But although the foremast hand finds it impossible to be fair; although he, taken collectively, regards all owners as blood-suckers, and all officers as traitors or tyrants, every one of his well-wishers—of whom I claim to be one of the warmest—can, and do, find many excuses for him. Please to consider his position. For the great majority of his days he lives in the utmost ignorance of what is going on in the world. He is like the inhabitants of some undiscovered country where-into none of the latter-day adjuncts of civilization had penetrated. From year's end to year's end he never reads a newspaper, at least not until it is long out of date. During his quiet voyaging from one side of the world to the other, the whole political aspect of the planet may be changed, but he knows nor recks nothing of it. Speak to him of the rise and fall of governments, the strife of parties, the hubbub of a general election, and he will look upon you as one that talks in an unknown tongue. To those of his class who read, supposing that they possess the right books, this aloofness from the world-movement is all to the good: they can enter into the spirit of those giants of literature as no other men can. Bringing to the consideration of immense topics minds unfettered and undisturbed by the petty squabbling and sordid tricks of politics, whether Imperial or local, they enjoy their reading as few other men do. One of my chief delights when I was before the mast was to sit on deck in the brilliant tropical moonlight, or on a lotus-eating evening before the dark had arrived, and read aloud to the assembled watch. I had no inattentive listeners. Hardly breathing, except to keep their pipes aglow, they drank in every syllable, their long acquaintance with all sorts of hybrid variants of English enabling them to catch the sense, even if they were unable to grasp the full meaning of the sonorous sentences. For I never would read them rubbish, or what I considered rubbish. I carried with me for years three volumes of the Chandos Classics, the "Odyssey," the "Æneid," and Longfellow. Shakespeare I always had, and I should be puzzled indeed to say which of the two, the "Odyssey" or Shakespeare, they relished most. They did not favour discussion of the books read very much; they were content to enjoy. I grieve to say that their discussions were usually most trivial and unprofitable. They would start an argument upon some question about which none of them knew anything, and carry it on with the utmost fierceness and heat, even unto blows. Once I used to intervene with some reliable information, but I found that when, in reply to the query, "Who told you that?" I admitted that I had learned it from books, I was thenceforward scouted as a purveyor of second-hand information, and I desisted.
It is a poor task bringing book evidence to the average sailor. Marshal your authorities as you may, you will ever be met with the stolid question, "How do you know? You wasn't there!" etc., until you retire like a man who in the dark has run head first against a stone wall. It is no good to argue with the average sailor, either. He lives in a little world of his own, its horizon bounded by the blue sky, and unbroken by any vision of the movements of shore-dwellers except at long intervals. Then when those brief periods of contact with landward folk arrive, he is like a boy suddenly let loose from school. He forgets his sea-troubles, his long confinement, in the strange sensation of liberty. How can these men be expected to use their freedom wisely? Their experience of it is so limited, their ignorance of shore ways so pathetic, that it would be surely a miracle to see them behave themselves in reasonable fashion. But one peculiarity I have often noticed among sailors is their preternatural suspicion, allied to a blind trustfulness—two opposite qualities meeting. Only, with the perversity of poor human nature, they exercise suspicion where they should be trustful, and confidence where they should be most cautious. Any scoundrel that lays himself out to cajole and cheat a sailor is almost certain to succeed, while a philanthropist, aiming only at the seaman's highest welfare, will find it a most difficult and disheartening task to gain his confidence or even attention. And so it comes to pass that at seamen's missions, wherever anything is being done for destitute sailors, the greatest care has to be exercised, the wisest discrimination used, in order that meals, etc., provided are not entirely monopolized by longshoremen, and the sailor conspicuous by his absence. It must always be borne in mind that the sailor is just a big child, whose opportunities for being understood by shore people are almost nil, who cannot tell you what he wants, and whose life is hidden from you. Herein is one of the greatest difficulties confronting missions to seamen. They have but a very short time to work upon any individual sailor, only a few days wherein to teach him things that shore people, when they learn them at all, often take years to acquire, and then the exigencies of his calling remove him from all those hallowed influences for perhaps four or five months on end. On shore it is recognized by all the Churches that if you would do good it is not sufficient to preach godliness to people: you must provide for them the right kind of society in lieu of that which they must abandon, you must nurse them through their period of babyhood in grace until they are able to stand, or walk, or run, in the way of righteousness. But the poor sailor gets no such nursing. Before he has scarcely awakened to the fact that old things have passed away, all things have become new, he is back again to the fo'c'sle. And now he is very lonely, because he knows that the only things that are continually talked of are those that should not be so much as named. His quietness is taken for moroseness, he gets nicknamed the "queer fellow," all sorts of influences are brought to bear upon him, tending to push him back into the slough; and if he stand firm, be very sure that he is a man, in the highest sense of that much-abused word.
I feel, however, that I must apologize for straying into this side issue, which, although it is so important to me, hardly comes within the scope of the present work. Perhaps I ought to have begun this chapter with a definition of the A.B.'s position. It is popularly supposed, even at sea, that the able-bodied seaman, a term whereof the initials "A.B." are the recognized official contraction, is a man who can "hand, reef, and steer." These three duties mean, first, the furling of sails—that is, rolling them up, and making them secure; secondly, the reducing of a sail's area by enfolding a portion of it, and securing it by a series of short pieces of rope sewn into a doubled or trebled band of canvas across it, technically "reef points;" and the third requires no explanation for any one. But while it is undoubtedly true that a seaman who can do these things, and no more, cannot have his wages reduced for incompetency, it is absolutely certain that an A.B. on board a sailing ship, at any rate, who could do nothing more than these things would be looked upon as an impostor, not only by the officers, but by his shipmates. Yet there are an immense number of A.B.'s whose qualifications are hardly up to that primitive standard. More than that, their number is increasing; for in steamships the handling of sails is reduced to a continually lessening minimum, reefing is a vanished art, and as for steering, well, steamships of any importance carry quartermasters, who do all the steering, receiving a few shillings a month extra pay therefor. So that you shall often find a man occupying an A.B.'s position who is really only an unskilled labourer. Placed on board of a sailing ship he would be as helpless and useless as any landlubber, except that he would not be seasick.
An A.B., properly so called, is a skilled mechanic with great abilities. In the first place, he is able to splice hemp- or wire-rope, work that requires a considerable amount of technical skill, for splicing is not by any means simply the joining of two pieces of rope together in a certain way. There are many kinds of splices: short splices, long splices, eye-splices, sailmakers' splices, grummets, etc., etc. And it is not sufficient to be able to make a splice; it must be done neatly, in workmanlike fashion, so that when it is "wormed," "parcelled," and "served," it shall only show as a smoothly graduated enlargement in the rope, or, as in the case of a sailmaker's long splice, be without any covering, hardly visible at all as a splice. He must be able to make all the various "seizings," or securing of two parts of a rope together by a neatly passed lashing of tarred cord or wire—make them, too, in any position aloft, while the ship is tumbling about, and not merely in a comfortable corner on deck. He must know the right method of "bending" sails—that is, of fastening them to yards or stays, for setting by "robands" and "earrings," so that they shall remain doing their work, no matter how severe the weather. He must understand the technique of sending up or down yards and masts, be able to improvise lashings for the securing of sails when carried away in a gale, or broken spars dangling aloft like fractured limbs. He should know how to handle a "palm and needle"—that is, sew canvas for making or mending sails, and understand the manipulation of "purchases" (pulleys and ropes), the rigging of derricks, and the distribution of strains; how to "set up rigging," "rattle down," and "heave the lead," of course.
Now, all these queer-sounding names of duties that the good A.B. must be able to perform would require a vast amount of laborious explanation to make their meaning and purpose clear to any landsman, and it is doubtful whether one person in ten thousand would take the trouble to master their details if an attempt were made to give them. But I think that few will assert that a man who can do all these things as they must be done at sea can be in any sense classed as an unskilled man. And I must add that what I have given are only the broad features, as it were. There remain still an enormous number of smaller matters, knowledge of which is expected of an A.B. But I must admit that the class of A.B. which is capable of answering to such a description as this is growing yearly smaller and smaller. That, of course, is the fault of steam. While sailing ships endure there will always be some of them—there must be—but they are not wanted in steamships, and so the supply dwindles with the demand. But it is a great pity, because these men are capable of rising to the height of an emergency. They have individuality and resource as well as technical ability. And when, as so often happens, a steamer gets into trouble at sea, breaks down, or is overtaken by a gale against which her low power is helpless, the need of skilled seamen is often sorely felt.
An old shipmate of my own was telling me the other day of a case in point. He was one of the A.B.'s in a large steamer called the Bengal, outward bound to Japan. They were overtaken in the Bay of Biscay by a tremendous gale, before which they scudded with the huge square foresail set, in order to keep her ahead of the sea. (It was being overtaken by such a sea that caused the awful loss of the London.) But at last it became necessary to take in that foresail, and heave the ship to; it was unsafe to run her any longer, especially as the sail might carry away at any moment, and the very evil they dreaded come upon them instantly. So all hands were called aft, eight of them, and the skipper said, "D'ye think ye can take that foresail in, my lads?" At which question they were amazed, for none of them had ever heard such a question put before. After a moment's silence one fellow shouted, "Take it in! Why, 'course we can, sir. We c'd eat it!"
That comforted the old man, and he gave orders to haul it up, at the same time manipulating the spanker so that she came round cannily, head to sea, and did not ship any heavy water. They furled sail without any difficulty more than usual; but when they had cleared up the gear, the old man's voice rang out again, "Splice the main-brace." Pelting aft at the double, they received each a glass of grog, and the old man's heartfelt thanks. He told them that on the previous voyage he had a crew of steamboat sailors, who in just such a night as that refused to go aloft—they were afraid; and he had to see the sail blow away, see also a great deal of damage done to his deck-gear, and at one time it looked as if the vessel would be lost. So this voyage he had been careful to select sailing-ship sailors, and the result had entirely justified him. "Yes," said one man, "that's all very well for you, sir. But how about our getting a ship next voyage? We shall be called steamboat sailors now." Of course the poor shipper had no answer to that, but I have no doubt he felt the full force of the remark. For therein lies the great difficulty. No skipper of a sailing ship dare take steamboat men, unless he has absolute proof that they know the work on board a sailing vessel. And even then he is sure that a few months in steam rusts a sailor; he is not likely to be very smart getting aloft, or to be as expert as a man in training when he gets there. More than that, the steamboat sailor being, as I have said, almost invariably better fed than he is in any sailing vessel, does not take at all kindly to a return to the same miserable way of living, neither does he appreciate being so long at sea. And all these things tend to assist the influx of the foreign element which, flocking into our sailing ships, speedily overflows into steamers, and, having once obtained a secure foothold, never returns to its own place again.