Ships of the seven seas

by Hawthorne Daniel

Here and there one still finds sailors comparable or even superior to the rough-and-ready men of years gone by. The fishermen of Gloucester are such men, but an able captain could more easily take a steamer across the ocean with a crew of mechanics who never before saw the sea, than with a crew of Gloucester fishermen who had had no experience with machinery. All of this was proved during the World War when Britain largely manned her M L’s, those tiny motor cruisers built to hunt for submarines, with men who first went to sea in those unsteady ships of war. And America, in 1917 and 1918, sent across the Atlantic scores of craft only slightly larger—the 110-footers—most of them officered and manned with college boys and others who had had no experience at sea. And of all the scores that went over and came back in the service of the United States Navy, not one was lost because of storm or shipwreck.

But I do not mean to imply by this that the need for seamanship is gone. Far from it. Seamanship has changed, not disappeared, and more knowledge, though of a different sort, is needed to operate a steamer than to operate a sailing ship.

A sailor still has need to know the many knots that earlier seamen used so constantly. The square knot and the bowline are, perhaps, the most important of the lot, but the fishermen’s bend and the timber hitch, the catspaw and the sheepshank, the single and double Blackwall hitches, the figure of eight, the bowline on a bight, the rolling hitch, and a dozen others are useful still. But nowadays wire rope is commoner than formerly, so thimble eyes and wire rope clips, turnbuckles, shackles, and other apparatus used with wire rope are useful things with which to be familiar. And still it is advisable to know how to splice both hemp and wire rope. But the Turk’s head, the double Matthew Walker, and others of that type are less in evidence than formerly.

More rope is used to-day in the movement of cargo than in rigging, but sailors have little to do with the cargoes of ships. Crews are used nowadays merely to handle the ships, while stevedores at every port load and unload, stow and break out the freight that fills the great holds.

HOW A FORE-AND-AFT SAIL IS REEFED

The sail is partly lowered, the reef points are tied beneath the sail and above the boom, and the sail is then raised. A part of the sail, however, has been held by the reef points and is not spread to the wind.

Few really nautical things, in the old sense, are asked of modern sailors. They must be able to steer, although many ships have quartermasters whose duties are only those that have to do with the bridge. They must be able to handle the “ground tackle,” that is, the anchors and cables, but that is simple, for one has only to throw off a few lashings and pull a lever in order that the anchor may plunge to the bottom as the cable roars through the hawse pipe. To weigh anchor a steam valve is opened, or an electric switch is turned, and a windlass brings in link after link until the anchor once more is snugly in place, while the hawse pipe drips water and the anchor flukes drip mud. The sailor then has only to wash the mud from the flukes with a hose, clamp down a “slip stopper” to make the cable secure, and the task is done.

Sailors are supposed to know how to lower and handle the lifeboats, and many of them do, but alas, the smartness of small boats under oars is almost gone. Such a thing takes practice and coördination, and few indeed are the merchant ships to-day that can muster a boat crew worthy of the name. And even that is less necessary than it was, for motor boats do the work in ports, and lifeboats need only float for a time before they are picked up by some ship that has caught the radio call for help. And to float they need no seamen, for nowadays they are both noncapsizable and practically unsinkable.

If a ship goes aground where there is no help, the old method of using small boats to carry an anchor out to seaward and of hauling the ship off by means of a cable made fast to the anchor, is seldom enough in these days of large ships to accomplish the task. The unfortunate ship is either beyond help, save for her crew, or needs a sea-going tug or two and a crew of professional salvagers.