In the dog-watches of the evening, after supper, from six to eight P.M., the blue-jacket is given his leisure. It is then that pipes are smoked, vigilance relaxed, boxing and wrestling bouts are in order, and Jacky settles down for his rest after the day of labor. From somewhere down on the gun-deck comes the tinkle of a guitar or banjo, and a tuneful, manly voice sings the songs of France or Spain, and, better still, of beloved America, for the shipmates.
The sailor of to-day is also a soldier. Back in the days of Henry the Eighth, when England first had a navy, the sailors only worked the ships. The fighting was done by the soldiers. Later, when the ships were armed with many guns and carried a greater spread of canvas, there was no space for great companies of soldiers, and the sailors became gunners as well. A few soldiers there were, but these did only sentry duty and performed the duties of the ships’s police. As such they were cordially hated by the jackies.
This antipathy has come down through the ages to the present day, and marines are still looked on by the sailor-men as land-lubbers and Johnnies—sea-people who have no mission upon the earth save to do all the eating and very little of the rough work.
The new navy has done much to change this feeling. The mission of the marine is now a definite one. Always used as a sharpshooter, he now mans the rapid-fire batteries, and even guns of a larger caliber. He has done his work well, and the affair at Guantanamo has caused the sneer to fade from the lip of the American sailor-man. Two of the ablest captains of our navy, always the deadliest opponents of the marine corps, upon assuming their latest commands, applied immediately for the largest complement of marines that they could get.
Any ship, old or new, is as frail as the crew that mans it. The strength of any vessel varies directly with its discipline and personnel. Hull, Jones, Decatur, Bainbridge, and Stewart, in the old days, knew with some accuracy the forces they had to reckon with. Their guns were of simple contrivance, and their men knew them as well as they knew how to reef a topsail or smartly pass a weather-earing. They feared nothing so long as they were confident of their captain. New and mysterious contrivances for death-dealing were unknown to them, and hence the morale of the old sea-battles was the morale only of strength and discipline. There were no uncertain factors to reckon with, save the weight of metal and the comparative training of the gun-crews.
To-day the unknown plays a large part in warfare. Intricate appliances, mysterious inventions, new types of torpedo-boats, and submarine vessels form a new element to contend against and have a personal moral influence upon the discipline of crews. To combat this new element of the unknown and uncertain has required sailors and men of a different stripe from the old. Where, in the old days, ignorance and all its accompanying evils held sway over the mind of poor Jack, and made him a prey to superstition and imagination, to-day, by dint of careful training of brain as well as body, he has become a thinking creature of power and force of mind. He knows in a general way the working of the great mechanical contrivances; and in the fights that are to come, as well as those that have been, he will show that the metal the American Jacky is made of rings true and stands well the trial by fire.
THE OLD SHIPS AND THE NEW
With much hitching of trousers and shifting of quid, the old longshoreman will tell you that sea-life isn’t at all what it once was.
He will gaze out to sea, where the great iron machines are plying back and forth, and a reminiscent sparkle will come into his eyes as he turns to his lobster-pots and tells you how it was in the good days of clippers and sailing-frigates, when sailor-men were sailor-men and not boiler-room swabs, machine-made and steam-soaked. He will also yarn, with much d—ning of his eyes (and yours), of how fair it was in the deck-watches of the “Saucy Sally” barque, with everything drawing alow and aloft, grog and ’baccy a-plenty, and never a care but the hurry to spend the voyage-money. And not till he’s mumbled all his discontent will he haul his sheets and give you right-of-way.
He forgets, sheer hulk that he is, that he’s been in dry-dock a generation or more and that swift-moving Time has loosed his gear and dimmed his binnacle-lights. Despite his ancient croaking, tricks at the wheel are to-day as ably kept, eyes as sharp as his still peer into the dimness over the forecastle, and the sea-lead takes as long a heave as in the early sixties, when he hauled up to New York with a thousand dollars in prize-money and a heart full for the business of spending it. It has always been so. There has never been an age that has not had its carper to tell you of the wonders that once were.