When my young friend has successfully passed as second mate—he will not find it very hard—he will go to work for a chief mate's certificate. Meanwhile he is at sea as second officer, let us say of a small barque. On what wages? Shall I suggest twenty dollars a month? This is no liberal income; but it suffices to keep a man's sea-chest filled with good clothes, and all the while he is at sea and in harbor abroad he is maintained at the ship's expense. My young friend must think of that. Forecastle sailors complain of the poorness of their pay, and I have again and again said that it is miserable enough as a return for the services rendered; but Jack forgets one feature of his money-getting; what he receives, to use the commercial phrase, is net—his money is not taxed for what he has eaten and drunk, and for the use of his bedroom and sea-parlor. A man might step ashore and draw for his services thirty or forty pounds. If he is a careful man he will know what to do with as much of it as he can put away; and after several voyages there is no reason why he should not have saved money enough to establish himself in a little business, or to purchase an interest in some longshore or water-borne industry. But this refers to forecastle Jack, and I must recover the hand of my young friend.
He will naturally start with high ambitions. He will think of the fine berths which must be constantly falling vacant on board the grand Atlantic expresses through officers tumbling overboard or being left sick behind. Dreams of the Peninsular & Oriental Company, of the Cape Mail lines, of many services which need not be named here, will have haunted his young imagination; but for the most part he will find them but stars, which a man may see without being able to approach. I should say that it is only a little less difficult to secure a berth, in this age of interest and directors, on board of the great mail-steamers than it is to enter the royal navy. If I were my young friend I should not look very high, though. I should still think cheerily of the sea as a vocation. First and foremost it is the calling of and for a man. That is good. Hundreds of sailing-ships and of steamers crowd the docks and harbors, and whiten the sea with sail or wake. They are not necessarily P. & O.'s or White Star liners, yet they will yield a young fellow the chance he seeks; they will give him a living; they will find him posts of trust and command.
One condition of the sea should be indicated by every one who offers advice to the young as to the life. I refer to the engine-room. When parents talk of sending their sons to sea, they seem to think only of the old traditional quarter-deck; they forget that amidships of the steamer is a well, filled with resplendent arms of steel, and with the innumerable machinery of perhaps the most marvellous and perfect of human inventions. The engine-room requires men. It must be fed with men of the workshops of the rivers, as the furnace is fed with coal from the bunkers. There is still a great plenty of sailing-ships afloat, and there will always be a demand for masters and mates for these vessels. But a boy intent on a sea life should be invited to dwell upon the liberal and popular side of it—the side where there is most abundance, where the pickings are fairly plentiful if seldom handsome. Now a steamer needs two sets of men, a crew for her fo'c's'le and a crew for her engine-room. They are perfectly independent of each other, and though no doubt the captain is master of the ship, it is often the engineer who, by virtue of his post of enormous trust and usefulness, subtly but certainly holds the real command.
The suggestion of the engine-room to a young lover of the sea might affect him with something like a shock; he wants to be on deck, to climb the masts, to behold the blue sea foaming to the horizon. But waiving all romance, if I am to be asked should a boy go to sea for a living, I am bound to annex the engine-room as a present considerable and ever-growing chance. The theoretical examinations are no doubt a little stiff (in the British royal navy they are simply man-killing, and I marvel that any young fellow is able to obtain even a third-class certificate, so numerous and abstruse are the subjects he is examined in; the merchant-service examinations are much easier), and there is plenty of hard work involved in the probationary term of labor in a shipwright's yard, but then the opportunities of employment are plentiful as compared with the chilling toil of seeking a situation in sailing-ships; the pay is, all round, better than the money received on the bridge or the quarter-deck. Socially, moreover, the marine engineer is fast lifting his head. Time was when, only a very rough class of men could be found for the engine-room. The tradition of roughness lingers. It is well known and complained of in British war-ships, that though the officers of the engine-room mess with the officers of the vessels there is a "feeling"; in a word the lieutenants and midshipmen have not yet got to regard the engineers as of themselves, as men as fully entitled to the same degree of respect as is exacted by the quarter-deck. But the lad who thinks of the sea as a profession, and who may lightly or seriously turn his thoughts to the engine-room, should consider that everyday witnesses the growing importance and dignity of the marine engineer. Science is asserting him. He has scarcely had time to declare himself. He is mainly hidden in the bowels of the ship, and is little seen, though the safety of the whole magnificent fabric is as much in his hands as in the captain's. Let us consider that there are plenty of people now living who remember the time when there was not a passenger steamship afloat. So the marine engineer still advances socially and commercially, while the master and mate of the sailing-ship walk in footprints as old as the red flag of Great Britain.
The profession of the sea, however, is so full of hardships, perils, and difficulties, that the friends of a lad should endeavor to make him as clearly understand it as a vocation as his unformed intellect will allow. He might be sent on a short excursion to sea as a sailor-boy; in his presence seafaring men might be consulted, and their words would weigh with him. The peculiarity of the sea is this, that when once adopted as a calling it generally unfits a young man for any form of steady, monotonous life ashore. Richard Dana used to say that had he remained another year on the coast of California he should have been a sailor forever. A lad, or rather the lad's friends, before deciding should, unless the little fellow be an enthusiast, weigh the chances of payment and promotion at sea with the opportunities a boy is likely to obtain ashore. Such is the stress of life nowadays that I do not think a serious consideration of chances ashore and afloat would tell very heavily against the sea. It is the life of a man, as I have said, and sailors are always wanted. And for my own part, I would rather be the master of a vessel on fifty dollars a month than the manager of a bank on two thousand dollars a year.
[MY REALM.]
BY ALBERT LEE.
When I was quite a little chap
They took me to the sea;
A broad-brimmed hat, a wooden spade,
And pail they gave to me.
They turned my little trousers up,
They stripped me of my socks,
And let me paddle in the waves,
And climb the weed-grown rocks.
I built great walls and fortresses
With parapets and moats;
I dug deep lakes and waterways
To sail my paper boats.
And thus I learned to love the sea,
The shells, the surf, the sand,
For, truly, all this seemed to me
A very fairy-land
Where I was king of all the shore
So far as I could see,
And Ocean was a docile thing,
Obedient to me.
For when I built a fort of sand
And gave it to the foe,
I called upon the tide to come
And wash the fortress low.
But when I knew the flood must turn,
I shook my little spade,
And drove the curling breakers back
As far as I could wade.
Oh, truly, for big sailing-ships
I think God made the sea;
But all the shore, the surf, the sand,
He made for little me.