This, however, is a part of my subject that belongs to another place in the book. It is necessary to mention it here in passing, because it is one of the prime reasons for the rapid decay and disappearance of a body of men whose seamanship was peerless—men who carried the Stars and Stripes triumphantly over all the seas of the world. It must not be supposed, either, that American skippers were uneducated men. Many of them were, of course, but the proportion was far less than existed in our own service. Navigation as taught in the sea-ports of the United States, on the lines of Bowditch, was no mere perfunctory business; and although there were no compulsory certificates of competency necessary in those days, there was a good deal of proper pride in mathematical attainment which those who employed officers of ships did their best to foster. And if there were a goodly sprinkling of men among them who did not care, so long as they could fudge their position out in the most rudimentary way by means of an old wooden quadrant or hog-yoke, a ten-cent almanac, and the barest acquaintance with a set of nautical tables, why, so there were, and so there are now, among our own people, even with compulsory certificates granted by a vigilant Board of Trade.
THE MASTER'S QUALITIES.
If, as is highly improbable, the average landsman ever thinks anything about the duties of a shipmaster, it would be most interesting to know what he imagines them to be. Most intelligent men and women know that the primary duty of a shipmaster is to take his vessel across the trackless ocean to her destined port and return again as speedily as possible. So far so good, but beyond this first reason for a shipmaster's existence there are a host of other duties, in all of which he is supposed to be more or less proficient. And there are certain qualities which he must also possess. Failing them, he may be perfect in science, full of energy, and faultless in seamanship, but as a commander he is naught. Of these, the ability to command stands unquestionably first. No doubt this quality is hard to define, but the possession or the want of it makes all the difference between a comfortable and a miserable ship. One man will seldom raise his voice during a whole voyage loud enough to be heard by any one except the individual to whom he is speaking; the calmness and placidity of his demeanour is amazing, yet in some mysterious way every one on board is made to feel that the master holds the reins of power with no slack or unready hand, that to disobey one of his orders would be a most dangerous experiment, and that he knows everything that is going on fore and aft.
Such a man fulfilling this perfect attribute of command I once had the pleasure to serve under—an elderly, prosaic-looking figure, who used to come on deck shortly after daybreak every morning, with a moth-eaten Bombay-made dressing-gown flung over his pyjamas, a mangy old fez upon his head, and his bare feet thrust into sloppy slippers. Thus attired, he would pace rapidly up and down the poop for the space of half an hour, taking his constitutional—a most mirth-provoking figure. Yet no one ever laughed, either behind his back, on deck, or in the privacy of the fo'c'sle. When he spoke it was in a velvet voice, but the man spoken to invariably took an attitude of profound respect on the instant. He was old and feeble, and our crew numbered among them some rowdies; but from England to China and back again that old gentleman's commanding personality kept the ship in a quiet state of discipline which was as perfect as it was rare.
On the other hand, I have seen a most stately figure of a man, with a voice like a thunder-peal, unable to obtain respect from his crew. Because in the Merchant Service, as I am never tired of reiterating, respect cannot be enforced; it must come spontaneously, a tribute to the personality of the officer to whom it is due, or it does not come at all; and then that ship is in a bad way.
Another quality, which is only second in importance to the one just mentioned, is self-control. Since the shipmaster has no one above him in his little realm, it is highly important to his whole well-being, as well as to the comfort of the ship, that he should command himself. However irritated he may feel at a mistake on the part of one of his officers, he should be able to conceal it before his crew. And here the Americans have shown British officers a good example. So long as an officer remains an officer on board of American vessels, so long is he upheld by all the authority of the master. There is no sneering comment upon his movements indulged in before the crew, no tacit information conveyed to those keen-witted fellows that the hapless mate, first, second, or third, as the case may be, has lost the confidence and respect of his commander, and that consequently there is little or no danger in them treating him disrespectfully. Perhaps this is one of the hardest lessons that a shipmaster has to learn, especially in a sailing ship. For three, or perhaps four, or even five, months sole monarch of his small kingdom, anxious to make a smart passage, and often sadly hampered by adverse winds and calms, it is no easy thing for a naturally hasty man to discipline himself in such wise as to win the maximum amount of obedience and deference from those around him. Happy man if he have a hobby of some kind—a thirst for learning, a taste for natural history, anything that will exercise the powers of his mind and keep him from the moral dry-rot that always sets in where men are at the top of things, amenable to no authority but their own, and without any definite object whereon they may work and feed that appetite for labour, whether mental or physical, possessed by every healthy human organism.