At the risk of being thought tedious, I must repeat that for the ship boy, as for boys everywhere else in our favoured land, a brighter day has dawned. Within the memory of middle-aged men a boy on board a ship was the butt, the vicarious sacrifice to all the accumulated ill-temper of the ship. To-day tales are told of the treatment of boys in "Geordie" colliers that are enough to make the flesh creep to hear. In those days it was the privilege of every man on board to ill-treat the boy; and if, as very often happened, the poor little wretch died under it—well, what of it?—it was only a boy. And the peculiar part of it all was that the brutes who did these evil deeds prided themselves that their actions were right and proper. There was only one way of training a boy—with a rope's-end if it were handy; if not, a fist or a boot would do, but he must be beaten. One man, whom I shall always remember, as smart a seaman as ever trod a ship's deck, beat me until there was not a square inch of my small body unbruised. Scarcely a watch passed that I did not receive some token of his interest in my welfare, and on two occasions he kicked me with such violence that, with all the will in the world to obey his orders, I was perfectly helpless. My only wonder is that he did not kill me.
Yet when I left the ship he bade me quite an affectionate farewell, bidding me remember how hard he had laboured for my benefit, that every blow he had given me was solely aimed at making me more useful, and fitting me for my duties. At the time I felt that he was lying, and that his treatment of me was dictated by that savage lust of cruelty to an unresisting victim that grows alarmingly with the yielding thereto, and that had I only possessed the strength and courage to retaliate, he would speedily have altered his mind. But now I do not know. I feel that perhaps he may have been sincere. Men were self-deceivers ever; and there are few self-deceptions more common among mankind than this—that cruelty is a splendid aid to education. But here let me say that cruelty to boys was far more common among the officers than the men. If a boy was willing and respectful and clean, it was very seldom that he got beaten in the fo'c'sle. There was almost always a certain amount of public spirit which made for justice where half a dozen of even the roughest men were gathered together. I have known one exception to this good rule—have experienced it in my own person—where out of a whole crew of eight there was not one man enough to protest against the daily practice of cruelty to me. More than that, they encouraged a big boy, who was getting the same pay as myself, but whose qualifications, except strength, were far inferior to mine, to pummel me too. Such a gang I have never met with before or since, and I am sure that the combination is uncommon.
The majority of the boys going to sea to-day unapprenticed are drawn from the training ships, those good schools for the boy who is said to be unmanageable ashore. Coming from the wild and precarious life of the streets into such a ship as the Warspite, Arethusa, or Cornwall, is such a revelation to a boy, that for a little while he feels as if the bottom had fallen out of his world. For the anarchical condition, tempered by a salutary dread of the policeman, under which he has been living, there are substituted law and order, cleanliness and discipline; for regular short commons and dog-like snatching of sleep come good food regularly eaten, regular sleep at set times, regular play, and a sound prospect of benefits, very real indeed, for the patient worker in well-doing. Here the boy is taught all the essentials of seafaring except the actual going to sea, and in at least one instance that practical want is supplied, in that a small square-rigged vessel is kept, which, with selected boys for a crew, under the charge of experienced seamen, plies up and down the river under sail. And it may truly be said that a boy who has passed a couple of years under such treatment as this is as well prepared for becoming a good seaman as it is possible for a boy to be.
But, strangely enough, the training is of very little real service to the lads when they go to sea to earn their living. For at once they find themselves under such conditions as they never before dreamed of. In place of the perfect discipline and stringent rules to which they have been accustomed, they find the greatest laxity prevailing. Rules are almost non-existent. In the training ship each of them had his work allotted to him. When the signal was given he knew just what to do, and how to do it; and when it was done, he was done too. In the merchant ship the rigging is different, the method is different, and instead of his having any set duties, he is at everybody's beck and call, given tasks to accomplish single-handed that he has been taught to do man-of-war fashion—that is, with so many hands that the work was done like magic, and in a few seconds a sail was furled or set, or a mast was sent up or down.
They cannot now keep themselves clean and smart-looking. For, in the first place, they have little time allowed, and, in the next, there is not much water (in sailing ships). No longer is it necessary that they should present themselves at stated hours for inspection; no longer is every movement of theirs regulated as if by clock-work. They may be as slovenly, as dirty as they list, there is no one to enforce upon them the keeping of the good rules they have so long been under; and that principally because those who bear rule over them know that such enforcement is impossible. So that the carefully instilled habits of order, regularity, and cleanliness are broken down at once, and in place of the smartly-clad, well-set-up youth who joined the ship, there is presently seen a slouchy, shifty-eyed gamin, who is a profound student of the art of "dodging Pompey," who gets the well-deserved character from his shipmates of being "a young sailor, but a d—— old soldier." There is a greater evil, if possible, than this impending. It is that all the careful training of the lad shall presently be of no avail whatever; because, mixing freely with the crew, he is sedulously taught that the sea as a profession or calling is played out. "Why, just look at it a minnit," says his mentor. "You've never got no time to call yer own" (which is a lie, in an English ship, at any rate), "yer everybody's dorg, yer fed wuss'n a pig, and what y' got t' look forrward ter? T' die in the wukkus. 'Sides, 'n Englishman don't like ter be mucked up all the time with a lot er foreigners in one of his country ships. Why, they looks down on us now 'sif we wus a—— lot of interlopers wot got no right to sail under owr own flag. 'N, after all, wot are yer? Never nothin' but a dirty sailor all yer days. Nobody 'shore knows nothin' about yer; 'n don' care neither. Y' ain't got no vote, y' ain't got no home, y'r jest a bit of wreckage. Quit it, me son, 'n git a job ashore, where, if you're a bloomin' scavenger, you've got yer pull on the vestrymin, because you've got a vote, an' if they don't look after your interests, w'y, out they goes; see!"
This is the kind of pernicious stuff (all the more dangerous because of its half-truth) that the boy is regaled with, along with a great deal more that cannot be reproduced, for reasons that need not be given; and again I say, without fear of being hauled over the coals for repetition, it is quite sufficient to account for the falling off in the numbers of young British seamen. But I feel certain that some such scheme as I have sketched out in the Apprentice chapters would be efficacious in preventing this wholesale waste of good material. From the lowest class of seamen up to the second mate (except in the first-class liners) the evil to be battled with is the lack of continuous employment. It does not admit of the sailor acquiring any interest in his ship. Moreover, there is ever dangling before his eyes the terror of being "outward bound"—those two fateful words that convey such a mountain of meaning to every seafaring man. To be outward bound means that he is ashore penniless, dependent upon the kindness of a boarding-master for a little food; to prowl about the docks, boarding ship after ship, in the remote chance of securing a berth, and to meet with black looks everywhere; to be told continually that he is a cumberer of the ground, a loafer, a fellow that might, if he would, get a ship, but prefers instead to hang around maritime liquor shops, keeping a keen look-out for homeward bounders who will treat him, instead of being, as he really is in nearly every case, feverishly anxious to get back to sea again: these are some of the greatest drawbacks to a deep-water sailor's career.
And they tell with tremendous force against the boy. Friendless and homeless in many cases, or with parents so poor that they can do nothing to help him, earning such small wages that he can hardly purchase necessary clothing, much less pay for board and lodging, and with all a boy's natural carelessness, he is sorely tempted to take the first job that comes in his way, and quit the sea altogether as a means of livelihood. If he does so, even though the new employment may only last for a few months, he will hardly go to sea again. And no one knowing the peculiar difficulties of his lot will be able to blame him.
I have often wished that it were possible to make lads who at school chatter so glibly about "running away to sea," understand how impossible it is to do any such thing nowadays, except, indeed, in such vessels as are the last resort of the unfortunate. Even after I had been at sea for a couple of years I found it difficult to get a ship, on account of the competition of the training-ship lads, who, with their well-replenished outfits and sturdy appearance—to say nothing of the persistence of the agent charged with the duty of getting them shipped—were readily accepted by skippers, to the exclusion of outsiders. The "unfortunate" vessels of which I speak are those small sailing craft which still drag out a precarious existence in competition with steam. They may be seen in all our smaller ports, often lying disconsolately upon mud-banks at ebb-tide, or, looking woefully out of place, at some wharf belonging to a seaside place like Margate or Ramsgate. Oh, so dirty, so miserable they look! They only carry such rough cargoes as it does not pay to put in steam, and, in consequence, their freight-earning capacity is very low. That, again, reacts upon the equipment. Worn-out gear, wretched food, and not enough men or boys to do the heavy work, they provide a hard school for the young seaman. In them may still be found lingering some of the bad traditions of half a century ago.
Yet among even these poor relations of the sea may be found varieties of grade. The great majority of them are coasters—that is to say, they do not leave the vicinity of our shores except for ports just across the Channel. In these, though the conditions of life are hard for a boy, who usually does the cooking (?) at an open stove on deck, the food, if coarse, is much better than it is on vessels of the same kind going "deep water." There no relief can be found for months, while in the home trade it is but a few days from port to port, so that the ill-used or aggrieved youngster has but to step ashore and be off. And under the peculiar slipshod method of engagement and discharge in these vessels there is little danger to the deserter.
In my day there used to be regular houses of call for men and boys shipping in such vessels in London. One public-house of the kind I knew well, having, when very young, spent many a weary hour in its dingy tap-room waiting for a chance of shipment. To it used to come burly skippers clad in pilot-cloth, with blue jerseys in lieu of vests, and fur caps. They sought first a stout, well-spoken man, who was always hanging about there from ten till six, and told him their requirements. He knew what men and boys were available, and where to find them—in the tap-room or just at the door. He introduced master to man, and the first preliminary was always to feel the applicants' hands. If they were horny enough to satisfy the skipper that their possessor had not been too long out of work, a few questions ensued relative to wages, destination, etc. There was seldom any difficulty raised by the sailors. Poor fellows, by the time they had got to waiting at the King's Head or Arms, they were in no mood for haggling, and in this way wages were often cut down very low for men, while I have seen boys going for five shillings a month. When the bargain was made, a handsel of a shilling was given to the sailor. Whether he gave the agent anything I never knew, for although I waited there a long time—some three months off and on—I never got a ship or a barge there. Of course the skipper paid something to the agent, who looked fat and prosperous; but beyond the shillings I never saw any money change hands. And that money was always spent forthwith in the same manner—it was like performing a mystic rite. Two pots of four ale and two half-ounces of shag were purchased at the bar, and all the waiting hands, without being invited, stepped up and partook. It looked so strange to me, I remember, for many of the poor fellows looked as if a meal would have done them so much more good.