The Men of the Merchant Service / Being the polity of the mercantile marine for 'longshore readers

by Frank Thomas Bullen

But to return. Having, then, this potent lever in his grasp, this guarantee for the good behaviour of his officers, the indolent master may, if he will, leave everything to them, except just the obtaining of the ship's position each day. Even that it has been my lot to see neglected by a shipmaster. Of course he will occasionally potter about and find fault, if he be, as well as indolent, of a small, mean character. Such a master is a sore trial to both officers and crew. Asked for instructions as to what he wishes done, he will reply that he did not expect his officers would need to be shown their work, and that he would prefer to have men about him who did not want dry-nursing. Which being translated means that he wants his officers to do things on their own initiative, so that he can at any time, if in want of a little recreation, find it in quarrelling with them for doing that which they deemed to be right.

For instance, I was once mate of a barque. While lying in Noumea, failing any instructions from the master, I decided to set up all the rigging, which was so slack as to be dangerous supposing that we encountered any bad weather. The work was well under way when the master came on deck from his cabin, where he had been dozing all the morning, and, seeing what was going on, called out loudly: "Here, Mr. Bullen, just stop that, will you? That can be done any time. I want the ship painted outside." Far too well in hand to make any remark, and really rather glad to get a definite order, I had the gear unrove and put away; and soon we were in the thick of painting. We did not get another opportunity to tighten up that rigging before we left one of the northern ports of the island, deep loaded with copper ore. We were hardly outside the harbour, bound to Newcastle, N.S.W., when it came on to blow, the vessel rolled tremendously, the rigging worked slacker and slacker, and in the middle watch that night she rolled her three masts over the side. Then, of course, I was blamed for not having had the rigging set up.

Then there is the indolent skipper, who leaves everything to the mate, and never finds fault either. Amiable but lazy, he spends most of his time in sleep. He scarcely looks at a book, does not meditate, but leads a sort of fungus life, indulging in a perpetual kief, or cessation of all the nobler faculties. Naturally, young officers like that kind of skipper, since they have a perfectly free hand; but they despise him, and in their inmost heart they know that such a ship is very little good to them. And in times of emergency or danger, when naturally every one on board looks to the head for leadership, it is disconcerting, to say the least, to find him altogether wanting in initiative either in energy or resource. Of course, this is not saying that many masters will not be found who are fussy and meddlesome to the most irritating degree when the weather is fine and the ship is on the high seas, who, when danger looms near and the master's good qualities should shine brightest, are but broken reeds. One master whom I liked very much—a really good man, but without back-bone—was looked upon by all hands with good-natured toleration as a sort of benevolent old female, who, if he did keep himself in evidence pretty much all the time, did not interfere to any great extent. But there came a day when we were running the Easting down (bound to Calcutta) that we were overtaken by a really heavy gale. All our energies were needed to get sail off the deeply laden ship, for she was wallowing dangerously, and was not speedy enough to keep ahead of the sea. While we were thus striving with all our powers, under the smart mate's direction, the skipper, swathed in many clothes, clung desperately to the weather-mizzen rigging, a pitiful picture of fear, his legs bending under him all ways, and his grey beard beslavered with the foam of fright. A more abject specimen of a coward I never saw. All hands noted his behaviour, and from that day forward he was treated with utter contempt. His authority was a thing of naught, and the discipline of the ship (never very rigid in the Merchant Service) was entirely gone. At last the men refused to obey a most necessary order, simply because it necessitated work in their watch below. The offence was flagrant, involving as it did the possible loss of the ship and all hands. He summoned the recalcitrant watch aft and reasoned with them. They merely gibed at and taunted him with cowardice and uselessness in reply. When we arrived at Calcutta he had them up before the shipping-master for punishment, and that worthy fined them two days' pay—at which they laughed hugely.

Now, such a scene as that would be unthinkable on board of either an American ship or a "Blue-nose" (British North American vessel). There the traditions are all on the side of stern discipline, which is not based upon law, but upon force. The foremast hand, whoever he may be, that signs in an American ship realizes at once that it is dangerous to play any tricks with his superior officers. Because, although he does not reason it out, he feels that it would be useless to invoke the law to protect him against the certain consequences of shirking work, insolence, or laziness.

And this leads me naturally to a consideration of the American skipper; that is to say, the skipper of the sailing ship, the man who, by dint of seamanship alone, has risen from the lowliest position to command. No better sailors ever lived than the masters of American ships; and it should never be forgotten, when the statistics of our marvellous Mercantile Marine are studied, that not so many years ago the American merchant navy was more than equal to our own. Not only so, but the shore population was also so deeply tinged with the maritime spirit that nautical terms were a part of the common speech of those who had never even seen the sea. It is hardly fair to use the past tense, because this is largely the case now; so much so, that a book bristling with nautical phrases will be read in America by both sexes with perfect ease, from their familiarity with nautical terminology.

What sailor is there worth his salt who does not cherish proudly the remembrance of those magnificent "Down East" clipper ships and their wonderful passages to and from the Far East and San Francisco? Their doings have passed into proverbs, the runs they made from day to day, the mountainous press of canvas they carried and the smartness of their crews. Many of them were built by "rule of thumb," and were sailed also much in the same way, for their officers prided themselves far more upon their knowledge of sailorizing than mathematics, but they flew over the wide sea at a speed that our clumsier wooden vessels could not begin to compete with. In them the master was looked upon almost as a demigod. No man-o'-war's man to-day regards even an admiral with such awe as did the foremost hand of an American packet ship or China clipper the saturnine, deep-browed man who, in spotless raiment and with an Olympian air, strode up and down the weather side of his immaculate quarter-deck. And a man who had once made a voyage in such a flyer as the Sovereign of the Seas or the Dreadnought before the mast, was wont to brag of it loudly ever after. It conferred a sort of brevet rank upon an A.B. that he had successfully survived all the hardships of such a voyage.

The watchwords on board these ships were "Good food and hard work." No cook dare venture on board of them unless he could justify his title. And unless he were clean enough to satisfy those hawk-eyed officers he had better never have been born than have ventured under the Stars and Stripes as cook. I have myself seen a Yankee skipper go into the galley, and, taking up the first saucepan to hand from the rack, wipe it out with a snowy handkerchief brought clean from his drawer on purpose; and if it showed a smear upon inspection, there was at once a sound of revelry in that galley. Another one had a pleasant habit of going around the panelling of the saloon and state-rooms, poking his handkerchief into the mouldings with a piece of pointed stick, and examining it most carefully afterwards for any mark of dust. This, of course, was carrying the Yankee officers' passion for cleanliness to an absurd length, but it may safely be said that nowhere on the sea was freedom from dirt maintained at so high a level as it was on board the now almost extinct American clipper ships.

These masters fought their way up to command by sheer merit and force of character, allied to physical prowess, dauntless courage, and, it must be said in the majority of cases, ruthless cruelty. Laws for the protection of the common seaman undoubtedly existed, but it was an unheard-of thing for them to be enforced; and many dark stories are current of men being done to death by incessant brutality, whose murderers, whether officers or master, quietly slipped ashore in the pilot-cutter upon reaching the offing of their home port. Then, if such an unlikely thing happened as the dead man's shipmates taking the matter of his slaying before the authorities, it was hopeless to attempt the murderer's arrest.

But brutal and reckless as Yankee masters undoubtedly were, the fact remains that they were unapproachable for seamanship and speedy passages. They skimmed the cream off the Far Eastern trade, and, owing to the generosity with which they were treated by their owners, took no long time to amass comfortable fortunes. The knell of their supremacy was sounded, however, when Britain took to building iron ships. Even before that time, so well had the lessons taught by these dashing Yankee shipmasters and born shipbuilders been learned, that some of our firms had been able to build wooden ships that could hold their own in the swiftest ocean race. Then came the day of the composite (wooden planking with iron frame) ships—the famous tea-clippers of fo'c'sle story, built by such firms as Hall of Aberdeen and Steel of Greenock, against which no Yankee clipper had any chance whatever. And when the iron ship appeared in her turn, in spite of the immense difficulty of keeping the hull under water free from encumbrances of weeds and barnacles, she at once sprang into premier place.