Down to the sea in their crazy ships
Went the sailors David knew.
There have been, and perhaps still are, many theories covering that amorphous mass of moving men who constitute the merchant service of the world. They are trained, or untrained, they serve in every sort of craft that floats; many achieve distinction, command great liners, are knighted, decorated or damned, depending upon the turn of fate. A Captain Smith goes down with the Titanic, a Captain Carey founders with the Vestris. But Rostron of the Carpathia, picking up survivors of the Titanic, became Sir Arthur, while Captain Schuyler Cumings, who saved the largest number of the Vestris victims, is forgotten. Ranging down from these heroic figures, names America has come to know, Fried, Randall, Grening, Fish, Manning, Moore, descending as it were, we enter the pages of an obscure log that seldom finds its way to print. Down the line, passengers, cargo on regular schedule, and tramps, coastwise and cross seas, the seamen become a hazy myth, mere instruments in the ocean-carrying trade. Where do they come from? Why do they go to sea?
Aside from woman, cause of nine-tenths of the agitation in our semicivilized world, the greatest fact on earth is the sea. Practically everyone has heard of it, countless millions stand upon its shores and marvel after a fashion as to its meaning. Out of these multitudes come the men who are tempted to try the temper of the sea. These adventurous ones have always found their individual answers, most of them so interlaced with hardship, so overshadowed with disappointment, so meager in returns, that the sea, or the life at sea, takes on an aspect of doom. Parents argue against a life at sea; preachers intone the solemn prayer—“O Eternal Lord God, preserve us from the dangers of the sea.”
The Spaniards have a proverb: “Give your son luck, and cast him into the sea.”
Possibly the Dons have come as close to truth as is possible in the consideration of any puzzle involving the happiness of men.
While the naval service has its special problems of education, training, and the development of offensive and defensive weapons, it meets with the merchant service in the common use of the sea as a theater of activity. The Navy, necessarily, is an organization developed to a high point of perfection. It has a special mission, calling for knowledge of all phases of shipping and not the least part of this is a broad understanding of the international rivalry of trade, and of the type of men who do the work at sea. The merchant craft of all nations, plying the oceans, are the hopeful ventures of those who still believe in taking chances. Tremendous fortunes have been made out of the sea, nations have prospered, in fact, no nation has ever become great without the use of trading ships. On the other hand, periods of depression have ruthlessly wiped away the gains of shipping; in no part of the world’s activity is competition so keen as at sea. The struggle for cargoes and passengers on the one hand is paralleled by an effort to keep down costs. The merchant seaman, officer and man, comes in direct contact with this relentless economic fact. Man for man, gauging them by the yardstick of ability, the merchant seaman is the poorest paid worker in the world.
Having agreed that there is no money to be made at sea, and the naval seaman is no better off in this respect, what sort of men go to sea in merchant craft? Having had a term at sea of about fifteen years, all of it afloat on various voyages, my answer would be limited, as such answers always are, to my individual experience. The merchant craft we pass at sea and meet in port are largely officered and manned by the victims of an early hankering for romance. All attempts to better prepare boys for the life at sea, are met with the absolute fact that no matter how they start, the sea, in the end, takes them in charge; this may account for a certain rough alikeness among seamen.
The percentage of cunning, the development of a certain technique of evasion, the common practice of “passing the buck,” is less a factor at sea than anywhere else. Always, on every voyage, comes the time when men are called upon to perform some duty or make some decision absolutely on their own. The seaman, whether on deck or below, constantly finds himself face to face with reality. The intimate contact with shipmates, not for the purpose of trading with them, but because of the necessity of working with them, seems to bring out characteristics quite different from those resulting from a life ashore. Salesmanship, so glorified in our present system, seldom ventures on the sea. All of that is left behind, the ship’s services have been sold, and her cargo may be sold, but the interval, which concerns our merchant seaman, is free from this debilitating influence. Ashore, most seamen are the easy victims of every device employed by traders.
Visit aboard a naval ship and you meet with men who are more or less alike in outlook and intelligence. Board a merchantman and talk with her officers and the chances are you will encounter a barrier of reserve; you may utterly misjudge them because of a lack of understanding. You may have to make half a voyage before you discover that Nils Jacobsen, the big Swede second mate, is not simply an ignorant squarehead. It may turn out that he spends hours in his watch below reading Voltaire in the original and also has an appreciation of music and has heard great singers in all parts of the world. But I defy anyone to find this out until many weeks have passed and you meet him on the common level of respect that grows out of your mutual ability as seamen. The social insulation of most merchant craft is possibly incomprehensible to the naval officer who enjoys the reasonable contacts of a homogeneous service.
I have never been at sea in merchant craft with what I would definitely set down as an ignorant man. Many of them have been hopelessly one-sided in their development, many proved to be crude, uncultured, and even bad, but all seemed to have within themselves a certain indefinite whimsical wisdom of expectation; they seem, if I may so put it, to believe in fairies. This curious trait is what keeps them at sea, combined with the fact that most of them would starve if left ashore.
Certainly the merchant service has been a remarkable incubator of genius. Navigation owes no greater debt than that accruing to the memory of Captain Thomas H. Sumner, discoverer of the line of position. In letters it has given us Herman Melville who also served as a seaman in the frigate United States. The merchant ship gave us Joseph Conrad and William McFee. The spread of intelligence among the seamen of the working craft of the world is wide indeed. Perhaps that rusty old tramp off on the horizon carries more valuable stuff than is listed on her manifest.
The growth of good feeling, of mutual understanding, as between naval seamen and merchant seamen is one of the hopeful developments of our times; each has much to learn from the other. Our Naval Reserve, following the World War, is doing its part to bring closer together men of the sea who have the common heritage of rendering service for their country.