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

by Frank Thomas Bullen

I may as well admit at the outset of this chapter that I approach it with a heavy sense of responsibility. For many reasons. I am exceedingly anxious about the future of our Merchant Service; and the decay of the apprentice system at sea is full of menace for that future. Again, I know that many dear friends throughout the length and breadth of this land of ours are looking with pathetic eagerness for some guidance upon this subject. They want to gratify their sons' inbred craving for a sea-life; but what are the prospects? How will it affect their boys, supposing they find, after a short acquaintance with the sea, that they are not fit for it at all?

In short, there are so many middle-class folks ready to apprentice their boys in the Merchant Service, if that service is worth their attention as a probable life occupation, and they are so pathetically eager and earnest to obtain reliable information and enlightenment on their utter ignorance of all the details of a nautical life, that it behoves all who have that information, to give it carefully, without bias, and intelligibly. That is therefore no reason why they should withhold it altogether, from craven fear of being upbraided for after-consequences of following the advice they had given.

With this in my mind, I would say at the outset that I believe the system of apprenticeship might be revived, with great advantage to the country and to individuals, but it needs revision. As it exists at present its only effect is to flood the Merchant Service with an enormous number of certificated men, who cannot get ships as officers, and who find the fo'c'sle society disgusting, having trained themselves to expect something better. Worse still, it will be found to have unsettled many lads for any steady land occupation, while completely disenchanting them as to the fine life they expected at sea. It has just aroused in these well-brought-up, home-keeping youths the nomad instinct that is latent in every human breast, and the love of wandering once established, nothing short of main force will make that man a settled citizen again until he reaches middle age.

Apprenticeship is often spoken of as a means to the laudable end of replenishing the British Merchant Service with British seamen. But in its present form such a suggestion about apprenticeship is utterly absurd. Respectable people who have spent money upon their sons' education do not pay a heavy premium, and apprentice him to a ship, with the object of his becoming an able seaman. They expect him to be an officer as soon as possible, and that is the goal to which the lad looks forward. Now, it must be said at once, plainly and frankly, that the supply of officers far exceeds the demand. The fact that there are many foreign officers in our Merchant Service does not affect this statement at all. All that it means is, that as the pay of officers is a matter of individual bargaining, and not a fairly fixed quantity like that of the seamen, there is always an opportunity for underselling. Let me give an instance. Before my last voyage I had been prowling about the docks, looking for a ship, until I was in very low water indeed, and glad of almost anything. Yet, as I was married and had one child, there was a minimum wage below which I could not go without the prospect of my dear ones starving. Receiving information that there was a brig in the St. Katherine dock wanting a mate, I hastened down to her, finding the master a pleasant, genial man, and English. I told him my errand, showed my credentials, and was asked what wages I wanted. I suggested £6 10s. per month, feeling as I did so that I might as well ask for the moon while I was about it. We finally agreed upon £5 15s. a month, which made my wife's income while I was at sea about 14s. a week. But I went home light-hearted enough in the feeling that I was no longer a dock-slouching mendicant, and that something was sure for at least twelve months.

The next morning, when I came on board to work, the skipper told me that he had received an offer from a German, fully certificated, to come as mate for £3 a month, and one from an Englishman, who said that, as he had money of his own, and only wanted to get his time in for master, he would come for nothing. "I didn't take the German," said Captain W——, "entirely because I had given you my word, but because I hold that it is a national crime to permit foreign officers to have charge of our ships, apart altogether from the shame of having them cut the already too scanty wages. And I didn't take the other fellow, because I wanted a man to earn his wages, and I knew that he was likely to earn what he offered to go for—nothing." So I kept the berth, but, as the skipper truly remarked, had the owner known that he was paying much more for my services than there was any necessity for him to do, he would have been very angry.

My contention is that the apprentice should be classified. If there were two grades established, one with a view to making foremast hands, and another for training officers, I think much good might be done. For instance, the poor lads who go in such charitable training ships as the Warspite and Chichester, the Exmouth, Shaftesbury, and Cornwall, should not be sent adrift as they are now, shipped as boys in whatever ship will take them, and discharged with the rest of the crew on their return to the home port. It is true that the authorities ruling the training ships are always ready to befriend these young sea-boys when they return, to a certain extent; but it should be remembered that there are always many fresh lads to be disposed of, boys who have finished their training-time, and are waiting for a ship in which to begin their sea-life. It is not always an easy task to provide ships for them either, and therefore it is hardly fair to expect the training-ship people to handicap them by looking after the shipment of old boys as well. But if those lads were apprenticed without premium, at a small wage, increasing each year, and with the definite object of making good foremast hands of them, I am sure much good might be done. They would certainly be no worse off than any lad ashore who serves his time as a mason, a carpenter, or a plumber. In the vast majority of cases the horizon of such apprentices is bounded by the prospect of becoming a good journeyman, for which the demand is always greater than the supply. If they develop habits of thrift, a faculty of organization, and power of command, the way is open for them to become master, and in like manner there would be nothing to prevent the non-premium apprentice from rising higher than a mere "journeyman" sailor, if I may thus use the expression, in the fact that he had been apprenticed on a lower grade than those intended for officers from the beginning.

The treatment of such apprentices would be no different to that in force now on board ship for "boys" so called. They would probably live in the forecastle among the men, or with the petty officers. I know that some people will raise an outcry against the idea of boys being sent to live in the forecastle with the men, but from experience I am sure that this would not be detrimental to the boys at all. When a boy has spent two or three years on board a training ship (I do not mean a training college like the Worcester or Conway, although I don't suppose all the boys there are unfledged angels), he has nothing to learn in the way of evil in a ship's fo'c'sle. Please, my good friends the officers in charge of these ships, don't imagine that I am casting any reflections upon you. You do your best, but it is simply impossible for you to keep such a crowd of young rascals as you have to deal with like an ideal Sunday school. I have been shipmate with a great number of these boys—good, bad, and indifferent; but in one respect their education was never wanting: the knowledge of such evil as we do not write about, only hint at in conversation.

I have heard—of course I do not assert it—that even our great public schools are not above suspicion in these matters. But there they are all sons of gentle parents; they have led a guarded life from their childhood, the foul innuendo and salacious gabble of the streets have never reached their ears. So that if they in the carefully-guarded precincts of these homes of education acquire a knowledge of the grosser forms of evil, we need not be surprised at the poor street boy who joins the Arethusa or the Cornwall being wiser even than they are. I have often seen a boy checked in a ship's fo'c'sle for using an expression that was not, well, fit for ears polite, although the man who checked him was constantly in the habit of talking in that strain. It is perfectly true that one occasionally finds a low-minded beast of man's age, who will deliberately encourage a boy to swagger in foulness for his private ear, but it is always in private; such a practice would never be tolerated in the midst of the watch. And such loathsome company will always be open to the boy, whoever he lives with on board.

No; it is not nearly as dangerous for boys to live with the men in the open fo'c'sle as it is for them to live with one or two petty officers, or, worse still, by themselves. The latter should never be allowed at all—it is as bad as it can be. Living with the men they hear foul language continually, but they have always heard it; most of them have long been proficient in its use, and none of its shades of meaning are lost on them. But they must not use it themselves, now. They will not be ill-used, that is, beaten, because of that growing tenderness for the young which is such a fine feature of our day, and one that has been just as fully developed on board ship as it has ashore. They must be civil and obliging, and if willing to learn, will always find some one willing to teach. The fact of their being bound to serve for a period of four years would operate powerfully against that tendency, so fatal to the replenishment of our Merchant Service with young British seamen, to quit the sea after the first voyage or two, and get some job, requiring no skill, ashore. At present, when first the training-ship boys go to sea, they are sure to find some fellow who will lay before them a lurid picture of the hopelessness of ever doing any good at sea. He will din into the young ears continually the advice to sweep a crossing, become a dung-puncher, anything rather than lead such a dog's life as he says the common seaman always endures. With what results let the Registrar-General of Shipping and Seamen's Reports tell. According to them, there is a constant drain of young men out of the Merchant Service, lads who had served one, two, or three years, and, consequently, the supply is cut off at its source.

Now, this sad thing is distinctly traceable, in my mind, to three great causes. The first is the want of provision made for keeping these lads a reasonable time at sea by some binding agreement like apprenticeship indentures. The second is the utter carelessness manifested in the majority of cases about food and accommodation. And the third is undermanning. These last two do not in any way apply to the highest class of liners, which is above reproach in these matters. But it does apply to most of the ships we own in Britain; and until the European standard of what is due to a workman's needs more closely approximates to our own, either by our sinking to their level or them rising to ours, it will continue to operate in the direction of displacing British subjects by aliens. I do not believe that the question of wages enters into it at all. Wages do not affect the officers, who, as I have before said, make their individual bargains, but if a crew of Scandinavians or a crew of Britons are shipped before the mast, the wages paid will be the same in both cases. And when you come to think of it, foremast hands are not at all badly paid. When the A.B. was a skilled mechanic and received £2 10s. a month, while a carpenter, a joiner, or a mason was getting 35s. a week ashore, the former had some ground of complaint; but when, as is the case now, the majority of seamen before the mast, in steamers at any rate, are really little more skilled than labourers, £3 10s. to £4 10s. per month, with board and lodging, is better pay than any of their fellows ashore are getting. Sailing-ship A.B.'s deserve more, but they get less than steamboat men, for some strange reason that has always puzzled me.