experiences, I dwell upon my own sensations when I had to work out and away harder than a pitman or a bricklayer, on a flatulent diet of sickly biscuit and stale water; and with all my heart I pity the men, knowing that in ninety-nine cases out of every hundred the complaint is well founded.

This condition of the life should be borne in mind by the young fellow who wants to go to sea. I exaggerate nothing. It has been suggested that the rottenness and wretchedness of the forecastle food is mainly owing to the ill manner in which it is dressed, and there are proposals afloat for establishing a school of marine cookery. I will not say that the trained ship's cook might not mend matters a little, but I am afraid that those who are for teaching people how to cook for sailors at sea, have but a very slender acquaintance with the quality and character of the stuff their artists of the galley would be called upon to boil.

It remains to be seen whether the new Victualling Scale will satisfy the sailor. The forecastle menu "reads" very well; but so did the old ones. Nothing to a hungry man sounds nicer than beef and pork and pudding. But Oh, the beef of the sea! And Oh, the puddings! Jack's bill of fare is now, it seems, to run thus:

of an undermanned forecastle of which perhaps a full half of the men prove themselves, when at sea, utterly unfit for their duties-ignorant of the very elements of the vocation, unable to steer or to furl, trustless when on the look-out, absolutely afraid some of them to go aloft! The work in a ship thus manned obviously falls on the few competent men who get no additional pay for the extra duty imposed; nor dare they murmur; it is mutiny to step aft even to respectfully protest. A young fellow on first going to sea should contrive at all events to get aboard a ship where there are numbers enough to comfortably work her. I fear he will not easily find such a ship in an English port.

But

There is now with us a system of filling a deckhouse or a living-room below with a number of apprentices, sons of respectable men who bind their lads at the cost of a trifling premium. This worthily supersedes an old fraud that was largely practised in my time; I mean that of taking lads into a ship and calling them midshipmen. Fathers paid heavily in premiums for each voyage; some of the lines used to charge seventy guineas for the first, sixty guineas for the second, and fifty for the third Voyage. The boys were taught nothing. I never knew a cap

This swindle is exploded. Here and there, indeed, in the advertisements you read of "midshipmen wanted for a fine clipper ship; uniform worn." But it usually comes to the lads being apprenticed and clothed for about one-third the amount they used to charge to fill a boy's chest with drill breeches and bars of marine soap.

A young fellow in England who wants to go to sea should undoubtedly start as an apprentice. Indeed, I don't see how he is going to get into the forecastle as a sailor in any capacity without previous experience. The shipping-yards of Great Britain swarm with respectable English seamen who loaf about all day long for weeks, unable to obtain a berth. The Dutchman is taking Jack's place with us; Yawcob will sign on for a trifling wage, and set his teeth and choke his growl over the mess kid, let the scent of it

The seaman's parliamentary representative recently stated in the House of Commons that the British Mercantile Marine was composed of 150,000 men, of which 27,000 were foreigners, exclusive of between 20,000 and 30,000 Chinamen and Lascars, reducing the total of the British-born to 100,000 seamen. One cannot get a proportion of 12.4 per cent. out of these statistics. The shipowners declare that the foreigners and Lascars combined do not greatly exceed 50,000 men. When the Right Honorable Joseph Chamberlain was President of the Board of Trade, he and the late Thomas Gray, C.B., as worthy and kindly a gentleman as ever filled an official position, went closely into this matter of the number of foreigners employed in the British Merchant Service; but, if I remember rightly, the figures they submitted with a view to legislation widely differed from the statistics

which were obtained and diligently circulated by representatives of the shipowning industry. What is the sailor then to believe? But the point really comes to this: Do you or do you not find plenty of "Dutchmen" sailing under the red flag of Great Britain? How many of these gentry there may be I do not know; enough, anyhow, to block the road. They abound in the forecastle and swarm in the shipping yards. I shall long remember a visit I once paid to the Shipping Yard at Tower Hill; I watched crew after crew of foreigners called in to sign on, leaving the Englishmen without a ship, seemingly hopeless. Many of these poor fellows came about me and explained their grievance. They flourished certificates of good conduct; their eyes sparkled as they raged against the "Dutchman;" they nearly suffocated me as they pressed round, eager to find one who could understand them, more eager yet to obtain an exponent and a representation. One man, a plain, steady, respectable ship's carpenter who had served in several

employs I was acquainted with, and who showed me a number of certificates indicating the grades he had filled, assured me he had been hanging about that yard for upward of four months; he had seen scores of foreigners called in, but to him never once in that time had a berth in any capacity been offered. These are facts which Mr. Thomas Scrutton and others should look into before they challenge the statements of men who, like Mr. J. H. Wilson, M.P., seek to give expression to a calling that for centuries has been practically voiceless on the forecastle side of it.

A young apprentice bound to a respectable line, and despatched in a ship commanded by a captain who respects himself and his calling, stands, at all events, a professional chance: I can say no more. Every ship afloat, steam and sail, must have a master and mates; the young sailor should remember this, work on, and hope on.

The great British mail lines, such as the Peninsular & Oriental Company, the Union Steamship Company, and

others, demand that a young fellow shall have served in a square-rigged ship before he can be deemed suitable for a post. This also is comprised in the Board of Trade regulations for obtaining certificates of competency. The system of taking apprentices, not as formerly under the obligations of the old Navigation Laws, but as now practised, should be encouraged. Young fellows of good families are going to sea in a branch of the marine where culture, education, and manners are wanted. Every lover of the ocean life must wish to see the purple - faced swaggerer of the quarter-deck, the typical Blowhard with his fiery nose and profane tongue, swept over the side, and set ashore forever. We have had too much of that sort of dog. I never can believe that the Merchant Service has been degraded by the forecastle; I look aft when they talk to me of the debasement of the red flag. You don't expect a sea career to polish a man; yet you find few but gentlemen in the Navy, and there is no reason why there should not be a higher tone than now exists among the masters and mates of merchant ships. How much higher it is than it was may be gathered from the following statement made by an eminent shipowner in regard to the repeal of the Navigation Laws. "I get," he said, "a couple of hundred of ships that I charter every year, and I have an opportunity of seeing the captains, and as a sample I must state that of one hundred out of those two hundred ships the captains can hardly sign their names to the charter-party. I ascribe the inferiority of the captains chiefly to the poverty of the ship-owners. You must pass an Act of Parliament compelling the ship-owner to pay double the rate to the captain that he pays now, because you will not get an educated man to serve at a low rate. And that operates downward, because if you have an uneducated and brutal captain he makes his ship a hell upon earth to his crew, and you will not get a superior class of seamen to serve on board, and your best seamen will be doing what they are now doing-going in shoals to the United States."

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This was said above forty years ago. So far ahead were the people in the United States in the theory of marine needs when they had a great shipping industry of their own that they were training some of the best of the youth of their country to the sea, and embellishing their white quarter-decks with seamen who were educated gentlemen, when we in Great Britain were protesting against the compulsory examination of men as to their fitness and competency to take charge of ships. The late Mr. Lindsay has a note on this subject in his excellent "History of Merchant Shipping." "In my own time," he says, "I remember a shipowner saying to me that he never would have a 'scholar' in command of any of his vessels, because education taught him how to make up false accounts and the art of cheating; while another whom I knew only retained one educated' master in his service, because he was flattered by being invariably addressed by him as Mr. Joseph Perkins, Esquire.' It was then that the Americans were submitting an example which our obstinate pride rendered us very slow to follow. A lad intended for the higher grades of the American Merchant Service was sent to school where he was taught mathematics, navigation, ship's husbandry, and perhaps French; he was then bound to a merchant in whose counting-house he learned all about exchanges and other such commercial knowledge as a shipmaster should possess. He then went to sea. The American captain often invested his savings in his ship. "Thus," says Lindsay, "young men of good position and talent were led to enter the American merchant service, and had much greater inducements than they would have had in Great Britain to take a zealous interest in the economy, discipline, and success of the ship they commanded. Captains of the larger class of packets or merchant ships, therefore, could not only afford to live as gentlemen, but, if men of good character and manners (which they generally were), they were received in the best mercantile circles on shore."

I dwell upon this point because I regard it as of vital interest and signifi

cance to the seaman. When you ask about the every-day life of the merchant sailor, when you inquire into his prospects, labor, pleasures, a reference to the quarter-deck is inevitable. What sort of captain commands? Is he a gentleman, a man of education, a humane man, though a sailor first of all? Then you will find that the every-day life of the sailor who serves under him is as pleasant, hearty, cheerful a routine as the ocean and all the hard conditions of the ocean will allow human endeavor to contrive. The sailor's comfort will be regarded, his complaints wisely inquired into and judiciously dealt with; there will be no undue exaction of toil from him, even in moments which a worthless skipper might regard as a time of stress; harmless indulgences will be permitted; the noise of the fiddle will be constant in the fine weather dog-watch, the laugh in the hour of leisure frequent and hearty. There will be good feeling among the men, who will work together as one, with an honest, cordial rivalry between the watches. Ships filled with contented men in charge of educated, humane commanders, have been afloat by the score; some in this age-as I am very well informed-the winds continue to blow to their several destinations. It was Lord Collingwood, Nelson's famous second at Trafalgar, who, whenever he heard of trouble and mutiny in a ship, charged the captain with the difficulty. "It must be the fault of the officers," he would say, and investigation invariably proved him right.

The sailor's pleasures at sea, as I have said, are few: it is ashore that he steps for the dance and the drink, and if he is not considerably more artful than the folks who lay in wait for him his land-going carouse is commonly but a brief one. 'Rise up, Jack, let John sit down" is a very old seaman's boarding-house joke. "You have spent all your money, Jack, so out you go; here is John, new from an eighteen months' voyage. Let him sit." But there is one side of the ocean life that must not be overlooked, and in it lies the fascination of the vocation to the young and the curious. Its possibilities of adventure are unlimited. Yes,

Nor

even in this prosaic age, much that is extraordinarily picturesque and romantic is every day happening at sea. are the old-fashioned horrors any longer plentiful. Science has proved a good angel to Jack; she has munificently equipped the captain's cabin, enlarged the horizon of the ship's steward; and, however ill-fed the seaman may be, it should be wholly the owner's fault if ever the poor fellow perishes for want of a drink of water.

I do not attempt to follow the merchant sailor ashore. The crimp, the boarding-house, the sailor's home, the "Midge" system, as it is called, the contract note, the penalties for failing to join after signing articles, though the ship may be overloaded and undermanned, charged with the menace of death even as she floats motionless on the smooth stream of a river; these and the like are features of the merchant sailor's life when he quits his vessel, which I have no space to enter upon here. Enough that the ocean is finding employment for countless persons; it is a vocation, and its chances, taking them all round, are at least as promising as you find in many of the shore-going walks. I am personally acquainted with some, I have also heard of many, men now in command in receipt of salaries averaging from £400 to £800 a year, who have worked their way to the bridge or quarterdeck from the forecastle; and they are the more trustworthy as commanders of ships, and the wiser and more respected as commanders of men, because of the rough and practical experience they gained before the mast. In the English Army the man who rises from the ranks is never much loved, nor his good qualities appreciated by the privates and non-commissioned officers of his regiment. It is otherwise at sea-at least in the merchant service; a sailor good or bad appreciates a thoroughly practical seaman whenever he encounters him. am often asked by young fellows if I would advise them to go to sea; I always answer no, not if you can get a living ashore. Yet, if the seafaring yearnings of a lad prove unconquerable, he will find an ocean career not

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