weather one, and overhaul the lee one. Let go the brails, and haul out on the outhaul. Be careful not to let the throat brail go before the head and foot. Trim the boom by the sheets and guys, and the gaff by the vangs. TO SET A SPENCER.--Take the sheet to the deck on the lee side of the stay, let go the brails, haul on the sheet, and trim the gaff by the vangs. TO TAKE IN A COURSE.--If the wind is light and there are hands enough, let go the tack, sheet, and bowline, and haul up on the clew-garnets, buntlines, and leechlines, being careful not to haul the buntlines taut until the clews are well up. If light-handed, or the wind fresh, let go the bowline and ease off the tack, (being careful to let the bowline go before the tack,) and haul up the weather clew. Then ease off the sheet and haul up on the lee clew-garnet, and the buntlines and leechlines. TO TAKE IN A TOPSAIL.--The usual mode of taking in a topsail when coming to anchor in light winds, is to lower away on the halyards and haul down on the clewlines and reef-tackles, (if the latter run in the way described in this book,) until the yard is down by the lifts, rounding in on the weather brace, and hauling taut to leeward, when the yard is square. Then let go the sheets and haul up on the clewlines and buntlines. A better way is to start the sheets, clew about one third up, then let go the halyards and take the slack in. If the wind is fresh, and the yard braced up, lower away handsomely on the halyards, get the yard down by the clewlines and reef-tackles, rounding in on the weather brace, and steadying the yard by both braces. Then let go the weather sheet and haul up to windward first. The weather clew being up, let go the lee sheet and haul up by the clewline and buntlines, keeping the clew in advance of the body of the sail. Sometimes, if the weather brace cannot be well rounded in, as if a ship is weak-handed, the sail may be clewed up to leeward a little, first. In which case, ease off the lee sheet, and haul up on the clewline; ease off the lee brace and round the yard in; and when the lee clew is about half up, ease off the weather sheet and haul the weather clew chock up. Haul the buntlines up after the weather clew, and steady the yard by the braces. There is danger in clewing up to leeward first that the sail may be shaken and jerked so as to split, before the weather clew is up; whereas, if clewed up to windward first, the lee clew will keep full, until the lee sheet is started. When coming to anchor, it is the best plan to haul the clews about half up before the halyards are let go. In taking in a close-reefed topsail in a gale of wind, the most general practice is to clew up to windward, keeping the sail full; then lower away the halyards, and ease off the lee sheet; clew the yard down, and haul up briskly on the lee clewline and the buntlines, bracing to the wind the moment the lee sheet is started. TO TAKE IN A TOPGALLANT SAIL OR ROYAL.--If the wind is light, and from aft or quartering, let go the halyards and clew down, squaring the yard by the braces. Then start the sheets and clew up, and haul up the buntlines. If the yard is braced up, the old style was to let go the halyards, clew down and round in on the weather brace; clewing up to windward first, then start the lee clew, and haul up the lee clewline and the buntlines. But the practice now is to clew up to leeward first, which prevents the slack of the sail getting too much over to leeward, or foul of the clewline block under the yard, as it is apt to, if the weather clew is hauled up first. If the wind is very fresh, and the vessel close-hauled, a good practice is to let go the lee sheet and halyards, and clew down, rounding in at the same time on the weather brace. Then start the weather sheet, and haul the weather clew chock up. Haul up the buntlines and steady the yard by the braces. TO TAKE IN A SKYSAIL.--If bent in the way described in this book, which is believed to be the most convenient, let go the halyards, haul down on the brails, and haul taut the royal stay. TO TAKE IN A JIB.--Let go the halyards, haul on the downhaul, easing off the sheet as the halyards are let go. TO TAKE IN A SPANKER.--Ease off the outhaul, and haul well up on the lee brails, taking in the slack of the weather ones. Mind particularly the lee throat-brail. Haul the boom amidships and steady it by the guys, lower the topping lifts, and square the gaff by the vangs. TO FURL A ROYAL.--This sail is usually furled by one person, and is that upon which green hands are practised. For the benefit of beginners, I will give particular directions. When you have got aloft to the topgallant mast-head, see, in the first place, that the yard is well down by the lifts, and steadied by the braces; then see that both clews are hauled chock up to the blocks, and if they are not, call out to the officer of the deck, and have it done. Then see your yard-arm gaskets clear. The best way is to cast them off from the tye, and lay them across, between the tye and the mast. This done, stretch out on the weather yard-arm, get hold of the weather leech, and bring it in to the slings taut along the yard. Hold the clew up with one hand, and with the other haul all the sail through the clew, letting it fall in the bunt. Bring the weather clew a little over abaft the yard, and put your knee upon it. Then stretch out to leeward and bring in the lee leech in the same manner, hauling all the sail through the clew, and putting the clew upon the yard in the same way, and holding it there by your other knee. Then prepare to make up your bunt. First get hold of the foot-rope and lay it on the yard and abaft; then take up the body of the sail, and lay it on the yard, seeing that it is all fairly through the clews. Having got all the sail upon the yard, make a _skin_ of the upper part of the body of the sail, large enough to come well down abaft and cover the whole bunt when the sail is furled. Lift the skin up, and put into the bunt the slack of the clews (not too taut,) the leech and foot-rope, and the body of the sail; being careful not to let it get forward under the yard or hang down abaft. Then haul your bunt well upon the yard, smoothing the skin, and bringing it down well abaft, and make fast the bunt-gasket round the mast, and the jigger, if there be one, to the tye. The glut will always come in the middle of the bunt, if it is properly made up. Now take your weather yard-arm gasket and pass it round the yard, three or four times, haul taut, and make it fast to the mast; then the lee one in the same manner. Never make a long gasket fast to its own part round the yard, for it may work loose and slip out to the yard-arm. Always pass a gasket _over_ the yard and down abaft, which will help to bring the sail upon the yard. A TOPGALLANT SAIL is furled in the same manner, except that it usually requires two men, in a large vessel; in which case, each man takes a yard-arm, and they make the bunt up together. If there are buntlines and a jigger, the bunt may be triced well up, by bending the jigger to the bight of a buntline, and having it hauled taut on deck. TO FURL A TOPSAIL OR COURSE.--The sail being hauled up, lay out on the yard, the two most experienced men standing in the slings, one on each side of the mast, to make the bunt up. The light hands lay out to the yard-arms, and take the leech up and bring it taut along the yard. In this way the clews are reached and handed to the men in the bunt, and the slack of the sail hauled through them and stowed away on and abaft the yard. The bunt being made up fairly on the yard against the mast, and the skin prepared, let it fall a little forward, and stow all the body of the sail, the clews, bolt-rope, and blocks, away in it; then, as many as can get hold, lend a hand to haul it well upon the yard. Overhaul a buntline a little, bend the jigger to it, and trice up on deck. Bring the skin down well abaft, see that the clews are not too taut, pass the bunt gasket, cast the jigger off, and make it fast slack to the tye. Then pass the yard-arm gaskets, hauling the sail well upon the yard, and passing the turns over the yard, and down abaft. If the sail has long gaskets, make them fast to the tye; if short, pass them in turns close together, and make them fast to their own parts, jammed as well as possible. TO FURL A JIB.--Go out upon the weather side of the boom. See your gasket clear for passing. The handiest way usually is, to make it up on its end, take a hitch over the whole with the standing part, and let it hang. Haul the sail well upon the boom, getting the clew, and having the sheet pennant hauled amidships. Cast the hitch off the gasket, take it in your hand, and pass two or three turns, beginning at the head; haul them taut; and so on to the clew. Pass the turns over and to windward. This will help to bring the sail upon the boom and to windward. Make the end fast to the stay, to the withe, or to the boom inside the cap, in any way that shall keep it from slipping back, which it might do if made fast to its own part round the boom. If there is but one hand on the boom, the first turns may be hauled taut enough to keep the sail up for the time; then, after the gasket is fast, go out to the head, and haul each turn well taut, beating the sail down with the hand. Be careful to confine the clew well. TO STOW A JIB IN CLOTH.--Haul the jib down snugly, and get it fairly up on the boom. Overhaul the after leech until you come to the first straight cloth. Gather this cloth over the rest of the sail on the boom, stopping the outer end of the cloth with a rope-yarn round the jib stay. If the jib halyards are double, stop the block inside the sail. Cover the sail well up with the cloth, stopping it at every two feet with rope-yarns round the sail and boom. If you are to lie in port for a long time, cast off the pennant, stow the clew on the boom, snugly under the cloth, which will be stopped as before with rope-yarns. TO REEF A TOPSAIL.--Round in on the weather brace, ease off the halyards, and clew the yard down by the clewlines and reef-tackles. Brace the yard in nearly to the wind, and haul taut both braces. Haul out the reef-tackles, make fast, and haul taut the buntlines. Before going upon the yard, see that it is well down by the lifts. Let the best men go to the yard-arms, and the light hands remain in the slings. Cast adrift the weather earing, pass it _over_ the yard-arm outside the lift, down abaft and under the yard, and _up_ through the reef-cringle. Haul well out, and take a round-turn with the earing round the cringle. Then pass several turns round the yard and through the cringle, hauling them well taut, passing the turns _over_ the yard, down abaft and under, and _up_ through the cringle.[3] Having expended nearly all the earing, hitch the remainder round the two first parts, that go outside the lift, jamming them together and passing several turns round them both to expend the rope. The bare end may be hitched to these two parts or to the lift. The men on the yard light the sail out to windward by the reef-points, to help the man at the weather yard-arm in hauling out his earing. As soon as the weather earing is hauled out and made secure by a turn or two, the word is passed--"Haul out to leeward," and the lee earing is hauled out till the band is taut along the yard, and made fast in the same manner. Then the men on the yard tie the reef-points with square knots, being careful to take the after points clear of the topgallant sheets. [3] Be careful to pass the turns clear of the topgallant sheets. In reefing, a good deal depends upon the way in which the yard is laid. If the yard is braced too much in, the sail catches flat aback and cannot be hauled out, besides the danger of knocking the men off the foot-ropes. The best way is to shiver the sail well till the yard is down, then brace it in with a slight full, make the braces fast, and luff up occasionally and shake the sail while the men are reefing. If you are going before the wind, you may, by putting your helm either way, and bringing the wind abeam, clew the yard down as the sail lifts, and keep her in this position, with the yard braced sharp up, until the sail is reefed; or, if you are not willing to keep off from your course, and the wind is very fresh, clew down and clew up, and reef as before directed. All the reefs are taken in the same way except the _close reef_. In close reefing, pass your earing _under_ the yard, up abaft and over, and _down_ through the cringle. Pass all your turns in the same manner; and bring the reef-band well under the yard in knotting, so as to cover the other reefs. As soon as the men are off the yard, let go the reef-tackles, clewlines, buntlines, and topgallant sheets; man the halyards, let go the lee brace, slack off the weather one, and hoist away. When well up, trim the yard by the braces, and haul out the bowlines. A reefed sail should never be braced quite sharp up, and if there is a heavy sea and the vessel pitches badly, ease the braces a little, that the yard may play freely, and do not haul the leech too taut. TO REEF A COURSE.--As a course generally has no reef-tackle, you must clew it up as for furling, according to the directions before given, except that the clews are not hauled chock up. Lay out on the yard and haul out the earings, and knot the points as for the first reef of a topsail, seeing them clear of the topsail sheets. If a long course of bad weather is anticipated, as in doubling the southern capes, or crossing the Atlantic in winter, reef-tackles are rove for the courses. If there are any studdingsail booms on the lower or topsail yards, they must be triced up before reefing. TO TURN OUT REEFS.--For a topsail, haul taut the reef-tackles and buntlines, settle a little on the halyards, if necessary; lay aloft, and cast off all the reef-points, beginning at the bunt and laying out. Be careful to cast all off before slacking up the earing; for, when there is more than one reef, a point may be easily left, if care is not taken. Have one hand at each earing, cast off all the turns but enough to hold it, and when both earings are ready, ease off both together. Pass the end of the earing through the cringle next above its own, and make it fast slack to its own part by a bowline knot. Lay in off the yard, let go reef-tackles, clewlines, buntlines, and topgallant sheets; overhaul them in the top and hoist away, slacking the braces and trimming the yard. The reefs of a course are turned out a good deal in the same manner; slacking up the sheet and tack, if necessary, and, when the earings are cast off, let go clew-garnets, buntlines and leechlines, board the tack, and haul aft the sheet. TO SET A TOPGALLANT STUDDINGSAIL.--This sail is always set from the top; the sail, together with the tack and halyards in two coils, being kept in the top. If there is but one hand aloft, take the end of the halyards aloft, _abaft_ everything, and reeve it _up_ through the block at the topgallant mast-head, and _down_ through the sheave-hole or block at the topgallant yard-arm, _abaft_ the sheet, and bring it into the top, forward of the rigging, and make it fast to the forward shroud. Take the end of your tack out on the topsail yard, _under_ the brace, reeve it _up_ through the block at the end of the topgallant studdingsail boom, bring it in _over_ the brace, overhauling a plenty of it so as to let the boom go out, and hitch it to the topmast rigging while you rig your boom out. Cast off the heel-lashing and rig your boom out to the mark, slue the boom with the block up and make fast round the yard. (The easiest way of passing the boom-lashing is to take it over the yard and put a bight up between the head-rope and yard; then take the end back over the yard and boom and through the bight, and haul taut. This may be done twice, if necessary, and then hitch it round all parts, between the boom and the yard.) The boom being rigged out and fast, take the end of your tack down into the top and hitch it to the forward shroud. Then take the coil of the tack and throw the other end down on deck, outside of the rigging and backstays. (It is well, in throwing the coil down, to keep hold of the bight with one hand, for otherwise, if they should miss it on deck, you will have to rig in your boom.) Throw down the hauling end of your halyards abaft and inside everything. Now get your sail clear for sending out. Lay the yard across the top, forward of the rigging, with the outer end out. Bend your halyards to the yard by a fisherman's bend, about one third of the way out. Take your tack under the yard and bend it by a sheet-bend to the outer clew, and pay down the sheet and downhaul through the lubber-hole. All being clear for hoisting, sway away on the halyards on deck, the men in the top guying the sail by the sheet and downhaul, the latter being hauled taut enough to keep the outer clew up to the inner yard-arm. (Sometimes it is well to make up the downhaul as is done with the downhaul of the topmast studdingsail.) When the sail is above the brace, haul out on the tack, sway the yard chock up by the halyards, and trim the sheet down. Make the end of the downhaul fast slack. A weather topgallant or topmast studdingsail should be set abaft the sail, and a lee one forward of the sail. Therefore, in setting a lee topgallant studdingsail, it is well to send it out of the top with a turn in it, that is, with the inner yard-arm slued forward and out, so that when the tack and sheet are hauled upon, the inner yard-arm will swing forward of the topgallant sail.[4] [4] It will assist this operation to keep hold of the outer leech until the sail is clear of the top. Small sized vessels have no downhaul to the topgallant studdingsails. This saves confusion, and is very well if the sail is small. TO TAKE IN A TOPGALLANT STUDDINGSAIL.--Let go the tack and clew up the downhaul, dipping the yard abaft the leech of the topgallant sail, if it is forward. Lower away handsomely on the halyards, hauling down on the sheet and downhaul. When the yard is below the topsail brace, lower roundly and haul into the top, forward of the rigging. If the sail is taken in temporarily, stand the yard up and down and becket it to the middle topmast shroud; make the sail up, hitch the bight of the tack and halyards to the forward shroud, and haul up the sheet and downhaul. If everything is to be stowed away, unreeve the tack and halyards, and coil them away separately in the top; also coil away the sheets and downhaul, and stop all the coils down by hitches passed through the slats of the top. Rig the boom in and make it fast to the tye. Sometimes the halyards are unrove from the yard-arm and rounded up to the span-block, with a knot in their end. TO SET A TOPMAST STUDDINGSAIL.--The topmast studdingsail halyards are generally kept coiled away in the top. Take the end up, reeve it _up_ through the span-block at the cap, and _out_ through the block at the topsail yard-arm, and pay the end down to the forecastle, forward of the yard and outside the bowline. Pay the hauling end down through the lubber-hole. Reeve your lower halyards. These are usually kept coiled away in the top, with the pennant, which hooks to the cap of the lower mast. Hook the pennant, reeve the halyards _up_ through the pennant block, _out_ through the block on the boom-end, and pay the end down to the forecastle. Pay the hauling end down _forward_ of the top. (Some vessels keep their top-mast studdingsail tacks coiled away at the yard-arm, and hitched down to the boom and yard. This is a clumsy practice, and saves no time or trouble. The best way is to unreeve them whenever the boom is to be rigged in, and coil them away in the bow of the long-boat, or elsewhere. There is no more trouble, and less liability to confusion, in reeving them afresh, than in coiling them away and clearing again on the yard-arms.) Carry your tack outside the backstays and lower rigging, clear of everything, out upon the lower yard under the brace; reeve it _forward_ through the tack-block at the boom-end, first sluing the block up, and pay the end down forward of the yard. Rig the boom out to the mark and lash it. Get the studdingsail on the forecastle clear for setting. Bend the halyards to the yard, about one half of the way out. Hitch the end of the downhaul over the inner yard-arm by the eye in its end, reeve it through the lizard on the outer leech, and through the block at the outer clew abaft the sail. Bend the tack to the outer clew, and take a turn with the sheet. Clew the yard down by the downhaul, and make the downhaul up just clear of the block, by a catspaw doubled and the bight of the running part shoved through the bight of all the parts, so that hauling on it may clear it and let the yard go up. Hoist on the halyards until the sail is above the lower yard, guying it by the sheet and downhaul, then haul out on the tack until the clew is chock out to the boom-end, hoist on the halyards, jerking the downhaul clear, and trim down the sheet. TO TAKE IN A TOPMAST STUDDINGSAIL.--Lower away handsomely on the halyards, clewing the yard down to the outer clew by the downhaul. Slack up the tack, and lower away on the halyards, hauling down well on the sheet and downhaul, till the sail is in upon the forecastle. The sail may be made up on the forecastle, and the end of the tack and halyards made fast forward, if it is to be soon set again. If not, cast off all, unreeve your tack, hauling from aft, and coil it away. Unreeve the halyards, or round them up to the block at the mast-head with a knot in their end. Rig the boom in, and lash it to the slings. TO SET A LOWER STUDDINGSAIL.--Before rigging out the top-mast studdingsail boom, the lower halyards should always be rove, as before directed. Reeve the inner halyards _out_ through a small single block under the slings of the lower yard, and through another about two thirds of the way out, and pay the end down upon the forecastle for bending. Get the studdingsail clear, bend the outer halyards to the yard, and the inner halyards to the inner cringle at the head of the sail. Reeve the outhaul through the block at the swinging-boom-end, and bend the forward end to the outer clew of the sail. Hook the topping-lift and forward guy to the boom, and top up on it. Haul on the forward guy, and ease off the after one, slacking away a little on the topping-lift, until the boom is trimmed by the lower yard; then make fast the guys and lift. Haul well taut the fore lift and brace, and belay. Take a turn with one sheet, hoist away on the outer halyards, and when about one third up, clear the downhaul, haul chock out on the outhaul, and hoist well up by the halyards, which will serve as a lift to the topmast studdingsail boom; and then set taut on the inner halyards and trim down the sheet. The practice now is, and it is found most convenient, to set the sail before rigging out the boom; then clap on the outhaul and forward guy, and trim the boom by the lower yard. TO TAKE IN A LOWER STUDDINGSAIL.--Let go the outhaul, and haul on the clewline till the outer clew is up to the yard. Then lower away the outer halyards, and haul in on the sheet and clewline. When the sail is in over the rail, lower away the inner halyards. If the booms are to be rigged in, cast off all the gear; making the bending end of the outhaul fast in-board, and unreeving the outer and inner halyards, or running the outer up to the pennant block, and the inner up to the yard block, with knots in their ends. Ease off the forward guy with a turn, haul in on the after guy, topping well up by the lift, and get the boom alongside. Rig in the topmast studdingsail boom before unreeving the outer halyards. It is a convenient practice, when the swinging boom is alongside, to hook the topping-lift to a becket or thimble at the turning in of the fore swifter, and the forward guy to a strap and thimble on the spritsail yard. In strong winds it is well to have a boom-brace-pennant fitted to the topmast studdingsail boom-end with a single block, making a whip purchase, the hauling part leading to the gangway, and belaying at the same pin with the tack; or else, the brace may lead to the gangway, and the tack be brought in through blocks on the yard, and lead down on deck, beside the mast. The former mode is more usual. The topmast studdingsail is sometimes made with a reef in it, to be carried with a single reefed topsail; in which case it is reefed on deck to the yard and sent out as before. CHAPTER X. GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF WORKING A SHIP. Action of the water upon the rudder. Headway. Sternway. Action of the wind upon the sails. Head-sails. After-sails. Centre of gravity or rotation. Turning a ship to or from the wind. A ship is acted upon principally by the rudder and sails. When the rudder is fore-and-aft, that is, on a line with the keel, the water runs by it, and it has no effect upon the ship's direction. When it is changed from a right line to one side or the other, the water strikes against it, and forces the stern in an opposite direction. For instance, if the helm is put to the starboard, the rudder is put off the line of the keel, to port. This sends the stern off to the starboard, and, of course, the ship turning on her centre of gravity, her head goes in an opposite direction, to port. If the helm is put to port, the reverse will follow, and the ship's head will turn off her course to starboard. Therefore the helm is always put in the opposite direction from that in which the ship's head is to be moved. Moving the rudder from a right line has the effect of deadening the ship's way more or less, according as it is put at a greater or less angle with the keel. A ship should therefore be so balanced by her sails that a slight change of her helm may answer the purpose. If a vessel is going astern, and the rudder is turned off from the line of the keel, the water, striking against the back of the rudder, pushes the stern off in the same direction in which the rudder is turned. For instance, if sternway is on her, and the helm is put to the starboard, the rudder turns to port, the water forces the stern in the same direction, and the ship's head goes off to the starboard. Therefore, when sternway is on a vessel, put the helm in the same direction in which the head is to be turned. A current or tide running astern, that is, when the ship's head is toward it, will have the same effect on the rudder as if the ship were going ahead; and when it runs forward, it will be the same as though the ship were going astern. It will now be well to show how the sails act upon a ship, with reference to her centre of rotation. Suppose a vessel to be rigged with three sails, one in the forward part, one at the centre, and the third at the after part, and her left or larboard side to be presented to the wind, which we will suppose to be abeam, or at right angles with the keel. If the head sail only were set, the effect would be that the wind would send the vessel a little ahead and off to the starboard on her centre of rotation, so as to bring her stern slowly round to the wind. If the after sail only were set, the vessel would shoot ahead a little, her stern would go off to the starboard and her head come up into the wind. If only the centre sail were set, the effect would be the same as if all three of the sails were set, and she would go ahead in a straight line. So far, we have supposed the sails to be set _full_; that is, with their tacks forward and their sheets aft. If they were all set _aback_, the vessel would go astern nearly, if the rudder were kept steady, in a straight line. If the head sail only is set and aback, she will go astern and round upon her axis, with her head from the wind, much quicker than if full. So, if the after sail alone were set and aback, she would go astern, and her head would come suddenly into the wind. These principles of the wind acting upon the sails, and the water upon the rudder, are the foundation of the whole science of working a ship. In large vessels the sails are numerous, but they may all be reduced to three classes, viz., head sails, or those which are forward of the centre of gravity or rotation, having a tendency to send the ship's head off from the wind; after sails, or those abaft the centre of rotation, and which send the stern off and the head toward the wind; and lastly, centre sails, which act equally on each side the centre of rotation, and do not turn the ship off her course one way or the other. These classes of sails, if set aback, tend to stop the headway and send the ship astern, and also to turn her off her course in the same direction as when set full, but with more rapidity. The further a sail is from the centre of rotation, the greater is its tendency to send the ship off from the line of her keel. Accordingly, a jib is the strongest head sail, and a spanker the strongest after sail. The centre of rotation is not necessarily at the centre of the ship. On the contrary, as vessels are now built, it may not be much abaft that part of the deck to which the main tack is boarded. For the main breadth, or dead-flat, being there, the greatest cavity will also be there, and of course the principal weight of the cargo should centre there, as being the strongest part. Therefore the centre of rotation will greatly depend upon proper stowage. If the ship is much by the stern, the centre of rotation will be carried aft, and if by the head, it will be carried forward. The cause of this is, that when loaded down by the stern, her after sails have but little effect to move her stern against the water, and a very slight action upon the forward sails will send her head off to leeward, as she is there light and high in the air. Accordingly, to keep her in a straight line, the press of sail is required to be further aft, or, in other words, the centre of rotation is further aft. If a ship is loaded down by the head, the opposite results follow, and more head and less after sail is necessary. A ship should be so stowed, and have her sails so trimmed, that she may be balanced as much as possible, and not be obliged to carry her helm much off the line of her keel, which tends to deaden her way. If a ship is stowed in her best sailing trim, and it is found, when on a wind, that her head tends to windward, obliging her to carry a strong weather helm, it may be remedied by taking in some after sail, or adding head sail. So, if she carries a lee helm, that is, if her head tends to fly off from the wind, it is remedied by taking in head or adding after sail. Sometimes a ship is made to carry a weather helm by having too much head sail set aloft. For, if she lies much over on a wind, the square sails forward have a tendency to press her downwards and raise her proportionally abaft, so that she meets great resistance from the water to leeward under her bows, while her stern, being light, is easily carried off; which, of course, requires her to carry a weather helm. The general rules, then, for turning a ship, are these: to bring her head to the wind,--put the helm to leeward, and bring the wind to act as much as possible on the after sails, and as little as possible on the head sails. This may be done without taking in any sail, by letting go the head sheets, so that those sails may lose their wind, and by pointing the head yards to the wind, so as to keep the head sails shaking. At the same time keep the after sails full, and flatten in the spanker sheet; or, if this is not sufficient, the after sails may be braced aback, which will send the stern off and the head to windward. But as this makes back sails of them, and tends to send the vessel astern, there should be either head or centre sails enough filled to counteract this and keep headway upon her. On the other hand, to turn the head off from the wind, put the helm to windward, shiver the after sails, and flatten in the head sheets. Brace the head yards aback if necessary, being careful not to let her lose headway if it can be avoided. The vessel may be assisted very much in going off or coming to, by setting or taking in the jib and spanker; which, if the latter is fitted with brails, are easily handled. CHAPTER XI. TACKING, WEARING, BOXING, &C. Tacking without fore-reaching. Tacking against a heavy sea. Hauling off all. To trim the yards. Flattening in. Missing stays. Wearing--under courses--under a mainsail--under bare poles. Box-hauling--short round. Club-hauling. Drifting in a tide-way. Backing and filling in do. Clubbing in do. TACKING.--Have the ship so suited with sails that she may steer herself as nearly as possible, and come to with a small helm. Keep her a good full, so that she may have plenty of headway. _Ready, About!_ Send all hands to their stations. The chief mate and one, two, or more of the best men, according to the size of the vessel, on the forecastle, to work the head sheets and bowlines and the fore tack; two or more good men (one usually a petty officer, or an older and trusty seaman) to work the main tack and bowline. The second mate sees the lee fore and main braces clear and ready for letting go, and stands by to let go the lee main braces, which may all be belayed to one pin. Put one hand to let go the weather cross-jack braces, and others to haul in to leeward; the cook works the fore sheet, and the steward the main; station one or more at the spanker sheet and guys; and the rest at the weather main braces. Ease the helm down gradually; _Helm's a-lee!_ and let go the jib sheet and fore sheets. As soon as the wind is parallel with the yards, blowing directly upon the leeches of the square sails, so that all is shaking, _Raise tacks and sheets!_ and let go the fore and main tacks and main sheet, keeping the fore and main bowline fast. As soon as her head is within a point or a point and a half of the wind, _Mainsail haul!_ let go the lee main and weather cross-jack braces, and swing the after yards round. While she is head to the wind, and the after sails are becalmed by the head sails, get the main tack down and sheet aft, and right your helm, using it afterwards as her coming to or falling off requires. As soon as she passes the direction of the wind, shift your jib sheets over the stays, and when the after sails take full, or when she brings the wind four points on the other bow, and you are sure of paying off sufficiently, _Let go and haul!_ brace round the head yards briskly, down fore tack and aft the sheet, brace sharp up and haul your bowlines out, and trim down your head sheets. It is best to haul the mainsail just before you get the wind right ahead, for then the wind, striking the weather leeches of the after sails, forces them round almost without the braces, and you will have time to brace up and get your tack down and sheet aft, when she has payed off on the other side. If she falls off too rapidly while swinging your head yards, so as to bring the wind abeam or abaft, _'Vast bracing!_ Ease off head sheets and put your helm a-lee; and as she comes up, meet her and brace sharp up. If, on the other hand, (as sometimes happens with vessels which carry a strong weather helm,) she does not fall off after the after sails take, be careful not to haul your head yards until she is fully round; and if she should fly up into the wind, let go the main sheet, and, if necessary, brail up the spanker and shiver the cross-jack yards. In staying, be careful to right your helm before she loses headway. TO TACK WITHOUT FORE-REACHING, as in a narrow channel, when you are afraid to keep headway. If she comes slowly up to windward, haul down the jib and get your spanker-boom well over to windward. As you raise tacks and sheets, let go the lee fore topsail brace, being careful to brace up again as soon as she takes aback. Also, hoist the jib, and trim down, if necessary, as soon as she takes on the other side. TACKING AGAINST A HEAVY HEAD SEA.--You are under short sail, there is a heavy head sea, and you doubt whether she will stay against it. Haul down the fore topmast staysail, ease down the helm, and raise fore sheet. When within about a point of the wind's eye, let go main tack and sheet, lee braces and after bowlines, and _Mainsail haul!_ If she loses her headway at this time, shift your helm. As soon as she brings the wind on the other bow, she will fall off rapidly by reason of her sternway, therefore shift your helm again to meet her, and _Let go and haul!_ at once. Brace about the head yards, but keep the weather braces in, to moderate her falling off. When she gets headway, right the helm, and as she comes up to the wind, brace up and haul aft. TACKING BY HAULING OFF ALL.--This can be done only in a smooth sea, with a light working breeze, a smart vessel and strong crew. Man all the braces. Let her come up head to the wind, and fall off on the other tack, shifting the helm if she gathers sternway. When you get the wind about five points on the other bow, _Haul off all!_ let go all the braces and bowlines and swing all the yards at once. Right the helm, board tacks and haul aft sheets, brace up and haul out. TO TRIM THE YARDS WHEN CLOSE-HAULED.--In smooth water, with a light breeze, brace the lower yards sharp up, and trim the upper yards each a trifle in abaft the one below it. If you have a pretty stiff breeze, brace the topsail yard in about half a point more than the lower yard, and the topgallant yard half a point more than the topsail yard, and so on. If you have a strong breeze and a topping sea, and especially if reduced to short sail, brace in your lower yards a little, and the others proportionally. This will prevent the vessel going off bodily to leeward; and if she labors heavily, the play of the mast would otherwise carry away the braces and sheets, or spring the yards. MISSING STAYS.--If after getting head to the wind she comes to a stand and begins to fall off before you have hauled your main yard, flatten in your jib sheets, board fore tack, and haul aft fore sheet; also ease off spanker sheet, or brail up the spanker, if necessary. When she is full again, trim the jib and spanker sheets, and when she has recovered sufficient headway, try it again. If, after coming head to the wind, and after the after yards are swung, she loses headway and refuses to go round, or begins to fall off on the same tack on which she was before, and you have shifted the helm without effect, haul up the mainsail and spanker, square the after yards, shift your helm again a-lee, so as to assist her in falling off, and brace round the head yards so as to box her off. As she fills on her former tack, brace up the after yards, brace round the head yards, sharp up all, board tacks, haul out and haul aft. WEARING.--Haul up the mainsail and spanker, put the helm up, and, as she goes off, brace in the after yards. If there is a light breeze, the rule is to keep the mizzen topsail lifting, and the main topsail full. This will keep sufficient headway on her, and at the same time enable her to fall off. But if you have a good breeze and she goes off fast, keep both the main and mizzen topsails lifting. As she goes round, bringing the wind on her quarter and aft, follow the wind with your after yards, keeping the mizzen topsail lifting, and the main either lifting or full, as is best. After a vessel has fallen off much, the less headway she has the better, provided she has enough to give her steerage. When you have the wind aft, raise fore tack and sheet, square in the head yards, and haul down the jib. As she brings the wind on the other quarter, brace sharp up the after yards, haul out the spanker, and set the mainsail. As she comes to on the other tack, brace up the head yards, keeping the sails full, board fore tack and aft the sheet, hoist the jib, and meet her with the helm. TO WEAR UNDER COURSES.--Square the cross-jack yards, ease off main bowline and tack, and haul up the weather clew of the mainsail. Ease off the main sheet, and haul up the lee clew, and the buntlines and leechlines. Square the main yards and put the helm a-weather. As she falls off, let go the fore bowline, ease off the fore sheet, and brace in the fore yard. When she gets before the wind, board the fore and main tacks on the other side, and haul aft the main sheet, but keep the weather braces in. As she comes to on the other side, ease the helm, trim down the fore sheet, brace up and haul out. TO WEAR UNDER A MAINSAIL.--Vessels lying-to under this sail generally wear by hoisting the fore topmast staysail, or some other head sail. If this cannot be done, brace the cross-jack yards to the wind, and, if necessary, send down the mizzen topmast and the cross-jack yard. Brace the head yards full. Take an opportunity when she has headway, and will fall off, to put the helm up. Ease off the main sheet, and, as she falls off, brace in the main yard a little. When the wind is abaft the beam, raise the main tack. When she is dead before it, get the other main tack down as far as possible; and when she has the wind on the other quarter, ease the helm, haul aft the sheet, and brace up. TO WEAR UNDER BARE POLES.--Some vessels, which are well down by the stern, will wear in this situation, by merely pointing the after yards to the wind, or sending down the mizzen topmast and the cross-jack yard, and filling the head yards; but vessels in good trim will not do this. To assist the vessel, veer a good scope of hawser out of the lee quarter, with a buoy, or something for a stop-water, attached to the end. As the ship sags off to leeward, the buoy will be to windward, and will tend to bring the stern round to the wind. When she is before it, haul the hawser aboard. BOX-HAULING.--Put the helm down, light up the head sheets and slack the lee braces, to deaden her way. As she comes to the wind, raise tacks and sheets, and haul up the mainsail and spanker. As soon as she comes head to the wind and loses her headway, square the after yards, brace the head yards sharp aback, and flatten in the head sheets. The helm, being put down to bring her up, will now pay her off, as she has sternway on. As she goes off, keep the after sails lifting, and square in the head yards. As soon as the sails on the foremast give her headway, shift the helm. When she gets the wind on the other quarter, haul down the jib, haul out the spanker, set the mainsail, and brace the after yards sharp up. As she comes to on the other tack, brace up the head yards, meet her with the helm, and set the jib. BOX-HAULING SHORT ROUND; sometimes called _wearing short round._--Haul up the mainsail and spanker, put the helm hard a-weather, square the after yards, brace the head yards sharp aback, and flatten in the head sheets. As she gathers sternway, shift the helm. After this, proceed as in box-hauling by the former method. The first mode is preferable when you wish to stop headway as soon as possible; as a vessel under good way will range ahead some distance after the sails are all thrown flat aback. 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. CLUB-HAULING.--This method of going about is resorted to when on a lee shore, and the vessel can neither be tacked nor box-hauled. Cock-bill your lee anchor, get a hawser on it for a spring, and lead it to the lee quarter; range your cable, and unshackle it abaft the windlass. _Helm's a-lee!_ and _Raise tacks and sheets!_ as for going in stays. The moment she loses headway, let go the anchor and _Mainsail haul!_ As soon as the anchor brings her head to the wind, let the chain cable go, holding on to the spring; and when the after sails take full, cast off or cut the spring, and _Let go and haul!_ DRIFTING IN A TIDE-WAY.--As a vessel is deeper aft than forward, her stern will always tend to drift faster than her head. If the current is setting out of a river or harbor, and the wind the opposite way, or only partly across the current, you may work out by tacking from shore to shore; or you may let her drift out, broadside to the current; or, keeping her head to the current by sufficient sail, you may let her drift out stern first; or, lastly, you may _club_ her down. If the wind is partly across the current, cast to windward. If you work down by tacking, and the wind is at all across the current, be careful of the lee shore, and stay in season, since, if you miss stays, you may not be able to save yourself by wearing or box-hauling, as you might on the weather shore. If the channel is very narrow, or there are many vessels at anchor, the safest way is to bring her head to the current, brace the yards full, and keep only sail enough to give her steerage, that you may sheer from side to side. If there is room enough, you will drift more rapidly by bringing her broadside to the current, keeping the topsails shaking, and counteract the force of the current upon the stern by having the spanker full and the helm a-lee. You can at any time shoot her ahead, back her astern, or bring her head to the current, by filling the head yards, taking in the spanker, and setting the jib; filling the after yards, taking in the jib, and setting the spanker; or by bracing all aback. BACKING AND FILLING IN A TIDE-WAY.--Counter-brace your yards as in lying-to, and drift down broadside to the current. Fill away and shoot ahead, or throw all aback and force her astern, as occasion may require. When you approach the shore on either side, fill away till she gets sufficient headway, and put her in stays or wear her round. CLUBBING IN A TIDE-WAY.--Drift down with your anchor under your foot, heaving in or paying out on your cable as you wish to increase or deaden her way. Have a spring on your cable, so as to present a broadside to the current. This method is a troublesome and dangerous one, and rarely resorted to. An anchor will seldom drag clear, through the whole operation. CHAPTER XII. GALES OF WIND, LYING-TO, GETTING ABACK, BY THE LEE, &C. Lying-to.--choice of sails. Scudding. Heave-to after scudding. Taken aback. Chappelling. Broaching-to. By the lee. LYING-TO.--The best single sail to lie-to under, is generally thought to be a close-reefed maintopsail. The fore or the main spencer (sails which are used very much now instead of main and mizzen staysails) may be used to advantage, according as a ship requires sail more before or abaft the centre of gravity. If a ship will bear more than one sail, it is thought best to separate the pressure. Then set the fore and main spencers; or (if she carries staysails instead) the main and mizzen staysail; or, if she is easier under lofty sail, the fore and main topsails close-reefed. A close-reefed main topsail, with three lower storm staysails; or, with the two spencers, fore topmast staysail, and reefed spanker, is considered a good arrangement for lying-to. If the fore topmast staysail and balance-reefed spanker can be added to the two close-reefed topsails, she will keep some way, will go less to leeward, and can be easily wore round. Close-reefed topsails are used much more now for lying-to than the courses. As ships are now built, with the centre of gravity farther forward, and the foremast stepped more aft, they will lie-to under head sail better than formerly. Some vessels, which are well down by the stern, will lie-to under a reefed foresail, as this tends to press her down forward; whereas, if she had much after sail, she would have all the lateral resistance of the water aft, and would come up to the wind. In carrying most head or after sail, you must be determined by the trim of the vessel, her tendency to come to or go off, and as to whether the sail you use will act as a lifting or a burying sail. A topsail has an advantage over a spencer or lower staysail for lying-to, since it steadies the ship better, and counteracts the heavy weather roll, which a vessel will give under low and small fore-and-aft sails. SCUDDING.--The most approved sail for scudding is the close-reefed maintopsail, with a reefed foresail. The course alone might get becalmed under the lee of a high sea, and the vessel, losing her way, would be overtaken by the sea from aft; whereas the topsail will always give her way enough and lift her. The foresail is of use in case she should be brought by the lee. Many officers recommend that the fore topmast staysail, or fore storm staysail, should always be set in scudding, to pay her off if she should broach-to, and with the sheets hauled flat aft. It has been thought that with the wind quartering and a heavy sea, a vessel is more under command with a close-reefed foretopsail and maintopmast staysail. The foretopmast staysail may also be hoisted. If the ship flies off and gets by the lee, the foretopsail is soon braced about, and, with the maintopmast staysail sheet shifted to the other side, the headway is not lost. TO HEAVE-TO AFTER SCUDDING.--Secure everything about decks, and watch a smooth time. Suppose her to be scudding under a close-reefed maintopsail and reefed foresail; haul up the foresail, put the helm down, brace up the after yards, and set the mizzen staysail. As she comes to, set the main staysail, meet her with the helm, brace up the head-yards, and set the fore or foretopmast staysail. If your vessel labors much, ease the lee braces and the halyards, that everything may work fairly aloft, and let her have a plenty of helm, to come to and fall off freely with the sea. The helmsman will often let the wheel fly off to leeward, taking care to meet her easily and in season. The sails should be so arranged as to require little of the rudder. TAKEN ABACK.--It will frequently happen, when sailing close-hauled, especially in light winds, from a shift of wind, from its dying away, or from inattention, that the ship will come up into the wind, shaking the square sails forward. In this case, it will often be sufficient to put the helm hard up, flatten in the head sheets, or haul their bights to windward, and haul up the spanker. If this will not recover her, and she continues to come to, box her off. Raise fore tack and sheet, haul up the spanker and mainsail, brace the head-yards aback, haul the jib sheets to windward, and haul out the lee bowlines. When the after sails fill, _Let go and haul!_ This manoeuvre of boxing can only be performed in good weather and light winds, as it usually gives a vessel sternway. If the wind has got round upon the other bow, and it is too late for box-hauling, square the yards fore and aft, keeping your helm so as to pay her off under sternway; and, as the sails fill, keep the after yards shaking, and haul up the spanker and mainsail, squaring the head-yards, and shifting your helm as she gathers headway. CHAPPELLING.--This operation is performed when, instead of coming to, you are taken aback in light winds. Put the helm up, if she has headway, haul up the mainsail and spanker, and square the after yards. Shift the helm as she gathers sternway, and when the after sails fill, and she gathers headway, shift your helm again. When she brings the wind aft, brace up the after yards, get the main tack down and sheet aft, and haul out the spanker as soon as it will take. The head braces are not touched, but the yards remain braced as before. The former mode of wearing, by squaring the head-yards when the after sails are full, has great advantages over chappelling, as the vessel will go off faster when the wind is abeam and abaft, and will come to quicker when the wind gets on the other side. BROACHING-TO.--This is when a vessel is scudding, and comes up into the wind and gets aback. For such an accident, the foretopmast staysail is set, which will act as an off-sail, so that by keeping the helm up, with the maintopsail (if set) braced into the wind, she will pay off again without getting sternway. If the close-reefed foretopsail is carried instead of the main, it can be easily filled. BROUGHT BY THE LEE.--This is when a vessel is scudding with the wind quartering, and falls off so as to bring the wind on the other side, laying the sails aback. This is more likely to occur than broaching-to, especially in a heavy sea. Suppose the vessel to be scudding under a close-reefed maintopsail and reefed foresail, with the wind on her larboard quarter. She falls off suddenly and brings the wind on the starboard quarter, laying all aback. Put your helm hard a-starboard, raise fore tack and sheet, and fill the foresail, shivering the maintopsail. When she brings the wind aft again, meet her with the helm, and trim the yards for her course. CHAPTER XIII. ACCIDENTS. On beam-ends. Losing a rudder. A squall. A man overboard. Collision. Rules for vessels passing one another. ON BEAM-ENDS.--A vessel is usually thrown upon her beam-ends by a sudden squall taking her, when under a press of sail, and shifting the ballast. She must be righted, if possible, without cutting away the masts. For, beside sacrificing them, the object can seldom be accomplished in that way, if the ballast and cargo have shifted. Carry a hawser from the lee quarter, with spars and other good stop-waters bent to it. As the ship drifts well to leeward, the hawser will bring her stern to the wind; but it may not cast her on the other side. If a spring can be got upon the hawser from the lee bow, and hauled upon, and the stern fast let go, this will bring the wind to act upon the flat part of the deck and pay her stern off, and assist the spring, when the sails may be trimmed to help her in righting. If she can be brought head to the wind, and the sails be taken aback, she may cast on the other tack. When there is anchoring ground, the practice is to let go the lee anchor, which may take the sails aback and cast her. Then the ballast and cargo may be righted. If there is no anchoring ground, a vessel may still be kept head to the wind, by paying a chain cable out of the lee hawse-hole; or by bending a hawser to a large spar, which may be kept broadside-to by a span, to the centre of which the hawser is bent. The same operation may be applied to a vessel overset, and is preferable to wearing by a hawser. Make fast the hawser forward to the lee bow, carry the other end aft to windward and bend it to the spar, and launch the spar overboard. By this means, or by letting go an anchor, though there be no bottom to be reached, a vessel may often be recovered. LOSING A RUDDER.--The first thing to be done on losing a rudder, is to bring the ship to the wind by bracing up the after yards. Meet her with the head yards, as she comes to. Take in sail forward and aft, and keep her hove-to by her sails. A vessel may be made to steer herself for a long time, by carefully trimming the yards and slacking up the jib sheets or the spanker sheet a little, as may be required. Having got the ship by the wind, get up a hawser, middle it, and take a slack clove-hitch at the centre. Get up a cable, reeve its end through this hitch, and pay the cable out over the taffrail. Having payed out about fifty fathoms, jam the hitch and rack it well, so that it cannot slip; pay out on the cable until the hitch takes the water; then lash the cable to the centre of the taffrail; lash a spare spar under it across the stern, with a block well secured at each end, through which reeve the ends of the hawser, one on each quarter, and reeve them again through blocks at the sides, abreast of the wheel. By this, a ship may be steered until a temporary rudder can be constructed. A rudder may be fitted by taking a spare topmast, or other large spar, and cutting it flat in the form of a stern-post. Bore holes at proper distances in that part which is to be the fore part of the preventer or additional stern-post; then take the thickest plank on board, and make it as near as possible into the form of a rudder; bore holes at proper distances in the fore part of it and in the after part of the preventer stern-post, to correspond with each other, and reeve rope grommets through those holes in the rudder and after part of the stern-post, for the rudder to play upon. Through the preventer stern-post, reeve guys, and at the fore part of them fix tackles, and then put the machine overboard. When it is in a proper position, or in a line with the ship's stern-post, lash the upper part of the preventer post to the upper part of the ship's stern-post; then hook tackles at or near the main chains, and bowse taut on the guys to confine it to the lower part of the preventer stern-post. Having holes bored through the preventer and proper stern-post, run an iron bolt through both, (taking care not to touch the rudder,) which will prevent the false stern-post from rising or falling. By the guys on the after part of the rudder and tackles affixed to them, the ship may be steered, taking care to bowse taut the tackles on the preventer stern-post, to keep it close to the proper stern-post. A SQUALL.--If you see a squall approaching, take in the light sails, stand by to clew down, and keep her off a little, if necessary. If you are taken by one, unprepared, with all sail set and close-hauled, put the helm hard up, let go the spanker sheet and outhaul, and the main sheet. Clew up royals and topgallant sails, haul down flying-jib, haul up the mainsail, and clew down the mizzen topsail. When you are before the wind, clew down the topsail yards, and haul out the reef-tackles. You may run before the squall until it moderates, or furl the light sails, bring by the wind, and reef. A MAN OVERBOARD.[5]--The moment the cry is heard, put the helm down and bring her up into the wind, whether she is on the wind or free, and deaden her headway. Throw overboard instantly life buoys, or, if there are none at hand, take a grating, the carpenter's bench, or any pieces of plank or loose spars there may be about decks; and let two or three hands clear away a quarter boat. The best plan is, if the vessel was on the wind, to haul the mainsail up and brace aback the after yards and raise the head sheets; then, having her main yard aback, she will drift down directly toward the man. Keep your head sails full to steady her, while the after ones stop her headway. [5] See Totten's Naval Text Book, Letter XX. If you are sailing free, with studdingsails set, clew up the lower studdingsail, brace up the head yards, haul forward the fore tack, and keep the head yards full, while you luff up to back the after ones. Lower away the boat as soon as it is safe, and, as the vessel will have turned nearly round, direct the boat with reference to her position when the accident happened and her progress since. COLLISION.--If two vessels approach one another, both having a free wind, each keeps to the right. That is, the one with her starboard tacks aboard keeps on or luffs; and the other, if it is necessary to alter her course, keeps off. So, if two vessels approach one another close-hauled on different tacks, and it is doubtful which is to windward, the vessel on the starboard tack keeps on her course, and the other gives way and keeps off. That is, each goes to the right, and the vessel with her starboard tacks aboard has the preference. The only exception to this is, that if the vessel on the larboard tack is so much to windward that in case both persist the vessel on the starboard tack will strike her to leeward and abaft the beam; then the vessel on the starboard tack must give way, as she can do it more easily than the other. Another rule is that if one vessel is going dead before the wind and the other going free on the starboard tack, the latter must luff and go under the stern of the former. CHAPTER XIV. HEAVING-TO BY COUNTER-BRACING. SPEAKING. SOUNDING. HEAVING THE LOG. COUNTER-BRACING.--This is done whenever, with a breeze, a vessel wishes to remain stationary, for the purpose of speaking another vessel, sounding, lowering a boat, or the like. If you do not wish to stop your way entirely, haul up the mainsail, square the main yards aback, keeping the fore and cross-jack yards full, and the foresail, spanker and jib set. If you wish to stop her way still more, back the cross-jack yards also, haul up the foresail, and put the helm a-lee. She will then fall off and come to, which you may regulate by the jib and spanker sheets; and she may be ranged a little ahead, or deadened, by filling or backing the cross-jack yards. You may, on the other hand, back the head yards and fill the after yards. The former method is called heaving-to with the maintopsail to the mast, and the latter, with the foretopsail to the mast. SPEAKING.--When two vessels speak at sea, the one to windward heaves her maintopsail to the mast, and the one to leeward her fore. This is in order that the weather one may the more readily fill without falling off so as to run afoul of the other, and that the lee one may box her head off and keep clear of the ship to windward. The weather one either throws all aback and drops astern, or fills her after yards and shoots ahead. The lee one shivers her after yards and boxes off. If the weather ship comes too near the lee one, before the latter has time to wear, the weather ship squares her head yards, drops her mainsail, braces her cross-jack yards sharp aback, and puts her helm a-weather. This gives her sternway, and the after sails and helm keep her to the wind. If three vessels communicate at sea, the weather and middle ones back their main topsails, and the lee one her fore; then, in case of necessity, the weather one fills her after yards and shoots ahead, the middle one throws all aback and drops astern, and the lee one shivers her after sails and falls off. SOUNDING.--The marks upon the lead-lines have been given previously, at page 17. To sound with the hand-lead, a man stands in the weather main channels with a breast-rope secured to the rigging, and throws the lead forward, while the vessel has headway on. If the depth corresponds with the marks upon the line, as if it is 5, 7, or 10 fathoms, he calls out, "By the _mark five_!" &c. If it is a depth the fathoms of which have no mark upon the line, as 6, 8, or 9, he calls out, "By the _deep six_!" &c. If he judges the depth to be a quarter or a half more than a particular fathom, as, for instance, 5, he calls out, "And a quarter," or, "And a half, five!" &c. If it is 5 and three quarters, he would say, "Quarter less six!" and so on. TO SOUND BY THE DEEP-SEA-LEAD.--Have the line coiled down in a tub or rack, clear for running, abreast of the main rigging. Carry the end of the line forward on the weather side, outside of everything, to the cat-head or the spritsail yard-arm, and bend it to the lead, which must be armed with tallow. One man holds the lead for heaving, and the others range themselves along the side, at intervals, each with a coil of the line in his hand. An officer, generally the chief mate, should stand by to get the depth. All being ready, the word is given, "_Stand by! Heave!_" As soon as the man heaves the lead, he calls out, "_Watch, ho! Watch!_" and each man, as the last fake of the coil goes out of his hand, repeats, "_Watch, ho! Watch!_" The line then runs out until it brings up by the lead's being on bottom, or until there is enough out to show that there is no bottom to be reached. The officer notes the depth by the line, which is then snatched, and the men haul it aboard, and coil it away fair. If the lead has been on the bottom, the arming of tallow will bring up some of it; by which the character of the soundings may be ascertained. The soundings, however, cannot be taken until the vessel's way has been stopped or deadened. For this purpose, before heaving the lead, either luff up and keep all shaking, or brace aback the main or mizzen topsail, or both, according to your headway, keeping the head yards full. If you are going free with studdingsails set, you may clew up the lower and boom-end the topmast studdingsails, bring her up to the wind, and keep the sails lifting, without getting them aback. It has been laid down as a rule, that if the vessel sags much to leeward, as when under short sail in a gale of wind, pass the line from the weather side round the stern, clear of everything, and heave the lead from the lee side; otherwise she would leave the lead too far to windward for measurement, or for recovering it again. But in this mode there is great danger of the line getting caught on the bottom or at the rudder-heel. It must be very deep water if a vessel cannot be managed so as to get soundings to windward. HEAVING THE LOG.--One man holds the log-reel, upon which the log-line is wound, another holds the glass, and the officer squares the chip; and, having coiled up a little of the stray line, he throws the chip overboard astern, or from the lee quarter. As he throws the chip, he calls out, "Watch!" To which the man with the glass answers, "Watch." As soon as the mark for the stray-line goes off the reel, he calls out, "Turn!" and the man turns the glass, answering, "Turn," or "Done." The instant the sand has run out, he calls, "Out!" or "Stop!" and the officer stops the line and notes the marks. It is then wound up again on the reel. CHAPTER XV. COMING TO ANCHOR. Getting ready for port. Coming to anchor,--close-hauled--free. Mooring. Flying moor. Clearing hawse. To anchor with a slip-rope. Slipping a cable. Coming-to at a slipped cable. GETTING READY FOR PORT.--Get your anchors off the bows, and let them hang by the cat-stoppers and shank-painters. Bend your cables and overhaul a few ranges forward of the windlass, according to the depth of the anchorage and the strength of the tide or wind, and range the remainder that you expect to use along the decks, abaft the windlass. Have the boats ready for lowering, and a spare hawser, with some stout rope for kedging or warping, at hand, coiled on the hatches. COMING TO ANCHOR.--If you have the wind free and all sail set, take in your studdingsails, make them up and stow them away, rig in the booms and coil away the gear, and have all ready in good season. You may then, as you draw in toward the anchorage, take in your royals and flying jib, furling the royals if you have time. The topgallant sails are next taken in, and the foresail hauled up. The topgallant sails may be furled or not, according to the strength of the wind and the number of hands. If you are before the wind, your mainsail will be hauled up, or, if the sheet is aft, haul up the lee clew-garnet. Get your ship under her topsails, jib and spanker. When near the ground, clew up the fore and main topsails, put the helm down, haul down the jib and flatten in the spanker. If you have too much headway, back the mizzen topsail. Cock-bill your anchor and stream the buoy. When she has lost her headway, let go the anchor. Let hands stand by to give her chain, as she needs it. If you come into anchoring ground close-hauled, haul in the weather fore and main braces, and clew up. If the wind is light, you may square the fore and main yards before clewing up. This will deaden her way. If the wind is fresh, it would make it difficult to clew up the sails. Haul down the jib, and come to by the spanker, or mizzen topsail and spanker. If the wind is light, she may need the mizzen topsail; if not, it may be taken in, and she may be brought to by the spanker. If she has too much headway or there is a tide setting her in, throw all aback. MOORING.--A vessel is said to be moored when she rides with more than one anchor, in different directions. The common method of mooring is, when you have come to with one anchor, to pay out chain and let her drop astern until you have out double the scope you intend to ride by. Then let go your other anchor. Slack up the cable of the latter anchor, and heave in on that of the first, until you have the same scope to each anchor. You may also moor by lowering the anchor and lashing it to the stern of the long boat, and coiling away the full scope in the bottom of the boat. You may then pull off and pick out your own berth, and let go. If you wish to drop your second anchor in any other place than directly to leeward of the first, you may, without using your long boat, warp the vessel over the berth intended for your second anchor. You should always moor so that you may ride with an open hawse in the direction from which you are liable to the strongest winds. If you have chain cables, you may moor with both cables bent to a swivel just clear of the hawse hole, one chain coming in-board. In moderate weather, and where you are not in a strong tide-way, it will generally be sufficient to let go one anchor, since, if you have out a good scope of chain, you will ride by the bight of it, and it will require a very heavy blow to bring a strain upon the anchor. In mooring, you should always have a shackle near the hawse-hole, for clearing hawse. If it is just abaft the windlass, it will be convenient in case you wish to slip your cable. A FLYING MOOR--sometimes called a RUNNING MOOR.--Have both anchors ready for letting go, with double the scope of chain you intend to ride by ranged for the weather anchor, and the riding scope of the lee chain. There are two ways of making a flying moor. One is to clew up everything and let go the first anchor while she has sufficient headway to run out the whole double range. When it is all out, or just before, luff sharp up, brace aback to stop her way, and let go the other anchor. Then heave in on the first and light out on the second, until there is the same scope to each. This mode is almost impracticable in a merchant vessel, where there is but one deck, and where the chain may have to be paid out over a windlass, since the headway would in most cases be soon stopped. The other mode is, to lay all flat aback, and the moment the headway ceases, let go your first anchor, paying out chain as she drops astern, until double your riding scope is out. Then let go your second anchor and heave in on the first. CLEARING HAWSE.--When a vessel is moored she may swing so as to get a _foul hawse_; that is, so as to bring one cable across the other. If one cable lies over the other, it is called _a cross_. When they make another cross, it is called an _elbow_. Three crosses make a _round turn_. The turns may be kept out of a cable by tending the vessel when she swings, and casting her stern one side or the other, by the helm, jib and spanker. To clear hawse, trice the slack cable up by a line or a whip purchase and hook, below the turns. Lash the two cables together just below the lowest turn. Pass a line round the cable from outside, following each turn, and in through the hawse-hole of the slack cable, and bend it to the shackle. Unshackle and bend a line to the end. Rouse the cable out through the hawse-hole, slacking up on the end line, and tricing up if necessary. Take out the turns by the first line passed in, and haul in again on the end line. Shackle the chain again, heave taut, and cast off the lashings. TO ANCHOR WITH A SLIP-ROPE.--This is necessary when you are lying in an open road-stead, where you must stand out to sea upon a gale coming up, without taking time to get your anchor. You must ride at one anchor. Having come to, take a hawser round from the quarter on the same side with your anchor, outside of everything, and bend its end to the cable just below the hawse-hole. Have a buoy triced up forward, clear of everything and carry the buoy-rope in through the hawse-hole, and round the windlass, with three turns, (the first turn being _outside_ the others,) and bend it to the shackle which is to be cast off when the cable is slipped. Have another buoy bent to the end of the hawser which is to be used for the slip-rope. TO SLIP A CABLE.--When ready to slip, everything having been prepared as above, unshackle the chain abaft the windlass, and hoist the topsails, reefed, if necessary. Stream the buoy for the end of the chain, and that at the end of the slip-rope aft. Take good turns with the slip-rope round the timber-heads, at the quarter. Hoist the fore topmast staysail and back the fore topsail, hauling in the braces on the same side with the cable, so that she may cast to the opposite side. Fill the after yards, and let go the end of the cable. Hold on to the slip-rope aft, until her head is fairly off; then let go, brace full the head yards, and set the spanker. COMING-TO AT A SLIPPED CABLE.--Keep a lookout for your buoys. Having found them, heave-to to windward of them, send a boat with a strong warp and bend it to the slip-rope buoy, take the other end to the capstan and walk the ship up to the buoy. Take the slip-rope through the chock, forward, and heave on it until you get the chain, where the slip-rope was bent to it, under foot. Make well fast the slip-rope, then fish the buoy at the end of the chain, haul up on that buoy-rope, and get the end of the chain. Rouse it in through the hawse-hole and shackle it. Heave taut, until the bend of the slip-rope is above the water, then take the other end round aft and make it fast at the quarter-port again. Pass in the buoy-rope for the end of the chain, and you are all ready for slipping again. CHAPTER XVI. GETTING UNDER WAY. To unmoor. Getting under way from a single anchor. To cat and fish. To get under way with a wind blowing directly out, and riding head to it;--with a rock or shoal close astern;--when riding head to wind and tide, and to stand out close-hauled;--wind-rode, with a weather tide;--tide-rode, casting to windward;--tide-rode, wearing round. UNMOOR.--Pay out on your riding cable, heaving in the slack of the other. When the other is short, trip it, cat and fish, and heave in on your riding cable. Instead of this method, the anchor which you are not riding by may be weighed, if it is a small one, by the long boat. Send the long boat out over the anchor, take aboard the buoy-rope, carrying it over the roller in the boat's stern, or through the end of a davit, clap the watch-tackle to it, and weigh it out of the ground. This done, and the buoy-rope and tackle secured to the boat, heave in on the chain on board, which will bring the anchor alongside, the boat approaching at the same time. When under the bow, cast off the fasts to the boat, heave up the anchor, cat and fish. GETTING UNDER WAY FROM A SINGLE ANCHOR.--It is the duty of the chief mate to see all ready forward for getting under way; the rigging fair for making sail, the cat and fish-tackles rove, and the fish-davit at hand. Heave short on your chain and pawl the windlass. Loose all the sails, if the wind is light, and sheet home and hoist up topsails, topgallant sails, and royals. If there is a stiff breeze, set topsails alone, whole or reefed. You should always, if it will answer, cast on the opposite side from your anchor; that is, if you are riding by your starboard anchor, cast to port. Brace your head yards aback and your after yards full, for the tack you mean to cast upon. The sails being set, man the windlass again, give her a sheer with the helm, and trip your anchor. The mate reports when it is away. As soon as it is away, hoist the jib. The fore topsail aback will pay her head off. Put the helm for stern-board. When her head is off enough, fill away the head yards and haul out the spanker, shifting the helm for headway. Trim the yards for your course, and make sail on her. If the wind is light and the sea smooth, you may cat and fish your anchor after you get under way; but it is best in a rough sea to keep the vessel hove-to until the anchor is catted and fished. TO CAT AND FISH AN ANCHOR.--When the anchor is lifted and brought under foot, pawl the windlass, keeping a good hold on the chain. Overhaul down the cat-block and hook it to the ring of the anchor. Stretch along the cat-fall and let all hands tally on. Set taut on the cat-tackle and pay out a little chain. Hoist away the anchor to the cat-head, and belay the fall. Pass the cat-stopper through the ring of the anchor, through the chock, belay it to the cat-tail, and seize it to its own part. Overhaul down the fish-tackle, hook the lower block to the pennant, and hook the fish-hook to the inner fluke of the anchor. Rig out your fish-davit across the forecastle, and put the bight of the pennant into the sheave-hole. Get a guy over it, near the outer end, to keep it down, and another at the inner end, to keep it out. Get the shoe over the side, to fend off the bill of the anchor. Hoist the fluke well up, pass the shank-painter under the inner arm and shank, bring it inboard, and belay and stop it to the timber-heads. Rig in the davit, unreeve the cat-fall and fish-tackle. A vessel may sometimes be got under way to advantage with the jib and spanker; particularly if the wind is blowing directly out of the harbor. Heave the anchor up at once. When it has broken ground, hoist the jib, and, as she pays off, haul out the spanker. Keep her under this sail until the anchor is catted and fished, then make sail and stand out. TO GET UNDER WAY, WITH A WIND BLOWING DIRECTLY OUT, AND RIDING HEAD TO IT.--Suppose the ship to have her starboard anchor down. Heave short and clear away the jib, and put the helm to port. Heave again until the anchor is up to the bows. Cat and fish. When the anchor is a-weigh, hoist the jib. Let her pay off under the jib. When she gathers headway, shift the helm, and let fall the sails. When she gets before it, sheet home and hoist the topsails, set the foresail, and haul down the jib. Make sail aloft. TO GET UNDER WAY, RIDING HEAD TO THE WIND, WITH A ROCK OR SHOAL CLOSE ASTERN.--Suppose you wish to cast the ship on the starboard tack. Heave in a safe scope on the chain, and run out a kedge with a hawser from the starboard bow. Cast off the yard-arm gaskets and mast-head the topsails, keeping the bunts fast. Heave taut on the hawser, and brace the yards up for the starboard tack fore and aft, hauling the jib sheet to windward. Heave up the anchor, taking in the slack of the hawser, cat it, pass the stopper, and have all ready for letting go. Haul ahead on the hawser, and as soon as the kedge is short a-peak or comes home, sheet home the topsails, run up the jib, and put the helm a-starboard. As soon as the jib fills, run the kedge up and take it in. When the topsails take and she gathers headway, draw the jib, set the spanker, board fore and main tacks, haul aft sheets, and right the helm. If she falls off too rapidly when the topsails take, give her the spanker and mainsail, easing off the jib sheet. When she comes to, haul aft the jib sheet and board the fore tack. If, when the kedge is a-weigh, she falls off on the wrong side, let go the anchor. TO GET UNDER WAY, RIDING HEAD TO WIND AND TIDE, AND TO STAND OUT CLOSE-HAULED.--Suppose you wish to cast to port. Heave short, keeping the helm a-starboard. Set the topsails. Brace up the after yards for the starboard tack, and back the head yards. Man the windlass and heave up the anchor. When the anchor is a-weigh, hoist the jib. When she has payed off sufficiently, fill away the head yards, shift the helm for headway, set the spanker, and make sail. Cat and fish, either before or after filling away. If you have no room to cast on either side, but have a vessel on each quarter, heave short, set the topsails, jib, and spanker, brace all the yards half up for the starboard tack, weigh the anchor, and put the helm to port. The tide acting on the rudder will sheer her head to starboard. When the sails take aback and give her sternway, the rudder and after sails will act against the head sails, and she will drift fairly down between the two vessels. Keep her off or to, by the spanker and jib. When you are clear, cast to port; or, haul up the spanker, shiver the after yards, and let her go off before it. TO GET UNDER WAY WIND-RODE, WITH A WEATHER TIDE; that is, a tide setting to windward.--Suppose you wish to cast to port. Heave short, loose the sails, and set the topsails. Square the after yards, and haul in the starboard head-braces. Heave again, and, when you are a-weigh, put the helm to port and hoist the jib. When she has payed off enough, fill away the head yards and shift the helm for headway. TO GET UNDER WAY, TIDE-RODE, CASTING TO WINDWARD.--Suppose the wind to be a little on the starboard bow, and you wish to cast to starboard, standing out on the larboard tack. Having hove short and set the topsails, brace up the after yards for the larboard tack, and brace the head yards aback. Weigh the anchor, keeping your helm to port, and hauling the spanker boom well over to starboard. When she comes head to the wind, hoist the jib, with the sheet to port. Shift the helm for sternway. As she falls off, draw the jib, fill the head yards, and shift the helm for headway. TO GET UNDER WAY, TIDE-RODE, WEARING ROUND.--Suppose you have the wind on your starboard quarter, and are obliged to wear her round and stand out on the larboard tack. Set the topsails, square the head yards, and shiver the after yards. When the anchor is a-weigh, put the helm hard a-starboard, and give her the foresail, if necessary. Having headway, she will go round on her keel, and you may proceed as in wearing. If a vessel is in a confined situation, without room to cast by her sails or by the tide, she may be cast by a spring upon her cable, leading in at that which will be the weather quarter. The spring may be bent to the ring of the anchor before it is let go, or it may be seized to the cable just outside the hawse-hole. It will be remembered that when a vessel is riding head to the tide, the helm is to be put as though she had headway; and when the tide sets from astern, as though she had sternway. But you should be reminded that when you have the wind and tide both ahead, if the vessel, after you weigh your anchor, goes astern faster than the current, the helm must be used as for stern-board. DICTIONARY OF SEA TERMS. ABACK. The situation of the sails when the wind presses their surfaces against the mast, and tends to force the vessel astern. ABAFT. Toward the stern of a vessel. ABOARD. Within a vessel. ABOUT. On the other tack. ABREAST. Alongside of. Side by side. ACCOMMODATION. (See LADDER.) A-COCK-BILL. The situation of the yards when they are topped up at an angle with the deck. The situation of an anchor when it hangs to the cathead by the ring only. ADRIFT. Broken from moorings or fasts. Without fasts. AFLOAT. Resting on the surface of the water. AFORE. Forward. The opposite of abaft. AFT--AFTER. Near the stern. AGROUND. Touching the bottom. AHEAD. In the direction of the vessel's head. _Wind ahead_ is from the direction toward which the vessel's head points. A-HULL. The situation of a vessel when she lies with all her sails furled and her helm lashed a-lee. A-LEE. The situation of the helm when it is put in the opposite direction from that in which the wind blows. ALL-ABACK. When all the sails are aback. ALL HANDS. The whole crew. ALL IN THE WIND. When all the sails are shaking. ALOFT. Above the deck. ALOOF. At a distance. AMAIN. Suddenly. At once. AMIDSHIPS. In the centre of the vessel; either with reference to her length or to her breadth. ANCHOR. The machine by which, when dropped to the bottom, the vessel is held fast. ANCHOR-WATCH. (See WATCH.) AN-END. When a mast is perpendicular to the deck. A-PEEK. When the cable is hove taut so as to bring the vessel nearly over her anchor. The _yards_ are _a-peek_ when they are topped up by contrary lifts. APRON. A piece of timber fixed behind the lower part of the stem, just above the fore end of the keel. A covering to the vent or lock of a cannon. ARM. YARD-ARM. The extremity of a yard. Also, the lower part of an anchor, crossing the shank and terminating in the flukes. ARMING. A piece of tallow put in the cavity and over the bottom of a lead-line. A-STERN. In the direction of the stern. The opposite of ahead. A-TAUNT. (See TAUNT.) ATHWART. Across. _Athwart-ships._ Across the line of the vessel's keel. _Athwart-hawse._ Across the direction of a vessel's head. Across her cable. ATHWART-SHIPS. Across the length of a vessel. In opposition to fore-and-aft. A-TRIP. The situation of the anchor when it is raised clear of the ground. The same as a-weigh. AVAST, or 'VAST. An order to stop; as, "Avast heaving!" A-WEATHER. The situation of the helm when it is put in the direction from which the wind blows. A-WEIGH. The same as a-trip. AWNING. A covering of canvass over a vessel's deck, or over a boat, to keep off sun or rain. BACK. _To back an anchor_, is to carry out a smaller one ahead of the one by which the vessel rides, to take off some of the strain. _To back a sail_, is to throw it aback. _To back and fill_, is alternately to back and fill the sails. BACKSTAYS. Stays running from a masthead to the vessel's side, slanting a little aft. (See STAYS.) BAGPIPE. _To bagpipe the mizzen_, is to lay it aback by bringing the sheet to the weather mizzen rigging. BALANCE-REEF. A reef in a spanker or fore-and-aft mainsail, which runs from the outer head-earing, diagonally, to the tack. It is the closest reef, and makes the sail triangular, or nearly so. BALE. _To bale a boat_, is to throw water out of her. BALLAST. Heavy material, as iron, lead, or stone, placed in the bottom of the hold, to keep a vessel from upsetting. _To freshen ballast_, is to shift it. Coarse gravel is called _shingle ballast_. BANK. A boat is _double banked_ when two oars, one opposite the other, are pulled by men seated on the same thwart. BAR. A bank or shoal at the entrance of a harbor. _Capstan-bars_ are heavy pieces of wood by which the capstan is hove round. BARE-POLES. The condition of a ship when she has no sail set. BARGE. A large double-banked boat, used by the commander of a vessel, in the navy. BARK, OR BARQUE. (See PLATE 4.) A three-masted vessel, having her fore and main masts rigged like a ship's, and her mizzen mast like the main mast of a schooner, with no sail upon it but a spanker, and gaff topsail. BARNACLE. A shell-fish often found on a vessel's bottom. BATTENS. Thin strips of wood put around the hatches, to keep the tarpaulin down. Also, put upon rigging to keep it from chafing. A large batten widened at the end, and put upon rigging, is called a _scotchman_. BEACON. A post or buoy placed over a shoal or bank to warn vessels off. Also as a signal-mark on land. BEAMS. Strong pieces of timber stretching across the vessel, to support the decks. _On the weather or lee beam_, is in a direction to windward or leeward, at right angles with the keel. _On beam-ends._ The situation of a vessel when turned over so that her beams are inclined toward the vertical. BEAR. An object _bears_ so and so, when it is in such a direction from the person looking. _To bear down_ upon a vessel, is to approach her from the windward. _To bear up_, is to put the helm up and keep a vessel off from her course, and move her to leeward. _To bear away_, is the same as to _bear up_; being applied to the vessel instead of to the tiller. _To bear-a-hand._ To make haste. BEARING. The direction of an object from the person looking. The _bearings_ of a vessel, are the widest part of her below the plank-shear. That part of her hull which is on the water-line when she is at anchor and in her proper trim. BEATING. Going toward the direction of the wind, by alternate tacks. BECALM. To intercept the wind. A vessel or highland to windward is said to _becalm_ another. So one sail _becalms_ another. BECKET. A piece of rope placed so as to confine a spar or another rope. A handle made of rope, in the form of a circle, (as the handle of a chest,) is called a _becket_. BEES. Pieces of plank bolted to the outer end of the bowsprit, to reeve the foretopmast stays through. BELAY. To make a rope fast by turns round a pin or coil, without hitching or seizing it. BEND. To make fast. _To bend a sail_, is to make it fast to the yard. _To bend a cable_, is to make it fast to the anchor. _A bend_, is a knot by which one rope is made fast to another. BENDS. (See PLATE 3.) The strongest part of a vessel's side, to which the beams, knees, and foot-hooks are bolted. The part between the water's edge and the bulwarks. BENEAPED. (See NEAPED.) BENTICK SHROUDS. Formerly used, and extending from the futtock-staves to the opposite channels. BERTH. The place where a vessel lies. The place in which a man sleeps. BETWEEN-DECKS. The space between any two decks of a ship. BIBBS. Pieces of timber bolted to the hounds of a mast, to support the trestle-trees. BIGHT. The double part of a rope when it is folded; in contradistinction from the ends. Any part of a rope may be called the bight, except the ends. Also, a bend in the shore, making a small bay or inlet. BILGE. That part of the floor of a ship upon which she would rest if aground; being the part near the keel which is more in a horizontal than a perpendicular line. _Bilge-ways._ Pieces of timber bolted together and placed under the bilge, in launching. _Bilged._ When the bilge is broken in. _Bilge Water._ Water which settles in the bilge. _Bilge._ The largest circumference of a cask. BILL. The point at the extremity of the fluke of an anchor. BILLET-HEAD. (See HEAD.) BINNACLE. A box near the helm, containing the compass. BITTS. Perpendicular pieces of timber going through the deck, placed to secure anything to. The cables are fastened to them, if there is no windlass. There are also _bitts_ to secure the windlass, and on each side of the heel of the bowsprit. BITTER, or BITTER-END. That part of the cable which is abaft the bitts. BLACKWALL HITCH. (See PLATE 5 and page 49.) BLADE. The flat part of an oar, which goes into the water. BLOCK. A piece of wood with sheaves, or wheels, in it, through which the running rigging passes, to add to the purchase. (See page 53.) BLUFF. A _bluff-bowed_ or _bluff-headed_ vessel is one which is full and square forward. BOARD. The stretch a vessel makes upon one tack, when she is beating. _Stern-board._ When a vessel goes stern foremost. _By the board._ Said of masts, when they fall over the side. BOAT-HOOK. An iron hook with a long staff, held in the hand, by which a boat is kept fast to a wharf, or vessel. BOATSWAIN. (Pronounced _bo-s'n_.) A warrant officer in the navy, who has charge of the rigging, and calls the crew to duty. BOBSTAYS. Used to confine the bowsprit down to the stem or cutwater. BOLSTERS. Pieces of soft wood, covered with canvass, placed on the trestle-trees, for the eyes of the rigging to rest upon. BOLTS. Long cylindrical bars of iron or copper, used to secure or unite the different parts of a vessel. BOLT-ROPE. The rope which goes round a sail, and to which the canvass is sewed. BONNET. An additional piece of canvass attached to the foot of a jib, or a schooner's foresail, by lacings. Taken off in bad weather. BOOM. A spar used to extend the foot of a fore-and-aft sail or studdingsail. _Boom-irons._ Iron rings on the yards, through which the studdingsail booms traverse. BOOT-TOPPING. Scraping off the grass, or other matter, which may be on a vessel's bottom, and daubing it over with tallow, or some mixture. BOUND. _Wind-bound._ When a vessel is kept in port by a head wind. BOW. The rounded part of a vessel, forward. BOWER. A working anchor, the cable of which is bent and reeved through the hawse-hole. _Best bower_ is the larger of the two bowers. (See page 16.) BOW-GRACE. A frame of old rope or junk, placed round the bows and sides of a vessel, to prevent the ice from injuring her. BOWLINE. (Pronounced _bo-lin_.) A rope leading forward from the leech of a square sail, to keep the leech well out when sailing close-hauled. A vessel is said to be _on a bowline_, or _on a taut bowline_, when she is close-hauled. _Bowline-bridle._ The span on the leech of the sail to which the bowline is toggled. _Bowline-knot._ (See PLATE 5 and page 49.) BOWSE. To pull upon a tackle. BOWSPRIT. (Pronounced _bo-sprit_.) A large and strong spar, standing from the bows of a vessel. (See PLATE 1.) BOX-HAULING. Wearing a vessel by backing the head sails. (See page 75.) BOX. _To box the compass_, is to repeat the thirty-two points of the compass in order. BRACE. A rope by which a yard is turned about. _To brace a yard_, is to turn it about horizontally. _To brace up_, is to lay the yard more fore-and-aft. _To brace in_, is to lay it nearer square. _To brace aback._ (See ABACK.) _To brace to_, is to brace the head yards a little aback, in tacking or wearing. BRAILS. Ropes by which the foot or lower corners of fore-and-aft sails are hauled up. BRAKE. The handle of a ship's pump. BREAK. _To break bulk_, is to begin to unload. _To break ground_, is to lift the anchor from the bottom. _To break shear_, is when a vessel, at anchor, in tending, is forced the wrong way by the wind or current, so that she does not lie so well for keeping herself clear of her anchor. BREAKER. A small cask containing water. BREAMING. Cleaning a ship's bottom by burning. BREAST-FAST. A rope used to confine a vessel sideways to a wharf, or to some other vessel. BREAST-HOOKS. Knees placed in the forward part of a vessel, across the stem, to unite the bows on each side. (See PLATE 3.) BREAST-ROPE. A rope passed round a man in the chains, while sounding. BREECH. The outside angle of a knee-timber. The after end of a gun. BREECHING. A strong rope used to secure the breech of a gun to the ship's side. BRIDLE. Spans of rope attached to the leeches of square sails, to which the bowlines are made fast. _Bridle-port._ The foremost port, used for stowing the anchors. BRIG. A square-rigged vessel, with two masts. An _hermaphrodite brig_ has a brig's foremast and a schooner's mainmast. (See PLATE 4.) BROACH-TO. To fall off so much, when going free, as to bring the wind round on the other quarter and take the sails aback. BROADSIDE. The whole side of a vessel. BROKEN-BACKED. The state of a vessel when she is so loosened as to droop at each end. BUCKLERS. Blocks of wood made to fit in the hawse-holes, or holes in the half-ports, when at sea. Those in the hawse-holes are sometimes called _hawse-blocks_. BULGE. (See BILGE.) BULK. The whole cargo when stowed. _Stowed in bulk_, is when goods are stowed loose, instead of being stowed in casks or bags. (See BREAK BULK.) BULK HEAD. Temporary partitions of boards to separate different parts of a vessel. BULL. A sailor's term for a small keg, holding a gallon or two. BULL'S EYE. (See page 53.) A small piece of stout wood with a hole in the centre for a stay or rope to reeve through, without any sheave, and with a groove round it for the strap, which is usually of iron. Also, a piece of thick glass inserted in the deck to let light below. BULWARKS. The wood work round a vessel, above her deck, consisting of boards fastened to stanchions and timber-heads. BUM-BOATS. Boats which lie alongside a vessel in port with provisions and fruit to sell. BUMPKIN. Pieces of timber projecting from the vessel, to board the fore tack to; and from each quarter, for the main brace-blocks. BUNT. The middle of a sail. BUNTINE. (Pronounced _buntin_.) Thin woollen stuff of which a ship's colors are made. BUNTLINES. Ropes used for hauling up the body of a sail. BUOY. A floating cask, or piece of wood, attached by a rope to an anchor, to show its position. Also, floated over a shoal, or other dangerous place as a beacon. _To stream a buoy_, is to drop it into the water before letting go the anchor. A buoy is said to _watch_, when it floats upon the surface of the water. BURTON. A tackle, rove in a particular manner. _A single Spanish burton_ has three single blocks, or two single blocks and a hook in the bight of one of the running parts. _A double Spanish burton_ has three double blocks. (See page 54.) BUTT. The end of a plank where it unites with the end of another. _Scuttle-butt._ A cask with a hole cut in its bilge, and kept on deck to hold water for daily use. BUTTOCK. That part of the convexity of a vessel abaft, under the stern, contained between the counter above and the after part of the bilge below, and between the quarter on the side and the stern-post. (See PLATE 3.) BY. _By the head._ Said of a vessel when her head is lower in the water than her stern. If her stern is lower, she is _by the stern_. _By the lee._ (See LEE. See RUN.) CABIN. The after part of a vessel, in which the officers live. CABLE. A large, strong rope, made fast to the anchor, by which the vessel is secured. It is usually 120 fathoms in length. CABLE-TIER. (See TIER.) CABOOSE. A house on deck, where the cooking is done. Commonly called the _Galley_. CALK. (See CAULK.) CAMBERED. When the floor of a vessel is higher at the middle than towards the stem and stern. CAMEL. A machine used for lifting vessels over a shoal or bar. CAMFERING. Taking off an angle or edge of a timber. CAN-HOOKS. Slings with flat hooks at each end, used for hoisting barrels or light casks, the hooks being placed round the chimes, and the purchase hooked to the centre of the slings. Small ones are usually wholly of iron. CANT-PIECES. Pieces of timber fastened to the angles of fishes and side-trees, to supply any part that may prove rotten. CANT-TIMBERS. Timbers at the two ends of a vessel, raised obliquely from the keel. _Lower Half Cants._ Those parts of frames situated forward and abaft the square frames, or the floor timbers which cross the keel. CANVASS. The cloth of which sails are made. No. 1 is the coarsest and strongest. CAP. A thick, strong block of wood with two holes through it, one square and the other round, used to confine together the head of one mast and the lower part of the mast next above it. (See PLATE 1.) CAPSIZE. To overturn. CAPSTAN. A machine placed perpendicularly in the deck, and used for a strong purchase in heaving or hoisting. Men-of-war weigh their anchors by capstans. Merchant vessels use a windlass. (See BAR.) CAREEN. To heave a vessel down upon her side by purchases upon the masts. To lie over, when sailing on the wind. CARLINGS. Short and small pieces of timber running between the beams. CARRICK-BEND. A kind of knot. (See PLATE 5 and page 50.) _Carrick-bitts_ are the windlass bitts. CARRY-AWAY. To break a spar, or part a rope. CAST. To pay a vessel's head off, in getting under way, on the tack she is to sail upon. CAT. The tackle used to hoist the anchor up to the cat-head. _Cat-block_, the block of this tackle. CAT-HARPIN. An iron leg used to confine the upper part of the rigging to the mast. CAT-HEAD. Large timbers projecting from the vessel's side, to which the anchor is raised and secured. CAT'S-PAW. A kind of hitch made in a rope. (See PLATE 5 and page 50.) A light current of air seen on the surface of the water during a calm. CAULK. To fill the seams of a vessel with oakum. CAVIL. (See KEVEL.) CEILING. The inside planking of a vessel. CHAFE. To rub the surface of a rope or spar. _Chafing-gear_ is the stuff put upon the rigging and spars to prevent their chafing. CHAINS. (See PLATE 1.) Strong links or plates of iron, the lower ends of which are bolted through the ship's side to the timbers. Their upper ends are secured to the bottom of the dead-eyes in the channels. Also, used familiarly for the CHANNELS, which see. The chain cable of a vessel is called familiarly her _chain_. _Rudder-chains_ lead from the outer and upper end of the rudder to the quarters. They are hung slack. CHAIN-PLATES. Plates of iron bolted to the side of a ship, to which the chains and dead-eyes of the lower rigging are connected. CHANNELS. Broad pieces of plank bolted edgewise to the outside of a vessel. Used for spreading the lower rigging. (See CHAINS.) CHAPELLING. Wearing a ship round, when taken aback, without bracing the head yards. (See page 80.) CHECK. A term sometimes used for slacking off a little on a brace, and then belaying it. CHEEKS. The projections on each side of a mast, upon which the trestle-trees rest. The sides of the shell of a block. CHEERLY! Quickly, with a will. CHESS-TREES. Pieces of oak, fitted to the sides of a vessel, abaft the fore chains, with a sheave in them, to board the main tack to. Now out of use. CHIMES. The ends of the staves of a cask, where they come out beyond the head of the cask. CHINSE. To thrust oakum into seams with a small iron. CHOCK. A wedge used to secure anything with, or for anything to rest upon. The long boat rests upon two large _chocks_, when it is stowed. _Chock-a-block._ When the lower block of a tackle is run close up to the upper one, so that you can hoist no higher. This is also called hoisting up _two-blocks_. CISTERN. An apartment in the hold of a vessel, having a pipe leading out through the side, with a cock, by which water may be let into her. CLAMPS. Thick planks on the inside of vessels, to support the ends of beams. Also, crooked plates of iron fore-locked upon the trunnions of cannon. Any plate of iron made to turn, open, and shut so as to confine a spar or boom, as, a studdingsail boom, or a boat's mast. CLASP-HOOK. (See CLOVE-HOOK.) CLEAT. A piece of wood used in different parts of a vessel to belay ropes to. CLEW. The lower corner of square sails, and the after corner of a fore-and-aft sail. _To clew up_, is to haul up the clew of a sail. CLEW-GARNET. A rope that hauls up the clew of a foresail or mainsail in a square-rigged vessel. CLEWLINE. A rope that hauls up the clew of a square sail. The clew-garnet is the clewline of a course. CLINCH. A half-hitch, stopped to its own part. CLOSE-HAULED. Applied to a vessel which is sailing with her yards braced up so as to get as much as possible to windward. The same as _on a taut bowline_, _full and by_, _on the wind_, &c. CLOVE-HITCH. Two half-hitches round a spar or other rope. (See PLATE 5 and page 48.) CLOVE-HOOK. An iron clasp, in two parts, moving upon the same pivot, and overlapping one another. Used for bending chain sheets to the clews of sails. CLUB-HAUL. To bring a vessel's head round on the other tack, by letting go the lee anchor and cutting or slipping the cable. (See page 76.) CLUBBING. Drifting down a current with an anchor out. (See page 77.) COAKING. Uniting pieces of spar by means of tabular projections, formed by cutting away the solid of one piece into a hollow, so as to make a projection in the other, in such a manner that they may correctly fit, the butts preventing the pieces from drawing asunder. _Coaks_ are fitted into the beams and knees of vessels to prevent their drawing. COAL TAR. Tar made from bituminous coal. COAMINGS. Raised work round the hatches, to prevent water going down into the hold. COAT. _Mast-Coat_ is a piece of canvass, tarred or painted, placed round a mast or bowsprit, where it enters the deck. COCK-BILL. To cock-bill a yard or anchor. (See A-COCK-BILL.) COCK-PIT. An apartment in a vessel of war, used by the surgeon during an action. CODLINE. An eighteen thread line. COXSWAIN. (Pronounced _cox'n_.) The person who steers a boat and has charge of her. COIL. To lay a rope up in a ring, with one turn or fake over another. _A coil_ is a quantity of rope laid up in that manner. COLLAR. An eye in the end or bight of a shroud or stay, to go over the mast-head. COME. _Come home_, said of an anchor when it is broken from the ground and drags. _To come up_ a rope or tackle, is to slack it off. COMPANION. A wooden covering over the staircase to a cabin. _Companion-way_, the staircase to the cabin. _Companion-ladder._ The ladder leading from the poop to the main deck. COMPASS. The instrument which tells the course of a vessel. _Compass-timbers_ are such as are curved or arched. CONCLUDING-LINE. A small line leading through the centre of the steps of a rope or Jacob's ladder. CONNING, or CUNNING. Directing the helmsman in steering a vessel. COUNTER. (See PLATE 3.) That part of a vessel between the bottom of the stern and the wing-transom and buttock. _Counter-timbers_ are short timbers put in to strengthen the counter. _To counter-brace_ yards, is to brace the head-yards one way and the after-yards another. COURSES. The common term for the sails that hang from a ship's lower yards. The foresail is called the _fore course_ and the mainsail the _main course_. CRANES. Pieces of iron or timber at the vessel's sides, used to stow boats or spars upon. A machine used at a wharf for hoisting. CRANK. The condition of a vessel when she is inclined to lean over a great deal and cannot bear much sail. This may be owing to her construction or to her stowage. CREEPER. An iron instrument, like a grapnell, with four claws, used for dragging the bottom of a harbor or river, to find anything lost. CRINGLE. A short piece of rope with each end spliced into the bolt-rope of a sail, confining an iron ring or thimble. CROSS-BARS. Round bars of iron, bent at each end, used as levers to turn the shank of an anchor. CROSS-CHOCKS. Pieces of timber fayed across the dead-wood amidships, to make good the deficiency of the heels of the lower futtocks. CROSS-JACK. (Pronounced _croj-jack_.) The cross-jack yard is the lower yard on the mizzen mast. (See PLATE 1.) CROSS-PAWLS. Pieces of timber that keep a vessel together while in her frames. CROSS-PIECE. A piece of timber connecting two bitts. CROSS-SPALES. Pieces of timber placed across a vessel, and nailed to the frames, to keep the sides together until the knees are bolted. CROSS-TREES. (See PLATE 1.) Pieces of oak supported by the cheeks and trestle-trees, at the mast-heads, to sustain the tops on the lower mast, and to spread the topgallant rigging at the topmast-head. CROW-FOOT. A number of small lines rove through the uvrou to suspend an awning by. CROWN of an anchor, is the place where the arms are joined to the shank. _To crown a knot_, is to pass the strands over and under each other above the knot. (See PLATE 5, page 46.) CRUTCH. A knee or piece of knee-timber, placed inside of a vessel, to secure the heels of the cant-timbers abaft. Also, the chock upon which the spanker-boom rests when the sail is not set. CUCKOLD'S NECK. A knot by which a rope is secured to a spar, the two parts of the rope crossing each other, and seized together. CUDDY. A cabin in the fore part of a boat. CUNTLINE. The space between the bilges of two casks, stowed side by side. Where one cask is set upon the cuntline between two others, they are stowed _bilge and cuntline_. CUT-WATER. The foremost part of a vessel's prow, which projects forward of the bows. CUTTER. A small boat. Also, a kind of sloop. DAGGER. A piece of timber crossing all the puppets of the bilge-ways to keep them together. _Dagger-knees._ Knees placed obliquely, to avoid a port. DAVITS. Pieces of timber or iron, with sheaves or blocks at their ends, projecting over a vessel's sides or stern, to hoist boats up to. Also, a spar with a roller or sheave at its end, used for fishing the anchor, called a _fish-davit_. DEAD-EYE. A circular block of wood, with three holes through it, for the lanyards of rigging to reeve through, without sheaves, and with a groove round it for an iron strap. (See page 59.) DEAD-FLAT. One of the bends, amidships. DEAD-LIGHTS. Ports placed in the cabin windows in bad weather. DEAD RECKONING. A reckoning kept by observing a vessel's courses and distances by the log, to ascertain her position. DEAD-RISING, OR RISING-LINE. Those parts of a vessel's floor, throughout her whole length, where the floor-timber is terminated upon the lower futtock. DEAD-WATER. The eddy under a vessel's counter. DEAD-WOOD. Blocks of timber, laid upon each end of the keel, where the vessel narrows. DECK. The planked floor of a vessel, resting upon her beams. DECK-STOPPER. A stopper used for securing the cable forward of the windlass or capstan, while it is overhauled. (See STOPPER.) DEEP-SEA-LEAD. (Pronounced _dipsey_.) (See page 17.) The lead used in sounding at great depths. DEPARTURE. The easting or westing made by a vessel. The bearing of an object on the coast from which a vessel commences her dead reckoning. DERRICK. A single spar, supported by stays and guys, to which a purchase is attached, used to unload vessels, and for hoisting. DOG. A short iron bar, with a fang or teeth at one end, and a ring at the other. Used for a purchase, the fang being placed against a beam or knee, and the block of a tackle hooked to the ring. DOG-VANE. A small vane, made of feathers or buntin, to show the direction of the wind. DOG-WATCHES. Half watches of two hours each, from 4 to 6, and from 6 to 8, P.M. (See WATCH.) DOLPHIN. A rope or strap round a mast to support the puddening, where the lower yards rest in the slings. Also, a spar or buoy with a large ring in it, secured to an anchor, to which vessels may bend their cables. DOLPHIN-STRIKER. The martingale. (See PLATE I.) DOUSE. To lower suddenly. DOWELLING. A method of coaking, by letting pieces into the solid, or uniting two pieces together by tenons. DOWNHAUL. A rope used to haul down jibs, staysails, and studdingsails. DRABLER. A piece of canvass laced to the bonnet of a sail, to give it more drop. DRAG. A machine with a bag net, used for dragging on the bottom for anything lost. DRAUGHT. The depth of water which a vessel requires to float her. DRAW. A sail _draws_ when it is filled by the wind. _To draw a jib_, is to shift it over the stay to leeward, when it is aback. DRIFTS. Those pieces in the sheer-draught where the rails are cut off. DRIVE. To scud before a gale, or to drift in a current. DRIVER. A spanker. DROP. The depth of a sail, from head to foot, amidships. DRUM-HEAD. The top of the capstan. DUB. To reduce the end of a timber. DUCK. A kind of cloth, lighter and finer than canvass; used for small sails. DUNNAGE. Loose wood or other matters, placed on the bottom of the hold, above the ballast, to stow cargo upon. EARING. A rope attached to the cringle of a sail, by which it is bent or reefed. EIKING. A piece of wood fitted to make good a deficiency in length. ELBOW. Two crosses in a hawse. (See page 89.) ESCUTCHEON. The part of a vessel's stern where her name is written. EVEN-KEEL. The situation of a vessel when she is so trimmed that she sits evenly upon the water, neither end being down more than the other. EUVROU. A piece of wood, by which the legs of the crow-foot to an awning are extended. (See UVROU.) EYE. The circular part of a shroud or stay, where it goes over a mast. _Eye-bolt._ A long iron bar, having an eye at one end, driven through a vessel's deck or side into a timber or beam, with the eye remaining out, to hook a tackle to. If there is a ring through this eye, it is called a _ring-bolt_. _An Eye-splice_ is a certain kind of splice made with the end of a rope. (See PLATE 5 and page 45.) _Eyelet-hole._ A hole made in a sail for a cringle or roband to go through. _The Eyes of a vessel._ A familiar phrase for the forward part. FACE-PIECES. Pieces of wood wrought on the fore part of the knee of the head. FACING. Letting one piece of timber into another with a rabbet. FAG. A rope is _fagged_ when the end is untwisted. FAIR-LEADER. A strip of board or plank, with holes in it, for running rigging to lead through. Also, a block or thimble used for the same purpose. FAKE. One of the circles or rings made in coiling a rope. FALL. That part of a tackle to which the power is applied in hoisting. FALSE KEEL. Pieces of timber secured under the main keel of vessels. FANCY-LINE. A line rove through a block at the jaws of a gaff, used as a downhaul. Also, a line used for cross-hauling the lee topping-lift. FASHION-PIECES. The aftermost timbers, terminating the breadth and forming the shape of the stern. FAST. A rope by which a vessel is secured to a wharf. There are _bow_ or _head_, _breast_, _quarter_, and _stern_ fasts. FATHOM. Six feet. FEATHER. _To feather an oar_ in rowing, is to turn the blade horizontally with the top aft as it comes out of the water. FEATHER-EDGED. Planks which have one side thicker than another. FENDERS. Pieces of rope or wood hung over the side of a vessel or boat, to protect it from chafing. The fenders of a neat boat are usually made of canvass and stuffed. FID. A block of wood or iron, placed through the hole in the heel of a mast, and resting on the trestle-trees of the mast below. This supports the mast. Also, a wooden pin, tapered, used in splicing large ropes, in opening eyes, &c. FIDDLE-BLOCK. A long shell, having one sheave over the other, and the lower smaller than the upper. FIDDLE-HEAD. (See HEAD.) FIFE-RAIL. The rail going round a mast. FIGURE-HEAD. A carved head or full-length figure, over the cut-water. FILLINGS. Pieces of timber used to make the curve fair for the mouldings, between the edges of the fish-front and the sides of the mast. FILLER. (See MADE MAST.) FINISHING. Carved ornaments of the quarter-galley, below the second counter, and above the upper lights. FISH. To raise the flukes of an anchor upon the gunwale. Also, to strengthen a spar when sprung or weakened, by putting in or fastening on another piece. _Fish-front_, _Fishes-sides_. (See MADE MAST.) FISH-DAVIT. The davit used for fishing an anchor. FISH-HOOK. A hook with a pennant, to the end of which the fish-tackle is hooked. FISH-TACKLE. The tackle used for fishing an anchor. FLARE. When the vessel's sides go out from the perpendicular. In opposition to _falling-home_ or _tumbling-in_. FLAT. A sheet is said to be hauled _flat_, when it is hauled down close. _Flat-aback_, when a sail is blown with its after surface against the mast. FLEET. To come up a tackle and draw the blocks apart, for another pull, after they have been hauled _two-blocks_. _Fleet ho!_ The order given at such times. Also, to shift the position of a block or fall, so as to haul to more advantage. FLEMISH COIL. (See FRENCH-FAKE.) FLEMISH-EYE. A kind of eye-splice. (See PLATE 5 and page 45.) FLEMISH-HORSE. An additional foot-rope at the ends of topsail yards. FLOOR. The bottom of a vessel, on each side of the keelson. FLOOR TIMBERS. Those timbers of a vessel which are placed across the keel. (See PLATE 3.) FLOWING SHEET. When a vessel has the wind free, and the lee clews eased off. FLUKES. The broad triangular plates at the extremity of the arms of an anchor, terminating in a point called the _bill_. FLY. That part of a flag which extends from the Union to the extreme end. (See UNION.) FOOT. The lower end of a mast or sail. (See FORE-FOOT.) FOOT-ROPE. The rope stretching along a yard, upon which men stand when reefing or furling, formerly called _horses_. FOOT-WALING. The inside planks or lining of a vessel, over the floor-timbers. FORE. Used to distinguish the forward part of a vessel, or things in that direction; as, _fore mast_, _fore hatch_, in opposition to _aft_ or _after_. FORE-AND-AFT. Lengthwise with the vessel. In opposition to _athwart-ships_. (See SAILS.) FORECASTLE. That part of the upper deck forward of the fore mast; or, as some say, forward of the after part of the fore channels. (See PLATE 1.) Also, the forward part of the vessel, under the deck, where the sailors live, in merchant vessels. FORE-FOOT. A piece of timber at the forward extremity of the keel, upon which the lower end of the stem rests. (See PLATE 3.) FORE-GANGER. A short piece of rope grafted on a harpoon, to which the line is bent. FORE-LOCK. A flat piece of iron, driven through the end of a bolt, to prevent its drawing. FORE MAST. The forward mast of all vessels. (See PLATE 1.) FOREREACH. To shoot ahead, especially when going in stays. FORE-RUNNER. A piece of rag, terminating the stray-line of the log-line. FORGE. _To forge ahead_, to shoot ahead; as, in coming to anchor, after the sails are furled. (See FOREREACH.) FORMERS. Pieces of wood used for shaping cartridges or wads. FOTHER, or FODDER. To draw a sail, filled with oakum, under a vessel's bottom, in order to stop a leak. FOUL. The term for the opposite of clear. FOUL ANCHOR. When the cable has a turn round the anchor. FOUL HAWSE. When the two cables are crossed or twisted, outside the stem. FOUNDER. A vessel _founders_, when she fills with water and sinks. FOX. (See page 52.) Made by twisting together two or more rope-yarns. _A Spanish fox_ is made by untwisting a single yarn and laying it up the contrary way. FRAP. To pass ropes round a sail to keep it from blowing loose. Also, to draw ropes round a vessel which is weakened, to keep her together. FREE. A vessel is going _free_, when she has a fair wind and her yards braced in. A vessel is said to be _free_, when the water has been pumped out of her. FRESHEN. To relieve a rope, by moving its place; as, to _freshen the nip_ of a stay, is to shift it, so as to prevent its chafing through. _To freshen ballast_, is to alter its position. FRENCH-FAKE. To coil a rope with each fake outside of the other, beginning in the middle. If there are to be riding fakes, they begin outside and go in; and so on. This is called a _Flemish coil_. FULL-AND-BY. Sailing close-hauled on a wind. _Full-and-by!_ The order given to the man at the helm to keep the sails full and at the same time close to the wind. FURL. To roll a sail up snugly on a yard or boom, and secure it. FUTTOCK-PLATES. Iron plates crossing the sides of the top-rim perpendicularly. The dead-eyes of the topmast rigging are fitted to their upper ends, and the futtock-shrouds to their lower ends. FUTTOCK-SHROUDS. Short shrouds, leading from the lower ends of the futtock-plates to a bend round the lower mast, just below the top. FUTTOCK-STAFF. A short piece of wood or iron, seized across the upper part of the rigging, to which the catharpin legs are secured. FUTTOCK-TIMBERS. (See PLATE 3.) Those timbers between the floor and naval timbers, and the top-timbers. There are two--the _lower_, which is over the floor, and the _middle_, which is over the naval timber. The naval timber is sometimes called the _ground futtock_. GAFF. A spar, to which the head of a fore-and-aft sail is bent. (See PLATE 1.) GAFF-TOPSAIL. A light sail set over a gaff, the foot being spread by it. GAGE. The depth of water of a vessel. Also, her position as to another vessel, as having the _weather_ or _lee gage_. GALLEY. The place where the cooking is done. GALLOWS-BITTS. A strong frame raised amidships, to support spare spars, &c., in port. GAMMONING. (See PLATE 1.) The lashing by which the bowsprit is secured to the cut-water. GANG-CASKS. Small casks, used for bringing water on board in boats. GANGWAY. (See PLATE 1.) That part of a vessel's side, amidships, where people pass in and out of the vessel. GANTLINE. (See GIRTLINE.) GARBOARD-STREAK. (See PLATE 3.) The range of planks next to the keel, on each side. GARLAND. A large rope, strap or grommet, lashed to a spar when hoisting it inboard. GARNET. A purchase on the main stay, for hoisting cargo. GASKETS. Ropes or pieces of plated stuff, used to secure a sail to the yard or boom when it is furled. They are called a _bunt_, _quarter_, or _yard-arm gasket_, according to their position on the yard. GIMBLET. To turn an anchor round by its stock. To turn anything round on its end. GIRT. The situation of a vessel when her cables are too taut. GIRTLINE. A rope rove through a single block aloft, making a whip purchase. Commonly used to hoist rigging by, in fitting it. GIVE WAY! An order to men in a boat to pull with more force, or to begin pulling. The same as, _Lay out on your oars!_ or, _Lay out!_ GLUT. A piece of canvass sewed into the centre of a sail near the head. It has an eyelet-hole in the middle for the bunt-jigger or becket to go through. GOB-LINE, or GAUB-LINE. A rope leading from the martingale inboard. The same as _back-rope_. GOODGEON. (See GUDGEON.) GOOSE-NECK. An iron ring fitted to the end of a yard or boom, for various purposes. GOOSE-WINGED. The situation of a course when the buntlines and lee clew are hauled up, and the weather clew down. GORES. The angles at one or both ends of such cloths as increase the breadth or depth of a sail. GORING-CLOTHS. Pieces cut obliquely and put in to add to the breadth of a sail. GRAFTING. (See page 52.) A manner of covering a rope by weaving together yarns. GRAINS. An iron with four or more barbed points to it, used for striking small fish. GRAPNEL. A small anchor with several claws, used to secure boats. GRAPPLING IRONS. Crooked irons, used to seize and hold fast another vessel. GRATING. Open lattice work of wood. Used principally to cover hatches in good weather. GREAVE. To clean a ship's bottom by burning. GRIPE. The outside timber of the fore-foot, under water, fastened to the lower stem-piece. (See PLATE 3.) A vessel _gripes_ when she tends to come up into the wind. GRIPES. Bars of iron, with lanyards, rings and clews, by which a large boat is lashed to the ring-bolts of the deck. Those for a quarter-boat are made of long strips of matting, going round her and set taut by a lanyard. GROMMET. (See PLATE 5 and page 46.) A ring formed of rope, by laying round a single strand. GROUND TACKLE. General term for anchors, cables, warps, springs, &c.; everything used in securing a vessel at anchor. GROUND-TIER. The lowest tier of casks in a vessel's hold. GUESS-WARP, or GUESS-ROPE. A rope fastened to a vessel or wharf, and used to tow a boat by; or to haul it out to the swinging-boom-end, when in port. GUN-TACKLE PURCHASE. A purchase made by two single blocks. (See page 54.) GUNWALE. (Pronounced _gun-nel_.) The upper rail of a boat or vessel. GUY. A rope attaching to anything to steady it, and bear it one way and another in hoisting. GYBE. (Pronounced _jibe_.) To shift over the boom of a fore-and-aft sail. HAIL. To speak or call to another vessel, or to men in a different part of a ship. HALYARDS. Ropes or tackles used for hoisting and lowering yards, gaffs, and sails. HALF-HITCH. (See PLATE 5 and page 48.) HAMMOCK. A piece of canvass, hung at each end, in which seamen sleep. HAND. To _hand_ a sail is to _furl_ it. _Bear-a-hand_; make haste. _Lend-a-hand_; assist. _Hand-over-hand_; hauling rapidly on a rope, by putting one hand before the other alternately. HAND-LEAD. (See page 17.) A small lead, used for sounding in rivers and harbors. HANDSOMELY. Slowly, carefully. Used for an order, as, "Lower handsomely!" HANDSPIKE. A long wooden bar, used for heaving at the windlass. HANDY BILLY. A watch-tackle. HANKS. Rings or hoops of wood, rope, or iron, round a stay, and seized to the luff of a fore-and-aft sail. HARPINGS. The fore part of the wales, which encompass the bows of a vessel, and are fastened to the stem. (See PLATE 3.) HARPOON. A spear used for striking whales and other fish. HATCH, or HATCHWAY. An opening in the deck to afford a passage up and down. The coverings over these openings are also called _hatches_. _Hatch-bar_ is an iron bar going across the hatches to keep them down. HAUL. _Haul her wind_, said of a vessel when she comes up close upon the wind. HAWSE. The situation of the cables before a vessel's stem, when moored. Also, the distance upon the water a little in advance of the stem; as, a vessel sails _athwart the hawse_, or anchors _in the hawse_ of another. _Open hawse._ When a vessel rides by two anchors, without any cross in her cables. HAWSE-HOLE. The hole in the bows through which the cable runs. HAWSE-PIECES. Timbers through which the hawse-holes are cut. HAWSE-BLOCK. A block of wood fitted into a hawse-hole at sea. HAWSER. A large rope used for various purposes, as warping, for a spring, &c. HAWSER-LAID, or CABLE-LAID rope, is rope laid with nine strands against the sun. (See PLATE 5 and page 43.) HAZE. A term for punishing a man by keeping him unnecessarily at work upon disagreeable or difficult duty. HEAD. The work at the prow of a vessel. If it is a carved figure, it is called a _figure-head_; if simple carved work, bending over and out, a _billet-head_; and if bending in, like the head of a violin, a _fiddle-head_. Also, the upper end of a mast, called a _mast-head_. (See BY-THE-HEAD. See FAST.) HEAD-LEDGES. Thwartship pieces that frame the hatchways. HEAD-SAILS. A general name given to all sails that set forward of the fore-mast. HEART. A block of wood in the shape of a heart, for stays to reeve through. HEART-YARNS. The centre yarns of a strand. HEAVE SHORT. To heave in on the cable until the vessel is nearly over her anchor. HEAVE-TO. To put a vessel in the position of lying-to. (See LIE-TO.) HEAVE IN STAYS. To go about in tacking. HEAVER. A short wooden bar, tapering at each end. Used as a purchase. HEEL. The after part of the keel. Also, the lower end of a mast or boom. Also, the lower end of the stern-post. _To heel_, is to lie over on one side. HEELING. The square part of the lower end of a mast, through which the fid-hole is made. HELM. The machinery by which a vessel is steered, including the rudder, tiller, wheel, &c. Applied more particularly, perhaps, to the tiller. HELM-PORT. The hole in the counter through which the rudder-head passes. HELM-PORT-TRANSOM. A piece of timber placed across the lower counter, inside, at the height of the helm-port, and bolted through every timber, for the security of that port. (See PLATE 3.) HIGH AND DRY. The situation of a vessel when she is aground, above water mark. HITCH. A peculiar manner of fastening ropes. (See PLATE 5 and page 48.) HOG. A flat, rough broom, used for scrubbing the bottom of a vessel. HOGGED. The state of a vessel when, by any strain, she is made to droop at each end, bringing her centre up. HOLD. The interior of a vessel, where the cargo is stowed. HOLD WATER. To stop the progress of a boat by keeping the oar-blades in the water. HOLY-STONE. A large stone, used for cleaning a ship's decks. HOME. The sheets of a sail are said to be _home_, when the clews are hauled chock out to the sheave-holes. An anchor _comes home_ when it is loosened from the ground and is hove in toward the vessel. HOOD. A covering for a companion hatch, skylight, &c. HOOD-ENDS, or HOODING-ENDS, or WHOODEN-ENDS. Those ends of the planks which fit into the rabbets of the stem or stern-post. HOOK-AND-BUTT. The scarfing, or laying the ends of timbers over each other. HORNS. The jaws of booms. Also, the ends of cross-trees. HORSE. (See FOOT-ROPE.) HOUNDS. Those projections at the mast-head serving as shoulders for the top or trestle-trees to rest upon. HOUSE. To _house_ a mast, is to lower it about half its length, and secure it by lashing its heel to the mast below. (See page 37.) _To house a gun_, is to run it in clear of the port and secure it. HOUSING, or HOUSE-LINE. (Pronounced _houze-lin_.) A small cord made of three small yarns, and used for seizings. HULL. The body of a vessel. (See A-HULL.) IN-AND-OUT. A term sometimes used for the scantline of the timbers, the moulding way, and particularly for those bolts that are driven into the hanging and lodging knees, through the sides, which are called _in-and-out bolts_. INNER-POST. A piece brought on at the fore side of the main-post, and generally continued as high as the wing-transom, to seat the other transoms upon. IRONS. A ship is said to be _in irons_, when, in working, she will not cast one way or the other. JACK. A common term for the _jack-cross-trees_. (See UNION.) JACK-BLOCK. A block used in sending topgallant masts up and down. JACK-CROSS-TREES. (See PLATE 1.) Iron cross-trees at the head of long topgallant masts. JACK-STAFF. A short staff, raised at the bowsprit cap, upon which the Union Jack is hoisted. JACK-STAYS. Ropes stretched taut along a yard to bend the head of the sail to. Also, long strips of wood or iron, used now for the same purpose. JACK-SCREW. A purchase, used for stowing cotton. JACOB'S LADDER. A ladder made of rope, with wooden steps. JAWS. The inner ends of booms or gaffs, hollowed in. JEERS. Tackles for hoisting the lower yards. JEWEL-BLOCKS. Single blocks at the yard-arms, through which the studdingsail halyards lead. JIB. (See PLATE 2.) A triangular sail set on a stay, forward. _Flying-jib_ sets outside of the jib; and the _jib-o'-jib_ outside of that. JIB-BOOM. (See PLATE 1.) The boom, rigged out beyond the bowsprit, to which the tack of the jib is lashed. JIGGER. A small tackle, used about decks or aloft. JOLLY-BOAT. A small boat, usually hoisted at the stern. JUNK. Condemned rope, cut up and used for making mats, swabs, oakum, &c. JURY-MAST. A temporary mast, rigged at sea, in place of one lost. KECKLING. Old rope wound round cables, to keep them from chafing. (See ROUNDING.) KEDGE. A small anchor, with an iron stock, used for warping. _To kedge_, is to warp a vessel ahead by a kedge and hawser. KEEL. (See PLATE 3.) The lowest and principal timber of a vessel, running fore-and-aft its whole length, and supporting the whole frame. It is composed of several pieces, placed lengthwise, and scarfed and bolted together. (See FALSE KEEL.) KEEL-HAUL. To haul a man under a vessel's bottom, by ropes at the yard-arms on each side. Formerly practised as a punishment in ships of war. KEELSON. (See PLATE 3.) A timber placed over the keel on the floor-timbers, and running parallel with it. KENTLEDGE. Pig-iron ballast, laid each side of the keelson. KEVEL, or CAVIL. A strong piece of wood, bolted to some timber or stanchion, used for belaying large ropes to. KEVEL-HEADS. Timber-heads, used as kevels. KINK. A twist in a rope. KNEES. (See PLATE 3.) Crooked pieces of timber, having two arms, used to connect the beams of a vessel with her timbers. (See DAGGER.) _Lodging-knees_, are placed horizontally, having one arm bolted to a beam, and the other across two of the timbers. _Knee of the head_, is placed forward of the stem, and supports the figure-head. KNIGHT-HEADS, or BOLLARD-TIMBERS. The timbers next the stem on each side, and continued high enough to form a support for the bowsprit. (See PLATE 3.) KNITTLES, or NETTLES. (See page 51.) The halves of two adjoining yarns in a rope, twisted up together, for pointing or grafting. Also, small line used for seizings and for hammock-clews. KNOCK-OFF! An order to leave off work. KNOT. A division on the log-line, answering to a mile of distance. (See page 17.) LABOR. A vessel is said to labor when she rolls or pitches heavily. LACING. Rope used to lash a sail to a gaff, or a bonnet to a sail. Also, a piece of compass or knee timber, fayed to the back of the figure-head and the knee of the head, and bolted to each. LAND-FALL. The making land after being at sea. _A good land-fall_, is when a vessel makes the land as intended. LAND HO! The cry used when land is first seen. LANYARDS. Ropes rove through dead-eyes for setting up rigging. Also, a rope made fast to anything to secure it, or as a handle, is called a _lanyard_. LARBOARD. The left side of a vessel, looking forward. LARBOWLINES. The familiar term for the men in the larboard watch. LARGE. A vessel is said to be going _large_, when she has the wind free. LATCHINGS. Loops on the head rope of a bonnet, by which it is laced to the foot of the sail. LAUNCH. A large boat. The LONG-BOAT. LAUNCH HO! High enough! LAY. To come or to go; as, _Lay aloft!_ _Lay forward!_ _Lay aft!_ Also, the direction in which the strands of a rope are twisted; as, from left to right, or from right to left. LEACH. (See LEECH.) LEACHLINE. A rope used for hauling up the leach of a sail. LEAD. A piece of lead, in the shape of a cone or pyramid, with a small hole at the base, and a line attached to the upper end, used for sounding. (See HAND-LEAD, DEEP-SEA-LEAD.) LEADING-WIND. A fair wind. More particularly applied to a wind abeam or quartering. LEAK. A hole or breach in a vessel, at which the water comes in. LEDGES. Small pieces of timber placed athwart-ships under the decks of a vessel, between the beams. LEE. The side opposite to that from which the wind blows; as, if a vessel has the wind on her starboard side, that will be the _weather_, and the larboard will be the _lee_ side. _A lee shore_ is the shore upon which the wind is blowing. _Under the lee_ of anything, is when you have that between you and the wind. _By the lee._ The situation of a vessel, going free, when she has fallen off so much as to bring the wind round her stern, and to take her sails aback on the other side. LEE-BOARD. A board fitted to the lee side of flat-bottomed boats, to prevent their drifting to leeward. LEE-GAGE. (See GAGE.) LEEWAY. What a vessel loses by drifting to leeward. When sailing close-hauled with all sail set, a vessel should make no leeway. If the topgallant sails are furled, it is customary to allow one point; under close-reefed topsails, two points; when under one close-reefed sail, four or five points. LEECH, or LEACH. The border or edge of a sail, at the sides. LEEFANGE. An iron bar, upon which the sheets of fore-and-aft sails traverse. Also, a rope rove through the cringle of a sail which has a bonnet to it, for hauling in, so as to lace on the bonnet. Not much used. LEEWARD. (Pronounced _lu-ard_.) The lee side. In a direction opposite to that from which the wind blows, which is called _windward_. The opposite of _lee_ is _weather_, and of _leeward_ is _windward_; the two first being adjectives. LIE-TO, is to stop the progress of a vessel at sea, either by counter-bracing the yards, or by reducing sail so that she will make little or no headway, but will merely come to and fall off by the counteraction of the sails and helm. LIFE-LINES. Ropes carried along yards, booms, &c., or at any part of the vessel, for men to hold on by. LIFT. A rope or tackle, going from the yard-arms to the mast-head, to support and move the yard. Also, a term applied to the sails when the wind strikes them on the leeches and raises them slightly. LIGHT. To move or lift anything along; as, to "_Light_ out to windward!" that is, haul the sail over to windward. The _light sails_ are all above the topsails, also the studdingsails and flying jib. LIGHTER. A large boat, used in loading and unloading vessels. LIMBERS, or LIMBER-HOLES. Holes cut in the lower part of the floor-timbers, next the keelson, forming a passage for the water fore-and-aft. _Limber-boards_ are placed over the limbers, and are movable. _Limber-rope._ A rope rove fore-and-aft through the limbers, to clear them if necessary. _Limber-streak._ The streak of foot-waling nearest the keelson. LIST. The inclination of a vessel to one side; as, a _list_ to port, or a _list_ to starboard. LIZARD. A piece of rope, sometimes with two legs, and one or more iron thimbles spliced into it. It is used for various purposes. One with two legs, and a thimble to each, is often made fast to the topsail tye, for the buntlines to reeve through. A single one is sometimes used on the swinging-boom topping-lift. LOCKER. A chest or box, to stow anything away in. _Chain-locker._ Where the chain cables are kept. _Boatswain's locker._ Where tools and small stuff for working upon rigging are kept. LOG, or LOG-BOOK. A journal kept by the chief officer, in which the situation of the vessel, winds, weather, courses, distances, and everything of importance that occurs, is noted down. _Log._ A line with a piece of board, called the _log-chip_, attached to it, wound upon a reel, and used for ascertaining the ship's rate of sailing. (See page 17.) LONG-BOAT. The largest boat in a merchant vessel. When at sea, it is carried between the fore and main masts. LONGERS. The longest casks, stowed next the keelson. LONG-TIMBERS. Timbers in the cant-bodies, reaching from the dead-wood to the head of the second futtock. LOOF. That part of a vessel where the planks begin to bend as they approach the stern. LOOM. That part of an oar which is within the row-lock. Also, to appear above the surface of the water; to appear larger than nature, as in a fog. LUBBER'S HOLE. A hole in the top, next the mast. LUFF. To put the helm so as to bring the ship up nearer to the wind. _Spring-a-luff!_ _Keep your luff!_ &c. Orders to luff. Also, the roundest part of a vessel's bow. Also, the forward leech of fore-and-aft sails. LUFF-TACKLE. A purchase composed of a double and single block. (See page 54.) _Luff-upon-luff._ A luff tackle applied to the fall of another. LUGGER. A small vessel carrying lug-sails. _Lug-sail._ A sail used in boats and small vessels, bent to a yard which hangs obliquely to the mast. LURCH. The sudden rolling of a vessel to one side. LYING-TO. (See LIE-TO.) MADE. A _made mast_ or _block_ is one composed of different pieces. A ship's lower mast is a made spar, her topmast is a whole spar. MALL, or MAUL. (Pronounced _mawl_.) A heavy iron hammer used in driving bolts. (See TOP-MAUL.) MALLET. A small maul, made of wood; as, _caulking-mallet_; also, _serving-mallet_, used in putting service on a rope. MANGER. A coaming just within the hawse hole. Not much in use. MAN-ROPES. Ropes used in going up and down a vessel's side. MARL. To wind or twist a small line or rope round another. MARLINE. (Pronounced _mar-lin_.) Small two-stranded stuff, used for marling. A finer kind of spunyarn. MARLING-HITCH. A kind of hitch used in marling. MARLINGSPIKE. An iron pin, sharpened at one end, and having a hole in the other for a lanyard. Used both as a fid and a heaver. MARRY. To join ropes together by a worming over both. MARTINGALE. A short, perpendicular spar, under the bowsprit-end, used for guying down the head-stays. (See DOLPHIN-STRIKER.) MAST. A spar set upright from the deck, to support rigging, yards and sails. Masts are whole or _made_. MAT. Made of strands of old rope, and used to prevent chafing. MATE. An officer under the master. MAUL. (See MALL.) MEND. _To mend service_, is to add more to it. MESHES. The places between the lines of a netting. MESS. Any number of men who eat or lodge together. MESSENGER. A rope used for heaving in a cable by the capstan. MIDSHIPS. The timbers at the broadest part of the vessel. (See AMIDSHIPS.) MISS-STAYS. To fail of going about from one tack to another. (See page 74.) MIZZEN-MAST. The aftermost mast of a ship. (See PLATE 1.) The spanker is sometimes called the _mizzen_. MONKEY BLOCK. A small single block strapped with a swivel. MOON-SAIL. A small sail sometimes carried in light winds, above a sky sail. MOOR. To secure by two anchors. (See page 88.) MORTICE. A _morticed block_ is one made out of a whole block of wood with a hole cut in it for the sheave; in distinction from a _made block_. (See page 53.) MOULDS. The patterns by which the frames of a vessel are worked out. MOUSE. To put turns of rope yarn or spunyarn round the end of a hook and its standing part, when it is hooked to anything, so as to prevent its slipping out. MOUSING. A knot or puddening, made of yarns, and placed on the outside of a rope. MUFFLE. Oars are muffled by putting mats or canvass round their looms in the row-locks. MUNIONS. The pieces that separate the lights in the galleries. NAVAL HOODS, or HAWSE BOLSTERS. Plank above and below the hawse-holes. NEAP TIDES. Low tides, coming at the middle of the moon's second and fourth quarters. (See SPRING TIDES.) NEAPED, or BENEAPED. The situation of a vessel when she is aground at the height of the spring tides. NEAR. Close to wind. "Near!" the order to the helmsman when he is too near the wind. NETTING. Network of rope or small lines. Used for stowing away sails or hammocks. NETTLES. (See KNITTLES.) NINEPIN BLOCK. A block in the form of a ninepin, used for a _fair-leader_ in the rail. NIP. A short turn in a rope. NIPPERS. A number of yarns marled together, used to secure a cable to the messenger. NOCK. The forward upper end of a sail that sets with a boom. NUN-BUOY. A buoy tapering at each end. NUT. Projections on each side of the shank of an anchor, to secure the stock to its place. OAKUM. Stuff made by picking rope-yarns to pieces. Used for caulking, and other purposes. OAR. A long wooden instrument with a flat blade at one end, used for propelling boats. OFF-AND-ON. To stand on different tacks towards and from the land. OFFING. Distance from the shore. ORLOP. The lower deck of a ship of the line; or that on which the cables are stowed. OUT-HAUL. A rope used for hauling out the clew of a boom sail. OUT-RIGGER. A spar rigged out to windward from the tops or cross-trees, to spread the breast-backstays. (See page 25.) OVERHAUL. _To overhaul a tackle_, is to let go the fall and pull on the leading parts so as to separate the blocks. _To overhaul a rope_, is generally to pull a part through a block so as to make slack. _To overhaul rigging_, is to examine it. OVER-RAKE. Said of heavy seas which come over a vessel's head when she is at anchor, head to the sea. PAINTER. A rope attached to the bows of a boat, used for making her fast. PALM. A piece of leather fitted over the hand, with an iron for the head of a needle to press against in sewing upon canvass. Also, the fluke of an anchor. PANCH. (See PAUNCH.) PARBUCKLE. To hoist or lower a spar or cask by single ropes passed round it. PARCEL. (See page 44.) To wind tarred canvass, (called _parcelling_,) round a rope. PARCELLING. (See PARCEL.) PARLIAMENT-HEEL. The situation of a vessel when she is careened. PARRAL. The rope by which a yard is confined to a mast at its centre. PART. To break a rope. PARTNERS. A frame-work of short timber fitted to the hole in a deck, to receive the heel of a mast or pump, &c. PAZAREE. A rope attached to the clew of the foresail and rove through a block on the swinging boom. Used for guying the clews out when before the wind. PAUNCH MAT. A thick mat, placed at the slings of a yard or elsewhere. PAWL. A short bar of iron, which prevents the capstan or windlass from turning back. _To pawl_, is to drop a pawl and secure the windlass or capstan. PAY-OFF. When a vessel's head falls off from the wind. _To pay._ To cover over with tar or pitch. _To pay out._ To slack up on a cable and let it run out. PEAK. The upper outer corner of a gaff-sail. PEAK. (See A-PEAK.) A _stay-peak_ is when the cable and fore stay form a line. A _short stay-peak_ is when the cable is too much in to form this line. PENDANT, or PENNANT. A long narrow piece of bunting, carried at the mast-head. _Broad pennant_, is a square piece, carried in the same way, in a commodore's vessel. _Pennant._ A rope to which a purchase is hooked. A long strap fitted at one end to a yard or mast-head, with a hook or block at the other end, for a brace to reeve through, or to hook a tackle to. PILLOW. A block which supports the inner end of the bowsprit. PIN. The axis on which a sheave turns. Also, a short piece of wood or iron to belay ropes to. PINK-STERN. A high, narrow stern. PINNACE. A boat, in size between the launch and a cutter. PINTLE. A metal bolt, used for hanging a rudder. PITCH. A resin taken from pine, and used for filling up the seams of a vessel. PLANKS. Thick, strong boards, used for covering the sides and decks of vessels. PLAT. A braid of foxes. (See FOX.) PLATE. (See CHAIN-PLATE.) PLUG. A piece of wood, fitted into a hole in a vessel or boat, so as to let in or keep out water. POINT. To take the end of a rope and work it over with knittles. (See page 51. See REEF-POINTS.) POLE. Applied to the highest mast of a ship, usually painted; as, _skysail pole_. POOP. A deck raised over the after part of the spar deck. A vessel is _pooped_ when the sea breaks over her stern. POPPETS. Perpendicular pieces of timber fixed to the fore-and-aft part of the bilge-ways in launching. PORT. Used instead of _larboard_. _To port the helm_, is to put it to the larboard. PORT, or PORT-HOLE. Holes in the side of a vessel, to point cannon out of. (See BRIDLE.) PORTOISE. The gunwale. The yards are _a-portoise_ when they rest on the gunwale. PORT-SILLS. (See SILLS.) PREVENTER. An additional rope or spar, used as a support. PRICK. A quantity of spunyarn or rope laid close up together. PRICKER. A small marlinspike, used in sail-making. It generally has a wooden handle. PUDDENING. A quantity of yarns, matting or oakum, used to prevent chafing. PUMP-BRAKE. The handle to the pump. PURCHASE. A mechanical power which increases the force applied. _To purchase_, is to raise by a purchase. QUARTER. The part of a vessel's side between the after part of the main chains and the stern. The _quarter_ of a yard is between the slings and the yard-arm. The wind is said to be _quartering_, when it blows in a line between that of the keel and the beam and abaft the latter. QUARTER-BLOCK. A block fitted under the quarters of a yard on each side the slings, for the clewlines and sheets to reeve through. QUARTER-DECK. That part of the upper deck abaft the main-mast. QUARTER-MASTER. A petty officer in a man-of-war, who attends the helm and binnacle at sea, and watches for signals, &c., when in port. QUICK-WORK. That part of a vessel's side which is above the chain-wales and decks. So called in ship-building. QUILTING. A coating about a vessel, outside, formed of ropes woven together. QUOIN. A wooden wedge for the breech of a gun to rest upon. RACE. A strong, rippling tide. RACK. To seize two ropes together, with cross-turns. Also, a _fair-leader_ for running rigging. RACK-BLOCK. A course of blocks made from one piece of wood, for fair-leaders. RAKE. The inclination of a mast from the perpendicular. RAMLINE. A line used in mast-making to get a straight middle line on a spar. RANGE OF CABLE. A quantity of cable, more or less, placed in order for letting go the anchor or paying out. RATLINES. (Pronounced _rat-lins_.) Lines running across the shrouds, horizontally, like the rounds of a ladder, and used to step upon in going aloft. RATTLE DOWN RIGGING. To put ratlines upon rigging. It is still called rattling _down_, though they are now rattled _up_; beginning at the lowest. (See page 23.) RAZEE. A vessel of war which has had one deck cut down. REEF. To reduce a sail by taking in upon its head, if a square sail, and its foot, if a fore-and-aft sail. REEF-BAND. A band of stout canvass sewed on the sail across, with points in it, and earings at each end for reefing. A _reef_ is all of the sail that is comprehended between the head of the sail and the first reef-band, or between two reef-bands. REEF-TACKLE. A tackle used to haul the middle of each leech up toward the yard, so that the sail may be easily reefed. REEVE. To pass the end of a rope through a block, or any aperture. RELIEVING TACKLE. A tackle hooked to the tiller in a gale of wind, to steer by in case anything should happen to the wheel or tiller-ropes. RENDER. To pass a rope through a place. A rope is said to _render_ or not, according as it goes freely through any place. RIB-BANDS. Long, narrow, flexible pieces of timber nailed to the outside of the ribs, so as to encompass the vessel lengthwise. RIBS. A figurative term for a vessel's timbers. RIDE AT ANCHOR. To lie at anchor. Also, to bend or bear down by main strength and weight; as, to _ride down_ the main tack. RIDERS. Interior timbers placed occasionally opposite the principal ones, to which they are bolted, reaching from the keelson to the beams of the lower deck. Also, casks forming the second tier in a vessel's hold. RIGGING. The general term for all the ropes of a vessel. (See RUNNING, STANDING.) Also, the common term for the shrouds with their ratlines; as, the _main rigging_, _mizzen rigging_, &c. RIGHT. To _right_ the helm, is to put it amidships. RIM. The edge of a top. RING. The iron ring at the upper end of an anchor, to which the cable is bent. RING-BOLT. An eye-bolt with a ring through the eye. (See EYE-BOLT.) RING-TAIL. A small sail, shaped like a jib, set abaft the spanker in light winds. ROACH. A curve in the foot of a square sail, by which the clews are brought below the middle of the foot. The _roach_ of a fore-and-aft sail is in its forward leech. ROAD, or ROADSTEAD. An anchorage at some distance from the shore. ROBANDS. (See ROPE-BANDS.) ROLLING TACKLE. Tackles used to steady the yards in a heavy sea. ROMBOWLINE. Condemned canvass, rope, &c. ROPE-BANDS, or ROBANDS. Small pieces of two or three yarn spunyarn or marline, used to confine the head of the sail to the yard or gaff. Rope-yarn. A thread of hemp, or other stuff, of which a rope is made. (See page 43.) ROUGH-TREE. An unfinished spar. ROUND IN. To haul in on a rope, especially a weather-brace. ROUND UP. To haul up on a tackle. ROUNDING. A service of rope, hove round a spar or larger rope. ROWLOCKS, or ROLLOCKS. Places cut in the gunwale of a boat for the oar to rest in while pulling. ROYAL. A light sail next above a topgallant sail. (See PLATE 2.) ROYAL YARD. The yard from which the royal is set. The fourth from the deck. (See PLATE 1.) RUBBER. A small instrument used to rub or flatten down the seams of a sail in sail-making. RUDDER. The machine by which a vessel or boat is steered. RUN. The after part of a vessel's bottom, which rises and narrows in approaching the stern-post. _By the run._ To let go _by the run_, is to let go altogether, instead of slacking off. RUNG-HEADS. The upper ends of the floor-timbers. RUNNER. A rope used to increase the power of a tackle. It is rove through a single block which you wish to bring down, and a tackle is hooked to each end, or to one end, the other being made fast. RUNNING RIGGING. The ropes that reeve through blocks, and are pulled and hauled, such as braces, halyards, &c.; in opposition to the _standing rigging_, the ends of which are securely seized, such as stays, shrouds, &c. (See page 43.) SADDLES. Pieces of wood hollowed out to fit on the yards to which they are nailed, having a hollow in the upper part for the boom to rest in. SAG. To _sag to leeward_, is to drift off bodily to leeward. SAILS are of two kinds: _square sails_, which hang from yards, their foot lying across the line of the keel, as the courses, topsails, &c.; and _fore-and-aft sails_, which set upon gaffs, or on stays, their foot running with the line of the keel, as jib, spanker, &c. SAIL HO! The cry used when a sail is first discovered at sea. SAVE-ALL. A small sail sometimes set under the foot of a lower studdingsail. (See WATER SAIL.) SCANTLING. A term applied to any piece of timber, with regard to its breadth and thickness, when reduced to the standard size. SCARF. To join two pieces of timber at their ends by shaving them down and placing them over-lapping. SCHOONER. (See PLATE 4.) A small vessel with two masts and no tops. A _fore-and-aft schooner_ has only fore-and-aft sails. A _topsail schooner_ carries a square fore topsail, and frequently, also, topgallant sail and royal. There are some schooners with three masts. They also have no tops. A _main-topsail schooner_ is one that carries square topsails, fore and aft. SCORE. A groove in a block or dead-eye. SCOTCHMAN. A large batten placed over the turnings-in of rigging. (See BATTEN.) SCRAPER. A small, triangular iron instrument, with a handle fitted to its centre, and used for scraping decks and masts. SCROWL. A piece of timber bolted to the knees of the head, in place of a figure-head. SCUD. To drive before a gale, with no sail, or only enough to keep the vessel ahead of the sea. Also, low, thin clouds that fly swiftly before the wind. SCULL. A short oar. _To scull_, is to impel a boat by one oar at the stern. SCUPPERS. Holes cut in the water-ways for the water to run from the decks. SCUTTLE. A hole cut in a vessel's deck, as, a hatchway. Also, a hole cut in any part of a vessel. _To scuttle_, is to cut or bore holes in a vessel to make her sink. SCUTTLE-BUTT. (See BUTT.) SEAMS. The intervals between planks in a vessel's deck or side. SEIZE. To fasten ropes together by turns of small stuff. SEIZINGS. (See page 51.) The fastenings of ropes that are seized together. SELVAGEE. A skein of rope-yarns or spunyarn, marled together. Used as a neat strap. (See page 50.) SEND. When a ship's head or stern pitches suddenly and violently into the trough of the sea. SENNIT, or SINNIT. (See page 52.) A braid, formed by plaiting rope-yarns or spunyarn together. Straw, plaited in the same way for hats, is called sennit. SERVE. (See page 44.) To wind small stuff, as rope-yarns, spunyarn, &c., round a rope, to keep it from chafing. It is wound and hove round taut by a serving-board or mallet. SERVICE, is the stuff so wound round. SET. To _set up rigging_, is to tauten it by tackles. The seizings are then put on afresh. SHACKLES. Links in a chain cable which are fitted with a movable bolt so that the chain can be separated. SHAKES. The staves of hogsheads taken apart. SHANK. The main piece in an anchor, at one end of which the stock is made fast, and at the other the arms. SHANK-PAINTER. A strong rope by which the lower part of the shank of an anchor is secured to the ship's side. SHARP UP. Said of yards when braced as near fore-and-aft as possible. SHEATHING. A casing or covering on a vessel's bottom. SHEARS. Two or more spars, raised at angles and lashed together near their upper ends, used for taking in masts. (See page 52.) SHEAR HULK. An old vessel fitted with shears, &c., and used for taking out and putting in the masts of other vessels. SHEAVE. The wheel in a block upon which the rope works. _Sheave-hole_, the place cut in a block for the ropes to reeve through. SHEEP-SHANK. A kind of hitch or bend, used to shorten a rope temporarily. (See PLATE 5 and page 50.) SHEER, or SHEER-STRAKE. The line of plank on a vessel's side, running fore-and-aft under the gunwale. Also, a vessel's position when riding by a single anchor. SHEET. A rope used in setting a sail, to keep the clew down to its place. With square sails, the sheets run through each yard-arm. With boom sails, they haul the boom over one way and another. They keep down the inner clew of a studdingsail and the after clew of a jib. (See HOME.) SHEET ANCHOR. A vessel's largest anchor: not carried at the bow. SHELL. The case of a block. SHINGLE. (See BALLAST.) SHIP. A vessel with three masts, with tops and yards to each. (See PLATE 4.) To enter on board a vessel. To fix anything in its place. SHIVER. To shake the wind out of a sail by bracing it so that the wind strikes upon the leech. SHOE. A piece of wood used for the bill of an anchor to rest upon, to save the vessel's side. Also, for the heels of shears, &c. SHOE-BLOCK. A block with two sheaves, one above the other, the one horizontal and the other perpendicular. SHORE. A prop or stanchion, placed under a beam. To _shore_, to prop up. SHROUDS. A set of ropes reaching from the mast-heads to the vessel's sides, to support the masts. SILLS. Pieces of timber put in horizontally between the frames to form and secure any opening; as, for ports. SISTER BLOCK. A long piece of wood with two sheaves in it, one above the other, with a score between them for a seizing, and a groove around the block, lengthwise. SKIDS. Pieces of timber placed up and down a vessel's side, to bear any articles off clear that are hoisted in. SKIN. The part of a sail which is outside and covers the rest when it is furled. Also, familiarly, the sides of the hold; as, an article is said to be stowed _next the skin_. SKYSAIL. A light sail next above the royal. (See PLATE 2.) SKY-SCRAPER. A name given to a _skysail_ when it is triangular. SLABLINE. A small line used to haul up the foot of a course. SLACK. The part of a rope or sail that hangs down loose. _Slack in stays_, said of a vessel when she works slowly in tacking. SLEEPERS. The knees that connect the transoms to the after timbers on the ship's quarter. SLING. To set a cask, spar, gun, or other article, in ropes, so as to put on a tackle and hoist or lower it. SLINGS. The ropes used for securing the centre of a yard to the mast. _Yard-slings_ are now made of iron. Also, a large rope fitted so as to go round any article which is to be hoisted or lowered. SLIP. To let a cable go and stand out to sea. (See page 90.) SLIP-ROPE. A rope bent to the cable just outside the hawse-hole, and brought in on the weather quarter, for slipping. (See page 90.) SLOOP. A small vessel with one mast. (See PLATE 4.) SLOOP OF WAR. A vessel of any rig, mounting between 18 and 32 guns. SLUE. To turn anything round or over. SMALL STUFF. The term for spunyarn, marline, and the smallest kinds of rope, such as ratline-stuff, &c. SNAKE. To pass small stuff across a seizing, with marling hitches at the outer turns. SNATCH-BLOCK. A single block, with an opening in its side below the sheave, or at the bottom, to receive the bight of a rope. SNOTTER. A rope going over a yard-arm, with an eye, used to bend a tripping-line to in sending down topgallant and royal yards in vessels of war. SNOW. A kind of brig, formerly used. SNUB. To check a rope suddenly. SNYING. A term for a circular plank edgewise, to work in the bows of a vessel. SO! An order to 'vast hauling upon anything when it has come to its right position. SOLE. A piece of timber fastened to the foot of the rudder, to make it level with the false keel. SOUND. To get the depth of water by a lead and line. (See page 85.) The pumps are _sounded_ by an iron _sounding rod_, marked with a scale of feet and inches. SPAN. A rope with both ends made fast, for a purchase to be hooked to its bight. SPANKER. The after sail of a ship or bark. It is a fore-and-aft sail, setting with a boom and gaff. (See PLATE 2.) SPAR. The general term for all masts, yards, booms, gaffs, &c. SPELL. The common term for a portion of time given to any work. _To spell_, is to relieve another at his work. _Spell ho!_ An exclamation used as an order or request to be relieved at work by another. SPENCER. A fore-and-aft sail, set with a gaff and no boom, and hoisting from a small mast called a _spencer-mast_, just abaft the fore and main masts. (See PLATES 2 and 4.) SPILL. To shake the wind out of a sail by bracing it so that the wind may strike its leech and shiver it. SPILLING LINE. A rope used for spilling a sail. Rove in bad weather. SPINDLE. An iron pin upon which the capstan moves. Also, a piece of timber forming the diameter of a made mast. Also, any long pin or bar upon which anything revolves. SPIRKETING. The planks from the water-ways to the port-sills. SPLICE. (See PLATE 5 and page 44.) To join two ropes together by interweaving their strands. SPOON-DRIFT. Water swept from the tops of the waves by the violence of the wind in a tempest, and driven along before it, covering the surface of the sea. SPRAY. An occasional sprinkling dashed from the top of a wave by the wind, or by its striking an object. SPRING. To crack or split a mast. _To spring a leak_, is to begin to leak. _To spring a luff_, is to force a vessel close to the wind, in sailing. SPRING-STAY. A preventer-stay, to assist the regular one. (See STAY.) SPRING TIDES. The highest and lowest course of tides, occurring every new and full moon. SPRIT. A small boom or gaff, used with some sails in small boats. The lower end rests in a becket or snotter by the foot of the mast, and the other end spreads and raises the outer upper corner of the sail, crossing it diagonally. A sail so rigged in a boat is called a _sprit-sail_. SPRIT-SAIL-YARD. (See PLATE 1.) A yard lashed across the bowsprit or knight-heads, and used to spread the guys of the jib and flying jib-boom. There was formerly a sail bent to it called a _sprit-sail_. SPUNYARN. (See page 44.) A cord formed by twisting together two or three rope-yarns. SPURLING LINE. A line communicating between the tiller and tell-tale. SPURS. Pieces of timber fixed on the bilge-ways, their upper ends being bolted to the vessel's sides above the water. Also, curved pieces of timber, serving as half beams, to support the decks where whole beams cannot be placed. SPUR-SHOES. Large pieces of timber that come abaft the pump-well. SQUARE. Yards are _squared_ when they are horizontal and at right angles with the keel. Squaring by the lifts makes them horizontal; and by the braces, makes them at right angles with the vessel's line. Also, the proper term for the length of yards. A vessel has square yards when her yards are unusually long. A sail is said to be very square on the head when it is long on the head. _To square a yard_, in working ship, means to bring it in square by the braces. SQUARE-SAIL. A temporary sail, set at the fore-mast of a schooner or sloop when going before the wind. (See SAIL.) STABBER. A PRICKER. STAFF. A pole or mast, used to hoist flags upon. STANCHIONS. (See PLATE 3.) Upright posts of wood or iron, placed so as to support the beams of a vessel. Also, upright pieces of timber, placed at intervals along the sides of a vessel, to support the bulwarks and rail, and reaching down to the bends, by the side of the timbers, to which they are bolted. Also, any fixed, upright support; as to an awning, or for the man-ropes. STAND BY! An order to be prepared. STANDARD. An inverted knee, placed above the deck instead of beneath it; as, _bitt-standard_, &c. STANDING. The _standing part_ of a rope is that part which is fast, in opposition to the part that is hauled upon; or the main part, in opposition to the end. The _standing part_ of a tackle is that part which is made fast to the blocks and between that and the next sheave, in opposition to the hauling and leading parts. STANDING RIGGING. (See page 43.) That part of a vessel's rigging which is made fast and not hauled upon. (See RUNNING.) STARBOARD. The right side of a vessel, looking forward. STARBOWLINES. The familiar term for the men in the starboard watch. START. To _start a cask_, is to open it. STAY. To tack a vessel, or put her about, so that the wind, from being on one side, is brought upon the other, round the vessel's head. (See TACK, WEAR.) _To stay a mast_, is to incline it forward or aft, or to one side or the other, by the stays and backstays. Thus, a mast is said to be _stayed_ too much forward or aft, or too much to port, &c. _Stays._ Large ropes, used to support masts, and leading from the head of some mast down to some other mast, or to some part of the vessel. Those which lead forward are called _fore-and-aft stays_; and those which lead down to the vessel's sides, _backstays_. (See BACKSTAYS.) _In stays_, or _hove in stays_, the situation of a vessel when she is _staying_, or going about from one tack to the other. STAYSAIL. A sail which hoists upon a stay. STEADY! An order to keep the helm as it is. STEERAGE. That part of the between-decks which is just forward of the cabin. STEEVE. A bowsprit _steeves_ more or less, according as it is raised more or less from the horizontal. The _steeve_ is the angle it makes with the horizon. Also, a long, heavy spar, with a place to fit a block at one end, and used in stowing certain kinds of cargo, which need be driven in close. STEM. (See PLATE 3.) A piece of timber reaching from the forward end of the keel, to which it is scarfed, up to the bowsprit, and to which the two sides of the vessel are united. STEMSON. A piece of compass-timber, fixed on the after part of the apron inside. The lower end is scarfed into the keelson, and receives the scarf of the stem, through which it is bolted. STEP. A block of wood secured to the keel, into which the heel of the mast is placed. _To step a mast_, is to put it in its step. STERN. (See PLATE 3.) The after end of a vessel. (See BY THE STERN.) STERN-BOARD. The motion of a vessel when going stern foremost. STERN-FRAME. The frame composed of the stern-post transom and the fashion-pieces. STERN-POST. (See PLATE 3.) The aftermost timber in a ship, reaching from the after end of the keel to the deck. The stem and stern-post are the two extremes of a vessel's frame. _Inner stern-post._ A post on the inside, corresponding to the _stern-post_. STERN-SHEETS. The after part of a boat, abaft the rowers, where the passengers sit. STIFF. The quality of a vessel which enables it to carry a great deal of sail without lying over much on her side. The opposite to _crank_. STIRRUPS. Ropes with thimbles at their ends, through which the foot-ropes are rove, and by which they are kept up toward the yards. STOCK. A beam of wood, or a bar of iron, secured to the upper end of the shank of an anchor, at right angles with the arms. An iron stock usually goes with a key, and unships. STOCKS. The frame upon which a vessel is built. STOOLS. Small channels for the dead-eyes of the backstays. STOPPER. A stout rope with a knot at one end, and sometimes a hook at the other, used for various purposes about decks; as, making fast a cable, so as to overhaul. (See CAT STOPPER, DECK STOPPER.) STOPPER BOLTS. Ring-bolts to which the deck stoppers are secured. STOP. A fastening of small stuff. Also, small projections on the outside of the cheeks of a lower mast, at the upper parts of the hounds. STRAND. (See page 43.) A number of rope-yarns twisted together. Three, four or nine strands twisted together form a rope. A rope is _stranded_ when one of its strands is parted or broken by chafing or by a strain. A vessel is _stranded_ when she is driven on shore. STRAP. A piece of rope spliced round a block to keep its parts well together. Some blocks have iron straps, in which case they are called _iron bound_. STREAK, or STRAKE. A range of planks running fore and aft on a vessel's side. STREAM. The _stream anchor_ is one used for warping, &c., and sometimes as a lighter anchor to moor by, with a hawser. It is smaller than the _bowers_, and larger than the _kedges_. _To stream a buoy_, is to drop it into the water. _Stretchers._ Pieces of wood placed across a boat's bottom, inside, for the oarsmen to press their feet against, in rowing. Also, cross pieces placed between a boat's sides to keep them apart when hoisted up and griped. STRIKE. To lower a sail or colors. STUDDINGSAILS. (See PLATE 2.) Light sails set outside the square sails, on booms rigged out for that purpose. They are only carried with a fair wind and in moderate weather. SUED, or SEWED. The condition of a ship when she is high and dry on shore. If the water leaves her two feet, she sues, or is sued, two feet. SUPPORTERS. The knee-timbers under the cat-heads. SURF. The breaking of the sea upon the shore. SURGE. A large, swelling wave. To _surge_ a rope or cable, is to slack it up suddenly where it renders round a pin, or round the windlass or capstan. _Surge ho!_ The notice given when a cable is to be _surged_. SWAB. A mop, formed of old rope, used for cleaning and drying decks. SWEEP. To drag the bottom for an anchor. Also, large oars, used in small vessels to force them ahead. SWIFT. To bring two shrouds or stays close together by ropes. SWIFTER. The forward shroud to a lower-mast. Also, ropes used to confine the capstan bars to their places when shipped. SWIG. A term used by sailors for the mode of hauling off upon the bight of a rope when its lower end is fast. SWIVEL. A long link of iron, used in chain cables, made so as to turn upon an axis and keep the turns out of a chain. SYPHERING. Lapping the edges of planks over each other for a bulkhead. TABLING. Letting one beam-piece into another. (See SCARFING.) Also, the broad hem on the borders of sails, to which the bolt-rope is sewed. TACK. To put a ship about, so that from having the wind on one side, you bring it round on the other by the way of her head. The opposite of _wearing_. A vessel is on the _starboard tack_, or has her _starboard tacks on board_, when she has the wind on her starboard side. The rope or tackle by which the weather clew of a course is hauled forward and down to the deck. The _tack_ of a fore-and-aft sail is the rope that keeps down the lower forward clew; and of a studdingsail, the lower outer clew. The tack of the lower studdingsail is called the _outhaul_. Also, that part of a sail to which the tack is attached. TACKLE. (Pronounced _tay-cle_.) A purchase, formed by a rope rove through one or more blocks. TAFFRAIL, or TAFFEREL. The rail round a ship's stern. TAIL. A rope spliced into the end of a block and used for making it fast to rigging or spars. Such a block is called a _tail-block_. A ship is said to _tail_ up or down stream, when at anchor, according as her stern swings up or down with the tide; in opposition to _heading_ one way or another, which is said of a vessel when under way. TAIL-TACKLE. A watch-tackle. (See page 54.) TAIL ON! or TALLY ON! An order given to take hold of a rope and pull. TANK. An iron vessel placed in the hold to contain the vessel's water. TAR. A liquid gum, taken from pine and fir trees, and used for caulking, and to put upon yarns in rope-making, and upon standing rigging, to protect it from the weather. TARPAULIN. A piece of canvass, covered with tar, used for covering hatches, boats, &c. Also, the name commonly given to a sailor's hat when made of tarred or painted cloth. TAUT. Tight. TAUNT. High or tall. Commonly applied to a vessel's masts. _All-a-taunt-o._ Said of a vessel when she has all her light and tall masts and spars aloft. TELL-TALE. A compass hanging from the beams of the cabin, by which the heading of a vessel may be known at any time. Also, an instrument connected with the barrel of the wheel, and traversing so that the officer may see the position of the tiller. TEND. To watch a vessel at anchor at the turn of tides, and cast her by the helm, and some sail if necessary, so as to keep turns out of her cables. TENON. The heel of a mast, made to fit into the step. THICK-AND-THIN BLOCK. A block having one sheave larger than the other. Sometimes used for quarter-blocks. THIMBLE. An iron ring, having its rim concave on the outside for a rope or strap to fit snugly round. THOLE-PINS. Pins in the gunwale of a boat, between which an oar rests when pulling, instead of a rowlock. THROAT. The inner end of a gaff, where it widens and hollows in to fit the mast. (See JAWS.) Also, the hollow part of a knee. The _throat_ brails, halyards, &c., are those that hoist or haul up the gaff or sail near the throat. Also, the angle where the arm of an anchor is joined to the shank. THRUM. To stick short strands of yarn through a mat or piece of canvass, to make a rough surface. THWARTS. The seats going across a boat, upon which the oarsmen sit. THWARTSHIPS. (See ATHWARTSHIPS.) TIDE. To _tide up or down_ a river or harbor, is to work up or down with a fair tide and head wind or calm, coming to anchor when the tide turns. TIDE-RODE. The situation of a vessel, at anchor, when she swings by the force of the tide. In opposition to _wind-rode_. TIER. A range of casks. Also, the range of the fakes of a cable or hawser. The _cable tier_ is the place in a hold or between decks where the cables are stowed. TILLER. A bar of wood or iron, put into the head of the rudder, by which the rudder is moved. TILLER-ROPES. Ropes leading from the tiller-head round the barrel of the wheel, by which a vessel is steered. TIMBER. A general term for all large pieces of wood used in ship-building. Also, more particularly, long pieces of wood in a curved form, bending outward, and running from the keel up, on each side, forming the _ribs_ of a vessel. The keel, stem, stern-posts and timbers form a vessel's outer frame. (See PLATE 3.) TIMBER-HEADS. (See PLATE 3.) The ends of the timbers that come above the decks. Used for belaying hawsers and large ropes. TIMENOGUY. A rope carried taut between different parts of the vessel, to prevent the sheet or tack of a course from getting foul, in working ship. TOGGLE. A pin placed through the bight or eye of a rope, block-strap, or bolt, to keep it in its place, or to put the bight or eye of another rope upon, and thus to secure them both together. TOMPION. A bung or plug placed in the mouth of a cannon. TOP. A platform, placed over the head of a lower mast, resting on the trestle-trees, to spread the rigging, and for the convenience of men aloft. (See PLATE 1.) To _top_ up a yard or boom, is to raise up one end of it by hoisting on the lift. TOP-BLOCK. A large iron-bound block, hooked into a bolt under the lower cap, and used for the top-rope to reeve through in sending up and down topmasts. TOP-LIGHT. A signal lantern carried in the top. TOP-LINING. A lining on the after part of sails, to prevent them from chafing against the top-rim. TOPMAST. (See PLATE 1.) The second mast above the deck. Next above the lower mast. TOPGALLANT MAST. (See PLATE 1.) The third mast above the deck. TOP-ROPE. The rope used for sending topmasts up and down. TOPSAIL. (See PLATE 2.) The second sail above the deck. TOPGALLANT SAIL. (See PLATE 2.) The third sail above the deck. TOPPING-LIFT. (See PLATE 1.) A lift used for topping up the end of a boom. TOP TIMBERS. The highest timbers on a vessel's side, being above the futtocks. (See PLATE 3.) TOSS. To throw an oar out of the rowlock, and raise it perpendicularly on its end, and lay it down in the boat, with its blade forward. TOUCH. A sail is said to _touch_, when the wind strikes the leech so as to shake it a little. _Luff and touch her!_ The order to bring the vessel up and see how near she will go to the wind. TOW. To draw a vessel along by means of a rope. TRAIN-TACKLE. The tackle used for running guns in and out. TRANSOMS. (See PLATE 3.) Pieces of timber going across the stern-post, to which they are bolted. TRANSOM-KNEES. Knees bolted to the transoms and after timbers. TRAVELLER. An iron ring, fitted so as to slip up and down a rope. TREENAILS, or TRUNNELS. Long wooden pins, used for nailing a plank to a timber. TREND. The lower end of the shank of an anchor, being the same distance on the shank from the throat that the arm measures from the throat to the bill. TRESTLE-TREES. Two strong pieces of timber, placed horizontally and fore-and-aft on opposite sides of a mast-head, to support the cross-trees and top, and for the fid of the mast above to rest upon. TRIATIC STAY. A rope secured at each end to the heads of the fore and main masts, with thimbles spliced into its bight, to hook the stay tackles to. TRICE. To haul up by means of a rope. TRICK. The time allotted to a man to stand at the helm. TRIM. The condition of a vessel, with reference to her cargo and ballast. A vessel is _trimmed_ by the head or by the stern. _In ballast trim_, is when she has only ballast on board. Also, to arrange the sails by the braces with reference to the wind. TRIP. To raise an anchor clear of the bottom. TRIPPING LINE. A line used for tripping a topgallant or royal yard in sending it down. TRUCK. A circular piece of wood, placed at the head of the highest mast on a ship. It has small holes or sheaves in it for signal halyards to be rove through. Also, the wheel of a gun-carriage. TRUNNIONS. The arms on each side of a cannon by which it rests upon the carriage, and on which, as an axis, it is elevated or depressed. TRUSS. The rope by which the centre of a lower yard is kept in toward the mast. TRYSAIL. A fore-and-aft sail, set with a boom and gaff, and hoisting on a small mast abaft the lower mast, called a _trysail-mast_. This name is generally confined to the sail so carried at the mainmast of a full-rigged brig; those carried at the foremast and at the mainmast of a ship or bark being called _spencers_, and those that are at the mizzenmast of a ship or bark, _spankers_. TUMBLING HOME. Said of a ship's sides when they fall in above the bends. The opposite of _wall-sided_. TURN. Passing a rope once or twice round a pin or kevel, to keep it fast. Also, two crosses in a cable. _To turn in_ or _turn out_, nautical terms for going to rest in a berth or hammock, and getting up from them. _Turn up!_ The order given to send the men up from between decks. TYE. A rope connected with a yard, to the other end of which a tackle is attached for hoisting. UNBEND. To cast off or untie. (See BEND.) UNION. The upper inner corner of an ensign. The rest of the flag is called the _fly_. The _union_ of the U.S. ensign is a blue field with white stars, and the _fly_ is composed of alternate white and red stripes. _Union-down._ The situation of a flag when it is hoisted upside down, bringing the union down instead of up. Used as a signal of distress. _Union-jack._ A small flag, containing only the union, without the fly, usually hoisted at the bowsprit-cap. UNMOOR. To heave up one anchor so that the vessel may ride at a single anchor. (See _Moor_.) UNSHIP. (See SHIP.) UVROU. (See EUVROU.) VANE. A fly worn at the mast-head, made of feathers or buntine, traversing on a spindle, to show the direction of the wind. (See DOG VANE.) VANG. (See PLATE 1.) A rope leading from the peak of the gaff of a fore-and-aft sail to the rail on each side, and used for steadying the gaff. 'VAST. (See AVAST.) VEER. Said of the wind when it changes. Also, to slack a cable and let it run out. (See PAY.) _To veer and haul_, is to haul and slack alternately on a rope, as in warping, until the vessel or boat gets headway. VIOL, or VOYAL. A larger messenger sometimes used in weighing an anchor by a capstan. Also, the block through which the messenger passes. WAIST. That part of the upper deck between the quarter-deck and forecastle. _Waisters._ Green hands, or broken-down seamen, placed in the waist of a man-of-war. WAKE. The track or path a ship leaves behind her in the water. WALES. Strong planks in a vessel's sides, running her whole length fore and aft. WALL. A knot put on the end of a rope. (See PLATE 5 and page 46.) WALL-SIDED. A vessel is _wall-sided_ when her sides run up perpendicularly from the bends. In opposition to _tumbling-home_ or _flaring out_. WARD-ROOM. The room in a vessel of war in which the commissioned officers live. WARE, or WEAR. To turn a vessel round, so that, from having the wind on one side, you bring it upon the other, carrying her stern round by the wind. In _tacking_, the same result is produced by carrying a vessel's head round by the wind. WARP. To move a vessel from one place to another by means of a rope made fast to some fixed object, or to a kedge. A _warp_ is a rope used for warping. If the warp is bent to a kedge which is let go, and the vessel is hove ahead by the capstan or windlass, it would be called _kedging_. WASH-BOARDS. Light pieces of board placed above the gunwale of a boat. WATCH. (See page 167.) A division of time on board ship. There are seven watches in a day, reckoning from 12 M. round through the 24 hours, five of them being of four hours each, and the two others, called _dog watches_, of two hours each, viz., from 4 to 6, and from 6 to 8, P.M. (See DOG WATCH.) Also, a certain portion of a ship's company, appointed to stand a given length of time. In the merchant service all hands are divided into two watches, larboard and starboard, with a mate to command each. A _buoy_ is said to _watch_ when it floats on the surface. WATCH-AND-WATCH. The arrangement by which the watches are alternated every other four hours. In distinction from keeping all hands during one or more watches. (See page 167.) _Anchor watch_, a small watch of one or two men, kept while in port. WATCH HO! WATCH! The cry of the man that heaves the deep-sea-lead. WATCH-TACKLE. (See page 54.) A small luff purchase with a short fall, the double block having a tail to it, and the single one a hook. Used for various purposes about decks. WATER SAIL. A _save-all_, set under the swinging-boom. WATER-WAYS. Long pieces of timber, running fore and aft on both sides, connecting the deck with the vessel's sides. The _scuppers_ are made through them to let the water off. (See PLATE 3.) WEAR. (See WARE.) WEATHER. In the direction from which the wind blows. (See WINDWARD, LEE.) A ship carries a _weather helm_ when she tends to come up into the wind, requiring you to put the helm up. _Weather gage._ A vessel has the _weather gage_ of another when she is to windward of her. A _weatherly ship_, is one that works well to windward, making but little leeway. WEATHER-BITT. To take an additional turn with a cable round the windlass-end. WEATHER ROLL. The roll which a ship makes to windward. WEIGH. To lift up; as, to weigh an anchor or a mast. WHEEL. The instrument by which a ship is steered; being a barrel, (round which the tiller-ropes go,) and a wheel with spokes. WHIP. (See page 54.) A purchase formed by a rope rove through a single block. _To whip_, is to hoist by a whip. Also, to secure the end of a rope from fagging by a seizing of twine. _Whip-upon-whip._ One whip applied to the fall of another. WINCH. A purchase formed by a horizontal spindle or shaft with a wheel or crank at the end. A small one with a wheel is used for making ropes or spunyarn. WINDLASS. The machine used in merchant vessels to weigh the anchor by. WIND-RODE. The situation of a vessel at anchor when she swings and rides by the force of the wind, instead of the tide or current. (See TIDE-RODE.) WING. That part of the hold or between-decks which is next the side. WINGERS. Casks stowed in the wings of a vessel. WING-AND-WING. The situation of a fore-and-aft vessel when she is going dead before the wind, with her foresail hauled over on one side and her mainsail on the other. WITHE, or WYTHE. An iron instrument fitted on the end of a boom or mast, with a ring to it, through which another boom or mast is rigged out and secured. WOOLD. To wind a piece of rope round a spar, or other thing. WORK UP. To draw the yarns from old rigging and make them into spunyarn, foxes, sennit, &c. Also, a phrase for keeping a crew constantly at work upon needless matters, and in all weathers, and beyond their usual hours, for punishment. WORM. (See page 44.) To fill up between the lays of a rope with small stuff wound round spirally. Stuff so wound round is called _worming_. WRING. To bend or strain a mast by setting the rigging up too taut. WRING-BOLTS. Bolts that secure the planks to the timbers. WRING-STAVES. Strong pieces of plank used with the wring-bolts. YACHT. (Pronounced _yot_.) A vessel of pleasure or state. YARD. (See PLATE 1.) A long piece of timber, tapering slightly toward the ends, and hung by the centre to a mast, to spread the square sails upon. YARD-ARM. The extremities of a yard. YARD-ARM AND YARD-ARM. The situation of two vessels, lying alongside one another, so near that their yard-arms cross or touch. YARN. (See ROPE-YARN.) YAW. The motion of a vessel when she goes off from her course. YEOMAN. A man employed in a vessel of war to take charge of a storeroom; as, boatswain's yeoman, the man that has charge of the stores, of rigging, &c. YOKE. A piece of wood placed across the head of a boat's rudder, with a rope attached to each end, by which the boat is steered. PART II. CHAPTER I. THE MASTER. Beginning of the voyage. Shipping the crew. Outfit. Provisions. Watches. Navigation. Log-book. Observations. Working ship. Day's work. Discipline. In the third part of this work, it will be seen that the shipmaster is a person to whom, both by the general marine law of all commercial nations and by the special statutes of the United States, great powers are confided, and upon whom heavy responsibilities rest. The shipmaster will find there what are his legal rights, duties and remedies as to owner, ship and crew, and the various requirements as to the papers with which he is to furnish his ship, and the observances of revenue and other regulations. It is proposed to give here, rather more, perhaps, for the information of others than of the master himself, the ordinary and every-day duties of his office, and the customs which long usage has made almost as binding as laws. There is a great difference in different ports, and among the various owners, as to the part the master is to take in supplying and manning the vessel. In many cases, the owner puts on board all the stores for the ship's use and for the crew, and gives the master particular directions, sometimes in writing, as to the manner in which he is to dispense them. These directions are more or less liberal, according to the character of the owner; and, in some cases, the dispensing of the stores is left to the master's discretion. In other instances, the master makes out an inventory of all the stores he thinks it expedient to have put on board, and they are accordingly supplied by the owner's order. In the manner of shipping the crew, there is as great a difference as in that of providing the stores. Usually, the whole thing is left to shipping-masters, who are paid so much a head for each of the crew, and are responsible for their appearance on board at the time of sailing. When this plan is adopted, neither the master nor owner, except by accident, knows anything of the crew before the vessel goes to sea. The shipping-master opens the articles at his office, procures the men, sees that they sign in due form, pays them their advance, takes care that they, or others in their place, are on board at the time of sailing, and sends in a bill for the whole to the owner. In other cases, the master selects his crew, and occasionally the owner does it, if he has been at sea himself and understands seamen; though a shipping-master is still employed, to see them on board, and for other purposes. In the ordinary course of short voyages, where crews are shipped frequently, and there is not much motive for making a selection, the procuring a crew may be left entirely to the agency of a faithful shipping-master; but upon long voyages, the comfort and success of which may depend much upon the character of a crew, the master or owner should interest himself to select able-bodied and respectable men, to explain to them the nature and length of the voyage they are going upon, what clothing they will want, and the work that will be required of them, and should see that they have proper and sufficient accommodations and provisions for their comfort. The master or owner should also, though this duty is often neglected, go to the forecastle and see that it is cleaned out, whitewashed, or painted, put in a proper habitable condition, and furnished with every reasonable convenience. It would seem best that the master should have something to do with the selection of the provisions for his men, as he will usually be more interested in securing their good-will and comfort than the owner would be. By the master or owner's thus interesting himself for the crew, a great deal of misunderstanding, complaint, and ill-will may be avoided, and the beginning, at least, of the voyage be made under good auspices. Unless the master is also supercargo, his duties, before sailing, are mostly confined to looking after the outfit of the vessel, and seeing that she is in sea order. Everything being in readiness, the customhouse and other regulations complied with, and the crew on board, the vessel is put under the charge of the pilot to be carried out clear of the land. While the pilot is on board, the master has little else to do than to see that everything is in order, and that the commands of the pilot are executed. As soon as the pilot leaves the ship, the entire control and responsibility is thrown upon the master. When the vessel is well clear of the land, and things are put into some order, it is usual for the master to call all hands aft, and say something to them about the voyage upon which they have entered. After this, the crew are divided into watches. The watches are the divisions of the crew into two equal portions. The periods of time occupied by each part of the crew, while on duty, are also called watches. There are two watches,--the larboard, commanded by the chief mate, and the starboard, by the second mate. The master himself stands no watch, but comes and goes at all times, as he chooses. The starboard is sometimes called the captain's watch, probably from the fact that in the early days of the service, when vessels were smaller, there was usually but one mate, and the master stood his own watch; and now, in vessels which have no second mate, the master keeps the starboard watch. In dividing into watches, the master usually allows the officers to choose the men, one by one, alternately; but sometimes makes the division himself, upon consulting with his officers. The men are divided as equally as possible, with reference to their qualities as able seamen, ordinary seamen, or boys, (as all green hands are called, whatever their age may be;) but if the number is unequal, the larboard watch has the odd one, since the chief mate does not go aloft and do other duty in his watch, as the second mate does in his. The cook always musters with the larboard watch, and the steward with the starboard. If there is a carpenter, and the larboard watch is the largest, he generally goes aloft with the starboard watch; otherwise, with the larboard. As soon as the division is made, if the day's work is over, one watch is set, and the other is sent below. Among the numerous customs of the ocean, which can hardly be accounted for, it is one that on the first night of the outward passage the starboard watch should take the first four hours on deck, and on the first night of the homeward passage the larboard should do the same. The sailors explain this by the old phrase, that the master takes the ship out and the mate takes her home. The master takes the bearing and distance of the last point of departure upon the land, and from that point the ship's reckoning begins, and is regularly kept in the log-book. The chief mate keeps the log-book, but the master examines and corrects the reckoning every day. The master also attends to the chronometer, and takes all the observations, with the assistance of his officers, if necessary. Every day, a few minutes before noon, if there is any prospect of being able to get the sun, the master comes upon deck with his quadrant or sextant, and the chief mate also usually takes his. The second mate does not, except upon a Sunday, or when there is no work going forward. As soon as the sun crosses the meridian, eight bells are struck, and a new sea day begins. The reckoning is then corrected by the observation, under the master's superintendence. The master also takes the lunar observations, usually with the assistance of both his officers; in which case, the master takes the angle of the moon with the star or sun, the chief mate takes the altitude of the sun or star, and the second mate the altitude of the moon. In regulating the hours of duty and sleep, the meal times, the food, &c., the master has absolute power; yet the customs are very nearly the same in all vessels. The hour of breakfast is seven bells in the morning, (half after seven,) dinner at noon, and supper whenever the day's work is over. If the voyage is a long one, the crew are usually put upon an allowance of bread, beef, and water. The dispensing of the stores and regulating of the allowance lies, of course, with the master, though the duty of opening the casks, weighing, measuring, &c., falls upon the second mate. The chief mate enters in the log-book every barrel or cask of provisions that is broached. The steward takes charge of all the provisions for the use of the cabin, and keeps them in the pantry, over which he has the direct control. The average of allowance, in merchant vessels, is six pounds of bread a week, and three quarts of water, and one pound and a half of beef, or one and a quarter of pork, a day, to each man. The entire control of the navigation and working of the ship lies with the master. He gives the course and general directions to the officer of the watch, who enters upon a slate, at the end of the watch, the course made, and the number of knots, together with any other observations. The officer of the watch is at liberty to trim the yards, to make alterations in the upper sails, to take in and set royals, topgallant sails, &c.; but no important alteration can be made, as, for instance, reefing a topsail, without the special order of the master, who, in such cases, always comes upon deck and takes command in person. When on deck, the weather side of the quarter-deck belongs to him, and as soon as he appears, the officer of the watch will always leave it, and go over to leeward, or forward into the waist. If the alteration to be made is slight, the master usually tells the officer to take in or set such a sail, and leaves to him the particular ordering as to the braces, sheets, &c., and the seeing all things put in place. The principal manoeuvres of the vessel, as tacking, wearing, reefing topsails, getting under way, and coming to anchor, require all hands. In these cases, the master takes command and gives his orders in person, standing upon the quarter-deck. The chief mate superintends the forward part of the vessel, under the master, and the second mate assists in the waist. The master never goes aloft, nor does any work with his hands, unless for his own pleasure. If the officer of the watch thinks it necessary to reef the topsails, he calls the master, who, upon coming on deck, takes command, and, if he thinks proper, orders all hands to be called. The crew, officers and all, then take their stations, and await the orders of the master, who works the ship in person, giving all the commands, even the most minute, and looks out for trimming the yards and laying the ship for reefing. The chief mate commands upon the forecastle, under the master, and does not go aloft. The second mate goes aloft with the crew. In tacking and wearing, the master gives all the orders, as to trimming the yards, &c., though the chief mate is expected to look out for the head yards. So, in getting under way, and in coming to anchor, the master takes the entire personal control of everything, the officers acting under him in their several stations. In the ordinary day's work, however, which is carried on in a vessel, the state of things is somewhat different. This the master does not superintend personally; but gives general instructions to the chief mate, whose duty it is to see to their execution. To understand this distinction, the reader will bear in mind that there are two great divisions of duty and labor on shipboard. One, the _working and navigating of the vessel_: that is, the keeping and ascertaining the ship's position, and directing her course, the making and taking in sail, trimming the sails to the wind, and the various nautical manoeuvres and evolutions of a vessel. The other branch is, the work done upon the hull and rigging, to keep it in order, such as the making and fitting of new rigging, repairing of old, &c.; all which, together with making of small stuffs to be used on board, constitute the _day's work and jobs_ of the crew. As to the latter, the master usually converses with the chief mate upon the state of the vessel and rigging, and tells him, more or less particularly, what he wishes to have done. It then becomes the duty of this officer to see the thing accomplished. If, for instance, the master tells the chief mate to stay the topmasts more forward, the chief mate goes upon the forecastle, sets the men to work, one upon one thing and another upon another, sees that the stays and backstays are come up with, has tackles got upon the rigging, sights the mast, &c. If the master sees anything which he disapproves of, and has any preferences in the modes of doing the work, he should call the officer aft and speak to him; and if, instead of this, he were to go forward and give orders to the men, it would be considered an interference, and indeed an insult to the officer. So with any other work doing upon the ship or rigging, as rattling down, turning in and setting up rigging, bending and unbending sails, and all the knotting, splicing, serving, &c., and the making of small stuffs, which constitute the _day's work and jobs_ of a vessel. If the chief officer is a competent man, the master is not expected to trouble himself with the details of any of these things; and, indeed, if he were to do so to a great extent, it would probably lead to difficulty. Where there are passengers, as in regular line of packet ships (or, as they are familiarly called, _liners_,) between New York and Liverpool or Havre, for instance, the master has even less to do with the day's work; since the navigation and working of the ship, with proper attention to his passengers, is as much as can reasonably be required of him. The master has the entire control of the cabin. The mates usually live in a state room by themselves, or, if they live in the cabin, they yet feel that the master is the head of the house, and are unwilling to interfere with his hours and occupations. The chief mate dines with the master, and the second mate looks out for the ship while they are below, and dines at the second table. In the _liners_, however, the mates usually dine together; the master looks out for the ship while they are at dinner, and dines with his passengers at a later hour. As the master stands no watch, he comes and goes as he pleases, and takes his own hours for rest. In fine weather, he is not necessarily much on deck, but should be ready at all times, especially in bad weather, to be up at a moment's notice. Everything of importance that occurs, as the seeing a sail or land, or the like, must be immediately reported to the master. And in heaving-to for speaking, the master takes the entire charge of working the vessel, and speaks the other sail in person. As will be found in the third part of this book, the master has the entire control of the discipline of the ship, and no subordinate officer has authority to punish a seaman, or to use force, without the master's order, except in cases of necessity not admitting of delay. He has also the complete direction of the internal arrangements and economy of the vessel, and upon his character, and upon the course of conduct he pursues, depend in a great measure the character of the ship and the conduct of both officers and men. He has a power and influence, both direct and indirect, which may be the means of much good or much evil. If he is profane, passionate, tyrannical, indecent, or intemperate, more or less of the same qualities will spread themselves or break out among officers and men, which, perhaps would have been checked, if not in some degree removed, had the head of the ship been a man of high personal character. He may make his ship almost anything he chooses, and may render the lives and duties of his officers and men pleasant and profitable to them, or may introduce disagreements, discontent, tyranny, resistance, and, in fact, make the situation of all on board as uncomfortable as that in which any human beings can well be placed. Every master of a vessel who will lay this to heart, and consider his great responsibility, may not only be a benefactor to the numbers whom the course of many years will bring under his command, but may render a service to the whole class, and do much to raise the character of the calling. CHAPTER II. THE CHIEF MATE. Care of rigging and ship's furniture. Day's work. Working ship. Coming to anchor. Getting under way. Reefing. Furling. Duties in port. Account of cargo. Stowage. Station. Log-book. Navigation. The chief mate, or, as he is familiarly called on board ship, _the mate_, is the active superintending officer. In the previous chapter, upon the duties of the master, it will be seen that, in all matters relating to the care of and work done upon the ship and rigging, the master gives general orders to the mate, who attends personally to their execution in detail. Indeed, in the _day's work_ on board ship, the chief mate is the only officer who appears in command. The second mate works like a common seaman, and the men seldom know what is to be done until they receive their orders in detail from the chief mate. It is his duty to carry on the work, to find every man something to do, and to see that it is done. He appoints the second mate his work, as well as the common seamen theirs; and if the master is dissatisfied with anything, or wishes a change, he should speak to the chief mate, and let him make the change, and not interfere with the men individually. It is also the duty of this officer to examine all parts of the rigging, report anything of importance to the master and take his orders, or, if it be a small and common matter, he will have the repairs or changes made at his own pleasure, as a thing of course. He must also see that there is a supply of small stuffs for the work, and have them made up when necessary, and also that there are instruments ready for every kind of labor, or for any emergency. In bad weather, he must have spare rope, blocks, tackles, sennit, earings, &c., on hand; or rather, see that they are provided, the more immediate care of these things, when provided, belonging to the second mate. From this description of a chief mate's duty, it will be seen that he ought always to be not only a vigilant and active man, but also well acquainted with all kinds of seaman's work, and a good judge of rigging. In the working of the ship, when all hands are called and the master is on deck, the chief mate's place is on the forecastle, where, under the general direction of the master, who never need leave the quarter-deck, he commands the forward part of the vessel, and is the organ of communication with the men aloft. In getting under way and coming to anchor, it is his duty to attend to the ground tackle, and see everything ready forward. The master, for instance, tells him to have the ship ready for getting under way, and to heave short on the cable. He then goes forward, orders all hands to be called, sees everything secured about decks, tackles got up and boats hoisted in and lashed, fish and cat tackles, pennant, davit, &c., and spare hawsers and rope, in readiness, orders the men to the windlass, (the second mate taking a handspike with the rest,) and stationing himself between the knight-heads, looks out for the cable, ordering and encouraging the men. When the cable is hove short, he informs the master, and, at the word from him, orders the men aloft to loose the sails, and gives particular directions to them when aloft, as to the sails, gaskets, overhauling rigging, &c. The sails being loosed, he awaits the order from the master, which would be addressed to him rather than to the men, and has the windlass manned and the anchor hove up, giving notice to the master as soon as it is a-weigh. When the vessel is under way, the master begins to take more immediate control, ordering the yards to be braced and filled, sail to be set, and the like. The chief mate also sees to the catting and fishing of the anchors, to having the decks cleared up and everything secured. In coming to anchor, very nearly the same duty falls upon the chief officer. He must see the anchors and cables ready for letting go, the master ordering how much chain is to be overhauled. He must look out that the boats are ready for lowering, the rigging clear for letting go, hauling and clewing, and that spare hawsers, kedges, warps, &c., are at hand. If anything goes wrong forward, he alone is looked to for an explanation. As the vessel draws in toward her anchoring ground, the master gives all the orders as to trimming the yards and taking in sail; and at all times, when on deck, has the entire charge of the man at the helm, it being the mate's duty only to see that a good seaman is there, and that the helm is relieved. As to the sails, the master will, for instance, order--"Clew up the fore and main topsails!" The chief mate then gives the particular orders as to lowering and letting go the halyards, clewing down and up, overhauling rigging, &c. If both topsails were taken in at once, the second mate would attend to the main, unless the master should choose to look out for it himself. All being ready for letting go, the master gives the order--"Let go the anchor!" and the chief mate sees that it is done, has the chain payed out, reports how much is out, sees that the buoys _watch_, and the like. In furling the sails, the whole superintendence comes upon the mate, as the master would probably only tell him to have them furled. He has the rigging hauled taut, sends the men aloft, and, remaining on deck and forward, he gives his orders to them while on the yards, as to the manner of furling, and has the ropes hauled taut or let go on deck, as may be necessary. These instances may serve to show the distinctions between the duties of master and mate in the principal evolutions of a vessel. While in port, the chief mate has much more the control of the vessel than when at sea. As there is no navigating or working of the vessel to be done, the master has little to engage him, except transactions with merchants and others on shore, and the necessary general directions to the mate, as to the care of the ship. Beside the work upon the ship and rigging while in port, the chief mate has the charge of receiving, discharging, stowing and breaking out the cargo. In this he has the entire control, under the general directions of the master. It is his duty to keep an account of all the cargo, as it goes in and comes out of the vessel, and, as he generally gives receipts, he is bound to great care and accuracy. When cargo is coming in and going out, the chief mate will stand in the gangway, to keep an account, and the second mate will be down in the hold with some of the crew, breaking out, or stowing. The stowage, however, should still be somewhat under the chief mate's directions. While the master is on shore, the chief mate is necessarily commander of the ship, for the time, and though the law will extend his power proportionably for cases of necessity, yet, except in instances which will not admit of delay, he must not attempt to exercise any unusual powers, but should refer everything to the master's decision. It will be seen, by the laws, that the mate has no right to punish a man during the master's absence, unless it be a case in which delay would lead to serious consequences. While in port, the chief mate stands no watch at night, but he should always be the first to be called in the morning, and should be up early and order the calling of all hands. In cleaning the ship, as washing down decks, &c., which is done the first thing in the morning, each mate, while at sea, takes charge of it in his watch, in turn, as one or the other has the morning watch; but in port, the second mate oversees the washing down of the decks, under the chief mate's general orders. While at sea, in tacking, wearing, reefing topsails, &c., and in every kind of "all hands work," when the master is on deck, the chief mate's place, as I have said, is forward. To give a further notion of the manner of dividing the command, I will describe the evolution of tacking ship. The master finds that the ship will not lay her course, and tells the chief mate to 'see all clear for stays,' or 'ready about.' Upon this, the chief mate goes forward, sends all hands to their stations, and sees everything clear and ready on the forecastle. The master asks, "All ready forward?" and being answered, "Ay, ay, sir!" motions the man at the helm to put the wheel down, and calls out, "Helm's a-lee!" The mate, answering immediately, "Helm's a-lee," to let the master know he is heard and understood, sees that the head sheets are let go. At "Raise tacks and sheets!" from the master, the mate, and the men with him, let go the fore tack, while he looks after the overhauling of the other tack and sheet. He also sees to letting go the bowlines for "Let go and haul," and to getting down the head sheets when the ship is about, and trims the head yards, calling out to the men at the braces the usual orders, "Well the fore yard!" "Topsail yard, a small pull!" "Topgallant yard, well!" &c. The master usually trims the after yards. In reefing topsails, the chief mate should not go aloft, but should keep his place forward, and look out for the men on the yards. I am aware that it has been the custom in some classes of vessels, as in the New York liners, for the chief mate to take the weather earing of a course, especially if a topsail or the other course were reefing at the same time; yet this practice has never generally prevailed, and is now going out of date. I think I may say it is the opinion of all, masters, officers, and men, that it is better for the chief mate to remain on deck. There is always a good deal to be looked after, ropes to be let go or hauled, rigging to be cleared, and the like, beside the importance of having some one to oversee the men on the different yards; which the mate, standing at a little distance, can easily do. He is also the organ of communication between the yards and the deck, and can look after the reefing to more advantage than the master can upon the quarter-deck, where he must stay to watch the helm and sails. The chief mate is not required to work with his hands, like the second mate and the seamen. He will, of course, let go and belay ropes, and occasionally pull and haul with the men when working ship; but if there is much work to be done, his time and attention are sufficiently taken up with superintending and giving orders. As to his duties as a watch-officer, it will be necessary to repeat the explanations partly given in the chapter upon the master's duties. The crew are divided equally into two watches, the larboard and starboard; the larboard commanded by the chief mate, and the starboard by the second mate. These watches divide the day between them, being on and off duty every other four hours. This is the theory of the time, but in fact, in nearly all merchant vessels, all hands are kept on deck and at work throughout the afternoon, from one o'clock until sundown; and sometimes, if there is a great deal to be done, as immediately before making port, or after an accident, all hands may be kept throughout the day. This is, however, justly considered hard usage, if long continued, since it gives the men but little time for sleep, and none for reading, or taking care of their clothes. Although all hands may be on deck and at work during a day or a half day, yet the division of time is still kept up. For instance, if it is the mate's watch from 8 A.M. to 12; although all hands should be up from 12 to 5 or 6, yet from 12 to 4 the starboard watch would be considered as 'the watch on deck,' and the larboard again after 4; and so on; and during those hours the wheel will always be taken by men belonging to the watch on deck, and if any particular duty is ordered to be done by 'the watch,' that watch which has a man at the helm, and which would have been the only one on deck had not all hands been kept, would do the duty. But though this division is kept up as to the crew and the helmsman, it is not so as to the officers; for when all hands are on deck, the chief mate is always the officer in command, to whichever watch the hour may properly belong. He accordingly looks out for the ship, takes in and makes sail, and trims the yards, when all hands are on deck at work, as much in the hours of one watch as in those of the other, and he generally calls upon the men of either watch indifferently to pull and haul. But if only the starboard watch is on deck, though the chief mate should be on deck also, yet he will not interfere with the duties of that watch, but would leave the command of the vessel, and the weather side of the quarter-deck, to the second mate. Of course, whenever the master comes on deck, as I have said, in whosever watch it may be, or if all hands are up, he takes the weather side of the quarter-deck, and is considered as having charge of the ship; and the officer of the watch would then give no order with reference to the helm, trimming the yards, making sail, or the like, without a direction from the master. It will be necessary to make some explanations as to the stations of the chief and second mate. I have said that when all hands are called, the chief mate's place is the forecastle, and the second mate's amidships, or at the braces on the quarter-deck. This is only in working ship with all hands; that is, in tacking, wearing, reefing, coming to anchor, getting under way, &c. Whenever the work is done, and the necessity for the officers' presence at these parts of the vessel ceases, they return to their proper places on the quarter-deck. In a man-of-war there is always a lieutenant of the watch on the weather side of the quarter-deck, whatever work may be going forward, except in the single case of all hands being called to work ship; but it is not so in the merchant service. When the ordinary day's work is going forward, the mates must be about the decks or aloft, like the petty officers of a man-of-war; and it is only while no work is going forward, as in bad weather, on Sundays, or at night, that the officer of the watch keeps the quarter-deck. At these times he does so, and, if the master is not on deck, does not leave it, except for a short time, and for some necessary duty forward. It will be seen in the third part of this book, that the law looks upon the chief mate as standing in a different relation to the master from that of the second mate or the men. He is considered a confidential person, to whom the owners, shippers and insurers look, in some measure, for special duties and qualifications. The master, therefore, cannot remove him from office, except under very peculiar circumstances, and then must be able to prove a justifiable cause. One of these duties which the law throws upon him, is keeping the log-book. This is a very important trust, as the log-book is the depository of the evidence of everything that may occur during the voyage; and the position of the ship, the sail she was under, the wind, &c., at any one moment, may become matters of great consequence to all concerned. So it is with reference to anything that may occur between the master or officers and the crew. As to the manner of keeping the log, it is the custom for each officer at the end of his watch to enter upon the log-slate, which usually lies on the cabin table, the courses, distances, wind and weather during his watch, and anything worthy of note that may have occurred. Once in twenty-four hours the mate copies from this slate into the log-book; the master, however, first seeing the slate, examining it, and making any corrections or observations he may choose. This practice of copying from the slate, which is first submitted to the master, has led, in too many instances, to the mate's becoming the mere clerk of the master, to enter on the log-book whatever the latter may dictate. This is wrong. It is very proper that the master should examine the slate, and suggest alterations as to the ship's reckoning, &c., if necessary, but it is important to all concerned, both to the owners, shippers and insurers, on shore, and the crew of the vessel, that the independence of the mate, as the journalist of the voyage, should be preserved. The master, from the power of his office, can at all times make the situation of a mate who has displeased him extremely disagreeable, and from this cause has great indirect influence over him; the law and the custom should therefore be strictly adhered to which rightly make the chief officer, in this respect, in a manner the umpire between the master and the crew, as well as between all on board and the parties interested on shore. The law also makes the chief mate the successor to the master, in case the latter should die, or be unable to perform the duties of his office; and this without any action on the part of the crew. It is always important, therefore, that, to the practical seamanship and activity necessary for the discharge of the proper duties of his office, the mate should add a sufficient knowledge of navigation to be able to carry the ship on her voyage in case anything should happen to the master. Indeed, it has been doubted whether a vessel of the largest class, upon a long voyage, would be seaworthy with no navigator on board but the master. Both the chief and second mates are always addressed by their surnames, with _Mr._ prefixed, and are answered with the addition of _Sir_. This is a requirement of ship's duty, and an intentional omission of it is an offence against the rules and understanding of the service. CHAPTER III. SECOND AND THIRD MATES. SECOND MATE.--Navigation. Station. Watch duties. Day's work. Working ship. Reefing. Furling. Duties aloft. Care of ship's furniture. Stores. Duties in port. THIRD MATE.--Working ship. Day's work. Duties aloft--in port. Boating. Stores. The duties of the second mate are, to command the starboard watch when the master is not on deck, and to lead the crew in their work. It is not necessary that he should be a navigator, or even be able to keep a journal, though he should know enough of navigation to keep the courses and distances during his watch, and to report them correctly on the slate. There are also many advantages in his being acquainted with navigation and able to keep the log, as, in case of the chief mate's meeting with any accident, or being removed from office. The second mate, however, does not, by law, necessarily succeed to the office of chief mate, as the chief mate does to that of master; but it lies with the master for the time being to appoint whom he chooses to the office of chief mate: yet, if the second mate is capable of performing the duties of the office, he would ordinarily be appointed, as a matter of course. When the starboard watch alone is on deck, and the master is below, the second mate has charge of the ship. When both watches are on deck, the chief mate is officer of the deck, to whichever watch the time may belong, according to the division of the hours. When the master is on deck, he commands, in one watch as well as in the other. But the second mate does not give up the charge of the vessel to the chief mate, if he should happen to be on deck during the starboard watch, unless all hands are up. While he has charge of the vessel in his watch, his duties are the common ones of a watch officer; that is, to have an eye to the helm, watch the weather, keep a general lookout round the horizon, see to the trimming of the yards and making and taking in of the light sails, give the master notice of anything important that occurs, heave the log and keep an account of the winds, courses, rate of sailing, &c., and enter the same on the slate at the end of the watch. In these things the chief mate has no right to interfere, when it is not his watch on deck. But in all matters connected with the day's work and jobs, the second mate acts under the chief mate in his own watch, as that department belongs peculiarly to the chief mate. In working days, when the crew are employed about the ship and rigging, it is usual for the chief mate to tell the second mate what to do in his watch, and sometimes he remains on deck a few minutes to see to the commencement of the work. And while day's work is going forward, during the time that the chief mate has a watch below, as the second mate is expected to do jobs like a common seaman, it is the custom for the master to be on deck a good deal in the starboard watch and look after the vessel. While work is going forward, the second mate is about decks and aloft; but at other times, as at night, or on Sunday, or during bad weather, when day's work cannot be kept up, his place is on the quarter-deck; though still, he leaves it whenever anything is to be done forward or aloft which requires the presence of a whole watch, as, setting or taking in a lower or topmast studding-sail, or any of the heavy sails. When all hands are called to work ship, as in reefing, tacking, wearing, getting under way, coming to anchor, &c., the second mate's place is aft, at the fore and main braces and main and mizzen rigging; and generally, in all ship's duty, the chief mate and larboard watch belong forward, and the second mate and starboard watch aft. In tacking ship, the second mate looks out for the lee fore and main braces, sees them belayed to one pin and clear for letting go, lets go the main braces at "Mainsail haul!" and the fore at "Let go and haul!" He also steadies the weather braces as the yards come up. He then sees to getting down the main tack, hauling out the main and mizzen bowlines, hauling aft the main sheet, and, in short, has charge of all the duty to be done upon the quarterdeck and in the waist. In getting under way, the second mate takes a handspike at the windlass with the men, the place which custom has assigned him being the windlass-end. If anything is to be done with the braces while the men are heaving at the windlass, it is his duty to attend to it, as the chief mate must be looking out for the ground tackle. In reefing, the second mate goes aloft with the men, and takes his place at the weather earing. This is his proper duty, and he will never give it up, unless he is a youngster, and not strong enough or sufficiently experienced to lead the men on the yard. As soon as the order is given to clew down for reefing, and the halyards are let go, if there are hands enough to haul out the reef-tackles, he should go aloft, see that the yard is well down by the lifts, and then lay out to the weather yard-arm, and get his earing rove by the time the men are upon the yard. He then hauls it out and makes fast. If both topsails are reefed at once, he goes to the main; but if one sail is reefed at a time, he goes with the men from one to the other, taking the weather earing of each. He also goes aloft to reef a course, and takes the weather earing of that, in the same manner. He is not expected to go upon the mizzen topsail yard, as the mizzen topsail is a small sail, and can be reefed by a few men, or by the light hands. In furling sails, the second mate goes aloft to the topsails and courses, and takes the bunt, as that is the most important place in that duty. He is not expected to go upon the mizzen topsail yard for any service, and though in bad weather, and in case of necessity, he would do so, yet it would be out of the usual course. He might also, in heavy weather, assist in furling a large jib, or in taking the bonnet off; but he never furls a topgallantsail, royal, or flying jib. In short, the fore or main topsail and the courses are the only sails which the second mate is expected to handle, either in reefing or furling. And, as I said before, if the sails are reefed or furled by the watch, he leads the starboard watch on the main and maintopsail yards, and the best man in the larboard watch leads them at the fore. Although the proper place for the second mate on a yard, is the bunt in furling, and the weather earing in reefing, and it is the custom to give him a chance at them at first, yet he cannot retain them by virtue of his office; and if he has not the necessary strength or skill for the stations, it is no breach of duty in a seaman to take them from him; on the contrary, he must always expect, in such a case, to give them up to a smarter man. If the second mate is a youngster, as is sometimes the case, being put forward early for the sake of promotion, or if he is not active and ambitious, he will not attempt to take the bunt or weather earing. In the ordinary day's work done on shipboard, the second mate works with his hands like a common seaman. Indeed, he ought to be the best workman on board, and to be able to take upon himself the nicest and most difficult jobs, or to show the men how to do them. Among the various pieces of work constantly going forward on the vessel and rigging, there are some that require more skill and are less disagreeable than others. The assignment of all the work belongs to the chief mate, and if the second mate is a good seaman, (by which sailors generally understand a good workman upon rigging,) he will have the best and most important of these allotted to him; as, for instance, fitting, turning in and setting up rigging, rattling down, and making the neater straps, coverings, graftings, pointings, &c.; but if he is not a good workman, he will have to employ himself upon the inferior jobs, such as are usually assigned to ordinary seamen and boys. Whatever may be his capacity, however, he 'carries on the work,' when his watch alone is on deck, under directions previously received from the chief mate. It is a common saying among seamen that a man does not get his hands out of the tar bucket by becoming second mate. The meaning of this is, that as a great deal of tar is used in working upon rigging, and it is always put on by hand, the second mate is expected to put his hands to it as the others do. If the chief mate were to take hold upon a piece of work, and it should be necessary to put any tar on it, he might call some one to tar it for him, as all labor by hand is voluntary with him; but the second mate would be expected to do it for himself, as a part of his work. These matters, small in themselves, serve to show the different lights in which the duties of the officers are regarded by all sea-faring men. There are, however, some inferior services, such as slushing down masts, sweeping decks, &c., which the second mate takes no part in; and if he were ordered to do so, it would be considered as punishment, and might lead to a difficulty. In working ship, making and taking in sail, &c., the second mate pulls and hauls about decks with the rest of the men. Indeed, in all the work he is expected to join in, he should be the first man to take hold, both leading the men and working himself. In one thing, however, he differs from the seamen; that is, he never takes the helm. Neither master nor mates ever take the wheel, but it is left to the men, who steer the vessel under the direction of the master or officer of the deck. He is also not expected to go aloft to reeve and unreeve rigging, or rig in and out booms, when making or taking in sail, if there are men enough; but, as I have said, under ordinary circumstances, only goes aloft to reef or furl a topsail or course. In case, however, of any accident, as carrying away a mast or yard, or if any unusual work is going on aloft, as the sending up or down of topmasts or topsail yards, or getting rigging over the mast-head, sending down or bending a heavy sail in a gale of wind, or the like, then the second mate should be aloft to take charge of the work there, and to be the organ of communication between the men aloft and the chief mate, who should remain on deck, since he must superintend everything fore and aft, as well as a-low and aloft. Sending up or down royal and topgallant yards, being light work and done by one or two hands, does not call the second mate aloft; but if the topgallant masts are to be sent down, or a jib-boom rigged in bad weather, or any other work going on aloft of unusual importance or difficulty, the second mate should be there with the men, leading them in the work, and communicating with, and receiving the orders from the deck. During his own watch, if the master is not on deck, the second mate commands the ship, gives his orders and sees to their execution, precisely as the chief mate does in his; but, at the same time, he is expected to lend a hand at every "all-hands rope." There is another important part of the duties of a second mate; which is, the care of the spare rigging, blocks, sails, and small stuffs, and of the instruments for working upon rigging, as, marlinspikes, heavers, serving-boards, &c. It is the duty of the chief mate, as superintendent of the work, to see that these are on board, and to provide a constant supply of such as are made at sea; but when provided, it is the second mate's duty to look after them, to see them properly stowed away, and to have them at hand whenever they are called for. If, for instance, the chief mate orders a man to do a piece of work with certain instruments and certain kinds of stuff, the man will go to the second mate for them, and he must supply him. If there is no sailmaker on board, the second mate must also attend to the stowing away of the spare sails, and whenever one is called for, it is his duty to go below and find it. So with blocks, spare rigging, strands of yarns, and any part of a vessel's furniture, which an accident or emergency, as well as the ordinary course of duty, may bring into play. So, also, with the stores. It is his duty to see to the stowing away of the water, bread, beef, pork, and all the provisions of the vessel; and whenever a new cask or barrel of water or provisions is to be opened, the second mate must do it. Indeed, the crew should never be sent into the hold or steerage, or to any part where there is cargo or stores, without an officer. He also measures out the allowance to the men, at the rate ordered by the master. These latter duties, of getting out the stores and weighing or measuring the allowance, fall upon the third mate, if there is one, which is seldom the case in merchant vessels. While in port, when cargo is taking in or discharging, the second mate's place is in the hold; the chief mate standing at the gangway, to keep account, and to have a general supervision. If the vessel is lying at anchor, so that the cargo has to be brought on or off in boats, then the boating duty falls upon the second mate, who goes and comes in the boats, and looks after the landing and taking off of the goods. The chief mate seldom leaves the vessel when in port. The master is necessarily on shore a good deal, and the second mate must come and go in the boats, so that the chief mate is considered as the ship-keeper. So, if a warp or kedge is to be carried out, or a boat is lowered at sea, as in boarding another vessel, or when a man has fallen overboard, in all such cases the second mate should take charge of the boat. When in port, the second mate stands no anchor watch, but is expected to be on deck until eight o'clock, which is the hour at which the watch is usually set. If, however, the ship is short-handed, he would stand his watch; in which case it would probably be either the first or the morning watch. The second mate lives aft, sleeping in the cabin, if there are no passengers, or else in a state room in the steerage. He also eats in the cabin, but at a second table, taking charge of the vessel while the master and chief mate are at their meals. In packet ships the two mates generally eat together, by themselves, at an earlier hour than the master and passengers. THIRD MATE.--Merchant vessels bound on long voyages, upon which there are many vicissitudes to be anticipated, sometimes carry a third mate; but this is unusual; so much so, that his duties have hardly become settled by custom. He does not command a watch, but belongs to the larboard watch, and assists the chief mate in his duties. He goes aloft with the larboard watch to reef and furl, as the second mate does with the starboard, and performs very nearly the same duties aloft and about decks. If he is a good seaman, he will take the earing and bunt on the head yards, as the second mate does on the after yards; and in the allotment of work he will be favored with the most important jobs, if a good workman, otherwise, he will be put upon the work of an ordinary seaman. He is not expected to handle the light sails. He stands no helm, lives aft, and will look out for the vessel at mealtimes, if the second mate dines with the master and chief mate. While in port, he will be in the hold or in the boats, as he may be needed, thus dividing the labor with the second mate. Perhaps his place would more properly be in the boats, as that is considered more in the light of fatigue duty. He also relieves the second mate of the charge of the stores, and sees to the weighing and measuring of the allowances; and in his watch on deck, he relieves the chief mate of the inferior parts of his duty, such as washing decks in the morning, and looking after the boys in clearing up the decks at night. CHAPTER IV. CARPENTER, COOK, STEWARD, &C. CARPENTER.--Working ship. Seaman's work. Helm. Duty aloft. Work at his trade. Station. Berth and mess. Standing watch. SAILMAKER.--Seaman's work. Work at trade. Duty aloft. Standing watch. Berth and mess. Station. STEWARD.--Duty in passenger-ships. Care of cabin-table--passengers. In other vessels--Master--mate. Aloft. About decks. Working ship. COOK.--Berth. Standing watch. Care of galley and furniture. Working ship. Duty aloft. CARPENTER.--Almost every merchant vessel of a large class, or bound upon a long voyage, carries a carpenter. His duty is to work at his trade under the direction of the master, and to assist in all-hands work according to his ability. He is stationed with the larboard or starboard watch, as he may be needed, though, if there is no third mate, usually with the larboard. In working ship, if he is an able seaman, (as well as carpenter,) he will be put in some more important place, as looking after the main tack and bowlines, or working the forecastle with the mate; and if capable of leading his watch aloft, he would naturally take the bunt or an earing. He is not expected to handle the light sails, nor to go above the topsail yards, except upon the work of his trade. If he ships for an able seaman as well as carpenter, he must be capable of doing seaman's work upon the rigging and taking his turn at the wheel, if called upon; though he would not be required to do it except in bad weather, or in case the vessel should be short-handed. If he does not expressly ship for seaman as well as carpenter, no nautical skill can be required of him; but he must still, when all hands are called, or if ordered by the master, pull and haul about decks, and go aloft in the work usual on such occasions, as reefing and furling. But the inferior duties of the crew, as sweeping decks, slushing, tarring, &c., would not be put upon him, nor would he be required to do any strictly seaman's work, except taking a helm in case of necessity, or such work as all hands join in. The carpenter is not an officer, has no command, and cannot give an order even to the smallest boy; yet he is a privileged person. He lives in the steerage, with the steward, has charge of the ship's chest of tools, and in all things connected with his trade, is under the sole direction of the master. The chief mate has no authority over him, in his trade, unless it be in case of the master's absence or disability. In all things pertaining to the working of the vessel, however, and as far as he acts in the capacity of a seaman, he must obey the orders of the officers as implicitly as any of the crew would; though, perhaps, an order from the second mate would come somewhat in the form of a request. Yet there is no doubt that he must obey the second mate in his proper place, as much as he would the master in his. Although he lives in the steerage, he gets his food from the galley, from the same mess with the men in the forecastle, having no better or different fare in any respect; and he has no right on the quarterdeck, but must take his place on the forecastle with the common seamen. In many vessels, during fine weather, upon long voyages, the carpenter stands no watch, but "sleeps in" at night, is called at daylight, and works all day at his trade. But in this case, whenever all hands are called, he must come up with the rest. In bad weather, when he cannot well work at his trade, or if the vessel becomes short-handed, he is put in a watch, and does duty on deck, turning in and out with the rest. In many vessels, especially those bound on short voyages, the carpenter stands his watch, and, while on deck, works at his trade in the day-time, if the weather will permit, and at night, or in bad weather, does watch duty according to his ability. SAILMAKER.--Some ships of the largest class carry a sailmaker, though usually the older seamen are sufficiently skilled in the trade to make and mend sails, and the master or chief mate should know how to cut them out. As to the sailmaker's duty on board, the same remarks will apply to him that were made upon the carpenter. If he ships for seaman as well as sailmaker, 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, such as working ship, taking in and making sail, &c., according to his ability; and in bad weather, or a case of necessity, he may be put with a watch and required to do ship's duty with the rest. In all-hands work he is mustered with either watch, according to circumstances, and the station allotted to him will depend upon his qualities as a seaman; and, as with the carpenter, if he is a good seaman, he would naturally have some more important post assigned to him. He is not expected to handle the light sails, nor to go above the topsail yards. Nor would the inferior duties of the crew, such as tarring, slushing, and sweeping decks, be put upon him. In bad weather, or in case of necessity, he may be mustered in a watch, and must do duty as one of the crew, according to his ability. Sometimes he stands no watch, and works at his trade all day, and at others he stands his watch, and when on deck in the day time, and during good weather, works at his trade, and at night, or in bad weather, does duty with the watch. He usually lives in the steerage with the carpenter, and always takes his food from the galley. He has no command, and when on deck, belongs on the forecastle with the rest of the crew. In the work of his trade, he is under the sole direction of the master, or of the chief mate in the master's absence; but in ship's work he is as strictly under the command of the mates, as a common seaman is. STEWARD.--The duties of the steward are very different in packet ships, carrying a large number of passengers, from those which are required of him in other vessels. In the New York _liners_, for instance, he has waiters or under-stewards, who do most of the labor, he himself having the general superintendence of the department. It is his duty to see that the cabin and state-rooms are kept in order; to see to the laying and clearing of the tables; to take care of the dishes, and other furniture belonging to them; to provide the meals, under the master's direction, preparing the nicer dishes himself; to keep the general charge of the pantry and stores for the cabin; to look after the cook in his department; and, lastly, which is as important a part of his duty as any other, to attend to the comfort and convenience of the passengers. These duties, where there are many passengers, require all his time and attention, and he is not called upon for any ship's duty. In vessels which are not passenger-ships, he does the work which falls to the under-stewards of the large packets: cleans the cabin and state rooms, sets, tends and clears away the table, provides everything for the cook, and has charge of the pantry, where all the table furniture and the small stores are kept. He is also the body servant of the master. His relation to the chief mate is somewhat doubtful; but the general understanding is, that, although he waits upon him when at table and must obey him in all matters relating to the ship's work, yet he is not in any respect his servant. If the mate wishes any personal service done, he would ask it, or make some compensation. In these vessels, the steward must come on deck whenever all hands are called, and in working ship, pulls and hauls about decks with the men. The main sheet is called the steward's rope, and this he lets go and hauls aft in tacking and wearing. In reefing and furling, he is expected to go upon the lower and topsail yards, and especially the mizzen topsail yard of a ship. No seamanship is expected of him, and he stands no watch, sleeping in at night and turning out at daylight; yet he must do ship's duty according to his ability when all hands are called for working ship or for taking in or making sail. In these things he must obey the mates in the same way that a common seaman would, and is punishable for disobedience. The amount of ship's duty required of him depends, as I have said, upon the number of passengers. COOK.--The cook almost always lives in the forecastle, though sometimes in the steerage with the steward. He stands no watch, sleeping in at night, and working at his business throughout the day. He spends his time mostly in the cook-house, which is called the 'galley,' where he cooks both for the cabin and forecastle. This, with keeping the galley, boilers, pans, kids, &c., clean and in order, occupies him during the day. He is called with all hands, and in tacking and wearing, works the fore sheet. He is also expected to pull and haul about decks in all-hands work, and is occasionally called from his galley to give a pull at a tackle or halyards. No seamanship can be required of him, but he is usually expected to go upon a lower or topsail yard in reefing or furling, and to assist according to his ability in working ship. In regular passenger-ships, however, as he is more exclusively employed in cooking, he is not required to do any duty about decks, except in a case of necessity or of common danger. In some other vessels, too, if strongly manned, neither the cook nor steward are sent upon the yards. Yet it can, without doubt, be required of them, by the custom and understanding of the service, to go upon a lower or topsail yard to reef or furl. If there are on board armorers, coopers, or persons following any other trades, they take the same place and follow the same rules as to duty that govern the carpenter and sailmaker. In the merchant service, when 'all hands' are called, it literally calls every one on board but the passengers; excepting, as I have said, in the case of the cook and steward of strictly passenger-ships. Those persons of whom any duty can be required, who do not stand a watch, but sleep in at night and work during the day, are called _idlers_. Beside turning out with 'all hands,' the idlers are sometimes called up at night to help the watch on deck in any heavy or difficult duty, when it is not desirable to call the other watch, who may have had severe service. This is allowable, if practised only in cases of necessity, and not carried to an extreme. CHAPTER V. ABLE SEAMEN. Grades of sea-faring persons. Able seamen. Ordinary seamen. Boys. Shipping and rating. Over-rating. Requisites of an able seaman. Hand, reef and steer. Work upon rigging. Sailmaking. Day's work. Working ship. Reefing and furling. Watch duty. Coasters and small vessels. Sea-faring persons before the mast are divided into three classes,--able seamen, ordinary seamen, and boys or green hands. And it may be remarked here that all green hands in the merchant service are termed _boys_, and rated as such, whatever may be their age or size. In the United States navy, an able seaman receives twelve dollars per month, an ordinary seaman ten, and the boys, or green hands, from four to eight, according to their strength and experience. In the merchant service, wages are about the same on long voyages; but on voyages to Europe, the West Indies, and the southern ports, they are considerably higher, and very fluctuating. Still, the same proportion between the classes is preserved, an ordinary seaman getting about two dollars less than an able seaman, and the boys, from nothing up to two dollars less than ordinary seamen, according to circumstances. A full-grown man must ship for boy's wages upon his first voyage. It is not unusual to see a man receiving boy's wages and rated as a boy, who is older and larger than many of the able seamen. The crews are not rated by the officers after they get to sea, but, both in the merchant service and in the navy, each man rates himself when he ships. The shipping articles, in the merchant service, are prepared for so many of each class, and a man puts his name down and contracts for the wages and duty of a seaman, ordinary seaman, or boy, at his pleasure. Notwithstanding this license, there are very few instances of its being abused; for every man knows that if he is found incompetent to perform the duty he contracts for, his wages can not only be reduced to the grade for which he is fitted, but that something additional will be deducted for the deception practised upon all concerned, and for the loss of service and the numerous difficulties incurred, in case the fraud is not discovered until the vessel has got to sea. But, still more than this, the rest of the crew consider it a fraud upon themselves; as they are thus deprived of a man of the class the vessel required, which makes her short-handed for the voyage, and increases the duty put upon themselves. If, for instance, the articles provide for six able seamen, the men expect as many, and if one of the six turns out not to be a seaman, and is put upon inferior work, the duties which would commonly be done by seamen will fall upon the five. The difficulty is felt still more in the watches; as, in the case I have supposed, there would be in one watch only two able seamen instead of three, and if the delinquent was not a capable helmsman, the increased duty at the wheel alone would be, of itself, a serious evil. The officers also feel at liberty to punish a man who has so imposed upon all hands, and accordingly every kind of inferior and disagreeable duty is put upon him; and, as he finds no sympathy from the crew, his situation on board is made very unpleasant. Indeed, there is nothing a man can be guilty of, short of a felony, to which so little mercy is shown on board ship; for it is a deliberate act of deception, and one to which there is no temptation, except the gain of a few dollars. The common saying that to hand, reef and steer makes a sailor, is a mistake. It is true that no man is a sailor until he can do these things; yet to ship for an able seaman he must, in addition to these, be a good workman upon rigging. The rigging of a ship requires constant mending, covering and working upon in a multitude of ways; and whenever any of the ropes or yards are chafing or wearing upon it, it must be protected by 'chafing gear.' This chafing gear consists of worming, parcelling, serving, rounding, &c.; which requires a constant supply of small stuffs, such as foxes, sennit, spunyarn, marline, and the like, all which is made on board from condemned rigging and old junk. There is also a great deal of new rigging to be cut and fitted, on board, which requires neat knots, splices, seizings, coverings, and turnings in. It is also frequently necessary to set up the rigging in one part of the vessel or another; in which case it must be seized or turned in afresh. It is upon labor of this kind that the crew is employed in the 'day's work' and jobs which are constantly carried forward on board. A man's skill in this work is the chief test of his seamanship; a competent knowledge of steering, reefing, furling, and the like, being taken for granted, and being no more than is expected of an ordinary seaman. To put a marlinspike in a man's hand and set him to work upon a piece of rigging, is considered a fair trial of his qualities as an able seaman. There is, of course, a great deal of difference in the skill and neatness of the work of different men; but I believe I am safe in saying that no man will pass for an able seaman in a square-rigged vessel, who cannot make a long and short splice in a large rope, fit a block-strap, pass seizings to lower rigging, and make the ordinary knots, in a fair, workmanlike manner. This working upon rigging is the last thing to which a lad training up to the sea is put, and always supposes a competent acquaintance with all those kinds of work that are required of an ordinary seaman or boy. A seaman is generally expected to be able to sew upon a sail, and few men ship for seamen who cannot do it; yet, if he is competent in other respects, no fault can be found with an able seaman for want of skill in sailmaking. In allotting the jobs among the crew, reference is always had to a man's rate and capacity; and it is considered a decided imputation upon a man to put him upon inferior work. The most difficult jobs, and those requiring the neatest work, will be given to the older and more experienced among the seamen; and of this none will complain; but to single out an able seaman and keep him at turning the spunyarn winch, knotting yarns or picking oakum, while there are boys on board, and other properly seaman's work going forward at the same time, would be looked upon as punishment, unless it were temporarily, or from necessity, or while other seaman were employed in the same manner. Also, in consideration of the superior grade of an able seaman, he is not required to sweep down the decks at night, slush the masts, &c., if there are boys on board and at hand. Not that a seaman is not obliged to do these things. There is no question but that he is, just as much as to do any other ship's work; and if there are no boys on board or at hand at the time, or from any other cause it is reasonably required of him, no good seaman would object, and it would be a refusal of duty to do so, yet if an officer were deliberately, and without necessity for it, when there were boys about decks at the time, who could do the work as well, to order an able seaman to leave his work and sweep down the decks, or slush a mast, it would be considered as punishment. In working ship, the able seamen are stationed variously; though, for the most part, upon the forecastle, at the main tack or fore and main lower and topsail braces; the light hands being placed at the cross-jack and fore and main topgallant and royal braces. In taking in and making sail, and in all things connected with the working of a ship, there is no duty which may not be required of an able seaman; yet there are certain things requiring more skill or strength, to which he is always put, and others which are as invariably assigned to ordinary seamen and boys. In reefing, the men 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. The light hands are expected to loose and furl the light sails, as royals, flying jib and mizzen topgallant sail, and the men seldom go above the cross-trees, except to work upon the rigging, or to send a mast or yard up or down. The fore and main topgallant sails, and sometimes the flying jib of large vessels, require one or more able seamen for furling, but are loosed by light hands. In short, as to everything connected with working ship, making and taking in sail, &c., one general rule may be laid down. A seaman is obliged to obey the order of the master or officer, asking no questions and making no objection, whether the duty to which he is ordered be that which properly belongs to an able seaman or not; yet as able seamen alone can do the more nice and difficult work, the light hands, in their turn, are expected to do that which requires less skill and strength. In the watch on deck at night, for instance, the able and ordinary seamen steer the ship, and are depended upon in case of any accident, or if heavy sails are to be taken in or set, or ropes to be knotted or spliced; and in consideration of this, if there is light work to be done, as coiling up rigging about decks, holding the log-reel, loosing or furling a light sail, or the like, the boys are expected to do it, and should properly be called upon by the officer, unless from some circumstance it should be necessary to call upon a man. Yet, as I have said before, if ordered, the seaman must do the thing, under any circumstances, and a refusal would be a refusal of his duty. No man is entitled to the rate or wages of an able seaman, who is not a good helmsman. There is always a difference in a ship's company as to this duty, some men being more steady, careful, and expert helmsmen than others; and the best quality cannot be required of every able seaman; yet if, upon fair trial, in bad weather, a man is found incapable of steering the ship, under circumstances not extraordinary, he would be considered by all on board to have failed of his duty. It should be remembered, however, that there are times when the very best helmsman is hardly able to steer a ship, and if a vessel is out of trim or slow in her motions, no skill can keep her close to her course. An able seaman is also expected to do all the work necessary for reefing, furling, and setting sail, to be able to take a bunt or earing, to send yards and masts up and down, to rig in and out booms, to know how to reeve all the running rigging of a ship, and to steer, or pull an oar in a boat. The standard of seamanship, however, is not so high in coasting vessels and those of a smaller class bound upon short voyages, in which all the work that is necessary upon the vessel or rigging is usually done when in port by people hired from on shore. In such vessels many men ship for able seamen, and are considered, upon the whole, competent, if they are able-bodied, and can hand, reef, and steer, who perhaps would only have shipped for ordinary seamen in vessels bound upon long voyages. In all large class vessels, and in vessels of almost any class bound upon long voyages, the standard of seamanship is very nearly what I have before described. CHAPTER VI. ORDINARY SEAMEN. Requisites. Hand, reef, and steer. Loose, furl, and set sails. Reeve rigging. Work upon rigging. Watch duty. An ordinary seaman is one who, from not being of sufficient age and strength, or from want of sufficient experience, is not quite competent to perform all the duties of an able seaman, and accordingly receives a little less than full wages, and does not contract for the complete qualities of an able seaman. There is a large proportion of ordinary seamen in the navy. This is probably because the power of the officers is so great upon their long cruises to detect and punish any deficiency, and because, if a man can by any means be made to appear wanting in capacity for the duty he has shipped to perform, it will justify a great deal of hard usage. 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. An ordinary seaman need not be a complete helmsman, and if an able seaman should be put in his place at the wheel in very bad weather, or when the ship steered with difficulty, it would be no imputation upon him, provided he could steer his trick creditably under ordinary circumstances. In reefing or furling the courses and topsails, an ordinary seaman would not take the bunt or an earing, if there were able seamen on the yard; and perhaps, in the largest sized vessels, it would not be expected of him to pass an earing, or make up the bunt of a fore or main topsail or course in bad weather, yet he should know how to do both, and should be able to take a bunt or earing on the mizzen topsail yard, and on any topsail or lower yard of a small vessel. It is commonly understood that an ordinary seaman need not be a workman upon rigging. Yet there are probably few men capable of performing the duties of an ordinary seaman, as above detailed, who would not be somewhat acquainted with work upon rigging, and who could not do the simpler parts of it, such as, serving and splicing small ropes, passing a common seizing, or the like; and it is always expected that an ordinary seaman shall be able to make all the hitches, bends, and knots in common use: such as, two half-hitches, a rolling hitch, timber hitch, clove hitch, common bend, and bowline knot. He would also be thought deficient if he could not draw, knot, and ball up yarns, and make spunyarn, foxes, and common sennit. Yet it is said that if he can steer his trick, and do his duty creditably in working ship and taking in and making sail, he is entitled to the rate and wages of an ordinary seaman, though he cannot handle a marlinspike or serving-board. The duty upon which an ordinary seaman is put, depends a good deal upon whether there are boys or green hands on board or not. If there are, he has a preference over them, as an able seaman has over him, in the light work; and since he stands his helm regularly and is occasionally set to work upon rigging with the men, he will be favored accordingly in the watch and in common duty about decks. Yet the distinction between ordinary seamen and boys is not very carefully observed in the merchant service, and an ordinary seaman is frequently called upon for boy's duty, though there are boys on board and at hand. If an officer wished for some one to loose a royal, take a broom and sweep the decks, hold the log-reel, coil up a rope, or the like, he would probably first call upon a boy, if at hand; if not, upon an ordinary seaman; but upon either of them indifferently, before an able seaman. If there are no boys on board, the ordinary seamen do boy's duty; the only difference being, that if they take their trick at the wheel, and do other ordinary seaman's work, the able seamen are not so much preferred over them, as over mere boys and green hands. CHAPTER VII. BOYS. Requisites. Wages. Watch. Day's work. Working ship. Helm. Duties aloft and about decks. Boy is the term, as I have said before, for all green hands, whatever may be their size or age; and also for boys, who, though they have been at sea before, are not large and strong enough for ordinary seamen. It is the common saying, that a boy does not ship to know anything. Accordingly, if any person ships as a boy, and upon boy's wages, no fault can be found with him, though he should not know the name of a rope in the ship, or even the stem from the stern. In the navy, the boys are divided into three classes, according to their size and experience, and different duties are put upon them. In the merchant service, all except able and ordinary seamen are generally upon the same wages, though boys' wages vary in different voyages. Sometimes they get nothing, being considered as apprentices; and from that they rise to three, five, and sometimes eight dollars per month. Whatever boys' wages may be, a person who ships for them for that voyage, whether more or less, is rated as boy, and his duty is according to his rate. In the ordinary day's work, the boys are taught to draw and knot yarns, make spunyarn, foxes, sennit, &c., and are employed in passing a ball or otherwise assisting the able seamen in their jobs. Slushing masts, sweeping and clearing up decks, holding the log-reel, coiling up rigging, and loosing and furling the light sails, are duties that are invariably put upon the boys or green hands. They stand their watches like the rest, are called with all hands, go aloft to reef and furl, and work whenever and wherever the men do, the only difference being in the kind of work upon which they are put. In reefing, the boys lay in toward the slings of the yard, and in furling, they go out to the yard-arms. They are sent aloft immediately, as soon as they get to sea, to accustom them to the motion of a vessel, and to moving about in the rigging and on the yards. Loosing and furling the royals, setting topgallant studdingsails and reeving the gear, shaking out reefs, learning the names and uses of all the ropes, and to make the common hitches, bends, and knots, reeving all the studdingsail gear, and rigging in and out booms, and the like, is the knowledge first instilled into beginners. There is a good deal of difference in the manner in which boys are put forward in different vessels. Sometimes, in large vessels, where there are plenty of men, the boys never take the wheel at all, and are seldom put upon any but the most simple and inferior duties. In others, they are allowed to take the wheel in light winds, and gradually, if they are of sufficient age and strength, become regular helmsmen. So, also, in their duties aloft; if they are favored, they may be kept at the royals and topgallant sails, and gradually come to the earing of a mizzen topsail. In work upon rigging, however, a green hand makes but little progress beyond ropeyarns and spunyarn, during his first voyage; since there are men enough to do the jobs, and he can be employed to more advantage in the inferior work, and in making and taking in light sails, steering in light winds, &c.; a competent knowledge of which duty is sufficient to enable him to ship for an ordinary seaman upon the next voyage. It is generally while in the grade of ordinary seaman that the use of the marlinspike is learned. Whatever knowledge a boy may have acquired, or whatever may be his age or strength, so long as he is rated as a boy, (and the rates are not changed during a voyage unless a person changes his ship,) he must do the inferior duties of a boy. If decks are to be cleared up or swept, rigging to be coiled up, a man is to be helped in his job, or any duty to be done aloft or about decks which does not require the strength or skill of a seaman, a boy is always expected to start first and do it, though not called upon by name. CHAPTER VIII. MISCELLANEOUS. Watches. Calling the watch. Bells. Helm. Answering. Stations. Food. Sleep. WATCHES.--A watch is a term both for a division of the crew, and for the period of time allotted to such division. The crew are divided into two watches, larboard and starboard; the larboard commanded by the chief mate, and the starboard by the second mate. These watches divide the time between them, being on and off duty, or, as it is termed, on deck and below, every other four hours. If, for instance, the chief mate with the larboard watch have the first night watch, from eight to twelve, at the end of the four hours the starboard watch is called, and the second mate takes the deck, while the larboard watch and the chief mate go below until four in the morning. At four they come on deck again, and remain until eight; having what is called the 'morning watch.' As they will have been on deck eight hours out of the twelve, while the starboard watch, who had the middle watch, from twelve to four, will only have been up four hours, they are entitled to the watch below from eight till twelve, which is called the 'forenoon watch below.' Where this alternation of watches is kept up throughout the twenty-four hours, four hours up and four below it is called having "watch and watch." This is always given in bad weather, and when day's work cannot be carried on; but in most merchant vessels, it is the custom to keep all hands from one P.M. until sundown, or until four o'clock. In extreme cases, also, all hands are kept throughout the day; but the watch which has had eight hours on deck at night should always be allowed a forenoon watch below, if possible. The watch from four to eight, P.M., is divided into two half-watches of two hours each, called _dog-watches_. The object of this is to make an uneven number of watches, seven instead of six; otherwise the same watch would stand during the same hours for the whole voyage, and those who had two watches on deck the first night would have the same throughout the trip. But the uneven number shifts the watches. The dog-watches coming about sundown, or twilight, and between the end of a day's work and the setting of the night watch, are usually the time given for recreation,--for smoking, telling yarns, &c., on the forecastle; things which are not allowed during the day. CALLING THE WATCH.--As soon as eight bells are struck, the officer of the watch gives orders to call the watch, and one of the crew goes to the scuttle, knocks three times, and calls out in a loud voice, "All the starboard (or larboard) watch, ahoy!" or, "All starbowlines, ahoy!" or something of the kind, and adds, "Eight bells," or the hour; usually, also, a question, to know whether he is heard, as, "Do you hear the news there, sleepers?" Some one of the watch below must answer, "Ay, ay!" to show that the call has been heard. The watch below is entitled to be called in a loud and audible voice, and in the usual manner; and unless called, they cannot be expected to come up. They must also turn out at once and come on deck as soon as they are called, in order that the other watch may go below, especially as they are never called until the hour has expired, and since some minutes are allowed for turning out, dressing, and getting on deck. The man whose turn it is to take the helm goes immediately aft, and ought to be the first on deck, as the two hours' duty at the helm at night is tedious, and entitles a man to be speedily relieved. It is considered a bad trait in a man to be slack in relieving the helm. The relieving the helm is also the sign that the watch is changed, and no man is permitted to go below until that has been done. It is a man's watch on deck so long as one of his watch is at the wheel. BELLS.--The time at sea is marked by bells. At noon, eight bells are struck, that is, eight strokes are made upon the bell; and from that time it is struck every half-hour throughout the twenty-four, beginning at one stroke and going as high as eight, adding one at each half-hour. For instance, twelve o'clock is eight bells, half past twelve is one bell, one o'clock is two bells, half past one three bells, and so on until four o'clock, which will be eight bells. The watch is then out, and for half past four you strike one bell again. A watch of four hours therefore runs out the bells. It will be observed, also, that even bells come at the full hours, and the odd bells at the half-hours. For instance, eight bells is always twelve, four, or eight o'clock; and seven bells always half past three, half past seven, or half past eleven. The bells are sounded by two strokes following one another quickly, and then a short interval; after which, two more; and so on. If it is an odd number, the odd one is struck alone, after the interval. This is to make the counting more sure and easy; and, by this means, you can, at least, tell whether it is an hour or a half-hour. HELM. Neither the master nor mates of a merchant vessel ever take the helm. The proper helmsmen are the able and ordinary seamen. Sometimes the carpenter, sailmaker, &c., if they are seamen, are put at the helm; also the boys, in light winds, for practice. Each watch steers the ship in its turn, and the watch on deck must supply the helmsman, even when all hands are called. Each man stands at the helm two hours, which is called his _trick_. Thus, there are two tricks in a watch. Sometimes, in very cold weather, the tricks are reduced to one hour; and, if the ship steers badly, in a gale of wind, two men are sent to the wheel at once. In this case, the man who stands on the weather side of the wheel is the responsible helmsman, the man at the lee wheel merely assisting him by heaving the wheel when necessary. The men in the watch usually arrange their tricks among themselves, the officers being satisfied if there is always a man ready to take the wheel at the proper time. In steering, the helmsman stands on the weather side of a wheel and on the lee side of a tiller. But when steering by tiller-ropes with no hitch round the tiller-head, or with a tackle, as in a heavy gale and bad sea, when it is necessary to ease the helm a good deal, it is better to stand up to windward and steer by the parts of the tackle or tiller-ropes. In relieving the wheel, the man should come aft on the lee side of the quarter-deck, (as indeed he always should unless his duty lies to windward,) go to the wheel behind the helmsman and take hold of the spokes, so as to have the wheel in command when the other lets go. Before letting go, the helmsman should give the course to the man that relieves him in an audible voice, and the new man should repeat it aloud just as it was given, so as to make it sure that he has heard correctly. This is especially necessary, since the points and half points are so much alike that a mistake might easily be made. It is the duty of the officer of the watch to be present when the wheel is relieved, in order to see that the course is correctly reported and understood; which is another reason why the course should be spoken by both in a loud tone. It is unseamanlike and reprehensible to answer, "Ay, ay!" or, "I understand," or the like, instead of repeating the course. If a vessel is sailing close-hauled and does not lay her course, the order is, "Full and by!" which means, by the wind, yet all full. If a vessel lays her course, the order then is her course, as N.W. by W., E. by S., and the like. When a man is at the wheel, he has nothing else to attend to but steering the ship, and no conversation should be allowed with him. If he wishes to be relieved during his trick, it should not be done without the permission of the officer, and the same form of giving and repeating the course should be gone through, though he is to be absent from the helm but a minute or two. If an order is given to the man at the wheel as to his steering, he should always repeat the order, distinctly, that the officer may be sure he is understood. For instance, if the order is a new course, or, "Keep her off a point!" "Luff a little!" "Ease her!" "Meet her!" or the like, the man should answer by repeating the course or the order, as, "Luff a little, sir," "Meet her, sir," &c., and should not answer, "Ay, ay, sir!" or simply execute the order as he understands it. This practice of repeating every, even the most minute order at the wheel, is well understood among seamen, and a failure or refusal to do so is an offence sometimes leading to disagreeable results. If, when the watch is out and the other watch has been called, all hands are detained for any purpose, as, to reef a topsail, to set studdingsails, or the like, the helm should not be relieved until the work is done and the watch ready to go below. ANSWERING.--The rule has just been stated which requires a man at the wheel to answer by repeating distinctly the order given him. The same rule applies to some other parts of a seaman's duty, though to none so strictly, perhaps, as to that. In tacking, where the moment of letting go a rope or swinging a yard is very important, the order of the master is always repeated by the officer on the forecastle. This enables the master to know whether he is heard and understood, to repeat his order if it is not answered at once, and to correct any mistake, or obviate some of its consequences. The same may be said generally of every order to the proper or instant execution of which unusual importance is attached. If, for instance, a man is stationed by a rope to let it go upon an order given, if an order is addressed to him which he supposes to be for that purpose, he should answer, "Let go, sir!" and usually adds, "All gone!" as soon as it is done. Green hands should bear in mind that whenever an order is of a kind which ought to be repeated, it must be so, without reference to a man's distance from the officer who gives the order, but just as much if standing a few feet from him as if at the mast-head, since, upon the whole, the chance of misapprehension is not much less in one case than in the other. The common run of orders, however, are sufficiently answered by the usual reply of "Ay, ay, sir!" which is the proper seaman's answer, where the repetition of the order is not necessary. But _some answer or other should always be made to an order_. This is a rule difficult to impress upon beginners, but the reasonableness of it is obvious, and it is well understood among all seafaring persons; and even though an officer should see that the man was executing his order, he still would require, and has a right to demand a reply. The rule is as strictly observed by the master and officers between themselves, as it is required by them of the men; for the reason is the same. It is almost unnecessary to say that the addition 'Sir' is always to be used in speaking to the master or to either of the mates. The mates in their turn use it to the master. 'Mr.' is always to be prefixed to the name of an officer, whether chief or second mate. In well-disciplined vessels, no conversation is allowed among the men when they are employed at their work; that is to say, it is not allowed in the presence of an officer or of the master; and although, when two or more men are together aloft, or by themselves on deck, a little low conversation might not be noticed, yet if it seemed to take off their attention, or to attract the attention of others, it would be considered a misdemeanor. In this respect the practice is different in different vessels. 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. While the crew are below in the forecastle, great license is given them; and the severest officer will never interfere with the noise and sport of the forecastle, unless it is a serious inconvenience to those who are on deck. In working ship, when the men are at their stations, the same silence and decorum is observed. But during the dog-watches, and when the men are together on the forecastle at night, and no work is going forward, smoking, singing, telling yarns, &c., are allowed; and, in fact, a considerable degree of noise and _skylarking_ is permitted, unless it amounts to positive disorder and disturbance. It is a good rule to enforce, that whenever a man aloft wishes anything to be done on deck, he shall hail the officer of the deck, and not call out, as is often done, to any one whom he may see about decks, or generally to have a thing done by whoever may happen to hear him. By enforcing this rule the officer knows what is requested, and may order it and see that it is done as he thinks fit; whereas, otherwise, any one about decks, perhaps a green hand, may execute the order upon his own judgment and after his own manner. STATIONS.--The proper place for the seamen when they are on deck and there is no work going forward, is on the forecastle. By this is understood so much of the upper deck as is forward of the after fore-shroud. The men do not leave this to go aft or aloft unless ship's duty requires it of them. In working ship, they are stationed variously, and go wherever there is work to be done. The same is the case in working upon rigging. But if a man goes aft to take the wheel, or for any other purpose which does not require him to go to windward, he will go on the lee side of the quarter-deck. FOOD, SLEEP, &C.--The crew eat together in the forecastle, or on deck, if they choose, in fine weather. Their food is cooked at the galley, and they are expected to go to the galley for it and take it below or upon the forecastle. The cook puts the eatables into wooden tubs called "kids," and of these there are more or less, according to the number of men. The tea or coffee is served out to each man in his tin pot, which he brings to the galley. There is no table, and no knives nor forks to the forecastle; but each man helps himself, and furnishes his own eating utensils. These are usually a tin pot and pan, with an iron spoon. The usual time for breakfast is seven bells, that is, half past seven o'clock in the morning. Consequently, the watch below is called at seven bells, that they may get breakfast and be ready to take the deck at eight o'clock. Sometimes all hands get breakfast together at seven bells; but in bad weather, or if watch and watch is given, it is usual for the watch below to breakfast at seven bells, and the watch on deck at eight bells, after they are relieved. The dinner hour is twelve o'clock, if all hands get dinner together. If dinner is got 'by the watch,' the watch below is called for dinner at seven bells (half past eleven,) and the other watch dine when they go below, at twelve. If all hands are kept in the afternoon, or if both watches get supper together, the usual hour is three bells, or half past five; but if supper is got by the watch, three bells is the time for one watch and four for the other. In bad weather, each watch takes its meals during the watch below, as, otherwise, the men would be liable to be called up from their meals at any moment. As to the time allowed for SLEEP; it may be said, generally, that a sailor's watch below is at his own disposal to do what he chooses in, except, of course, when all hands are called. The meal times, and time for washing, mending, reading, writing, &c., must all come out of the watch below; since, whether there is work going forward or not, a man is considered as belonging to the ship in his watch on deck. At night, however, especially if watch and watch is not given, it is the custom in most merchant vessels, in good weather, to allow the watch to take naps about the decks, provided one of them keeps a look-out, and the rest are so that they can be called instantly. This privilege is rather a thing winked at than expressly allowed, and if the man who has the look-out falls asleep, or if the rest are slow in mustering at a call, they are all obliged to keep awake. In bad weather, also, or if near land, or in the track of other vessels, this privilege should not be granted. The men in each watch usually arrange the helms and look-outs among themselves, so that a man need not have a helm and a look-out during the same watch. A man should never go below during his watch on deck, without permission; and if he merely steps down into the forecastle for an instant, as, to get his jacket, he should tell some one, who may speak to him at once, if the watch is called upon. PART III. LAWS RELATING TO THE PRACTICAL DUTIES OF MASTER AND MARINERS. CHAPTER I. THE VESSEL. Title. Bill of sale. Registry. Enrolment. License. Documents. Certificate. Passport. Sea-letter. List of crew. Bill of health. General clearance. Clearing manifest. Invoice. Bill of lading. Charter-party. Log-book. Manifest. List of passengers and crew. Remaining sea-stores. Medicine-chest. Provisions. TITLE.--The bill of sale is the proper evidence of title to all vessels. It is the instrument of transfer which is used in all maritime countries, which courts of law look to for proof of title, and which is in most cases absolutely required.[6] [6] 5 Rob. Ad. 155. 1 Mason, 139; 2 do. 435; 4 do. 390. 16 Mass. 336. 7 Johns. 308. But see 8 Pick. 89. 16 Mass. 663. Possession of the vessel should also accompany the bill of sale, whenever it is practicable. If the bill of sale is transferred while the vessel is at sea, possession should be taken immediately upon her arrival in port. The fact of the bill of sale being with one person and the actual possession of the vessel with another, after there has been an opportunity to transfer it, will raise a presumption of fraud, and make the parties liable to losses and difficulties in dealing with creditors, and such as purchase in good faith.[7] [7] 4 Mass. 663. 4 Mason, 183. 9 Pick. 4. 6 Mass. 422; 15 do. 477; 18 do. 389. REGISTRY, ENROLMENT, AND LICENSE.--The laws of the United States have given many privileges to vessels built, owned and commanded by our own citizens. Such vessels are entitled to be registered, enrolled or licensed, according to circumstances, and are thereupon considered "vessels of the United States, entitled to the benefits and privileges appertaining to such ships." The only vessels entitled to a register are those built in the United States and owned wholly by citizens thereof; vessels captured in war by our citizens, and condemned as prizes; and vessels adjudged to be forfeited for breach of the laws of the United States, being wholly owned by such citizens. No owner is compelled to register his vessel, but unless registered (with the exception of those enrolled and licensed in the coasting and fishing trades) she is not entitled to the privileges and benefits of a "vessel of the United States," although she be built, owned and commanded by citizens thereof.[8] [8] Act 1792, ch. 45, §1. Vessels employed wholly in the whale-fishery, owned by an incorporated company, may be registered, so long as they shall be wholly employed therein.[9] If not so owned and registered, they must be enrolled and licensed.[10] [9] Act 1831, ch. 350, §1. [10] 3 Sumner, 342. 2 Law Rep. 146 contra. The name of every registered vessel, and the port to which she belongs, must be painted on her stern, on a black ground, in white letters, of not less than three inches in length. And if any registered vessel is found without her name and the name of her port so painted, the owners thereof forfeit fifty dollars.[11] [11] Act 1792, ch. 45, §3. In order to the obtaining of a register, oath must be made that the master is a citizen of the United States.[12] If the master of a registered vessel is changed, or if the vessel's name is altered, such fact must be endorsed upon the register at the custom-house, otherwise she will cease to be considered a vessel of the United States.[13] [12] Do. §4, §12. [13] Act 1792, ch. 45, §23. If any certificate of registry is fraudulently or knowingly used for any ship or vessel not at the time entitled to it, such ship or vessel, with her tackle, apparel and furniture, shall be forfeited to the United States.[14] If an enrolled or licensed vessel is about to proceed on a foreign voyage, she must surrender her enrolment and license, and take out a register, or she, together with her cargo, will be liable to forfeiture.[15] In case of the loss of a register, the master may make oath to the fact, and obtain a new one. [14] Do. §27. [15] Act 1793, ch. 52, §8. All vessels engaged in the coasting and fishing trades, above twenty tons' burden, in order to be entitled to the privileges of vessels of the United States in those trades, must be enrolled and licensed; and if less than twenty tons, must be licensed.[16] The same qualifications and requisites in all respects are demanded in order to the enrolling and licensing of a vessel, which are required for registering.[17] The name must be painted on the stern in the same manner, under penalty of $20.[18] [16] Do. §1. [17] Do. §2. [18] Do. §11. If any vessel licensed for the fisheries engages in any other business not expressly allowed by the license, she is forfeited.[19] Vessels, however, licensed for the mackerel trade are not forfeited in consequence of having been engaged in catching cod, or other fish; but they are not entitled to the bounty allowed to vessels in the cod fisheries.[20] The officers and at least three fourths of the crew of every fishing vessel must be American citizens, or they can recover none of the bounties.[21] [19] Act 1793, ch. 52, §32. [20] Acts 1828, ch. 119, §1, and 1836, ch. 55, §1. [21] Act 1817, ch. 204, §3. DOCUMENTS.--Every registered vessel should have a _certificate of registry_.[22] This is an abstract of the record of registry, showing the names and residences of the owners, the place where the vessel was built, with a particular description of the vessel. This document shows the national character of the vessel, and is important to prove neutrality in time of war between other powers. For the same reasons, an enrolled vessel should have a _certificate of enrolment_.[23] Vessels bound to Europe should have _passports_. A passport is a permission from the government for the vessel to go upon her voyage, and contains a description of the vessel, crew, &c., and the name of the master. Vessels bound round Cape Horn or the Cape of Good Hope should have _sea-letters_. These contain a description of the cargo, &c., and are written in four languages--English, French, Dutch and Spanish. The two latter documents are rendered necessary or expedient by reason of treaties with foreign powers. Every vessel should have a _list of crew_. This specifies the name, age, place of birth and residence, &c., of each one of the ship's company; and is, of course, very useful when sailing among belligerents. The other documents are the _bill of health_, _general clearance_, _clearing manifest_, _invoice_ and _bill of lading_ for the cargo, _charter-party_, if one has been given, and the _log-book_. On entering at the custom-house, the papers required in addition to these are the _manifest_, _list of passengers_ and _crew_, and of _remaining sea-stores_. [22] Act 1792, ch. 45. [23] Act 1793, ch. 52. MEDICINE-CHEST.--Every vessel belonging to citizens of the United States, of the burden of one hundred and fifty tons or upwards, navigated by ten or more persons in the whole, and bound on a foreign voyage, must be provided with a medicine-chest, put up by some apothecary of known reputation, and accompanied by directions for using the same. This chest must be examined and refitted by the same or some other apothecary at least once in a year.[24] The same rule applies to vessels of seventy-five tons and upwards, navigated by six persons in the whole, and bound to the West Indies.[25] [24] Act 1790, ch. 56, §8. [25] Act 1805, ch. 88, §1. NATIONAL CHARACTER OF CREW.--In order to be placed upon the most favorable footing as to duties, bounties, &c., it is necessary that the master, officers, and two thirds of the rest of the crew of vessels in the foreign trade, and officers and three fourths of the crew of fishing and coasting vessels, should be citizens, or "persons not the subjects of any foreign prince or state."[26] Nevertheless, while foreigners are employed in our vessels, they are under the protection of our laws as "mariners and seamen of the United States."[27] [26] Act 1817, ch. 204, §3, 5, 6. [27] 3 Sumner, 115. PROVISIONS.--Every vessel of the United States bound on a voyage across the Atlantic, shall, at the time of leaving the last port from which she sails, have on board, well secured under deck, at least sixty gallons of water, one hundred pounds of salted beef, and one hundred pounds of wholesome ship bread, for every person on board, (over and above any stores that the master or passengers may have put on board;) and in like proportions for shorter or longer voyages. If any vessel is not so provided, and the crew are put upon short allowance of bread, flesh or water, they can recover an additional day's wages for every day they are so allowanced.[28] [28] Act 1790, ch. 56, §9. PASSENGERS.--The same provision, with the addition of one gallon of vinegar, must be made for every passenger; and if, in default of these, the passengers are put on short allowance, each passenger can recover three dollars for every day he is so allowanced.[29] [29] Act 1819, ch. 170, §3. If any vessel takes on board a greater number of passengers than two for every five tons, custom-house measurement, the master forfeits $150 for every such passenger; and if the number by which they exceed two for every five tons shall amount to twenty, the vessel becomes forfeited.[30] [30] Do. §1, 2. CHAPTER II. THE MASTER'S RELATION TO VESSEL AND CARGO. Revenue duties and obligations. List of crew. Certificate. Sea letter. Passport. List of passengers. Manifest. Sea stores. Unloading. Post-office. Report. Citizenship. Coasting license. Power to sell and hypothecate. Keeping and delivering cargo. Deviation. Collision. Pilot. Wages and advances. REVENUE DUTIES AND OBLIGATIONS.--The master of every vessel bound on a foreign voyage, before clearance, must give to the collector of the customs a list of the crew, specifying their names, places of birth and residence, and containing a description of their persons; whereupon he is entitled to a certified copy of the same from the collector. This copy he must deliver, under a penalty of $400, to the first boarding officer upon his arrival in the United States, and produce the persons named therein, unless the same have been discharged in a foreign country, with the consent of the consul or other commercial agent thereto certified in writing under his hand and official seal; or by showing that they have died or absconded, or been impressed into foreign service.[31] The duplicate list of the crew shall be a fair copy, in one uniform handwriting, without erasure or interlineation.[32] [31] Act 1803, ch. 62, §1. [32] Act 1840, ch. 28, §1. The owners must also obtain from the collector of the customs a certified copy of the shipping articles. This must be produced by the master before any consul or commercial agent who may demand it, and all erasures in it or writings in a different hand shall be deemed fraudulent, unless satisfactorily explained.[33] [33] Do. The master of every vessel of the United States, on arriving at a foreign port, must deposit with the consul, or other commercial agent, his certificate of registry, sea letter, and passport (if he have one,) under a penalty of $500. The consul returns them to him, upon his obtaining a clearance.[34] [34] Act 1803, ch. 62, §2. Upon arriving in the United States, the master must report to the collector a list of passengers, specifying their names, age, sex, occupation, the country of which they are citizens, and that in which they intend to reside. This is under a penalty of $500.[35] [35] Act 1819, ch. 170, §4. Vessels arriving from foreign ports must unlade and deliver their cargoes between sunrise and sunset, unless by special permission of the collector of the port. In making out manifests of cargoes, the master must specify what articles are to be deemed _sea stores_, and declare the same upon oath. If the collector deems the amount excessive, he may charge them with a duty. If the cargo is found to exceed the manifest, the excess is forfeited to the government, and the master is liable to pay treble the amount.[36] [36] Act 1799, ch. 128, §45. If the master land any of the _sea stores_, without first obtaining a permit, such stores are forfeited, and the master becomes liable to pay treble the value of them.[37] [37] Act 1799, ch. 128, §45. The master subjects himself to a fine of $200 if the vessel departs on a foreign voyage without a _passport_. It is the duty of the master, coming from a foreign port, to have a _manifest_ of cargo and a copy of the same made out and ready for delivery to any officer of the customs who may board the vessel within four leagues of the coast.[38] Unless this manifest is produced, no merchandise can be unloaded from the vessel. The manifest shall specify the port where the merchandise was received, the port to which it is consigned, the name, build and description of the vessel, with the name of the master and owner, the marks and numbers of each package of goods, with the name of the consignee; and also the names of the passengers with their baggage, and the account of all remaining sea stores.[39] [38] Do. §23. [39] Act 1819, ch. 170, §4. If any goods are unladed within four leagues of the coast, or within the limits of any district, without authority from the proper officer, except in case of accident or necessity--which must be strictly proved--such goods are forfeited, and the master and mate incur, respectively, a penalty of $1000 for each offence.[40] [40] Act 1799, ch. 128, §27. If the master refuses to exhibit his manifest and deliver a copy of the same to the boarding officer, or to inform him of the true destination of the vessel, he incurs a penalty of $500 for each offence.[41] [41] Do. §26. The master must deposit all his letters in the post-office before entering his cargo; and if he shall break bulk before depositing his letters, he forfeits $100 for each offence.[42] [42] Act 1825, ch. 275, §17. If any merchandise is imported into the United States not contained in the manifest, the master of the vessel forfeits a sum equal to the value of such merchandise; and if any of it belongs or is consigned to the master, or to any officer or seaman on board, it becomes forfeited; unless it shall be made to appear that the omission occurred by accident or mistake.[43] [43] Act 1799, ch. 128, §24. The master of a vessel arriving from a foreign port must report himself to the collector within twenty-four hours, and within forty-eight hours he must make a further and more particular report, in writing, under penalty of $100; and if he shall attempt to leave the port without entry he forfeits $400.[44] [44] Do. §30. If any articles reported in the manifest are not found on board, the master forfeits $500, unless it shall be made to appear that the same was caused by accident or mistake. The master of every vessel bound on a foreign voyage must deliver a manifest of cargo to the collector, and obtain a clearance, under penalty of $500.[45] [45] Do. §3. The master of every vessel enrolled and licensed in the coasting trade must be a citizen of the United States; and if the vessel trades to any other than an adjoining state, three fourths of the crew must be citizens. If the master of a coasting vessel is changed, such change must be reported to the collector of the port where the change is made.[46] [46] Act 1793, ch. 52, §12. The master of every coasting vessel must deliver up his license within three days after it expired, or, if the vessel was then at sea, within three days after her first arrival thereafter, under a penalty of $50. The master of a coasting vessel departing from one great district to another, must deliver to the collector duplicate manifests of all the cargo on board, under penalty of $50; and within forty-eight hours after his arrival at the port of delivery, and before breaking bulk, he must deliver to the collector the manifest certified to by the collector of the former port, under penalty of $100.[47] If the vessel shall at any time be found without a manifest on board, the master forfeits $20, and if he refuses to inform the officer of his last port of departure, he forfeits $100.[48] [47] Do. §17. [48] Do. §18. POWER TO SELL AND HYPOTHECATE.--The master has, in certain cases, power to hypothecate the ship and cargo, and also to sell a part of the cargo; and in certain extreme cases a sale of the ship and cargo, made from necessity, and in the utmost good faith, will be upheld. His right to do any of these acts is confined to cases of necessity, in distant ports, where he cannot get the advice of the owner. The safest rule for the master is, to bear in mind that his duty is to _prosecute the voyage_, and that all his acts must be done for this purpose, and in good faith. If a necessity arises in a foreign port for the repairing or supplying of the ship, he must, in the first instance, make use of any property of the owner he may have under his control, other than cargo.[49] If, however, he has money of the owner in his hands, put on board for the purpose of procuring a cargo, he is not bound to apply this first; but must use his discretion, bearing in mind that all repairs have for their sole object the prosecution of the voyage, which might be defeated by making use of these funds.[50] His next recourse should be to the personal credit of the owner, by drawing bills, or otherwise.[51] [49] 3 Mason, 255. [50] Do. [51] 2 Wash. C. C. 226. If these means fail, he is next to hypothecate (that is, pledge) the ship (bottomry,) or cargo (respondentia,) or freight, or sell part of the cargo, according to circumstances. If the owner of the ship is also owner of the cargo, the better opinion seems to be, that the master may take whichever of these means can be adopted with the least sacrifice of the owner's interest; though, probably, selling part of the cargo would in almost all cases be the least favorable course for all the purposes of the voyage.[52] If the owner of the ship is not owner of the cargo, the master should bear in mind that he is agent of the former, and has generally no further control over the cargo than for safe keeping and transportation.[53] He should, therefore, first exhaust the credit of the ship and freight by hypothecation; and if these means fail, he then becomes, by necessity, agent for the owners of the cargo for the purposes of the voyage, and may hypothecate the whole, or sell a part, according to circumstances. As to selling part, he should remember that his duty is to carry forward the objects of the voyage, and that selling a large part would probably impair these objects more than hypothecating the whole.[54] [52] 2 Wash. C. C. 226. [53] Do. [54] 3 Mason, 255. 1 Wash. C. C. 49; 2 Do. 226. 3 Rob. 240. In no case can any of the cargo be sold or hypothecated to repair or supply the ship, unless these repairs and supplies are to be for the benefit of the cargo. The strictest proof is always required that the repairs were in the first place necessary, and, in the next place, that they were for the benefit of the cargo, and not merely for the good of the ship-owner.[55] [55] 2 Wash. 226. 3 Rob. 240. A further question arises, whether the master has ever, and when, the right to sell the whole cargo and the ship itself. If it should be impossible to repair the ship and send her on the voyage by any of the means before mentioned, it then becomes the master's duty to forward the cargo to the port of destination by some other conveyance. If neither of these things can be done, then he becomes, from necessity, agent of the owner of the cargo, and must make the best disposition of it in his power. If the goods are perishable, the owner cannot be consulted within a reasonable time, and has no agent in the port, and something must be done with the cargo, and there is no one else to act--then the master must dispose of it in such a way as best to subserve the interest of its owner. He should take the advice of the commercial agent or other suitable persons, should also use his own judgment and act with good faith, and take care to preserve evidence that he has so done. If all these requisites are not complied with, he will incur the danger of having his acts set aside.[56] [56] 2 Wash. C. C. 150. 3 Rob. 240. The rule as to the sale of the ship is very nearly the same, except that it is, perhaps, still more strict. If all means for repairing the vessel and sending her on her voyage have failed, and a case of absolute necessity arises, the master may make a sale of her. As a prudent man, he should have the sale made, if possible, under the authority of the judicial tribunals of the place. Even this will not, of itself, render the sale valid, but will go far toward sustaining it. He should consult the consul, or other suitable persons; should have a survey made; should take care to have the sale conducted publicly and with the best faith in all parties, and to preserve evidence of the same. Although a person should buy in good faith, yet the sale will be set aside unless it can be shown that there was the strictest necessity for it. The master must not become a purchaser himself, and even if he afterwards buys of one who purchased at the sale, this transaction will be very narrowly watched, and he will be bound to show the very highest good faith in all parties.[57] [57] 5 Mason, 465. 2 Sumner, 206. Edwards, 117. The strictness of these rules should not deter the master from acting, where the interest of all requires it, but will show him the risk that is run by acting otherwise than with prudence and entire honesty. He should remember, too, that, in taking command of a vessel, he not only covenants that he will act honestly and with the best of his judgment, but also holds himself out as having a reasonable degree of skill and prudence.[58] [58] 1 Dallas, 184. As to the safe keeping, transportation, and delivery of the cargo, the master's duties and obligations are those of a common carrier upon land. He is bound to the strictest diligence in commencing and prosecuting the voyage, a high degree of care both of vessel and goods, and is held liable for all losses and injuries not occasioned by inevitable accident, or by the acts of public enemies. He is answerable also for unnecessary delays and deviations, and for the wrongful or negligent acts of all persons under his command. At the termination of the voyage, he must deliver the goods to the consignee or his agents. A landing upon the wharf is a sufficient delivery, if due notice be given to the parties who are to receive them. He is not, however, bound to deliver until the freight due is paid or secured to his satisfaction, as he has a lien upon the goods for his freight; but the consignee can require the goods to be taken from the hold, in order that he may examine them, before paying freight. In such case they should not go out of the possession of the master or his agents. DEVIATION.--The master must not deviate from the course of the voyage. By a _deviation_ is meant, technically, any alteration of the risk insured against, without necessity or reasonable cause. It may be by departing from the regular and usual course of the voyage, or by any unusual and unnecessary delay. A deviation renders the insurance void, whether the loss of the vessel is caused by the deviation or not. It is not a deviation to make a port for repairs or supplies, if there be no unnecessary delay, nor to depart from the course of the voyage in order to succor persons in distress, to avoid an enemy, or the like. It is the master's duty, within twenty-four hours after arriving at his first port, to make a _protest_ in case of any accident or loss happening to vessel or cargo. The log-book also should be carefully kept, without interlineations or erasures. The master must also enter a protest in case any American seaman is impressed, and transmit a copy of the same to the secretary of state, under a penalty of $100.[59] [59] Act 1796, ch. 36, §5. COLLISION.--A vessel having the wind free must make way for a vessel close-hauled. The general practice is, that when two vessels approach each other, both having a free or fair wind, the one with the starboard tacks aboard keeps on her course, or, if any change is made, she luffs, so as to pass to windward of the other; or, in other words, each vessel passes to the right. This rule should also govern vessels sailing on the wind and approaching each other, when it is doubtful which is to windward. But if the vessel on the larboard tack is so far to windward that if both persist in their course the other will strike her on the lee side, abaft the beam, or near the stern; in such case, the vessel on the starboard tack must give way, as she can do so with less loss of time and greater facility than the other. These rules are particularly intended to govern vessels approaching each other under circumstances that prevent their course and movements being readily discerned with accuracy, as at night or in a fog. At other times, circumstances may render it expedient to depart from them. A steamer is considered as always sailing with a fair wind, and is bound to do whatever would be required of a vessel going free.[60] [60] Report of Benjamin Rich and others to District Court of Mass. PILOT.--The master must take a pilot when within the usual limits of the pilot's employment.[61] If he neglects or refuses so to do, he becomes liable to the owners, freighters, and insurers. If no pilot is at hand, he must make signals, and wait a reasonable time. The master is to be justified in entering port without a pilot only by extreme necessity. After the pilot is on board, the master has no more control over the working of the ship until she is at anchor.[62] [61] 6 Rob. 316. 7 T. R. 160. [62] 2 B. & Ad. 380. 3 Kent's Com. 175 c. WAGES, ADVANCES, &C.--The master has no lien upon the ship for his wages.[63] He is supposed to look to the personal responsibility of the owner. He has a lien on freight for wages, and also for his advances and necessary expenses incurred for the benefit of the ship.[64] He can sue in admiralty _in personam_, but not _in rem_;--that is, he can sue the owner personally, but cannot hold the ship. It does not seem to be settled in the United States whether the master has a lien on the ship for advances made abroad for the benefit of the vessel.[65] In case of sickness, the master's right to be cured at the expense of the ship seems to be the same as that of the seamen.[66] [63] 3 Mason, 91. 11 Pet. R. 175. [64] Ware, 149. But see 5 Wend. 314. [65] 3 Mason, 255. [66] 1 Sumner, 151. CHAPTER III. THE MASTER'S RELATION TO PASSENGERS AND OFFICERS. Treatment of passengers. Removal of officers. PASSENGERS.--The contract of passengers with the master is not for mere ship-room and personal existence on board, but for reasonable food, comforts, necessaries, and kindness. In respect to females, it extends still further, and includes an implied stipulation against obscenity, immodesty, and a wanton disregard of the feelings. An improper course of conduct in these particulars will be punished by the court, as much as a personal assault would be.[67] [67] 3 Mason, 242. OFFICERS.--The master may remove either of his officers from duty for fraudulent or unfaithful conduct, for gross negligence and disobedience, or for palpable incapacity. But the causes of removal must be strong and evident;[68] and much more so in the case of the chief mate than of the second mate. Any temporary appointments, made by the master, are held at his pleasure, and stand upon a different footing from those of persons who originally shipped in the character in question.[69] [68] 4 Wash. 334. [69] Gilpin, 83. When a man ships in a particular capacity, as carpenter, steward, or the like, he is not to be degraded for slight causes. He stipulates for fair and reasonable knowledge and due diligence, but not for extraordinary qualifications.[70] [70] 4 Mason, 84. Abbott Shipp. 147 n. Ware, 109. The right of the master to compel an officer, who has been removed, to do duty as a seaman before the mast, has never been completely established; but the better opinion would seem to be that he may do it in a case of necessity. Merchant vessels have no supernumeraries, and if the master can show that the officer was unfit for the duties he had undertaken, and thus made it necessary to take some one from the forecastle to fill his place, and that, by this means, the ship had become short-handed, he may turn the officer forward, assuming the responsibility for the act, as well as the risk of justification. He would be required to show a much stronger cause for removing the chief mate than would be insisted upon in the case of a second mate; and probably this necessity for exacting seaman's duty would be held to extend no further than an arrival at the first port where other hands could be shipped. Nothing but evident unfitness or gross and repeated misconduct will justify the master in turning a person forward who shipped in another capacity, as carpenter, cook, or steward. But in such cases, he undoubtedly may do so. Still, when before the mast, he cannot require of them the duty of able seamen, unless they are such in fact. CHAPTER IV. THE MASTER'S RELATION TO THE CREW. Shipment. Shipping papers. Discharge. Imprisonment. Punishment. SHIPMENT.--The master of every vessel of the United States, bound on a foreign voyage, and of all coasting vessels of fifty tons burden, must make a contract in writing (shipping articles) with each seaman, specifying the voyage, terms of time, &c.; and in default thereof shall forfeit $20 for every case of omission, and shall be obliged to pay every such seaman the highest rate of wages that have been paid for such voyages at the port of shipment within three months previous to the commencement of the voyage.[71] And when the master ships a seaman in a foreign port, he must take the list of crew and the duplicate of the shipping articles to the consul or commercial agent, who shall make the proper entries thereupon; and then the bond originally given for the return of the men shall embrace each person so shipped. All shipments made contrary to this or any other act of Congress shall be void, and the seaman may leave at any time, and claim the highest rate of wages paid for any man who shipped for the voyage, or the sum agreed to be given him at his shipment.[72] [71] Act 1790, ch. 56, §1. [72] Act 1840, ch. 23, §1. At the foot of every such contract there shall be a memorandum of writing of the day and hour on which such seaman shall render himself on board. If this memorandum is made and the seaman neglects to render himself on board at the time specified, he shall forfeit one day's pay for every hour he is so absent, provided the master or mate shall, on the same day, have made an entry of the name of such seaman in the log-book, specifying the time he was so absent. And if the seaman shall wholly neglect to render himself on board, or, after rendering, shall desert before sailing, so that the vessel goes to sea without him, he then forfeits the amount of his advance and a further sum equal thereto, both of which may be recovered from himself or his surety.[73] [73] Act 1790, ch. 56, §2. There is no obligation upon the master to make these memorandums and entries, other than that the forfeitures cannot be inflicted upon the seamen unless they have been made literally according to the form of the statute. If any seaman who has signed the articles shall desert during the voyage, the master may have him arrested and committed to jail until the vessel is ready to proceed, by applying to a justice of the peace and proving the contract, and the breach thereof by the seaman.[74] [74] Do. §7. Every vessel bound on a foreign voyage shall have on board a duplicate list of the crew, and a true copy of the shipping-articles, certified by the collector of the port, containing the names of the crew, which shall be written in a uniform hand, without erasures or interlineations. This copy the master must produce to any consul or commercial agent of the United States who shall require it; and it shall be deemed to contain all the conditions of the contract. All erasures and interlineations shall be deemed fraudulent unless proved to be innocent and bonâ fide. Every master who shall go upon a foreign voyage without these documents, or shall refuse to produce them when required, shall forfeit one hundred dollars for each offence, beside being liable in damages to any seaman who may have been injured thereby.[75] [75] Act 1840, ch. 23, §1. DISCHARGE.--If the master discharges any seaman in a foreign port, with his own consent, he shall pay to the consul three months' wages for every such seaman, in addition to the wages then due to him, two-thirds to go to the seaman upon his taking passage for the United States, and the remainder to be retained by the consul to make a fund for the relief of destitute seamen.[76] The master of every vessel bound to the United States shall, upon the request of the consul, take on board any seaman and transport him to the United States, on terms not exceeding ten dollars for each seaman, under penalty of one hundred dollars for every refusal. He is not, however, bound to receive more than two men to every hundred tons.[77] [76] Act 1803, ch. 62, §3. See also Act 1840, ch. 23, §5. [77] Act 1803, ch. 62, §4. The whole policy of the United States discourages the discharge of seamen in foreign ports. If the seaman is discharged against his consent, and without justifiable cause, he can recover his wages up to the time of the vessel's return, together with his own expenses. The certificate of the consul will not, of itself, prove the sufficiency of the cause of discharge. Though the seaman shall have made himself liable to be discharged, yet if he repents and offers to return to duty, the master must receive him, unless he can show a sufficient cause of refusal.[78] If the master alleges, as a cause for discharging a seaman, that he was a dangerous man, it must be shown that the danger was such as would affect a man of ordinary firmness.[79] [78] Ware, 65. 4 Mason, 541, 84. [79] Ware, 9. In addition to the master's liability to the seaman, he is criminally liable to the government for discharging a mariner without cause. The statute enacts that if the master shall, when abroad, force on shore or leave behind any officer or seaman without justifiable cause, he shall be fined not exceeding five hundred dollars, or imprisoned not exceeding six months, according to the aggravation of the offence.[80] [80] Act 1825, ch. 276, §10. Notwithstanding these liabilities, the master may discharge a seaman for gross misconduct; yet the right is very strictly construed.[81] [81] Abbott on Shipp., 147, note. IMPRISONMENT.--The master has the right to imprison a seaman in a foreign port, in a case of urgent necessity, but the power has always been very closely watched by courts of law. "The practice of imprisoning seamen in foreign jails is one of doubtful legality, and is to be justified only by a strong case of necessity."[82] "The master is not authorized to punish a seaman by imprisonment in a foreign jail unless in cases of aggravated misconduct and insubordination."[83] If he does so punish him, he is not permitted to deduct his wages during the time of imprisonment, nor charge him with the expense of it.[84] If the imprisonment is without justifiable cause, the master is not excused by showing that it was ordered by the consul.[85] And, generally, the advice of a consul is no justification of an illegal act.[86] [82] Gilpin, 31. Ware, 19. [83] Ware, 503. [84] Ware, 9, 503. [85] Ware, 367. [86] Gilpin, 31. PUNISHMENT.--The master may inflict moderate correction on a seaman for sufficient cause; but he must take care that it is not disproportionate to the offence. If he exceeds the bounds of moderation he is treated as a trespasser, and is liable in damages.[87] In respect to the mode of correction, it may be by personal chastisement, or by confinement on board ship, in irons, or otherwise.[88] But there must not be any cruelty or unnecessary severity exercised. The mode, instruments or extent of the punishment are not laid down by law. These must depend upon circumstances. In cases of urgent necessity, as of mutiny, weapons may be used which would be unlawful at other times; but even in these cases, they must be used with the caution which the law requires in other cases of self-defence and vindication of rightful authority.[89] [87] 1 Peters' Ad. 186, 172. 2 Do. 420. 1 Wash. 316. [88] 1 Peters' Ad. 186, 168. 15 Mass. 365. [89] Same cases. It is not necessary that the punishment should be inflicted to suppress the offence at the time of its commission. It may be inflicted for past offences, and to promote good discipline on board. But the reference to by-gone acts should be very clear and distinct, or they will be presumed to have been forgiven.[90] In many cases prudence may require a postponement of the proper punishment. The authority of the master, being in its nature parental, must be exercised with a due regard to the rights and interests of all parties. He has a large discretion, but is held to answer strictly for every abuse of it.[91] The law enjoins upon him a temperate demeanor and decent conduct towards seamen. He risks the consequences if he commences a dispute with illegal conduct and improper behavior.[92] In all his acts of correction, he must punish purely for reformation and discipline, and never to gratify personal feelings.[93] If a master generally permits or encourages disorderly behavior in his ship, he is less excusable for inflicting unusual punishment on account of misconduct arising out of that disorder.[94] If the case admits of delay, and the master does not make proper inquiry before punishing, he takes the consequences upon himself.[95] [90] 1 Hagg. 271. [91] 15 Mass. 365. 3 Day, 294. [92] 4 Wash. 340. [93] 1 Pet. Ad. 168, 173, note. [94] Bee, 239. [95] 1 Hagg. 271. This power over the liberty and person of a fellow man, being against common right, and intrusted to the master only from public policy, regarding the necessities of the service, is to be sparingly used, and a strict account will be required of its exercise. The master is responsible for any punishment inflicted on board the vessel, unless in his absence, or when he is prevented by force from interfering.[96] Neither will absence always be an excuse. If he had reason to suppose that such a thing might be done, and did not take pains to be present and interfere, he will be liable. Neither, (as is often supposed,) will the advice, or even the personal superintendence or orders of a consul, or any foreign authority, relieve the master of his personal responsibility.[97] 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; and this responsibility is not to be shaken off by calling in the aid of others. In case of an open mutiny, or of imminent danger to life and property, the master may make use of the local authorities; but then he is to remember that he can use them no further than for the purpose of quelling the mutiny, or of apprehending the felon. As soon as his authority is restored, the parental character is again thrown upon him, and all acts of punishment must be upon his own responsibility. He has no right to punish criminally. He has no judicial power. If a seaman has committed an offence further than against the internal order and economy of the ship, and which moderate correction is not sufficient to meet, the master must bring him home, (in confinement, if necessary,) or send him immediately by some other vessel, to be tried by the laws and by a jury of his country.[98] [96] 2 Sumner, 1. Ware, 219. [97] Ware, 367. Gilpin, 31. [98] 1 Pet. Ad. 168. The practice of subjecting American seamen to foreign authority, or to persons whom they cannot well hold answerable,--like that of foreign imprisonment,--is an odious one, and must be justified by an overpowering necessity. A recent statute[99] makes it the duty of consuls to exert themselves to reclaim deserters and discountenance insubordination, and authorizes them to employ the local authorities, where it can usefully be done, for those purposes. But this will unquestionably be restricted to the apprehension of the deserter, and the quelling of the revolt or mutiny; and as soon as these ends are attained, the sole responsibility of the master in dealing with the crew will re-attach. [99] Act 1840, ch. 23, §1. If the master is present while the mate, or any subordinate officer, inflicts punishment upon any of the crew, or if it is inflicted under such circumstances as would raise a presumption that the master was knowing of it, and he does not interfere, he will be held to have adopted it as his own act, and will be answerable accordingly.[100] [100] 2 Sumner, 1. In addition to the master's liability to the seamen in damages for abuse of power, he is also liable, as a criminal, to fine and imprisonment. A recent statute enacts, that "if any master, or other officer, of an American vessel, shall, from malice, hatred, or revenge, and without justifiable cause, beat, wound, or imprison any one or more of the crew of such vessel, or withhold from them suitable food or nourishment, or inflict on them any cruel or unusual punishment, every such person so offending shall, on conviction thereof, be punished by fine not exceeding one thousand dollars, or by imprisonment not exceeding five years, or by both, according to the nature and aggravation of the offence."[101] It is held that the word 'crew,' in this statute, includes officers; and accordingly a master was punished for unjustifiably confining and otherwise mal-treating his chief mate.[102] [101] Act 1835, ch. 313, §3. [102] 3 Sumner, 209. To constitute 'malice' in the above statute, it is not necessary to show malignity as it is commonly understood, or brutality; but the term, in law, requires no more than a 'wilful intention to do a wrongful act.' An offence is punishable under this act, even although no bad passions came into play, (as hatred, or revenge,) for the term 'malice,' in law, covers all cases of intentional wrong, in their mildest form.[103] [103] 2 Sumner, 584. If a seaman desires to lay any complaint before a consul in a foreign port, the master must permit him to land for that purpose, or else inform the consul immediately of the fact, stating his reasons in writing for not allowing the man to land. If he refuses to do this, he forfeits one hundred dollars, and is liable to the seaman in damages.[104] [104] Act 1840, ch. 23, §1. CHAPTER V. PASSENGERS. Provisions. Treatment. Passage-money. Deportment. Services. In Chapter I. of the Third Part, under the title "Provisions," it will be seen that the vessel must have on board, well secured under deck, at least sixty gallons of water, one hundred pounds of salted beef, one hundred pounds of wholesome ship bread, and one gallon of vinegar for each passenger, on a voyage across the Atlantic, and in like proportion for shorter or longer voyages. This, too, must be in addition to the private stores of the master or passengers.[105] [105] Act 1819, ch. 170, §3. The master is also forbidden to take on board more than two passengers for every five tons.[106] [106] Do. §1. The contract of passengers with the master is not for mere ship-room and personal existence on board, but for reasonable food, comforts, necessaries, and kindness. In respect to females it extends yet farther, and includes an implied stipulation against obscenity, immodesty, and a wanton disregard of the feelings. A course of conduct oppressive and malicious in these respects will be punished by the court, as well as a personal assault.[107] [107] 3 Mason, 342. No passage-money is due to a ship upon an engagement to transport a passenger, before the arrival of the vessel at the port of destination. Where the passenger has paid in advance, he can reclaim his money if the voyage is not performed. If a voyage is partially performed, no passage-money is due, unless the expenses of the passenger, or the means of proceeding to the place of destination, are paid or tendered to him; in which case, passage-money in proportion to the progress in the voyage is payable.[108] [108] 1 Pet. Ad. 126. A passenger must submit to the reasonable rules and usages of the ship. He has no right to interfere with its discipline and internal regulations. Indeed, in a case of necessity, and for the order and safety of the ship, the master may restrain a passenger by force; but the cause must be urgent, and the manner reasonable and moderate. In case of danger and distress, it is the duty as well as the interest of the passenger to contribute his aid, according to his ability, and he is entitled to no compensation therefor. He is not, however, bound to remain on board in time of danger, but may leave the vessel if he can; much less is he required to take upon himself any responsibility as to the conduct of the ship. If, therefore, he performs any extraordinary services, he becomes entitled to salvage.[109] [109] 2 B. and P. 612. 1 Pet. Ad. 70. 2 Hagg. 3. CHAPTER VI. MATES AND SUBORDINATES. Mates included in the 'crew.' Removal. Succession. Log-book Wages. Sickness. Punishment. Subordinates. Pilots. In all the statutes which entitle the 'crew,' or the 'seamen,' of a vessel to certain privileges as against the master or owner, these words, 'crew' and 'seamen,' are construed to include the mates; as, for instance, the statute requiring a certain amount of provisions to be on board; the statute requiring a medicine-chest, and that which punishes the master for illegal and cruel treatment of any of the crew. In all these cases the mates are entitled to the same privileges and protection with the seamen.[110] [110] 1 Sumner, 151; 3 do. 209. 4 Mason, 104. The _chief mate_ is usually put on board by the owner, and is a person who is looked to for extraordinary services and responsibility. Accordingly, he cannot be removed by the master, unless for repeated and aggravated misconduct, or for palpable incapacity.[111] He acts in the stead of the master in case the latter dies, and whenever he is absent.[112] He is then entrusted with the care of the ship, and the government of the crew. If he is appointed to act as mate by the master during the voyage, he holds his office at the master's pleasure;[113] but if he originally shipped in that capacity, he cannot be removed without proof of gross and flagrant misconduct, or of evident unfitness. Nor will one or two single instances of intemperance, disobedience or negligence, be sufficient; the misconduct must be repeated, and the habit apparently incorrigible.[114] [111] 1 Pet. Ad. 244. 4 Wash. 338. [112] 4 Mason, 541. 1 Sumner, 151. [113] Gilpin, 83. [114] 1 Pet. Ad. 244. 4 Wash. 338. The second mate and other inferior officers do not stand upon so firm a footing as the chief mate; yet they cannot be removed by the master, unless for gross and repeated acts of disobedience, intemperance, dishonesty or negligence, or for palpable incapacity. In case of the death or absence of the master, the chief mate becomes master by operation of law, but the second mate does not necessarily become chief mate. It lies with the new master to appoint whom he pleases to act as chief mate; though, in most cases, it should be the second mate, unless good reason exists for the contrary course. The second mate cannot, however, be degraded by the new master for any other cause than would have justified the former in so doing. LOG-BOOK.--It is the duty of the chief mate to keep the log-book of the ship. This should be neatly and carefully kept, and all interlineations and erasures should be avoided, as they always raise suspicion. The entries should be made as soon as possible after each event takes place, and nothing should be entered which the mate would not be willing to adhere to in a court of justice. (See page 145.) In Chapter III. of the Third Part, under the title, "Master's relation to Officers," page 188, will be found a discussion of the question, whether the master can compel an officer to do duty before the mast. In Chapters VIII., X., XI. and XII. of Part III., under the titles, "Revolt," "Forfeiture," "Desertion," &c., will be found the laws upon those subjects relating to seamen. And it may be generally remarked, that all those laws apply as well to the officers as to the foremast men. An officer forfeits his wages by desertion, and is criminally liable for mutiny, revolt, &c., like a common seaman. As to the questions what constitutes a revolt, mutiny, &c., and when absence or leaving a vessel is excusable, and when it works a forfeiture, and as to when wages are due, I would refer the reader to those titles in Chapters VIII., X., XI. and XII. of Part III., above referred to. WAGES.--Officers may sue in admiralty for their wages, and may arrest the ship, into whoseever hands it may have passed;[115] which is not the case with the master, who is supposed to look solely to the personal responsibility of the owners. [115] 1 Pet. Ad. 246. SICKNESS.--The right of an officer to be cured at the ship's expense is the same as that of a seaman.[116] The law upon that subject will be found in Chapter IX., title "Sickness," page 207. [116] 1 Sumner, 151. PUNISHMENT.--The laws of the United States provide that if any master or officer shall unjustifiably beat, wound, or imprison any of the crew, or withhold from them suitable food and nourishment, or inflict upon them any cruel and unusual punishment, he shall be imprisoned not exceeding five years, and fined not exceeding $1000 for each offence.[117] The officers, as part of the 'crew,' are entitled to the protection of this statute, against the master's acts; and, on the other hand, they are liable under it for any abuse of a seaman.[118] [117] Act 1835, ch. 313, §3. [118] 4 Mason, 104. 3 Sumner, 209. The law as to the officer's right to punish a seaman has been clearly settled, and is very simple. The sole authority to punish, for correction and discipline, resides with the master.[119] An officer has no right to use force with a seaman, either by chastising or confining him, except in a single class of cases; that is, upon an emergency which admits of no delay, and where the use of force is necessary for the safety of life and property. If a seaman is about to do an act which may endanger life or property, and instant action is required, the officer may confine him, or use force necessary to prevent him. So, if the immediate execution of an order is important, and a seaman, by obstinacy or wilful negligence, prevents or impedes the act, the officer may use force necessary to secure the performance of the duty. In these cases there must be a pressing necessity which will not admit of delay; for if delay is practicable, the officer must report to the master, and leave the duty of correction with him. A mate can in no case punish a seaman for the general purposes of correction and discipline, and still less for personal disrespect to himself.[120] If the master is not on board, and cannot be called upon, the authority of the officer is somewhat enlarged; but, even in this case, so far as a delay is practicable, he must leave the seaman to be dealt with by the master when he returns. Except in the cases and in the manner before mentioned, the officer is liable as a trespasser for any force used with a seaman. [119] 2 Sumner, 584. [120] Do. 1. 584. If the officer acts under the authority, express or implied, of the master, he will not be held liable, even though the punishment should be excessive and unjustifiable; for he is, in such cases, only the agent of the master, who is responsible for the act.[121] Yet, if the punishment be so excessive as to show malice or wantonness on the part of the officer, or there be anything in his conduct to imply the same, he will be liable in some measure himself. [121] Ware, 219. SUBORDINATES.--There are a number of men, usually, in merchant vessels, who are not in any respect officers, but who differ from the common seamen in that they ship in particular capacities, and to perform certain duties. These are the carpenter, steward, cook, &c. Such persons are not to be degraded for slight causes, though the master unquestionably has the power to do so, upon sufficient grounds.[122] He may also require them to do duty, if necessary, before the mast. He may require them to take the place of persons who have been obliged to do their work,[123] but he cannot exact from them the duty of able seamen, unless they are such in fact. Repeated acts of disobedience, intemperance, and gross negligence, and evident incapacity for the duties undertaken, are justifying causes of removal.[124] In all other respects this class of persons stands upon the same footing with common seamen. They have the same privileges, and are under the same obligations and penalties.[125] [122] 4 Mason, 84. Ware, 109. [123] Ware, 109. [124] Ware, 109. [125] 2 Pet. Ad. 268. PILOTS.--When a pilot, who is regularly appointed, is on board, he has the absolute control of the navigation of the vessel.[126] He is master for the time being, and is alone answerable for any damage occasioned by his own negligence or default.[127] [126] 1 Johns. 305. [127] 1 Pet. Ad. 223. 1 Mason, 508. A pilot may sue in admiralty for his wages.[128] [128] 1 Mason, 508. A pilot cannot claim _salvage_ for any acts done within the limits of his duty, however useful and meritorious they may have been.[129] If towing is necessary, pilots are bound to perform it, having a claim for compensation for damages done to their boats, or for extra labor.[130] If extraordinary pilot service is performed, additional pilotage is the proper reward, and not salvage.[131] If, however, the acts done by the pilot are clearly without and beyond his duty as pilot, he may claim salvage.[132] [129] Gilpin, 60. 10 Peters R. 108. 2 Hagg. 176. [130] 2 Hagg. 176. [131] 2 Hagg. 176. [132] 1 Rob. 106. Gilpin, 60. CHAPTER VII. SEAMEN. SHIPPING CONTRACT. Shipping contract--how formed--how signed. Erasures and interlineations. Unusual stipulations. By the law of the United States, in all foreign voyages, and in all coasting voyages to other than an adjoining state, there must be an agreement in writing, or in print, with every seaman on board the ship, (excepting only apprentices and servants of the master or owner,) declaring the voyage, and term or terms of time, for which such seaman is hired.[133] This contract is called the _shipping-articles_, and all the crew, including the master and officers, usually sign the same paper; it not being requisite that there should be a separate paper for each man. If there is not such a contract signed, each seaman could, by the old law, recover the highest rate of wages that had been given on similar voyages, at the port where he shipped, within three months next before the time of shipment.[134] By the law of 1840, he may, in such case, leave the vessel at any time, and demand the highest rate of wages given to any seaman during the voyage, or the rate agreed upon at the time of his shipment.[135] A seaman not signing the articles, is not bound by any of the regulations, nor subject to the penalties of the statutes;[136] but he is, notwithstanding, bound by the rules and liable to the forfeitures imposed by the general maritime law.[137] [133] Act 1790, ch. 56, §1. [134] Act 1790, ch. 56, §1. [135] Act 1840, ch. 23, §10. [136] Act 1790, ch. 56, §1. [137] 1 Pet. Ad. 212. These shipping-articles are legal evidence, and bind all parties whose names are annexed to them, both as to wages, the nature and length of the voyage, and the duties to be performed.[138] Accordingly, seamen have certain rights secured to them with reference to these papers. In the first place, the master must obtain a copy of the articles, certified to by the collector of the port from which the vessel sails, to take with him upon the voyage. This must be a fair and true copy, without erasures or interlineations. If there are any such erasures or interlineations, they will be presumed to be fraudulent, and will be set aside, unless they are satisfactorily explained in a manner consistent with innocent purposes, and with the provisions of laws which guard the rights of mariners. These articles must be produced by the master before any consul or commercial agent to whom a seaman may have submitted a complaint.[139] [138] 3 Mason, 161. Act 1840, ch. 23, §3. [139] Act 1840, ch. 23, §2, 19. Every unusual clause introduced into the shipping-articles, or anything which tends to deprive a seaman of what he would be entitled to by the general law, will be suspiciously regarded by the courts; and if there is reason to suppose that any advantage has been taken of him, or if the contract bears unequally upon him, it will be set aside. In order to sustain such a clause, the master or owner must show two things: first, that the seaman's attention was directed toward it, and its operation and effect explained to him; and, secondly, that he received some additional compensation or privilege in consideration of the clause. Unless the court is satisfied upon these two points, an unusual stipulation unfavorable to a seaman will be set aside.[140] For instance, seamen are entitled to have a medicine-chest on board, and in certain cases to be cured at the ship's expense; and the court set aside a clause in the shipping-articles in which it was stipulated that the seamen should bear all the expense, even though there were no medicine-chest on board.[141] Another clause was set aside, in which the voyage was described as from Baltimore to St. Domingo and _elsewhere_, on the ground that seamen are entitled to have their voyage accurately described.[142] [140] 2 Sumner, 443. 2 Mason, 541. [141] 2 Mason, 541. [142] 1 Hall's Law Jour. 207. 2 Gall. 477, 526. 2 Dods. 504. Gilp. 219. Some clauses which are not such as to be set aside, will yet be construed in favor of seamen, if their interpretation is at all doubtful.[143] A clause providing that no wages should be paid if the vessel should be taken or lost, or detained more than thirty days, was set aside, seamen being entitled to wages up to the last port of delivery.[144] If the amount of wages merely be omitted in the articles, there seems to be some doubt as to the introduction of other evidence to show the rate agreed upon, and as to the seaman's being entitled by statute to the highest rate of wages current.[145] If a seaman ships for a general coasting and trading voyage to different ports in the United States, and the articles provide for no time or place at which the voyage shall end, the seaman may leave at any time, provided he does not do so under circumstances peculiarly inconvenient to the other party.[146] [143] 1 Pet. Ad. 186, 215. [144] 2 Sumner, 443. [145] Gilpin, 452. Abb. on Shipp. 434, note. Act 1840, ch. 23, §10. [146] Ware, 437. If, however, the voyage is accurately described, and the wages specified, the seaman cannot be admitted to show that his contract was different from that contained in the articles.[147] [147] Gilpin, 305. It is no violation of the contract if the vessel departs from the voyage described, by accident, necessity, or superior force.[148] [148] 2 Hagg, 243. CHAPTER VIII. SEAMEN--CONTINUED. Rendering on board. Refusal to proceed. Desertion or absence during the voyage. Discharge. RENDERING ON BOARD.--If, after having signed the articles, and after a time has been appointed for the seaman to render himself on board, he neglects to appear, and an entry to that effect is made in the log-book, he forfeits one day's pay for every hour of absence; and if the ship is obliged to proceed without him, he forfeits a sum equal to double his advance.[149] These forfeitures apply to the commencement of the voyage, and cannot be exacted unless a memorandum is made on the articles, and an entry in full in the log-book. A justice of the peace may, upon complaint of the master, issue a warrant to apprehend a deserting seaman, and commit him to jail until the vessel is ready to proceed upon her voyage. The master must, however, first show that the contract has been signed, and that the seaman departed without leave, and in violation of it.[150] [149] Act 1790, ch. 56, §2. [150] Do. §7. REFUSAL TO PROCEED.--If, after the voyage has begun, and before the vessel has left the land, the first officer and a majority of the crew shall agree that the vessel is unfit to proceed on the voyage, either from fault or deficiency in hull, spars, rigging, outfits, provisions, or crew, they may require the master to make the nearest or most convenient port, and have the matter inquired into by the district judge, or two justices of the peace, taking two or more of the complainants before the judge. Thereupon the judge orders a survey, and decides whether the vessel is to proceed, or stop and be repaired and supplied; and both master and crew are bound by this decision. If the seamen and mate shall have made this complaint without reason, and from improper motives, they are liable to be charged with the expenses attending it.[151] [151] Do. §3. If, when the vessel is in a foreign port, the first or any other officer and a majority of the crew shall make complaint, in writing, to the consul, that the ship is unfit to proceed to sea, for any of the above reasons, the consul shall order an examination, in the same manner; and the decision of the consul shall bind all parties. If the consul shall decide that the vessel was sent to sea in an unsuitable condition, by neglect or design, the crew shall be entitled to their discharge and three months' additional pay; but not if it was done by accident or innocent mistake.[152] [152] Act 1840, ch. 23, §12--15. It is no justification for refusing to do duty and proceed upon the voyage, that a new master has been substituted in place of the one under whom the seaman originally shipped;[153] and if a blank is left for the name of the master, the seaman is supposed to ship under any who may be appointed.[154] The same rule applies to the substitution or appointment of any other officer of the ship during the voyage. [153] 1 Mason, 443. Bee, 48. 2 Sum. 582. [154] 6 Mass. 300. DESERTION OR ABSENCE DURING THE VOYAGE.--If, during the voyage, the seaman absents himself without leave, for less than forty-eight hours, and an entry thereof is made in full in the log-book, he forfeits three days' pay for each day's absence. But if the absence exceeds forty-eight hours, he forfeits all his wages then due, and all his goods and chattels on board the vessel at the time, and is liable to the owner in damages for the expense of hiring another seaman.[155] If he deserts within the limits of the United States, he is liable to be arrested and committed to jail, until the vessel sails.[156] If he deserts or absents himself in a foreign port, the consul is empowered to make use of the authorities of the place to reclaim him. If, however, the consul is satisfied that the desertion was caused by unusual or cruel treatment, the seaman may be discharged, and shall receive three months' additional wages.[157] It is not a desertion for a seaman to leave his vessel for the purpose of procuring necessary food, which has been refused on board; nor is a seaman liable if the conduct of the master has been such as to make it dangerous for him to remain on board,[158] or if the shipping-articles have been fraudulently altered.[159] Even in a clear case of desertion, if the party repents, and seeks to return to his duty within a reasonable time, he is entitled to be received on board again, unless his previous conduct had been such as would justify his discharge.[160] [155] Act 1790, ch. 56, §5. [156] Act 1790, ch. 56, §7. [157] Act 1840, ch. 23, §9. [158] 1 Hagg. 63. [159] Do. 182. [160] 1 Sumner, 373. As to the effect of desertion upon wages, and what is desertion in such cases, see the subject, "Wages affected by Desertion," Chapter XI. DISCHARGE.--By referring to Chapter IV., "Master's Relation to Crew," the seaman will find that, though the master has power to discharge a seaman for gross and repeated misconduct, yet that this right is closely watched, and any abuse of it is severely punished. He will also find there a statement of his own rights and privileges, with reference to a discharge. It has been seen that he may demand his discharge of the consul, if the vessel is not fit to proceed, and is not repaired, or if he has been cruelly and unjustifiably treated.[161] [161] Act 1840, ch. 23, §9, 14. If a vessel has been so much injured that it is doubtful whether she can be repaired, or the repairs cannot be made for a long time, during which it would be a great expense to the owners to support the seamen in a foreign country, it is held that the crew may be discharged, upon the owners' paying their passage home, and their wages up to the time of their arrival at the place of shipment.[162] [162] 2 Dodson, 403. As to discharge at the end of the voyage, see "Wages affected by Desertion," Chapter XI. CHAPTER IX. SEAMEN--CONTINUED. Provisions. Sickness. Medicine-chest. Hospital money. Relief in foreign ports. Protection. PROVISIONS.--For the benefit of seamen it has been enacted that every vessel bound on a voyage across the Atlantic, shall have on board, well secured under deck, at least sixty gallons of water, one hundred pounds of wholesome ship bread, and one hundred pounds of salted flesh meat, over and above the stores of master or passengers, and the live stock. And if the crew of any vessel not so provided shall be put upon short allowance of water, flesh, or bread, such seaman shall recover from the master double wages for every day he was so allowanced.[163] The same rule applies to other voyages than those across the Atlantic, and the amount of provisions stowed below must be in proportion to the length of the voyage, compared with one across the Atlantic.[164] It also applies to seamen shipped in foreign ports, as well as to those shipped in the United States.[165] It has been thought that if the articles enumerated cannot be procured, the master may substitute other wholesome provisions; but it is doubtful whether even this will free him from the penalty; at least it will not unless he can show that it was impossible to procure them at the last port of departure.[166] [163] Act 1790, ch. 56, §9. [164] Do. [165] 1 Pet. Ad. 223. [166] 1 Pet. Ad. 229, 223. Bee, 80 Abb. 135, note. Ware, 454. Besides this special enactment, a seaman may always recover damages of a master who unnecessarily and wantonly deprives him of sufficient food and nourishment.[167] If, however, the short allowance is caused by inevitable accident, without any fault of the master or owner, or is a matter of fair discretion in a case of common danger, the master is not liable. Another law of the United States provides that if any master or other officer shall wilfully and without justifiable cause withhold suitable food and nourishment from a seaman, he shall be fined not exceeding $1000 and imprisoned not exceeding five years.[168] The master may at any time, at his discretion, put the crew upon an allowance of water and eatables; but if it is a short allowance, he must be able to give a justifying reason. [167] 2 Pet. Ad. 409. [168] Act 1835, ch. 313, §3. SICKNESS. MEDICINE-CHEST.--Every vessel of one hundred and fifty tons or upwards, navigated by ten or more persons in all, and bound on a voyage beyond the United States, and every vessel of seventy-five tons or upwards, navigated by six or more persons in the whole, and bound from the United States to any port in the West Indies, is required to have a chest of medicines, put up by an apothecary of known reputation, and accompanied by directions for administering the same. The chest must also be examined at least once a year, and supplied with fresh medicines.[169] [169] Act 1790, ch. 56, §8; 1805, ch. 88, §1. In case of dispute, the owner must prove the sufficiency of the medicine-chest. It does not lie with the seaman to prove its insufficiency.[170] [170] 2 Mason, 541. If a vessel has a suitable medicine-chest on board, it would seem that the ship is not to be charged with the medicines and medical advice which a seaman may need. But the ship is still liable for the expenses of his nursing, care, diet, and lodging.[171] Accordingly, if a seaman is put on shore at a hospital or elsewhere, for his cure, the ship is chargeable with so much of the expense as is incurred for nursing, care, diet, and lodging; and unless the owner can specify the items of the charge, and show how much was for medical advice, and how much for other expenses, he must pay the whole.[172] The seaman is to be cured at the expense of the ship, of a sickness or injury sustained in the ship's service;[173] but if he contracts a disease by his own fault or vices, the ship is not chargeable.[174] A sick seaman is entitled to proper nursing, lodging, and diet. If these cannot be had, or are not furnished on board the vessel, he is entitled to be taken on shore to a hospital, or to some place where these can be obtained. It is often attempted to be shown that the seaman was put on shore at his own request. This is no defence. He is entitled to be put on shore if his disease requires it; and it is seldom that proper care can be taken of a seaman on board ship.[175] [171] 2 Mason, 541. 1 Sumner, 151. [172] 1 Pet. Ad. 256, note. [173] 1 Sumner, 195. [174] Gilpin, 435. 1 Pet. Ad. 142, 152. [175] 1 Pet. Ad. 256, note. If a seaman requires further medicines and medical advice than the chest and directions can give, and is not sent ashore, it would seem that the ship ought to bear the expense; but this point has never been decided.[176] If the medicine-chest can furnish all he needs, the ship is exempted.[177] [176] Gilpin, 435. 1 Pet. Ad. 142, 152, 255. [177] 2 Mason, 541. HOSPITAL MONEY.--Every seaman must pay twenty cents a month, out of his wages, for hospital money. This goes to the establishment and support of hospitals for sick and disabled seamen.[178] [178] Act 1798, ch. 94, §1. RELIEF IN FOREIGN PORTS.--If a vessel is sold in a foreign port and her crew discharged, or if a seaman is discharged with his own consent, he can receive two months' extra wages of the consul, who must obtain it of the master.[179] This applies only to the voluntary sale of the vessel, and not when the sale is rendered necessary by shipwreck. If, however, after the disaster the vessel might have been repaired at a reasonable expense and in a reasonable time, but the owner chooses to sell, the two months' pay is due. To escape the payment, the owner must show that he was obliged to sell.[180] [179] Act 1803, ch. 62, §3. [180] Ware, 485. Gilpin, 198. It is also the duty of the consuls to provide subsistence and a passage to the United States for any American seamen found destitute within their districts. The seamen must, if able, do duty on board the vessel in which they are sent home, according to their several abilities.[181] [181] Act 1803, ch. 62, §4. The crew of every vessel shall have the fullest liberty to lay their complaints before the consul or commercial agent in any foreign port, and shall in no respect be restrained or hindered therein by the master or any officer, unless sufficient and valid objection exist against their landing. In which case, if any seaman desire to see the consul, the master must inform the consul of it forthwith; stating, in writing, the reason why the seaman is not permitted to land, and that the consul is desired to come on board. Whereupon the consul must proceed on board and inquire into the causes of complaint.[182] [182] Act 1840, ch. 23, §1. PROTECTION.--Every American seaman, upon applying to the collector of the port from which he departs, and producing proof of his citizenship, is entitled to a letter of protection. The collector may charge for this twenty-five cents.[183] [183] Act 1796, ch. 36, §4. CHAPTER X. SEAMEN--CONTINUED. Punishment. Revolt and mutiny. Embezzlement. Piracy. PUNISHMENT.--As to the right of the master to punish a seaman by corporal chastisement, imprisonment on shore, confinement on board, &c., and the extent of that right, and the master's liability for exceeding it,--the seaman is referred to Chapter IV., "The Master's relation to the Crew," title, "Imprisonment" and "Punishment." He will there see that the master possesses this right to a limited extent, and that he is strictly answerable for the abuse of it. Disobedience of orders, combinations to refuse duty, dishonest conduct, personal insolence, and habitual negligence and backwardness, are all causes which justify punishment in a greater or less degree. The contract which a seaman makes with the master, is not like that of a man who engages in any service on shore. It is somewhat military in its nature.[184] The master has great responsibilities resting upon him, and is entitled to instant and implicit obedience. To ensure this, regular and somewhat strict discipline must be preserved. The master, also, cannot obtain assistance when at sea, as any one can who is in authority upon land. He must depend upon the habits of faithful and respectful discharge of duty which his crew have acquired, and if this fails, he may resort to force. He is answerable for the safety of the ship, and for the safe keeping and delivery of valuable cargoes, and in almost all cases he is the first person to whom the owner of the vessel and cargo will look for indemnity. Considering this, the seamen will feel that it is not unreasonable that the master should have power to protect himself and all for whom he acts, even by force if necessary.[185] A good seaman, who is able and willing to do his duty faithfully and at all times, and treats his officers respectfully, will seldom be abused; and if he is, the master is liable to him personally in damages, and is also subject to be indicted by the government and tried as a criminal. A seaman should be warned against taking the law into his own hands. If the treatment he receives is unjustifiable, he should still submit to it, if possible, until the voyage is up, or until he arrives at some port where he can make complaint. If he is conscious that he is not to blame, and an assault is made upon him unjustifiably and with dangerous severity, he may defend himself; but he should not attempt to punish the offender, or to inflict anything in the way of retaliation.[186] [184] Ware, 86. 3 Wash. 515. [185] Ware, 219. [186] Do. 3 Wash. 552. In Chapter VI., title, "Mates," the reader will see how far any inferior officer of a vessel may use force with a seaman. REVOLT AND MUTINY.--If any one or more of the crew of an American vessel shall by fraud or force, or by threats or intimidations, take the command of the vessel from the master or other commanding officer, or resist or prevent him in the free and lawful exercise of his authority, or transfer the command to any other person not lawfully entitled to it; every person so offending, and his aiders and abbettors, shall be deemed guilty of a revolt or mutiny and felony; and shall be punished by fine not exceeding $2000, and by imprisonment and confinement to hard labor not exceeding ten years, according to the nature and aggravation of the offence.[187] And if any seaman shall endeavor to commit a revolt or mutiny, or shall combine with others on board to make a revolt or mutiny, or shall solicit or incite any of the crew to disobey or resist the lawful orders of the master or other officer, or to refuse or neglect their proper duty on board, or shall assemble with others in a riotous or mutinous manner, or shall unlawfully confine the master or other commanding officer,--every person committing any one or more of these offences shall be imprisoned not exceeding five years, or fined not exceeding $1000, or both, according to the nature and aggravation of the offence.[188] [187] Act 1835, ch. 313, §1. [188] Do. §2. It will be seen that the first of these laws applies only to cases where seamen actually throw off all authority, deprive the master of his command, and assume the control themselves, which is to make a revolt. The last is designed to punish endeavors and combinations to make a revolt, which are not fully carried out. Every little instance of disobedience, or insolent conduct, or even force used against the master or other officer, will not be held a revolt or an endeavor to make a revolt. There must be something showing an intention to subvert the lawful authority of the master.[189] It does not excuse seamen, however, from this offence, that they confined their refusal to one particular portion of their duty. If that duty was lawfully required of them, it is equally a subversion of authority as if they had refused all duty.[190] [189] 4 Wash. 528. 1 Pet. Ad. 178. [190] 4 Mason, 105. If the crew interfere by force or threats to prevent the infliction of punishment for a gross offence, it is an endeavor to commit a revolt.[191] [191] 1 Sumner, 448. To constitute the offence of confining the master, it is not necessary that he should be forcibly secured in any particular place, or even that his body should be seized and held; any act which deprives him of his personal liberty in going about the ship, or prevents his doing his duty freely, (if done with that intention,[192]) is a confinement.[193] So is a threat of immediate bodily injury, if made in such a manner as would reasonably intimidate a man of ordinary firmness.[194] [192] 4 Wash. 428. [193] 4 Mason, 105. 4 Wash. 548. 1 Sumner, 448. 3 Wash. 525. [194] Pet. C. C. 213. In all these cases of revolt, mutiny, endeavors to commit the same, and confinement of the master, it is to be remembered that the acts are excusable if done from a sufficient justifying cause. The master may so conduct himself as to justify the officers and crew in placing restraints upon him, to prevent his committing acts which might endanger the lives of all the persons on board. But an excuse of this kind is received with great caution, and the crew should be well assured of the necessity of such a step, before taking it, since they run a great risk in so interfering.[195] [195] 4 Mason, 105. 1 Sumner, 448. Pet. C. C. 118. EMBEZZLEMENT.--If any of the crew steal, or appropriate, or by gross negligence suffer to be stolen, any part of the cargo, or anything belonging to the ship, they are responsible for the value of everything stolen or appropriated. It is necessary that the fraud, connivance, or negligence of a seaman should be proved against him, before he can be charged with anything lost or stolen; and in no case is an innocent man bound to contribute towards a loss occasioned by the misconduct of another. If, however, it is clearly proved that the whole crew were concerned, but one offender is not known more than another, and the circumstances are such as to affect all the crew, each man is to contribute to the loss, unless he clears himself from the suspicion.[196] [196] 1 Mason, 104. Gilpin, 461. PIRACY.--If the master or crew of a vessel shall, upon the high seas, seize upon or rob the master or crew of another vessel; or if they shall run away with the vessel committed to their charge, or any goods to the amount of $50; or voluntarily yield them up to pirates; or if the crew shall prevent the master by violence from fighting in the defence of vessel or property; such conduct is piracy, and punishable with death.[197] [197] Act 1790, ch. 36, §8; 1820, ch. 113, §3. It is also piracy, and punishable with death, to be engaged in any foreign country in kidnapping any negro or mulatto, or in decoying or receiving them on board a vessel with the intention of making them slaves.[198] [198] Act 1820, ch. 113, §4, 5. CHAPTER XI. Seamen's Wages. Affected by desertion or absence;--by misconduct;--by imprisonment;--by capture;--by loss of vessel and interruption of voyage. Wages on an illegal voyage. Wages affected by death or disability. WAGES AFFECTED BY DESERTION OR ABSENCE.--It has been seen that if a seaman, at the commencement of the voyage, neglects to render himself on board at the time appointed, and an entry thereof is made in the log-book, he forfeits one day's pay for every hour's absence; and if he shall wholly absent himself, so that the ship is obliged to go to sea without him, he forfeits his advance and as much more.[199] And if at any time during the voyage he absents himself without leave, and returns within forty-eight hours, he forfeits three days' pay for every day's absence; but if he is absent more than forty-eight hours, he forfeits all the wages then due him, and all his clothes and goods on board at the time.[200] These forfeitures cannot be exacted against the seaman unless there is an entry made in the log-book on the same day that he left, specifying the name of the seaman, and that he was absent without leave.[201] [199] Act 1790, ch. 56, §2. [200] Do. §4. [201] Gilpin, 83, 140, 207. Ware, 309. But independently of these regulations, and without the necessity of any entry, &c., a seaman forfeits his wages for deserting the vessel, or absenting himself wrongfully and without leave, by the general law of all commercial nations.[202] If, however, the seaman is absent without fault of his own,[203] or if he is obliged to desert by reason of cruel treatment, want of food, or the like, he does not forfeit his wages. But in such case, the seaman must prove that the treatment was such that he could not remain without imminent danger to his life, limbs, or health.[204] If the voyage for which he shipped has been abandoned, or there has been a gross and unnecessary deviation, he does not forfeit his wages for leaving the vessel; but then the change of voyage must have been actually determined upon and known to the seaman.[205] [202] Ware, 309. [203] 1 Mason, 45. Bee, 134, 48. Gilpin, 225. [204] 1 Pet. Ad. 186. Gilpin, 225. 2 Pet. Ad. 420, 428. Ware, 83, 91, 109. [205] Gilpin, 150. 2 Pet. Ad. 415. Even if the seaman shall have clearly deserted without justifiable cause, or absented himself more than forty-eight hours, yet, if he shall offer to return and do his duty, the master must receive him, unless his previous conduct would justify a discharge.[206] And if he is so received back, and does his duty faithfully for the rest of the voyage, the forfeiture is considered as remitted, and he is entitled to his wages for the whole voyage.[207] If, however, the owner has suffered any special damage from the wrongful absence of the seaman, as, if the vessel has been detained, or a man hired in his place, all such necessary expenses may be deducted from the wages.[208] [206] 1 Sumner, 373. [207] 2 Wash. 272. Gilpin, 145. 1 Sumner, 373. 1 Pet. Ad. 160. [208] Gilpin, 145, 298, 98. A mere leaving of the vessel, though a wrongful absence, is not a desertion, unless it is done with the intention to desert.[209] A seaman is bound to load and unload cargo in the course of the voyage if required of him, and a refusal to do so is a refusal of duty.[210] If the voyage is at an end, according to the articles, and the vessel is safely moored at the port of discharge, the seamen are still bound to discharge the cargo if it is required of them. If they do not, their refusal or neglect does not, however, work a forfeiture of all their wages, but only makes them liable to a deduction, as compensation to the owner for any damage he may have suffered.[211] The custom in almost all sea-ports of the United States is, to discharge the crew, and not to require them to unload cargo at the end of the voyage. This custom is so strong that if the owner or master wishes to retain the crew, he must give them notice to that effect. Unless the crew are distinctly told that they must remain and discharge cargo, they may leave the vessel as soon as she is safely moored, or made fast. If they are required to remain and discharge cargo, they make themselves liable to a deduction from their wages for a neglect or refusal, but do not forfeit them.[212] The seaman must bear in mind, however, that this is only when the voyage is at an end, and the ship is at the final port of discharge. If he refuses to load or unload at any port in the course of the voyage, and before it is up, according to the articles, he does so at the risk of forfeiting all his wages.[213] [209] 1 Sumner, 373. Ware, 309. [210] 1 Pet. Ad. 253. [211] 1 Sumner, 373. Gilpin, 208. Ware, 454. 2 Hagg. 40. [212] 1 Sumner, 373. Gilpin, 208. [213] 1 Pct. Ad. 253. The master and owners of a vessel are allowed ten days after the voyage is up, before a suit can be brought against them for the wages of the crew.[214] This is in order to give them time to settle all accounts and discover delinquencies. If the crew are retained to unload, then the ten days begin to run from the time the vessel is completely unloaded. But if the crew are not retained for this purpose, but are discharged and allowed to leave the vessel, then the ten days begin to run from the day they are discharged.[215] [214] Act 1790, ch. 56, §6. [215] 1 Pet. Ad. 165, 210. Ware, 458. Dunl. Ad. Pr. 99. WAGES AFFECTED BY MISCONDUCT.--A seaman may forfeit his wages by gross misconduct; and if not forfeited, he may be liable to have a deduction made from them, for any damage caused to the owner by such misconduct. To create a forfeiture, his misbehavior must be gross and aggravated.[216] A single act of disobedience, or a single neglect of duty, will not deprive him of his wages.[217] A refusal to do duty in a moment of high excitement caused by punishment will not forfeit wages, unless followed by obstinate perseverance in such refusal.[218] Where _drunkenness_ is habitual and gross, so as to create a general incapacity to perform duty, it is a ground of forfeiture of wages. But occasional acts of drunkenness, if the seaman in other respects performs his duty, will not deprive him of his wages.[219] In this, as in all cases of neglect, disobedience, or wilful misconduct, which do not create a forfeiture, a deduction may be made if the owner has suffered any loss.[220] [216] 4 Mason, 84. Bee, 148. [217] 4 Mason, 84. [218] Do. [219] 2 Hagg. 2. 4 Mason, 541. [220] 4 Mason, 541. I Sumner, 384. Bee, 237. 2 Hagg. 420. Gilpin, 140. 1 Pet. Ad. 168. In one instance a forfeiture of one half of a seaman's wages was decreed, in consequence of his striking the master. He did not forfeit the whole, because he had been otherwise punished.[221] [221] Bee. 184. If the seaman is imprisoned for misconduct, he does not forfeit the wages that accrued during his confinement, nor, what amounts to the same thing, is he bound to pay those of a person hired in his place during his imprisonment.[222] [222] Gilpin, 83, 140, 33. Ware, 9. If the crime of a seaman is against the laws of the United States, and too great for the master's authority to punish, he must be confined and brought home to trial. But this does not forfeit his wages, though any loss or damage to the owner may be deducted.[223] [223] 1 Pet. Ad. 168. In all cases of forfeiture of wages for misconduct, it is only the wages due at the time of the misconduct that are lost. The wages subsequently earned are not affected by any previous misbehavior.[224] [224] 4 Mason, 84. If a seaman or officer is evidently incapable of doing the duty he shipped for, he may be put upon other duty, and a reasonable deduction may be made from his wages.[225] [225] Ware, 109. WAGES AFFECTED BY IMPRISONMENT.--If a seaman is imprisoned by a warrant from a judge or justice of the peace, within the limits of the United States, for desertion or refusal to render himself on board, he is liable to pay the cost of his commitment and support in jail, as well as the wages of any person hired in his place.[226] So, if a seaman is imprisoned in a foreign port by the authorities of the place for a breach of their laws, the costs and loss to the owner may be deducted from his wages; but not so if he is imprisoned at the request of the master.[227] The right of the master to imprison at all is a doubtful one, and dangerous of exercise; and if he does resort to it, he can never charge the expenses to the seamen, nor deduct their wages during imprisonment.[228] [226] Gilpin, 223. [227] Gilpin, 223. [228] Ware, 18, 503, Gilpin, 83, 233. WAGES AFFECTED BY CAPTURE.--If a neutral ship is captured, it is the right and duty of the seamen to remain by the vessel until the case is finally settled.[229] If she is liberated, they are then entitled to their wages for the whole voyage; and if freight is decreed, they are entitled to their wages for as much of the voyage as freight is given.[230] And if at any future time the owners recover the vessel, or her value, upon appeal or by treaty, they are liable for wages.[231] In order to secure his wages in these cases, the seaman must remain by the vessel until her sale or condemnation, and the master cannot oblige him to take his discharge.[232] The condemnation or sale of the vessel puts an end to his contract. If he leaves before the condemnation or sale, with the master's consent, he does not lose his chance of recovering his wages.[233] Even if the vessel is condemned, and the owner never recovers the vessel or its value, yet the seaman is entitled to his wages up to the last port of delivery, and for half the time she lay there.[234] [229] 2 Sumner, 443. 1 Pet. Ad. 128. [230] 2 Gall. 178. 2 Sumner, 443. [231] 3 Mason, 161. [232] 1 Mason, 45. [233] 1 Mason, 45. [234] 1 Pet. Ad. 203. WAGES AFFECTED BY LOSS OF VESSEL OR INTERRUPTION OF VOYAGE.--If a vessel meets with a disaster, it is the duty of the crew to remain by her so long as they can do it with safety, and to exert themselves to the utmost of their ability to save as much as possible of the vessel and cargo.[235] If they abandon the vessel unnecessarily, they forfeit all their wages; and if their leaving was necessary and justifiable, yet they lose their wages except up to the last port of delivery and for half the time the vessel was lying there, or for so long as she was engaged with the outward cargo.[236] This rule may seem hard, but its object is to secure the services of the crew in case of a disaster. If by their exertions any parts of the vessel or cargo are saved, they are entitled to wages, and an extra sum for salvage.[237] If the vessel is abandoned and nothing is saved, they lose their wages, except up to the last port of delivery and for half the time the vessel was lying there.[238] [235] Ware, 49. 1 Pet. 204. [236] Pet. C. C. 182. 3 Sumner, 286. [237] Ware, 49. Gilpin, 79. 2 Mason, 319. I Hagg. 227. [238] 2 Mason, 329. 1 Pet. Ad. 204, 130; 2 do. 391. 11 Mass. 545. The general rule is, that a seaman's wages are secure to him whenever the vessel has earned any freight, whatever may afterwards happen. And a vessel earns freight at every port where she delivers any cargo. For the benefit of seamen a vessel is held to earn freight whenever she goes to a port under a contract for freight, though she go in ballast.[239] A seaman also secures his wages wherever the ship might have earned freight but for the agreement or other act of the owner.[240] If a vessel is on a trading voyage from port to port, and is lost on the homeward passage, wages would probably be allowed for the outward passage, and for half the time she was engaged in trading with the old or new cargoes; the trading and going from port to port being considered the same as though she had been lying in port all the time, and discharging and receiving cargo. Or else, wages would be given up to the last port at which she took in any return cargo, and for half the time she was lying there.[241] [239] 2 Mason, 319. 1 Pet. Ad. 207. [240] 3 Sumner, 286. 2 Mason, 319. 2 Hagg. 158. [241] Pet. C. C. 182. 2 Pet. Ad. 390. These rules apply only to cases where the voyage is broken up by inevitable accidents, as by perils of the seas, capture, war or superior force. If the voyage is broken up by the fault of the seamen, they lose all their wages. If, on the other hand, the seamen are compelled to leave, or the voyage is broken up by the fault of the master or owner, as by cruel treatment, want of provisions, or the like, the crew would be justly entitled to wages for the whole voyage contracted for. If the vessel is sold, or the voyage altered or abandoned by the master or owner, not from inevitable necessity, but for their own interest and convenience, then the crew are entitled, by statute, to wages for all the time they were on board, and two months' extra pay.[242] And, by the general law, they would always receive some extra wages as a compensation for the loss of the voyage, and as a means of supporting themselves and procuring a passage home; or, perhaps, full wages for the voyage.[243] [242] Act 1803, ch. 62, §3. [243] 2 Pet. Ad. 264. Bee, 48. 2 Gall. 182. 3 Johns. R. 518. WAGES ON AN ILLEGAL VOYAGE.--A seaman has no remedy for his wages upon an illegal voyage; as, for instance, in the slave trade.[244] Wages have, however, been allowed, where it was proved that the seaman was innocent of all knowledge of, or participation in, the illegal voyage.[245] [244] 9 Wheat. 409. 6 Rob. 207. 2 Mason, 58. Edw. 35. [245] 9 Wheat. 409. WAGES AFFECTED BY DEATH OR DISABILITY.--If a seaman dies during the voyage, wages are to be paid up to the time of his death.[246] A seaman is entitled to all his wages during sickness, and during any time he was disabled from performing duty. But if his sickness or disability is brought on by his own fault, as by vice or wilful misconduct, a deduction may be made for the loss of his services.[247] So, where the death of a seaman was caused by his own unjustifiable and wrongful acts, his wages were held forfeited.[248] If a seaman, at the time he ships, is laboring under a disease which incapacitates or is likely to incapacitate him during the voyage, and he conceals the same, no wages will be allowed him, or a deduction will be made from them, according to the nature of the case.[249] If, in consequence of sickness, a seaman is left at a foreign port, he is still entitled to wages for the whole voyage.[250] [246] Bee, 254, 441. [247] 1 Pet. Ad. 142, 138. [248] Do. 142. [249] 2 Pet. Ad. 263. [250] Bee, 414. 2 Gall. 46. 1 Pet. Ad. 117. CHAPTER XII. SEAMEN--CONCLUDED. Recovery of wages. Interest on wages. Salvage. RECOVERY OF WAGES.--A seaman has a threefold remedy for his wages: first, against the master; secondly, against the owners; and, thirdly, against the ship itself and the freight earned.[251] He may pursue any one of these, or he may pursue them all at the same time in courts of admiralty. He has what is called a _lien_ upon the ship for his wages; that is, he has a right, at any time, to seize the vessel by a process of law, and retain it until his claim is paid, or otherwise decided upon by the court. This lien does not cease upon the sailing of the ship on another voyage; and the vessel may be taken notwithstanding there is a new master and different owners.[252] A seaman does not lose his lien upon the ship by lapse of time. He may take the ship whenever he finds her; though he must not allow a long time to elapse if he has had any opportunity of enforcing his claim, lest it should be considered a stale demand. In common law courts a suit cannot be brought for wages after six years have expired since they became due. This is not the case in courts of admiralty.[253] [251] Bee, 254. 2 Sumner, 443. 2 Gall. 398. [252] 2 Sumner, 443. 5 Pet. R. 675. [253] 2 Gall. 477. Paine C. C. 180. 3 Mason, 91. The lien of the seaman for wages takes precedence of every other lien or claim upon the vessel.[254] The seaman's wages must be first paid, even if they take up the whole value of the ship or freight. The wreck of a ship is bound for the wages, and the rule in admiralty is, that a seaman's claim on the ship is good so long as there is a plank of her left.[255] If, after capture and condemnation, the ship itself is not restored, but the owners are indemnified in money, the seaman's lien attaches to such proceeds.[256] [254] Ware, 134, 41. [255] Sumner, 50. 1 Ware, 41. [256] 5 Pet. R. 675. Besides this lien upon the ship, the seaman has also a lien upon the freight earned, and upon the cargo.[257] He may also sue the owner or master, or both, personally. They are, however, answerable _personally_ only for the wages earned while the ship was in their own hands.[258] But a suit may be brought against the _ship_ after she has changed owners.[259] [257] Ware, 134. 5 Pet. R. 675. [258] 11 Johns. 72. 6 Mass. 300; 8 do. 483. [259] 5 Pet. R. 675. 2 Sumner, 443. A seaman does not lose his lien upon the vessel by taking an order upon the owner.[260] [260] Ware, 185. After a vessel is abandoned to the underwriters, they become liable for the seamen's wages, from the time of the abandonment.[261] [261] 4 Mason, 196. If, at the end of the voyage, the crew are discharged and not retained to unload, their wages are due immediately;[262] but they cannot sue in admiralty until ten days after the day of discharge.[263] If they are retained to unload, then the owner is allowed ten days from the time the cargo is fully discharged. If, however, the vessel is about to proceed to sea before the ten days will elapse, or before the cargo will be unloaded, the seaman may attach the vessel immediately.[264] If the owner retains his crew while the cargo is unloading, he must unload it within a reasonable time. Fifteen working days has frequently been held a reasonable time for unloading, and the ten days have been allowed to run from that time.[265] [262] Ware, 458. Dunl. Ad. Pr. 99. 1 Pet. Ad 165, 210. [263] Act 1790, ch. 56, §6. [264] Do. [265] 1 Pet. Ad. 165. Abb. Shipp. 456, n. The longest time allowed by law for unloading vessels is twenty days, if over 300 tons, and ten days, if under that tonnage. Probably seamen would not be held bound to the vessel for a longer time than is thus allowed by law for unloading. INTEREST ON WAGES.--In suits for seamen's wages, interest is allowed from the time of the demand; and if no demand is proved, then from the time of the commencement of the suit.[266] [266] 2 Gall. 45. SALVAGE.--If a vessel is picked up at sea abandoned, or in distress, and any of the crew of the vessel which falls in with her go on board, and are the means of saving her, or of bringing her into port, they are entitled to salvage.[267] In this case, all the crew who are ready and willing to engage in the service are entitled to a share of the reward, although they may not have gone on board the wreck.[268] The reason is, that where all are ready to go, and a selection is made, there would be injustice and favoritism in allowing any one the privilege more than another. Besides, those who remain have an extra duty to perform in consequence of the others having gone on board the wreck.[269] [267] Ware, 477. 1 Pet. Ad. 306. [268] Ware, 477. 2 Pet. Ad. 281. [269] 2 Dodson, 132. Crews are not ordinarily entitled to salvage for services performed on board their own vessel, whatever may have been their perils or hardships, or the gallantry of their services in saving ship and cargo;[270] for some degree of extra exertion to meet perils and accidents, is within the scope of a seaman's duty. In case of shipwreck, however, where, by the general law, wages are forfeited, the court will allow salvage, considering it as in the nature of wages due. In one instance salvage was refused to a part of a crew who rescued the ship from the rest who had mutinied; for this was held to be no more than their duty.[271] [270] 10 Pet. R. 108. 1 Hagg. 227. [271] 2 Dods. 14. Yet seamen may entitle themselves to salvage for services performed on board their own vessel, if clearly beyond the line of their regular duty; as, when the crew rise and rescue the vessel from the enemy after she has been taken.[272] So, where a ship was abandoned at sea, and one or two men voluntarily remained behind, and by great exertions brought her into port.[273] If an apprentice is a salvor, he, and not his master, is entitled to the salvage.[274] If one set of men go on board a wreck, but fall into distress and are relieved by others, they do not lose their claim for salvage, but each set of salvors shares according to the merit of its services. If the second set take advantage of the necessity and distress of the first salvors to impose terms upon them, as, that they shall give up all claim for salvage, such conditions will not be regarded by the court.[275] [272] 1 Pet. Ad. 306. [273] 2 Cr. 240. 1 Pet. Ad. 48. [274] 2 Cr. 240. 2 Pet. Ad. 282. [275] 1 Sumner, 400.