THE MASTER (SAILING SHIPS)--_continued_.
Hitherto I have endeavoured to pass lightly over the sailing ship
master's work in making passages, only showing the superior side of
these responsible men's characters. But if I were to go no farther in
this direction, many masters would rightly feel much aggrieved. They
would not feel satisfied that the public should imagine that they were
all alike excellent, and that the training and experience necessary
for the command of a ship always succeeded in turning out a man who
was really fit for the post he is called upon to occupy. Besides,
the picture would be a false one. Far too many masters, having once
obtained command, instead of utilizing their extended opportunities
of showing their fitness for such a post, just settle down on their
lees and become indolent, careless, and consequently worthless. It
must be granted that the temptation is great to a man not naturally
energetic. Once freed from the oversight and control of his owners or
their agents, and out upon the sea, he is in the position of an almost
absolute monarch. His officers are anxious to gain his good word, since
upon it depends their future.
This statement needs some explanation. By a rule of the Board of Trade,
every officer coming up for examination in order to take a certificate
of a higher grade must produce written testimonials from the master
he has served with. Wanting these, he is not allowed to enter for the
examination at all. Now, as by the common law no master is bound to
give his servant a character, it follows that a shipmaster need only
withhold that essential scrap of paper from an aspiring officer to
put an effectual bar before his rising any higher. I do not profess
to criticize the wisdom of this enactment, I merely state the facts
as they are. And as an instance of how this power is regarded by
shipmasters, I may mention that, recently writing upon the subject
in the press, I received an indignant letter from a shipmaster, who
said that if all shipmasters did their duty there would be far fewer
officers obtain certificates than there are now. Also that no good
officer need fear such treatment at the hands of any shipmaster--which
was manifestly absurd, since among shipmasters, as amongst all other
classes of men, there must be both bad and good, and the temptation to
use arbitrary power like that is far too great to be resisted by a bad
man.
But to return. Having, then, this potent lever in his grasp, this
guarantee for the good behaviour of his officers, the indolent master
may, if he will, leave everything to them, except just the obtaining
of the ship's position each day. Even that it has been my lot to see
neglected by a shipmaster. Of course he will occasionally potter
about and find fault, if he be, as well as indolent, of a small, mean
character. Such a master is a sore trial to both officers and crew.
Asked for instructions as to what he wishes done, he will reply that he
did not expect his officers would need to be shown their work, and that
he would prefer to have men about him who did not want dry-nursing.
Which being translated means that he wants his officers to do things
on their own initiative, so that he can at any time, if in want of a
little recreation, find it in quarrelling with them for doing that
which they deemed to be right.
For instance, I was once mate of a barque. While lying in Noumea,
failing any instructions from the master, I decided to set up all
the rigging, which was so slack as to be dangerous supposing that we
encountered any bad weather. The work was well under way when the
master came on deck from his cabin, where he had been dozing all the
morning, and, seeing what was going on, called out loudly: "Here, Mr.
Bullen, just stop that, will you? That can be done any time. _I_ want
the ship painted outside." Far too well in hand to make any remark, and
really rather glad to get a definite order, I had the gear unrove and
put away; and soon we were in the thick of painting. We did not get
another opportunity to tighten up that rigging before we left one of
the northern ports of the island, deep loaded with copper ore. We were
hardly outside the harbour, bound to Newcastle, N.S.W., when it came on
to blow, the vessel rolled tremendously, the rigging worked slacker and
slacker, and in the middle watch that night she rolled her three masts
over the side. Then, of course, I was blamed for not having had the
rigging set up.
Then there is the indolent skipper, who leaves everything to the mate,
and never finds fault either. Amiable but lazy, he spends most of
his time in sleep. He scarcely looks at a book, does not meditate,
but leads a sort of fungus life, indulging in a perpetual _kief_, or
cessation of all the nobler faculties. Naturally, young officers like
that kind of skipper, since they have a perfectly free hand; but they
despise him, and in their inmost heart they know that such a ship is
very little good to them. And in times of emergency or danger, when
naturally every one on board looks to the head for leadership, it is
disconcerting, to say the least, to find him altogether wanting in
initiative either in energy or resource. Of course, this is not saying
that many masters will not be found who are fussy and meddlesome to
the most irritating degree when the weather is fine and the ship is
on the high seas, who, when danger looms near and the master's good
qualities should shine brightest, are but broken reeds. One master
whom I liked very much--a really good man, but without back-bone--was
looked upon by all hands with good-natured toleration as a sort of
benevolent old female, who, if he did keep himself in evidence pretty
much all the time, did not interfere to any great extent. But there
came a day when we were running the _Easting_ down (bound to Calcutta)
that we were overtaken by a really heavy gale. All our energies were
needed to get sail off the deeply laden ship, for she was wallowing
dangerously, and was not speedy enough to keep ahead of the sea. While
we were thus striving with all our powers, under the smart mate's
direction, the skipper, swathed in many clothes, clung desperately to
the weather-mizzen rigging, a pitiful picture of fear, his legs bending
under him all ways, and his grey beard beslavered with the foam of
fright. A more abject specimen of a coward I never saw. All hands noted
his behaviour, and from that day forward he was treated with utter
contempt. His authority was a thing of naught, and the discipline of
the ship (never very rigid in the Merchant Service) was entirely gone.
At last the men refused to obey a most necessary order, simply because
it necessitated work in their watch below. The offence was flagrant,
involving as it did the possible loss of the ship and all hands. He
summoned the recalcitrant watch aft and reasoned with them. They merely
gibed at and taunted him with cowardice and uselessness in reply. When
we arrived at Calcutta he had them up before the shipping-master for
punishment, and that worthy fined them two days' pay--at which they
laughed hugely.
Now, such a scene as that would be unthinkable on board of either an
American ship or a "Blue-nose" (British North American vessel). There
the traditions are all on the side of stern discipline, which is not
based upon law, but upon force. The foremast hand, whoever he may be,
that signs in an American ship realizes at once that it is dangerous
to play any tricks with his superior officers. Because, although he
does not reason it out, he feels that it would be useless to invoke the
law to protect him against the certain consequences of shirking work,
insolence, or laziness.
And this leads me naturally to a consideration of the American skipper;
that is to say, the skipper of the sailing ship, the man who, by dint
of seamanship alone, has risen from the lowliest position to command.
No better sailors ever lived than the masters of American ships; and
it should never be forgotten, when the statistics of our marvellous
Mercantile Marine are studied, that not so many years ago the American
merchant navy was more than equal to our own. Not only so, but the
shore population was also so deeply tinged with the maritime spirit
that nautical terms were a part of the common speech of those who had
never even seen the sea. It is hardly fair to use the past tense,
because this is largely the case now; so much so, that a book bristling
with nautical phrases will be read in America by both sexes with
perfect ease, from their familiarity with nautical terminology.
What sailor is there worth his salt who does not cherish proudly the
remembrance of those magnificent "Down East" clipper ships and their
wonderful passages to and from the Far East and San Francisco? Their
doings have passed into proverbs, the runs they made from day to day,
the mountainous press of canvas they carried and the smartness of their
crews. Many of them were built by "rule of thumb," and were sailed
also much in the same way, for their officers prided themselves far
more upon their knowledge of sailorizing than mathematics, but they
flew over the wide sea at a speed that our clumsier wooden vessels
could not begin to compete with. In them the master was looked upon
almost as a demigod. No man-o'-war's man to-day regards even an admiral
with such awe as did the foremost hand of an American packet ship or
China clipper the saturnine, deep-browed man who, in spotless raiment
and with an Olympian air, strode up and down the weather side of his
immaculate quarter-deck. And a man who had once made a voyage in such
a flyer as the _Sovereign of the Seas_ or the _Dreadnought_ before the
mast, was wont to brag of it loudly ever after. It conferred a sort
of brevet rank upon an A.B. that he had successfully survived all the
hardships of such a voyage.
The watchwords on board these ships were "Good food and hard work." No
cook dare venture on board of them unless he could justify his title.
And unless he were clean enough to satisfy those hawk-eyed officers
he had better never have been born than have ventured under the Stars
and Stripes as cook. I have myself seen a Yankee skipper go into the
galley, and, taking up the first saucepan to hand from the rack, wipe
it out with a snowy handkerchief brought clean from his drawer on
purpose; and if it showed a smear upon inspection, there was at once
a sound of revelry in that galley. Another one had a pleasant habit
of going around the panelling of the saloon and state-rooms, poking
his handkerchief into the mouldings with a piece of pointed stick, and
examining it most carefully afterwards for any mark of dust. This, of
course, was carrying the Yankee officers' passion for cleanliness to an
absurd length, but it may safely be said that nowhere on the sea was
freedom from dirt maintained at so high a level as it was on board the
now almost extinct American clipper ships.
These masters fought their way up to command by sheer merit and force
of character, allied to physical prowess, dauntless courage, and,
it must be said in the majority of cases, ruthless cruelty. Laws for
the protection of the common seaman undoubtedly existed, but it was
an unheard-of thing for them to be enforced; and many dark stories
are current of men being done to death by incessant brutality, whose
murderers, whether officers or master, quietly slipped ashore in the
pilot-cutter upon reaching the offing of their home port. Then, if
such an unlikely thing happened as the dead man's shipmates taking
the matter of his slaying before the authorities, it was hopeless to
attempt the murderer's arrest.
But brutal and reckless as Yankee masters undoubtedly were, the fact
remains that they were unapproachable for seamanship and speedy
passages. They skimmed the cream off the Far Eastern trade, and, owing
to the generosity with which they were treated by their owners, took no
long time to amass comfortable fortunes. The knell of their supremacy
was sounded, however, when Britain took to building iron ships. Even
before that time, so well had the lessons taught by these dashing
Yankee shipmasters and born shipbuilders been learned, that some of our
firms had been able to build wooden ships that could hold their own in
the swiftest ocean race. Then came the day of the composite (wooden
planking with iron frame) ships--the famous tea-clippers of fo'c'sle
story, built by such firms as Hall of Aberdeen and Steel of Greenock,
against which no Yankee clipper had any chance whatever. And when the
iron ship appeared in her turn, in spite of the immense difficulty
of keeping the hull under water free from encumbrances of weeds and
barnacles, she at once sprang into premier place.
This, however, is a part of my subject that belongs to another place
in the book. It is necessary to mention it here in passing, because it
is one of the prime reasons for the rapid decay and disappearance of a
body of men whose seamanship was peerless--men who carried the Stars
and Stripes triumphantly over all the seas of the world. It must not be
supposed, either, that American skippers were uneducated men. Many of
them were, of course, but the proportion was far less than existed in
our own service. Navigation as taught in the sea-ports of the United
States, on the lines of Bowditch, was no mere perfunctory business; and
although there were no compulsory certificates of competency necessary
in those days, there was a good deal of proper pride in mathematical
attainment which those who employed officers of ships did their best
to foster. And if there were a goodly sprinkling of men among them who
did not care, so long as they could fudge their position out in the
most rudimentary way by means of an old wooden quadrant or hog-yoke, a
ten-cent almanac, and the barest acquaintance with a set of nautical
tables, why, so there were, and so there are now, among our own people,
even with compulsory certificates granted by a vigilant Board of Trade.