Social amenities are observed most carefully by these men. Every mess has its social secretary, who looks after social correspondence. The mess has its social card. When a ship reaches port where there are other ships of the navy or where there are foreign warships the niceties of calling and entertaining etiquette are observed. A naval officer would no more neglect observing all social proprieties than he would appear without his proper uniform on the quarter deck.
Many officers spend a large part of their time in reading. They are an unusually well-informed set of men. Their wide travel conduces to this. Some of them are musically inclined and many an evening is spent in the steerage where there is a piano. It takes only a few minutes to get up an improvised orchestra of a couple of violins, a guitar, a mandolin and a horn or two. Songs soon begin to be heard and the music fest often develops into a story telling contest and all hands turn in late after a jovial meeting.
Officers' club life on warships is run on good, wholesome lines. It is manly, free, entertaining, fruitful of self-control and always in keeping with the responsible station of men who have sworn to defend with their lives the honor and integrity of their country.
There are those who lament that in these days of steel ships and electrical appliances all the picturesque side of a sailorman's life on a warship has disappeared. They talk of the old days of romance and poetry and sentiment aboard ship. Well, things have changed for the sailorman, but those who know how much his creature comforts have been improved, how his health is safeguarded, how his mental necessities are looked after, are glad with him that there has been a change. A warship is not intended to be a poetry factory. It's a fighting machine and with the best guns that you can get you need the best men available to shoot them.
No longer is the navy the last refuge of the scum of town and country, the receptacle of jailbirds temporarily at large, the resort of men not fit for any decent toil on land. The navy needs men of intelligence and good character, the bright boys from the farm; young lads from the city, who otherwise would have to spend their lives in factories. The navy needs these men, and it is getting them all the time. Why? Because largely there have been many changes from the old methods, because no workingmen in the world have better food, more comfortable clothes, more sanitary housing, more opportunities for mental improvement, more wholesome recreations.
It is true that Jack no longer has to do duty as a captain of a top, no more does he receive orders to cockbill spars, square yards, man the main clew garnets and buntlines, as in the old days. The old horse block, as the platform where the officer of the deck formerly stood to give his orders at sea was called, can be found no more on warships. The old sports of head bumping, hammer and anvil and sparring, old style, have gone. Here is what sparring used to be:
"Sparring consists of playing single stick with bone poles instead of wooden ones. Two men stand apart and pummel each other with their fists (a hard bunch of knuckles permanently attached to the arms and made globular or extended into a palm at the pleasure of the proprietor) till one of them, finding himself sufficiently thrashed, cries enough."
Pretty good swatting, that.
No more are Wednesdays and Saturdays the regular shaving days with every man restricted to two shaves a week. No more are the sick bays the most cramped and worst ventilated places in the ship. A lot of these things have disappeared, just as flogging has disappeared, and if the romance of the sea has gone with the passing of sailing ships and the development of steel ships into great factories and arsenals the general condition of Jack has improved in inverse proportion and the country can say good-by to the old ways with no regrets.
When the general mess of the crew was formed in recent years there were those who said it would never do. Croakers and obstructors of new things abound in all walks of life and at all times. The result has been that one wonders how a warship ever managed to get along without the mess. One man now has charge of the feeding of all the men. There are no longer thirty or forty messes with varying grades of food. The navy regulations declare that so much material shall be fed to the crew for each man. He gets that allowance, and it is as wholesome food as any person can eat.