CAPTAIN CHADWICK'S LETTER RELATING TO THE TRAINING OF SEAMEN.
See No. 98.
Captain CASPAR F. GOODRICH.—The question with which Captain Chadwick deals is as old as the substitution of steam for sails in the primary motive power of ships. To this question, complete differentiation of labor will, of necessity, furnish the answer to those who look for material results only. Nothing can be more satisfactory than an organization in which each man's task, assigned in exact proportion to his strength and capacity, is performed day in, day out, with ceaseless regularity. Were vessels always to sail under sunny skies over smooth seas, unvisited by tempests and fogs and enemies, such a system would find no serious opponents, scarcely even an adverse critic, except among those perennial shell backs, the laudatores temporis acti. They would, indeed, have no real ground for their strictures—not a leg to stand on. As the sailor phrases it; under such circumstances, all the old women would be going to sea.
But, and this seems to me the gist of the whole matter, our organization should not consist exclusively of specialists, helpless in the presence of phenomena different, either in kind or in great degree, from those with which they are habitually concerned; rather should it comprise, in adequate numbers, men of sagacity, boldness, of training and experience in emergencies, when the best of physique and morale is none too good. It is when the tempest rages or the rock-bound coast, close at hand, is shrouded in a veil of fog, when death looms sudden and awful in a collision, or the lives of fellow human beings hang on the adroit tossing of a rope or the powerful and skillful handling of an oar, when in the thick of battle, men have to think for two and, act for six all at once, that any naval system is tested to the breaking point. If we have failed to provide men able to meet these and other exacting contingencies, then we have failed in our duty.
It can hardly be asserted that, hitherto in the history of our navy, the call has not found the right man. If that be so, we must admit that our honorable record has been made by men who got their nautical training in sailing ships. Surely, if experience counts for anything, we should be slow in abandoning the old ways which have confessedly worked so well.
Captain Chadwick would be quite within his logical rights if he simply took the ground that the burden of proof rests, not with him, but with the innovators. He might, very properly, invite them to carefully study the practical and undeniable outcome of the old method and challenge them to show how, in any other way, the man-of-wars-man, that ideally handy man of "courage, resourcefulness, activity, strength," can be better, more rapidly or more economically produced than on board a sailing ship. Until then, I shall be content to adhere to my convictions, so well expressed by Captain Chadwick, and to endeavor to curb a mild sense of resentment towards those who, in advocating something new and untried, would hold us, of the old school, to a demonstration of the efficacy of its processes, calmly ignoring the fact that the navy is today what it is because of what it has been. Paraphrasing a well known epitaph he might say with entire appropriateness, "Si demonstrationem queris, circumspice."