Round the Galley Fire

by William Clark Russell

I once wrote an account of a voyage in a smack in the North Sea. One such journey is enough for a lifetime, and the recollection of it makes me here declare—and I am sure there is not a sailor living who will contradict me—that of all the several forms of seafaring life there is absolutely none comparable in severity, exposure, hardship, and stern peril to that of the smacksman. His vessel is a small one; his cabin a little darksome hole; his working hours are full of harsh toil; he has to give battle to the wildest weather, to struggle on for bread through storm and snow and frost, through the long blackness of the howling winter’s night, through the grey wilderness of a foaming ocean swept by winds as pitiless as the hand of death. No legislation can alter these conditions of his life. Philanthropy will have its cod and sole and turbot. The fish must be caught, but caught in such a manner that those who shoot their trawls for them catch other things besides—a wild roughness of bearing, a defiance of civilized instincts, a sense of outlawed and neglected life that brings with it a fixed conviction of social immunity. “I’m a fisherman myself, sir,” a man once said to me; “and I’ll allow that there are many well-mannered, sober, steady men among us; but, taking us all round, you’ll not find a coarser set of human beings in the world; and, if you want to know the reason, you’ve only got to look at yonder smack, heading away into the North Sea, where, maybe, she’ll be heaving and tossing about for weeks, with ne’er a proper influence in the shape of books or company for the men to come at.”

Take now the fishing apprentice. He comes to this severe, coarse life, himself most often of the coarsest. He is fresh from a reformatory, from a union, or, worse still, from the gutter. His associates are men who were themselves apprentices; lads who came one knows not from where, the refuse of the street manufactured into marine objects by the owner’s boots, and breeches, and coats; and hammered into sprawling, unwieldy smacksmen by the hard blows of their calling. They know all about dandy-bridles and trawl-warps; but they do not know how to read, and they do not know how to write, and they do not know how to think. Their home is the public-house when ashore, and they take the morals of that sort of home to sea with them. The apprentice comes among them, gets knocked about, picks up their oaths and their shore theories, and imitates them masterfully enough to be able to hand on their conditions with an added flourish, when he is out of his time and has boys under him to swear at. Now, what is legislation going to do here? You have the roughest life in the world; the roughest lads in the world recruits its ranks. What is to be done, short of what a few philanthropists are endeavouring to do, to prevent them from being the roughest men in the world? I cannot see that the smack-owners are to blame. They must have apprentices. They will take the best of such boys as they can get; and it is really carrying idealism too high to expect that these men, who have to work hard themselves, who have to be down among their vessels, seeing that their men do not run away, that they are properly engaged in preparing for the voyage, and so forth,—I say you cannot expect that these men, who come home of a night tired out, should turn schoolmaster and parson to their apprentices, and set them to moral jobs, when they are ready to abscond—with their master’s clothes also—if they are not allowed their evening out after being at work all day up to their knees in mud, scrubbing the vessel’s bottom. No one with any knowledge of the smack-owner’s calling, of his hardly earned money, of his risks and anxieties, will envy him. Boys are boys all the world over, and that smack-boys should be peculiarly troublesome is not hard to account for on reference to their antecedents—that is, the antecedents of most of them. “The law has come between us and the boys,” was said to me, “and makes our case harder than it was. We have no remedy now. Time was when we could send a constable after a lad when he was off; but the law has stopped that. We have got to wait a couple of days, and then apply for a warrant, by which time the boy’s t’other end of England. Take the case of a vessel about to start. A boy refuses to turn to. I’m on the spot, and call a policeman, and in his presence repeat the order. Boy still refuses. Policeman then walks him off afore a magistrate, who fines him, and I have to pay the fine if I want to get the vessel to sea; for if I don’t pay then the boy’s locked up, and the vessel detained two or three days whilst I’m seeking another boy.” The hardship is clear enough, though I for one should be heartily sorry to see it rectified by a return to the old and brutal system of locking up lads in gaol at the will of the smack-owner. Let me briefly place the case of the owners before you with regard to their apprentices. To begin with, the lads come from all parts, as I have said, and are bound apprentice for terms of three, five, or six years. If bound by institutions such as workhouses, reformatories, and the like, a certain sum of money is paid with them—in some cases £10, enough to purchase an outfit. I asked a smack-owner what he reckoned to be the average yearly cost of a lad’s clothes, and he said £8. “A pair of sea-boots alone,” said he, “cost £1 16s.” Boys, however, when they first go to sea do not get sea-boots, but “bluchers,” the cost of which is about 12s. a pair. When the lads are in harbour the smack-owner has to house them. In many instances they sleep in his own house, or in lodgings provided for them. If they do not take their meals with their masters they live as well; dining from the same joint and getting much the same fare as he has for tea and breakfast. There may be exceptions to this; but it is a practice so general that it may be taken as a rule. When ashore the owners also keep the boys furnished with a little pocket-money. The lad, for instance, who acts as cook at sea gets, when in harbour, 6d. a night, the deck-boy 9d., and the third-hand apprentice 1s. These payments are made during what is termed “settling time;” but, in addition to this money, the owner gives them the small fish caught during the voyage, called “stocker-bait,” the produce of which yields each lad an average sum of 1s. a week all the year round. Whilst in port the apprentice’s work mainly consists in scrubbing the vessel’s bottom, touching her up with the paint-brush, preparing nets for the next voyage, etc. At sea the lesser duties are assigned him. Suppose a smack carries three boys; the youngest will probably act as cook. When the net is hove up his post is in the hold, where he coils away the trawl-warp, which done he returns to his cooking. The deck-boy’s post is on deck when the men are below taking their meals. He steers the vessel in the morning until noon or 12.30; then gets his dinner, and turns in. The duty of a third-hand apprentice is that of a man. He is commonly within two years of his time; and, though he is still an apprentice, he is generally treated as a well-seasoned and fully developed smacksman. Talking recently with a body of smack-boys, I asked them what sort of grub they got aboard.

“Good enough, master.”

“What do you have for breakfast?” said I.

“Well, we has the choice of tea or coffee or cocoa; we has roast fish and butter and soft tack—as long as it’ll last—and then we has biscuit.”

“And what do you get for dinner?”

“Why, fresh and corned beef for a spell; and when that’s ate up we has fish, and suet pudden, and cabbage—as long as it lasts—and carrots and parsnips when they’re in, and ’taties.”

“And your tea?”

“Tea’s the same as breakfast.”

“Do you get any supper?”