“Ay,” he replied, “and a good deal more.”
“And yet many of them persist in putting up at those haunts?”
“I can’t account for it,” said he. “Here’s such a chance as any gentleman with plenty of money in his pocket might be glad to take; and yet there are sailors who’ll carry their bags or chests to the lodging-houses, as certainly knowing that they are going there to be robbed of all they have as that their feet are upon dry ground.”
I have only ventured to write down a very little part of what I was told about these lodging-houses. I will not pretend to be ignorant of much of the inner life of those places; but I own that some of the stories related to me filled me with horror and astonishment that such deeds should still be doing in this enlightened age of marine progress. But is it not strange that so truly valuable an institution as this Well Street Home, which counts bishops, marquises, admirals, and captains in abundance among its directors, should be deliberately neglected, and even viewed hostilely, by the Board of Trade, whose efforts to promote the interests of the sailor it helps to a degree no one would credit without close and careful investigation of its theory and practice? Why, for instance, should the Board of Trade decline to licence a shipping-master in connection with this Home? Surely the directorate should abundantly guarantee the character of the duties such an official would discharge. What conceivable object can the Board of Trade have in objecting to the Home endeavouring, by legal means, to obtain employment on board ship for the numerous highly respectable men who use the institution, and who must often want help to obtain a berth? The Home asks for no State help; it is self-supporting; it has extinguished a number of low public-houses and crimps’ haunts in its neighbourhood; it is doing a great work; and no man who values the sailor can read the list of gentlemen whose names are associated with it without an emotion of gratitude to them for the generous, wise and humane part they are playing. Surely it is the duty of the State to co-operate with the endeavours which the working of this Home exemplifies, and to omit nothing that may tend to lighten the labours of its exemplary officials and advance the truly national purpose for which it was originally established.
THE PERILS OF HUMANITY.
“Sir,” said a middle-aged master of a merchantman to me a few days since, laying down his pipe in order to grope with both hands at once in his waistcoat-pockets, “I should very much like,” said he, looking now at one hand and now at another as he produced a number of odds and ends before lighting upon the things he wanted, “to have your opinion upon some documents which I cut out of a morning newspaper, and must have stowed away somewhere with such uncommon carefulness, that dash my wig if I know where I’ve put ’em!”
I waited whilst he groped and slapped himself, and explored a weather-beaten pocket-book. Finally returning again to his waistcoat, he produced with an air of triumph three newspaper cuttings, which, after putting on a pair of spectacles to read them first himself, he handed to me one at a time.
One was headed “Thanks.” The writer said that he considered it a portion of his duty to publicly express his deep gratitude and that of his surviving shipmates to Captain Townshend and the crew of the barque M. J. Foley, “who not only rescued us from a miserable death by frost and starvation, but did everything in their power, by the kindest possible treatment and self-sacrifice, to mitigate our intense suffering and supply our many wants.” The writer added that nautical men would fully appreciate the meaning of the addition of nineteen persons to a small crew in the winter-time; “but in this case my men were well fed, and we were sorry to be the means of every one being put on a limited supply of water.” The writer of this letter, brimful of honest, sailorly thanks, signed himself, “Abraham Evans, chief officer of the late Bath City (s).”
My friend the shipmaster kept his gaze attentively fixed upon me whilst I read this newspaper extract, and on my putting it down called out, “Kindly now cast your eye over this document,” and handed me a second cutting.
This was headed “Elba, brig,” and was a request to be allowed to thank Captain Jacob Backer, of the Norwegian barque Sarpen, for rescuing the eight men who signed the letter “from our water-logged vessel, when only 2 lbs. of putrid meat stood between us and starvation. He gave us food, clothing, medicine, and every attendance, and was most ably seconded by his kind-hearted crew; and in the seven days we were on board his vessel he made us in a great measure forget the privations we had undergone.”