American Merchant Ships and Sailors Part 15

Such are some of the safeguards which modern science and organization have provided for the sailor in pursuit of his always hazardous calling. Many others of course could be enumerated. The service of the weather bureau, by which warning of impending storms is given to mariners, is already of the highest utility. The new invention of wireless telegraphy, by which a ship at sea may call for aid from ash.o.r.e, perhaps a thousand miles away, has great possibilities. Modern marine architecture is making steamships almost unsinkable, more quickly responsive to their helms, more seaworthy in every way. Perhaps with the perfection of the submarine boat, ships, instead of being tossed on the boisterous surface of the waves, may go straight to their destination through the placid depths of ocean. But whatever the future may bring, the history of the American sailor will always bear evidence that he did not wait for the perfection of safety devices to wrest from the ocean all that there was of value in the conquest; that no peril daunted him, nor was any sea, however distant, a stranger to his adventurous sail.

Much has been said and written of the improvidence of the sailor, of his profligacy when in port, his childlike helplessness when in the hands of the landsharks who haunt the waterside streets, his blind reliance upon luck to get him out of difficulties, and his utter indifference to all precautionary provisions for the proverbial rainy day. Perhaps the sailor has been getting a shade the worse of it in the literature on this subject, for he, himself, is hardly literary in his habits, and has not been able to tell his own story. The world has heard much of the jolly Jack Tars who spend in a few days' revel in waterside dives the whole proceeds of a year's cruise; but it has heard less of the shrewd schemes which are devised for fleecing poor Jack, and applied by every one with whom he comes in contact, from the prosperous owner who pays him off in orders that can only be conveniently cashed at some outfitter's, who charges usurious rates for the accommodation, down to the tawdry drab who collects advance money on account of half a dozen sailor husbands. The seaman landing with money in his pocket in any large town is like the hapless fish in some of our much-angled streams. It is not enough to avoid the tempting bait displayed on every side. So thick are the hooks and snares that merely to swim along, intent on his own business, is likely to result sooner or later in his being impaled on some cruel barb. Not enough has been said, either, of the hundreds of American lads who shipped before the mast, made their voyages around Cape Horn and through all the Seven Seas, resisted the temptations of the sailors' quarters in a score of ports, kept themselves clean morally and physically, and came, in time, to the command and even the ownership of vessels. Among sailors, as in other callings, there are the idle and the industrious apprentices, and the lesson taught by Hogarth's famous pictures is as applicable to them that go down to the sea in ships as to the workers at the loom. It is doubtful, too, whether the sailor is either more gullible or more dissolute when in port than the cowboy when in town for a day's frolic, or the miner just in camp with a pocket full of dust, after months of solitude on his claim.

Men are much of a sort, whatever their calling. After weeks of monotonous and wearing toil, they are apt to go to extremes when the time for relaxation comes. Men whose physical natures only are fully developed seek physical pleasures, and the sailor's life is not one to cultivate a taste for the quieter forms of recreation.

But the romance that has always surrounded the sailor's character, his real improvidence, and his supposedly unique simplicity have, in some slight degree, redounded to his advantage. They have led people in all lands to form organizations for his aid, protection, and guidance, hospitals to care for him in illness, asylums and homes to provide for the days of his old age and decrepitude. Best known of all these charitable inst.i.tutions for the good of Jack Tar is the Sailor's Snug Harbor, whose dignified buildings on Staten Island look out across the finest harbor in the world to where New York's tall buildings tower high above the maintop-gallant mast of the biggest ship ever built. This inst.i.tution, founded just one hundred years ago by the will of Captain Robert R.

Randall, himself an American sailor of the old type, who ama.s.sed his fortune trading to all the countries on the globe, now has an income of $400,000 annually, and cares for 900 old sailors, each of whom must have sailed for at least five years under the American flag.

A new chapter in the story of the American sailor is opening as this book is closed. The period of the decadence of the American merchant marine is clearly ended, and everything gives a.s.surance that the first quarter of this new century will do as much toward re-establishing the United States flag on the high seas as the first quarter of the nineteenth century did toward first putting it there. As these words are being written, every shipyard in the United States is busy, and some have orders that will tax their capacity for three years to come. New yards are being planned and small establishments, designed only to build pleasure craft, are reaching out after greater things. The two biggest steamships ever planned are building near New London, where four years ago was no sign of shipyard or factory. The Great Lakes and the Pacific coast ring with the sound of the steel ship-builder's hammer.

But will the American sailor share in the new life of the American ship?

The question is no easy one to answer. Modern shipping methods offer little opportunity for ambitious lads to make their way from the forecastle to the owner's desk. The methods by which the Cleavelands, Crowninshields, Lows, and their fellows in the early shipping trade won their success, have no place in modern economy. As I write, the actual head of the greatest shipping concern the world has ever known, is a Wall Street banker, whose knowledge of the sea was gained from the deck of a private steam yacht or the cabin _de luxe_ of a fast liner, and who has applied to the shipping business only the same methods of stock manipulating that made him the greatest railroad director in the world before he thought to control the ocean as well. With steam, the sailor has become a mere deckhand; the captain a man of business and a disciplinarian, who may not know the names of the ropes on a real ship; the owner a corporation; the voyages mere trips to and fro between designated ports made with the regularity and the monotony of a sleeping-car's trips between Chicago and San Francisco. Until these conditions shall materially change, there is little likelihood that the sea will again attract restless, energetic, and ambitious young Americans.

Men of the type that we have described in earlier chapters of this book do not adopt a life calling that will forever keep them in subordinate positions, subject to the whims and domination of an employing corporation. A genial satirist, writing of the sort of men who became First Lords of the Admiralty in England, said:

"Mind your own business and never go to sea, And you'll come to be the ruler of the Queen's navee."

Perhaps a like situation confronts the American merchant marine in its new development.