But to return to the actual duties of the mate. Undoubtedly his prime duty is that of an overseer, the manager of the business wherein the skipper occupies the position of chairman of the Board of Directors. In the great liners, while the foregoing still holds true, it must necessarily be modified somewhat. There are in these splendid vessels many officials who, nominally responsible to the mate for all they do, really report direct to heads ashore. Still, for all practical purposes, the mate is the centre around which all the working interests of the ship outside the engineer's province revolve. He it is who sees that the routine of duty goes steadily forward, without any slackness or neglect; who must know the condition of the ship—again as distinguished from the engineer's department and the chief steward's domain, and who must see that her condition is first-class and kept so. Of course, in such a ship as the Lucania, for instance, the work of the mate resolves itself more and more into generalship. He has such an army of subordinates, each of whom is charged with some particular duty and responsibility to the mate for its being carried out, that he does not need to be for ever seeing for himself that the work is being done. In such a ship the mate keeps no watch. He is on duty all day, and sleeps in all night, although he would doubtless say that he was really always on duty, and that the fact of his not keeping a particular watch means only that he gets much less rest than if he did. But one thing may be taken as undeniable, the mate of a liner occupies a position of tremendous responsibility and honour. He is the real commander of the ship, the master being, like the captain of a man-o'-war, a sort of veiled prophet with whom the crew and junior officers seldom come in contact except in extra bad weather or entering and leaving harbour. Yet—and here comes the curious pinch—between the mate's salary and the master's, how great a gulf is fixed! It seems such an anomaly that a man who really bears the whole burden of the ship's working, who can be, and who is, called to account by the master when anything goes wrong, and who is generally well into middle age before he gets command himself, should be so poorly paid as compared with the master. It works out roughly like this: A friend of my own was second officer of a liner for four years. He had in his pre-steamer days been master of a large sailing ship, so that he was getting on in years. Then, as he began to fear that he was fixed in that subordinate position, he suddenly succeeded to the mate, who obtained a command elsewhere. For one year only he was mate, then, on the master's retirement, he obtained the command. We will not inquire what powerful influences were at work to push him on so suddenly. The net result was that in one year his income was nearly trebled, his salary as mate being only £3 per month more than it was as second mate. It does not appear easy to explain why, since the mate may at any moment be called upon to become master, it should be considered necessary to have so serious a difference between their salaries. But it explains the statement that is often truly made, that unless a man has a private income he must not only be very economical to live upon his pay while he is an officer in a swagger line, he must forego all idea of getting married. That is, if he wishes his wife and children to get enough to eat.
The next step down the scale of ships is a long one. From the mate of a liner to the mate of a cargo steamer, or tramp, is indeed a fall. And not only in status, but in decreased pay and increased work; for in the liner, as I have before noted, there are not only numerous officers below the position of mate to relieve him of onerous duties, such as tallying of cargo, charge of stores, etc., but he is practically relieved from any necessity of looking after these subordinates, as they are controlled from the offices ashore. In the cargo steamer, on the contrary, it is the mate who must look after the shipment of cargo, examine bills of lading, and, indeed, do the tallying as well. Moreover, since the number of mates in most cases is rigidly limited to three, and often to two, he must take his watch on the bridge, must work up the position of the ship, look after the compasses, with all their heart-breaking divagations, attend personally to the care of the ship in cleansing, etc., and last, but by no means least, keep in order the motley crew. And for this his pay is sometimes, nay, frequently, so small that mention of it excites disbelief among responsible persons ashore who know nothing of shipping matters. I have myself been offered five guineas a month to go mate of a steamer bound to the Baltic for timber, a steamer of 2000 tons burden. I would have gone, too, but that a German stepped down before me and agreed to have the five shillings a month knocked off. Perhaps the tramp mate's lot is harder than that of most other sea-officers, in that his work is never done, his responsibilities are very heavy, and his pay is so small that he must forego the delights of wife and children if he has only that pay to live upon. Yet these men form the marrow of our Merchant Service, and should certainly not be treated shabbily. How their work is done let owners and shippers declare, who know full well that while the master gets all the credit that his position entitles him to, the mate, working silently but strenuously in the background, must wait for any recognition until he has at last emerged from his obscurity into the coveted post of master. Not so, however, in the case of disaster to his ship. No amount of theory as to the master bearing the whole responsibility will avail to save the unhappy mate from the most severe punishment that can fall upon a Merchant officer—suspension or cancelling of his certificate—if any leather-headed court of inquiry choose to bring him in to blame in any way. I do not mean to speak evil of dignities, God knows; but the proceedings of some of these courts, abroad especially, are sufficient to make angels weep. We all know the rest of that wise quotation. In ships of this kind the mate's lot is seldom a happy one; it may easily be made intolerable if the master be not kindly disposed towards him, or so blind to his obvious duties as to neglect or refuse to give him all the weight of his own authority in the event of any trouble arising.
I said "in the event of any trouble arising." Well, to tell the truth, trouble in a foreign port, especially where the ship lies alongside a wharf, is the tramp mate's normal environment. Not only has he the entire conduct of the ship's business on board, as distinguished from that which the skipper performs on shore, but he must see to it that the work goes on. Each one of his crew will probably be devoting all his energy to the endeavour to do as little as possible, and to getting drunk. The motley crowd that are working the cargo work only under steady stress of compulsion. If receiving cargo, the second mate must keep an eye on the stowage, so that he cannot assist his superior on deck; and there are the innumerable horde of touts of one sort and another to keep at bay. Every one else will be complaining of the heat or something; the mate must bear all such personal inconveniences without noticing them, and keep the ball rolling steadily as well. And as if these things were not sufficient, he must compete with whatever personal abuse or violence a drunken seaman chooses to offer him, his only remedy to report the offender to the master, when he can get hold of him. Should he defend his own life, take a deadly weapon and use it, he is guilty of manslaughter, and sent to herd with criminals for years. This is by no means vague generalization. The particular instance that excites my whole-hearted indignation is the case of the mate of the Lanarkshire. He was threatened all day by a negro seaman who, instead of working, was oscillating between the ship and a grog-shop, and filling up the intervals by using the foulest abuse to his long-suffering officer. The most sanguinary threats were made by this scoundrel against the mate, who, naturally alarmed, loaded his revolver and carried it in his pocket. Then, when in the gloom of the evening he suddenly realized that the fellow was making for him with murderous knife uplifted, he fired and killed him. Surely if ever there was a case of justifiable homicide, this was. Yet, to the lasting injury of our Merchant Service, and the indelible shame of our laws, this hapless gentleman was sentenced to two years' imprisonment, and as I write he is undergoing this shameful sentence for doing what was his obvious duty. To have failed to do it would not only have been to have lost his own life, but to have put a premium upon murdering others.
Again I say that in the American Mercantile Marine such a thing would be inconceivable. In the first place, the man would never have been allowed to wander at his own sweet will backwards and forwards; and had he made a threat to murder, there is no doubt whatever that he would at once have been physically incapacitated from carrying it out. Had he, without threatening, attempted murder, there is also no doubt that he would have been instantly shot dead. And the officer acting in any of the ways hinted at above would have been held to have done not one jot more than his obvious duty. As to even bringing him to trial—the idea would have been scouted as absurd.
Nevertheless, it is certain that such a training as the mate of a tramp steamer gets is admirably calculated to bring out all a man's sterling qualities: patient persistence in the face of difficulties, ability to deal with refractory races by diplomacy rather than by force, orderly marshalling of thought—absolutely necessary where so many things must be kept going at one time; and, certainly, endurance of hardness. This is no easy way of getting through the world. It makes a man thankful for small mercies; as, for instance, when, after a harassing time, with all the worries of harbour, the mate heaves a sigh of relief upon mounting the bridge to keep watch through four hours of a dark, dirty night. With keen eyes, smarting under the incessant pelting of driving rain and spray, he peers over the edge of the weather-cloth into the blackness ahead, heeding not at all the "bucking beam-sea roll" or the thumpity-thump-thump of the untiring engines below him. Now he can send his thoughts a-roaming. Such tender musings as of love and home and rest may be admitted while the almost invisible blackness of the hull beneath him is thrust into the hungry expanse of darkness ahead, the only sure point being beneath the tiny circle of light in the binnacle. Here we will leave him, steady, resourceful, and alert, not without an affectionate remembrance of all his fellows at their posts on all the seas at this present, worthy members of the worthiest of all commercial enterprises, the Merchant Service.
THE MATE'S WORK (IN A SAILING SHIP).
There is no small difficulty, I find, in presenting for landward folk the various gradations of officers in the Merchant Service. As far as ability in his profession is concerned, there can be no question at all that the mate of a sailing ship is far before the mate of a steamer; only, the mate of a steamer is so much better paid, as a rule, that he naturally regards his status as much higher than that of the mate of a "wind-jammer." But here enters another complication. It is necessary for the steamer mate to have been a sailing-ship mate first. It has hardly been admitted yet by those in authority that any man is fit for an officer's position in steam until he has served in sail. There alone, they consider, does a man develop the true characteristics of the sailor—his all-round ability for dealing with unforeseen contingencies as they arise, his resourcefulness and skill in dealing with the wise old sea by the aid of the wind.