Chapter X: Part 10

This deposition worked very strongly in my head the other day when I happened to find myself standing under the bends of the towering iron skeleton of a ship that, when completed, would be 100 A 1, and qualified to carry three thousand tons of merchandize. The hammering all about me was sharp and furious, the sparks flew wildly, and as the white-hot rivets popped out of the holes they were cut and hammered by the men as though they were carrots. There were other ships on a line with this, one completely plated and painted, another half-finished, a third a mere outline of frames and keelson and stern-post and stem-pieces. The scene was an imposing one, and especially imposing was the appearance of the completed ship with the polish of her clean metal run and the gilt tracings about her figurehead and quarters. And yet when I turned my eyes from her to the skeleton under which I was standing I felt a good deal of my admiration leaking away from me. I called to a man who was hammering close beside me. “Do you know what clagging is, my friend?”

“Ay,” said he, looking at me with a broad grin, “ye dorn’t need to go very fur to find out the meanin’ o’ that word.”

“These things,” said I, striking a long curve of metal, “which in a wooden ship would be spoken of as ribs, are called frames, aren’t they?”

“Ay, those are the frames,” he answered.

“I suppose they have a good deal of weight to bear, a good deal of pressure to resist?” said I.

“Why,” he replied, “they’re pretty nigh the ship, man!”

“Then what do you make of that flaw there, and that crack there, and there, and there?” said I, pointing to the places as I spoke.

“Pooh!” said he, “when the plates are on that’s all covered up.”

“Yes,” said I, “so I suppose; but do you know I don’t see a frame that hasn’t three or four—and yonder is one with six—of those cracks and flaws plain to be viewed upon it. Considering the dimensions of this vessel, do you think it wise—I’m speaking in the interest of human lives, my man—to put in such defective iron as this?”

He made no answer, and was about to resume his work.

“Here,” said I, “there is no thirstier work than hammering,” and I gave him a shilling. “How do you get the iron plates which cover these ribs to fit?”

“They’re rolled,” he replied, pocketing the shilling with a look around.

“The part of the plate that overhangs another,” said I, “is, I think, called the landing?”

“Ay,” said he, “the lannin’, that’s right.”

“Do you see this landing, here?” I asked. “I’m not sure that I couldn’t put my little finger between.”

“Oh, the rivets ’ll draw that into its place,” said the man.

“True,” I exclaimed; “but you wouldn’t call it a fit?”

“No,” he answered; “I wouldn’t call it a fit, but the rivets ’ll make it one.”

“But, don’t you see,” said I, “that by prizing these plates together with the rivets you are putting work on the rivets for which they are not designed? If the blow of a sea springs the rivets, the plates must yawn. At this rate it seems to me that the rivets not only keep the plates together, but actually give the hull its shape.”

“What are ye, sir?” said he to me; “a surveyor?”

“No, my man,” I replied; “if I were, I should be talking to your master, not to you. Here’s another point that strikes me as worth noticing. Look at these rivet-holes. They’re all punched, I observe.”

“Certainly they’re punched,” he answered.

“But don’t you think they ought to be drilled?” I asked. “Punching is bound to weaken the rivet-holes, by cracking and dislocating the fibres of the metal around them, and rendering them the less fit as a hold for the rivets.”

“Drilling ’ud be much better, of course,” said the man; “but it ’ud pretty nigh double the expense, and that ’ud be going the wrong way to what the shipowners want.”

“But here again I see another curious feature,” said I. “Look through these rivet-holes, one after another, as many as you choose. There’s not a single hole in the front plates that corresponds with the holes in the plates at the back. How on earth are you going to drive a rivet through such a hole as that, for instance?” said I, pointing to a hole so much lower than the hole behind it that the apertures where the two plates met resembled a half-moon.

“Oh, we’ll rivet ’em somehow,” he answered, laughing, and without even glancing at the holes to which I sought to direct his attention.

At this juncture somebody who might have been the manager came sniffing curiously about me; the man went on with his work, and I moved off. Before quitting the yard, however, I walked over to the other vessels—the incomplete ones, I mean—and had a look at them. Here I found precisely the same kind of workmanship and material—the frames full of cracks and flaws, the rivet-holes roughly punched, and not a single hole corresponding with the holes behind; the “landings” yawning and waiting to be prized and warped and severely strained into their places by the rivets. I am not writing learnedly; I am avoiding all technicalities, as I wish the land-going public who know nothing about marine terms to understand me. Neither do I assert that this shipbuilding yard which I inspected is a typical one. But this much I will say, and as a man who has some small knowledge of the power and fury of the sea in a time of tempest—that were I a forecastle-hand and had to choose between one of these brand-new, A 1 iron steamships of from two thousand to three thousand tons gross and one of the old coasters which have long since been condemned and rendered impossible, I should be perfectly content to let the toss of a coin decide for me, satisfied that, so far as security at sea goes, there would be just as much promise of my speedy dissolution aboard such a brand-new steamer as aboard the sieve-like old coffin. It is not hard to understand what a reproach this kind of vessel is to us as a maritime nation and how it has come about. The same fierce competition that covers our tables with butter made of fat, and coffee made out of old beans, is covering the ocean with the sort of ships I am writing of. The problem is now how to build the cheapest steamer to carry a maximum cargo on a minimum draught of water, and to pass the surveyors as fit to go to sea. The shipbuilders are not to blame. They will do good work for good money; but if good money be not forthcoming, though some kind of work be expected, then they will give you frames which are only fit to sell for old iron; the workmanship will be mere “clagging,” the plates will be wrenched and warped into any kind of abominable fit by the rivets; the whole structure and the lives of the people who commit themselves to it will be made to depend upon points which no honest shipwright would dream of reckoning as factors in the binding and holding powers of the fabric; and the false and frail contrivance, doctored up and smothered over with paint, will be launched with all haste, and the next order proceeded with at once.

Therefore, in so far as the loadline is designed for the protection of the sailor against the rapacity of those owners who would load their vessels down to their waterways, if they could only manage to make them float at that, there must always be a most unpleasant quality of insufficiency in the controversies the subject has excited, so long as they exclude consideration of the kind of vessels which are launched month after month and year after year from many shipbuilding yards. The absurdity of painting or nailing a loading disc upon the side of a vessel which is to a strong well-constructed ship what a cheap suburban villa built with nine-inch walls is to a house in Grosvenor or Berkeley-square, struck me forcibly, as I stood the other day looking at the flimsy metal skeletons which, when plated with thin sheets of iron and loaded with the dead weight of coal and freight and engines, are to confront and give battle to the terrible sea. I shall be asked if no protection is afforded the sailor against the deadly risks such shipbuilding as this involves by those marine surveyors, whose duties as inspectors are very clearly and precisely laid down for them by the authorities they represent? I answer, let those interested in the subject make a tour of inspection for themselves—slip in quietly, as I did, into those shipbuilding yards where cheap steamers are manufactured, and judge with their own eyes to what extent I am inaccurate in affirming that a proportion of the ships which are built in this country are renewing with tenfold disgrace those maritime crimes which were supposed to have been ground out of our civilization, and reviving with tenfold horror those peculiar forms of marine disasters which were hopefully assumed to have been shelved along with the old wooden craft.

And now let me say here a few words on the subject of marine surveying.

If there be one class of responsible men more than another who should be wholly above suspicion, who should be possessed of a moral courage equal, under all circumstances, to the unbending and unfaltering discharge of the duties accepted by them, they should consist, one would think, of the men employed by Lloyd’s and the Board of Trade to inspect the construction of ships, and to pronounce upon their fitness as sea-going fabrics. You have only to consider what is involved in the duties of marine surveyors to appreciate the high and extraordinary character of their obligations. Upon their capacity to distinguish between good and bad work, and upon their courage as judges to whom their employers entrust the exercise of the widest possible discretion, practically depends the life of every human being who goes to sea as a sailor or as a passenger. Of course, the difficulties of the vocation, humanly speaking, are not hard to understand. We may appreciate the embarrassment a surveyor labours under in having to condemn the work of a shipbuilder with whom he is on very friendly terms, to say no more. The temptation to inspect any other part of the fabric than that which imperatively calls for condemnation must, under certain circumstances, be very great. But let all this be freely admitted. Life is more precious than class sensibilities, and if an evil is to flourish only on the condition that nothing is said about it, most of us will agree that it is high time to cultivate candour, in that direction at least.

I have no hesitation in saying that a large proportion of the marine surveying of the day is one of the most glaring, as it certainly is the cruellest, of the shams of the period. Samples of work are passed which, were there the least sincerity and conscience in the minds of those who decide upon them, could under no possibility have left the yards in which they were produced. Men, women, and children are sent to sea in structures which never would have been permitted to quit the only place they are safe on—I mean the dry land—had the surveyors put any shadow of honesty into the duties they are appointed to discharge.

“Look,” said a gentleman to me the other day in a shipbuilding yard, “Look at that faulty work there! is it possible that Mr. —— (naming the surveyor) means to pass it?”

The surveyor stood at a distance; the gentleman called him and pointed out the defective work. The surveyor seemed surprised, and shook his head. “Ah,” said he, “that is too bad. I shan’t be able to pass that.” But he _did_ pass it, for the gentleman some days after wrote to tell me that the faulty points had not been remedied, and that the ship was to be launched just as she was.

“What,” cries an American writer, in a Yankee shipping journal, “What of the _Ismailia_, _Bernina_, _Bayard_, _Homer_, _Stamfordham_, _Telford_, _Zanzibar_, _Toxford_, _Sylvia_, _Surbiton_, _Joseph Pease_, and the forty British steamers which foundered last year, and scores of others which have gone to Davy Jones’s Locker?” We are constantly boasting of the vastness and sovereignty of our mercantile marine; but we shall have to acquire a new theory of bragging if we are to reconcile our self-complacency with such plain-speaking as this, which comes to us in our own tongue from across the seas.

“Far less need of hospitals, did they use us well,
Were this forecastle of ours fit wherein to dwell.
Ships are coffins nowadays, life is but a toy,
‘Jerry’ murders millions, Board of Trade ahoy!”

sings the contemporary sailor; but there is very little use in his shouting “Ahoy,” if the only response he gets is the appointment of men who, filling offices designed for his protection, deliberately ignore their most grave and great responsibilities and lure him, by what are absolutely false representations, into committing his life to unseaworthy ships. Unhappily in marine topics public interest is only to be awaked by reiteration. But let it be remembered that it is not only Jack’s life that is jeopardized by our new shipbuilding departures. The subject is one that concerns every living being that crosses the ocean or who has friends at sea. The sailor, we know, is an abstraction. Nautical as we are as a people, we barely take count of him unless as a stage show, or as the pig-tailed Jack Pudding of a romance. But when we think of passengers we think of our friends and of ourselves. Is the loss of the _Clan Macduff_ still within living memory? Everybody was much shocked at the time by that dreadful wreck. But shore-going people would have been more shocked had they taken the trouble to master the meaning of the Wreck Commissioner’s finding, when, by absolving the owner from all responsibility on the grounds that the vessel had been passed by a Board of Trade surveyor, he practically decided that the Board of Trade, through the official who certificated the _Clan Macduff_, was answerable for the dreadful disaster that befel her. At this rate what assurance have the travelling public, leaving sailors out of the question, that their lives are in any degree cared for? Apparently the Board of Trade are not to be reached if one of their servants passes a ship which goes to pieces as an ill-built, crazy machine in the first gale of wind she encounters; whilst the owner of the sea-coffin becomes an irresponsible being on the merits of a certificate cunningly courted and fraudulently given. If the Wreck Commissioner’s law be sound, then the criminality of certificating unseaworthy ships is intensified by the fact that it secures the owners against all penalties. Of course, both the Board of Trade and Lloyd’s act with perfect sincerity. They appoint the best men they can get for the trifling wages they give to do certain work, and it is not their fault that some of these men should prove unfaithful. But since nothing can be more certain than that the whole system of marine surveyorship, as we have it, is deceptive, blundering, and in a high degree obnoxious to human life and property, is it not about time that we set to work to invent some better method for guaranteeing, so far as shipbuilding workmanship and material go, the lives and property of the hundreds and thousands of people who go to sea as sailors and passengers? No society nor Government department has a right to subject men invested with powers made solemn by their involvement of precious life to the temptations to faithlessness which surround the marine surveyor.

“How on earth did the builders manage to get that cruelly ill-built vessel passed?” was asked not long since.

“Why, sir,” was the answer, “by taking care that the surveyor saw her through no other medium than a bottle of champagne.”

A glass of liquor may cost a hundred lives; but the surveyor still keeps his place, and draws his little salary, and goes on passing bad work, with every shipwright in his district sniggering over the man’s complaisance. Is it a system proper to denounce? I think it is; and no disinterested person who is in the secret but must deplore it as deeply dishonouring to the highest and most opulent and fertile branch of British industry, and as a species of legalized and truly rank conspiracy against the lives of passengers and sailors.

I have briefly referred to the case of the _Clan Macduff_; it will serve my purpose to give a more particular instance of marine surveying as I found it reported at length in one of the shipping journals. The brig _Scio_ was a wooden vessel built in 1839, and she was still afloat in 1881. She was the property of a Mr. Blumer Bushell, of South Shields, who had purchased her for £110, probably quite as much as she was worth. She was docked and repaired at a cost of £336. Her first start, after leaving the doctor’s hands, was unfortunate, for she went ashore at Kunda and damaged her keel. This was repaired, £84 being spent upon her. Next voyage she went to sea with a crew of eight hands, and a load of four hundred and twenty-nine tons of coal, her registered tonnage being a trifle over two hundred and sixty-five. Scarcely was she at sea when she was found to be making water. The master’s attention was engrossed by the job of pumping, in the midst of which the wind breezed up hard, the vessel fell off, the mainboom jibed and broke in halves, one piece of which, falling upon a boy, struck him down dead. The leak increased, and the crew compelled the master to run for Leith Roads. Here the vessel was placed on the mud, and caulked as high as nine feet of water around her would let the irons go. Thus soldered, she started once more, and plumped on to Inchkeith. She was towed off after discharging fifteen tons of cargo, and was docked with four hundred and fourteen tons of coal in her bottom. A portion of her crew now refused to share any more of her fortunes, so they were discharged and others shipped in their room. Once more this noble brig proceeded, but had not put fifteen miles betwixt her and the land when the crew came aft in a body, swore that the water was coming in fast and must presently drown the ship, and begged the master to put back. This he did, in the face of a strong head wind, which obliged him to beat up the Firth of Forth in short tacks. By-and-by a squall came along and blew the lower fore-top-sail out of the bolt-ropes. Soon afterwards the _Scio_ struck on some sands off Buckhaven, but managed to beat over them. The master said he now wanted to haul his brig off the land, but that the men refused to turn to. The crew denied this, but, let the truth be what it would, not long after the vessel had beaten over the sands she went ashore somewhere north of Kirkcaldy, on which the crew very sensibly got out. Such is the picturesque history of a brig which no man will believe could by any possibility have been found afloat in these days of the stringent Merchant Shipping Act, and of surveyors appointed by the Board of Trade to stop rotten vessels from proceeding to sea. It was declared at the re-hearing—for a good deal of litigation was generated by this dismal old brig—that two shipwright surveyors, who were officers of the Board of Trade, inspected the vessel whilst under repairs, visiting her several times and pointing out what should be done. Yet you will have observed that the _Scio_ never quitted the dock without all hands going to the pumps, only to knock off in order to come aft and request the skipper to put back to save their lives. And, as if this most unimpeachable testimony to the value of Board of Trade surveying was not of sufficient weight, there comes a Mr. Turner into court with samples of the timbers and planks of the wreck which he had inspected on the beach, and this gentleman deliberately declares—pointing to the samples as he speaks—that, from the survey he made of the wretched old hooker’s remains, she was unseaworthy.

There is no arrogance in pretending to wisdom after the event has happened. The surveyors might affirm what they chose, but we, having the end of the story under our eyes, are at full liberty to say that no declarations that the brig was seaworthy can make her seaworthy in the face of the water that ran into her bottom, and that kept the crew pumping and hurrying back to land to save their lives. Theories are excellent things in the absence of facts; but when a fact comes in the road the biggest theory must make way. The pumping and the putting back are the most satirical commentaries which can be imagined on the declarations of the Board of Trade surveyors. What is their notion of seaworthiness? Is it pumping morning, noon, and night, and all hands imploring the skipper to put his helm up and try back? If it be not that, if, on the contrary, they define seaworthiness to consist of a tight, well-found craft, how are they going to reconcile the results of their survey of the brig _Scio_ with the results of her attempted voyages?

I quote this example of surveying because it is illustrative of the worthlessness of the supervision practised by the Board of Trade under the present system of protecting life and property, and because it is typical of much of the work that is done in that way by the men who are paid to look after the interests they represent. The land-going justices who sat at a re-hearing of the first investigation absolved the owner on the grounds that he did all that he could to render his brig seaworthy—that is to say, “taking into consideration the precautions taken by the owner, under the surveillance of the Board of Trade surveyors at Shields and at Leith, and having all the work executed by practical men of long standing, the Court could come to no other conclusion than that set forth in the judgment.”

But what said the assessors, the nautical element in this investigation? “We do not concur in this judgment ... and will furnish our own report.” That report is the only endurable supplement to the justices’ annex that could be devised. The writers declare that the brig was not properly and efficiently repaired, and that she was not in a good and seaworthy condition when she left Leith; “that, in their opinion, the _Scio_ was in all probability in a worse state when she left Leith on November 26th than when she left the Tyne on the 2nd.” They deny that the owner used all those reasonable means in opening the _Scio_ out and ascertaining her exact condition which, as a practical man, he should have known a vessel of her age required, “and which he had such ample and available means of doing in his own dock, thereby neglecting to ensure her being sent to sea in a seaworthy condition.”

The whole story bears out this decision; and, the assessors’ judgment being unquestionably correct, what are we to think of the surveyors who could allow the brig to go to sea leaking like a sieve and then come into court and speak well of the vessel on the grounds that they had superintended the repairing of her and had even pointed out what should be done? In this case, happily, no lives were lost; the brig went ashore and her people left her. But, suppose she had gone down and drowned her crew out of hand, would not the Board of Trade, in the person of their representative, have been morally guilty of the death of the men? Assuredly they accepted the responsibility of that brig being in a fit condition to go to sea, as they accept the responsibility of every vessel which their representatives pass being seaworthy. This consideration ought surely to give significance to the system of supervision they now practise; and to make them ask themselves whether, having regard to the weight and solemnity of their self-imposed obligations, they have any right, as servants of the public, to persist in multiplying the perils of the deep by a sham and hollow method of inspection. There is not a shipmaster in the country who is not sensible of the necessity of a speedy reform in this matter; and there is not a passenger who would not eagerly join in the cry for reformation were even but a very little bit of the truth published in language which should be intelligible to the landsman.[79]

Footnote 79:

This was written five years ago. In five years, at the present rate of
living, many changes happen; yet I do not find a single statement made
in this paper that I can expunge or modify as a fact of to-day, as it
was a fact five years since.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

_FRENCH SMACKSMEN._

I will not say that the Chinese junk is a handsomer and handier ship than the three-masted top-sail lug-rigged French smack that hails from Boulogne or Gravelines or Calais; but, viewed from a distance, they are not at all unlike. In truth, the horizon of these seas really offers nothing more gaunt, primitive, and cumbersome than the French lugger-rigged smack with her immensely round bows, great spring forward, raking pole-masts crowned with fantastic vanes, brown sails almost as square at the head as at the foot, and cut with an inclination towards the bows like those of a junk, showing more freeboard than many a seven hundred ton steam collier goes to sea with, her decks full of men dressed in a queer kind of blouses, huge sprawling boots and immense earrings, six sweeps or long oars perhaps over either side, an old man steering, and half a dozen women in red or blue petticoats and handkerchiefs tied over their heads, bustling about—the whole of them, from the ancient chap at the tiller to the small boy gutting fish on the forecastle, talking at once, and dropping their various jobs of sweeping, repairing nets, stringing fish, and the like, to gesticulate.

Where do all these people sleep? How do they manage to stow themselves away? I once counted twenty-three men, women, and boys aboard a French smack that certainly did not exceed five and twenty tons. Three or four men—two of whom probably might be youngsters—would have been thought as many hands as that smack wanted had she been an English vessel. And yet, numerous as those French men and women were—and the ladies lent a hand, pulling and hauling with the rest—they worked their ship so slowly and laboriously, and made so much noise, that any one would have supposed she was under-manned and all hands abusing the skipper for putting to sea without a proper complement. The wind was an inshore breeze, and they had to beat out of harbour. It was enough to make one split one’s sides to see the fellows tumbling and floundering over one another whenever the helm was put down. Every man seemed skipper, bawled out orders in a lingo compared to which the accents of a Newcastle pitman excited by whisky would be considered chaste music, and I looked to see half of them in their frantic hurry topple overboard. It so happened that at the particular moment when the Frenchman had rounded on the starboard tack for the purpose of making another board so as to fetch the open water, a large passenger steamer was entering the harbour at the rate of eight or nine miles an hour. The men on the pier roared to the French smack to get out of the road. “Yash, yash!” answered the old fellow at the tiller, waving his hand, but he never shifted his helm, either not understanding what was said, or else supposing that the steamer would go clear of him. What followed happened in a breath. The steamer could not stop her way, though her engines were by this time reversed and the wheels sending a whole surface of foam sluicing towards her bows; her sharp stem took the Frenchman right amidships, there was a crash of splintered wood, and, the vessels immediately going clear, I saw that the unfortunate smack was cut down to the water’s edge.

And her people? As I live to write it, all hands were overboard! They had jumped—men, women, and boys—over the rail when they saw that the steamer was bound to come, and the foaming eddies thrown along by the racing reversed wheels of the steamboat were full of revolving red caps, and earrings, and white handkerchiefs. It was wonderful to see them all in the water, supporting themselves with the utmost ease, half of them breast high, waiting until they should cease to rotate that they might “fix” their vessel and observe whether she meant to float or sink. Before any boat could put off to them they had made up their minds, and were swimming towards the smack, over whose sides they clambered, until her decks were once more filled with them, and there they stood, with the water streaming from their clothes, anathematizing the steamer in one voice, and with every contortion of figure it was possible for their ungovernable rage to fling them into. However, nobody was hurt, and the smack, throwing her sweeps out, was got alongside one of the wharves, where all hands promptly fell to drying themselves.

These vessels are very common objects in some of our English harbours; but, familiar as they are, there is a deal of amusement to be obtained by standing and looking down on their decks. If they hailed from a country ten thousand miles distant the manners, appearance, customs of the crews could not be more totally different from those of our own smacksmen. It makes one think of the Spaniards at Trafalgar hanging big wooden crosses on their spanker-boom ends before going into action, to see these poor fellows when they leave Boulogne—and may be the other ports they belong to for all I know—kneel down in their immense boots upon the deck and offer up a prayer to the cross on the church on the summit of the rocks. I have watched the English smacksman leave a good many harbours, but never observed him in a devotional posture. Perhaps on these occasions he withdraws into his little cabin, taking care to assemble the apprentices first. Be this as it may, the French smack’s deck in harbour is a real study, and one I never tire of watching. The craft is so crowded that she seems full of business. If it is summer time five or six brawny yellow-skinned lads are taking the diversion of a bath over the side, while the ladies of the extensive company go quietly on with their mending of nets or stockings. The men smoke, argue, grease their boots, peel potatoes, clean fish, and the gruff murmur of a wild _patois_ floats up, amid which the most accomplished French scholar can only now and again hear a word that reminds him of the French language. They and their ship make somehow—ugly as their vessel is—a prettier picture than an English smack to fit a summer day. It is no doubt the numerous crew, the oddness and wildness of their appearance, the dress of the women. Some of the boats are extraordinarily massive, perfect beds of timber with immensely round bows and enormously thick scantling. The vanes at their mastheads are often real marine curiosities; even the west country fishermen cannot beat them. You can always tell a Frenchman by his vane though he should lie in the middle of a whole forest of Dartmouth, Penzance, Brixham, Shoreham, and other spars. You may also know him by the smell of the smoke from his galley chimney—the little funnel that rises out of his deck, and discharges a fish-like vapour, made even worse than ancient to the British nostril by—what shall I say? what mystery of vegetable, seasoning, stirring, and peppering?

I suppose the _chasse-marée_ is the lineal descendant of those formidable French privateers, which in the old wars used to sneak about the Channel in search of our sugar-boxes and tea-waggons. But there is something in the sight of the French lug-rigged smack, with her two or three masts and decks crowded with men, that always recalls the old St. Malo, Ste. Brieux, Havre, Dieppe, and Boulogne picaroons—those pests of the sturdy old British merchantmen of other days. To see her pulling away out of harbour on a moonlit night, her long sweeps rising and falling like the fibrine limbs of some gigantic marine insect, is to bring up recollections of many a furious conflict under the very shadow of the white heights of this perfidious island. There is the stout high-pooped merchantman at rest, after a voyage of five months from the East Indies, under the lee of the towering North Foreland. At regular intervals the sound of her bell floats down upon the light air, blowing so softly that the shadows of the clouds upon the hazy stretch of moonlit water seem to be at rest. And now creeping round the huge point of land, urged by her sweeps and her dark sails goose-winged or boomed out on either side, comes a fac-simile of that French smack we have watched leaving the harbour. She is alongside the slumbering ship in a trice, lights flash, pistols explode, and in a few minutes behold! the cable is cut, and the ship, with her sails loosed, is standing south-by-west for Boulogne or the forts that way, the sneaking lugger ahead of her, black as ink against the silver splendour of the water in the south, and all hands keeping a breathless look-out for British cruisers.

But though there may be a deal of the poetry, or at least the romance, of history in the suggestions to be got from the form and rig of the French smack, there goes to the making of her every-day life as many hard, stern facts as ever a Gradgrind could desire. She sees as much weather of all kinds as our own fishermen experience; and suffers, having regard to proportion of numbers, as many disasters. The shipping reports are constantly mentioning her. One day she is stranded, and her crew burning flares and owing their lives to the lifeboat. Another day she is found abandoned, and towed into harbour with nothing standing save three or four feet of her mainmast. Or else a steamer plumps into her and drowns the whole of her company but two. As bad a wreck as ever I heard was that of _La Reine des Agnes_. The story was told by Adolphe Derevières, one of the crew, and it is worth repeating as a sample of the various misfortunes which follow in the wake of the French smacksman. Adolphe’s English was exceedingly good. He had learnt it, he told me, from intercourse with the English at Boulogne, and by constant visits and long detentions in harbour in this country.

“I sall hope,” he began, “to make you comprehend. I most speak slow, for dere is no language more difficult nor de Angleesh. De boat vas vhat you call a dandy—not a loggaire: you know vhat dandy means, hein? her name vas _La Reine des Agnes_; she vas forty-five torns; and ven ve left ze Nort Sea ve had vhat de Angleesh fishermen call twenty-tree last of herring in barrels, and loose in de bottaum. De veddaire had been very bad in de Nort Sea—mosh rain, heavee wind, and roff vaves. Ve had von boat only, and von day we lose her. She vas dragging behind ven soddenly a vave make de rope go and she go too. Dere vas too mosh vind to stop, so ve continue sailing for Boulogne. Eighteen men did form our companee. It vas four o’clock on de morning of de tirteenth of Septembre. Ve vas in a nasty part of de sea, off Yarmout, vid de Crosby and de Cross sands as we tink vell to de nor’, and ve to de souse, so as to bring de Newvarp light on our righthand. I say, dis vas as ve suppose. It vas veree dark, still mosh vind, and heavee vaves. Ve vas sailing fast, ven soddenly de vessel stop. Many of us tumble and cry out. Dere vas noting to be seen. Dem as tumble got up, and ve all ran about. De confusion was terrib. Eighteen men, you see, sare, de ship small, and her deck full of de herring barrels. Ve first take de barrels and trow dem overboard; ve had to feel, ve could not see, and all de time de vessel keep bomp, bomp, making us fall. Dere vas no telling de place vere ve vas wrecked—one say dis, anoder say dat, and everybody keep crying out. Dat is de worst of us Franchmen, sare. You Angleesh in dangaire are quiet; ve are as brave as you, but ve make too mosh noise, dere is not de ordaire, each man tink he know best, and, besides, de sea is not our province like it is yours. Some got pieces of vhat you call oakum and dipped dem in oil and made fires, and de rest, knowing dere vas no boats, made a raft composed of two spar and a lot of barrels. It vas a fearful sight—de red flame, de vataire vashing over, de sea all black around. Vell, juste vhen de raft vas ready, de vessel left de sand and began to sink. Mon Dieu! dat vas a horrib moment. Ve got pieces of rope, and tied ourselves to de raft, and put it into de sea, and den de vessel sank. It vas fearfullee cold. Ve vent op and down, op and down, and I feel de sea trying to tear me avay. It vas like an animal vid its claws dragging. Ve vere all on de raft ven de daylight came. Oh sare, tink of dat sight! eighteen men clinging to de barrels. Few could speak; ve vas all full of salt vataire, and I could not open my teeth—dey vas hard set vid de cold. De capitaine say it vas de Meedle Cross Sand de vessel strike. But it did not mattaire; she vas sunk: von sand vas as bad as anoder; and dere vas ve going op and down, op and down, noting in sight, no help coming—and all of us so seek, so veak, so miserable!

“Soon after it vas light a large vave came and covered us all; I did tink it had tore de raft to pieces; dere vas several dreadful cries, and vhen de vataire vas passed I look and see dat five of my comrades vas vashed avay. Sare, I envied dem. Oh, better to be drown, to know noting, to feel noting, dan to be on dat terrib raft vaiting each von his turn, and looking at von’s grave. Presentlee von of de men let go vid his hands, and de sea break his rope and vash him avay. Den anoder give op vid a fearful groan, and de sea take him too. Dis go on until five men vas perished, making ten, so dat dare vas only eight left. Ah, vhat a frightful time did follow! All day long ve did drift here and dere, here and dere upon dat raft. De land vas near—ve knew dat; dere vas Yarmout and dere vas Lowestoff vidin six mile, but had dey been Boulogne, had dey been Finisterre, dey could not have been farder off for us.

“Vell, sare, I do not know enough of your language to tell you all dat vas in my torts, de appearance of my companions, de cries and groans dat break from dem, de roff vaves, de cold, all de horrib pain and misery of dat incredib time. Vhen de evening came ve see a large steamboat. Ve all cry and cry to her vid our hands to our mouts, and she heard us, and came to vere ve vas. Oh, sare, vhat is dare in Angleesh, vhat is dare in Fransh, in any language dat is spoke by human creature, to express our joy ven de steamer lowered a boat, and ve did see it coming to us? I could have cried like a leetel girl, sare, but I vas too veak—all de tears vas vashed avay. Some of us tried to embrace de brave Angleeshmen dat saved us, but our legs at de joints gave vay—ve could not stan’. Vell, after ve had been in de steamboat a letell vile, a lifeboat come near, and dey told us dey had seen de flames ve made in de morning and gone to us, but dat ve had disappear, and dat dey had been looking and looking for us op to dis time! Ah, vhat a noble service—how estimable, how brave is de Angleesh lifeboat! Your countree, sare, has von a hundred battles on de ocean; but not von of dem for glory comes op to de solitary victoire of a lifeboat dat fights vid de terrib vaves and saves de poor sailor, no matter vedder he is Fransh, or Italian, or German. De steamer put us into de lifeboat, and ve vas taken to Yarmout, vere seven of us did go to de Sailors’ Home. But one—poor François Libert—vas so ill dat he vas carried to de hospital.”

Having arrived at this point poor Adolphe burst into French, and, regardless of my assurance that my knowledge of that useful tongue was growing every month more and more imperfect, he rattled himself into a violent fit of emotion, praising the English, lamenting his comrades, grieving over his past sufferings in the dialect any man may hear who will take a turn through the fish market at Boulogne, or linger on the quay there when a fleet of smacks is coming into the harbour. I was truly sorry not to get his story in his own tongue. How could he do justice to his terrible shipwreck in any other language than his? All his gesticulations went for little alongside his “dats” and “deys,” otherwise not a posture but would have helped the wild hoarse flow of recollection poured forth in French—the panic of the men rushing and stumbling upon the barrel-crowded deck; the horrible illumination of the oakum torches with the fires of the flaming paraffin oil streaming from them; the unspeakable anguish of the long twelve hours spent upon that raft, the land in sight, and the rough seas for ever trampling upon them. Is it because they go so heavily manned that disasters to French smacks rise to a height of tragedy that needs the loss of an English vessel of seven or eight hundred tons to parallel? Here was a vessel of forty-five tons furnished with a crew of eighteen souls. Why, a Blackwall liner would hardly need more seamen to work her, if, in calling over the muster-roll, you omit the “idlers.” And another feature that often makes disasters to French smacks peculiarly dreadful is their fashion of taking a number of women to sea with them. I cannot say whether or not they carry the ladies with them into the North Sea, but seldom a French fishing boat puts into an English harbour but half a dozen women and girls may be seen among the crowd of red and blue nightcap-shaped headgear worn by the men. One really cannot be surprised at the old British notion that one Englishman is equal to six Frenchmen when one compares a large Ramsgate, Grimsby, or Yarmouth dandy of fifty or sixty tons going for a six weeks’ cruise in the North Sea in winter manned by four or five men, with the lubbersome, apple-bowed, black-sided, heavily-timbered French three-masted lugger of forty tons, with her decks so crowded with fishermen and women that it seems impossible they can move without getting into one another’s road. Meanwhile, it is to be hoped that the long conference held at the Hague, the correspondence relative to which makes a volume of alarming dimensions, may be accepted as a preliminary to something like a good understanding subsisting among the smacks of various nationalities which drag their nets in the North Sea. Unquestionably the English fisherman has had a very great deal to complain of in the rough and cowardly treatment he has experienced at the hands of French, Dutch, and Belgian smacksmen. It is not only that his costly fishing gear has been irreparably ruined again and again by that mean and treacherous contrivance known as “the devil;” he has even been fired into, and his temper taxed so repeatedly by the basest professional treatment and the most studied insults, that the time was when those interested in the English fishermen expected day after day to hear of desperate battles at sea—small Trafalgars, Niles, and Copenhagens—between the fleets of Yarmouth, Grimsby, and the North and the allied squadrons of Belgium, France, and Holland.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

_OLD SEA CUSTOMS._

The changes which have taken place in the sea-life cannot be wholly restricted to the transformations of the shipbuilding yard. There is a mighty difference indeed between the line-of-battle ship of fifty years ago and the armour-clad of to-day—between the Atlantic passenger clippers of which Fenimore Cooper wrote and the iron mail steamers which have succeeded them; but there are changes in other maritime directions fully as remarkable, though perhaps not so deeply accentuated to the shore gaze. Where are the old customs of the ocean? Whither has fled the traditionary character of the sailor? His canvas remains. He still has his topsails (albeit halved) to hoist, his topgallant sails to sheet home, his royals to set; spite of steam, there are still scores of the old-fashioned windlasses for him to bawl his hurricane songs over; still scores of the old-fashioned capstans for him to wind round, “drunk, monotonous, and melodious,” davits at which he may cat his anchor, as did his forefathers, forecastles as clammy as the most reeking of the holes in which the Jacks of other days lay snoring, with purple faces, in clouds of cockroaches.

But, for all that, it will not do to pretend that the sailor is what he was. I do not speak of the caricatures of the fictionist; the monstrous pig-tailed figures with lanthorn jaws, broken teeth, wooden legs, and bloodshot eyes, the race of Hatchways, Trunnions, and Pipses, who stagger, full of drink and oaths, in clamorous procession through the pages of the sea novelists, losing, to be sure, something of their inexpressible garnishings as they enter the truer oceanic atmosphere of the Coopers and the Marryats of the present century. I refer simply to the old sailor, to the plain man-o’-warsman and merchantman of bygone years, not to the Frankenstein in flowing breeches and hat on nine hairs who trod the stage and procured his circulation in one, two, and three volumes, in the respectable name of Jack, prior even to the days when Sir Launcelot Greaves found the irresponsible anatomy willing to ship

“The broad habergeon,
Vant brace and greves and gauntlet.”

Let me be understood. The British or American mariner of to-day is as hearty, nimble, dexterous, determined a fellow as ever he was at any time during the choicest and most glorious period of his nation’s history. He needs but opportunity to test him. It is in his traditions, habits, superstitions, that he differs from his predecessors. I do not think it is the iron of his latter-day calling that has entered his soul and changed him. The very distinguishable difference is owing to a natural decay of marine sentiment. He is no longer superstitious—possibly because he is not without a tincture of education. Hard wear has attenuated his prejudices, and custom has lost its hold upon him. It would be difficult now, I should think, to find in any forecastle such a superstitious sea-dog as the old salt who, in Dana’s “Two Years Before the Mast,” agreed with the black cook as to the malignant and wizard qualities of the Finns. Familiarity with the grand liquid amphitheatre into which he descends and toils for his bread may have helped to rob the modern sailor of what I must call the romantic features of the seaman’s nature. In olden times the voyage was long, the art of navigation crude and halting; the wonders of the deep were many, at least they were found so; a man passed so long a while at sea that he was saturated with the spirit of it. Superstitions salt as the billow from which they were wrought begot peculiar forms of thought; customs grew out of the strange fancies and interpretations, and that they should now be dead means simply that they flourished for centuries, and that they died very hard at last.

How wide the difference is between the shipboard life of the mariners of the past and that of the present race of seamen may be collected by looking into a few of the customs which are now as extinct as the timbers of Noah’s ark. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was a practice on board Italian and Spanish, and possibly Portuguese ships, for the sailors on crossing the equator to erect a canopy on the forecastle, under which three seamen, absurdly dressed, seated themselves. One was called the president, the others judges. They started first with trying the captain, then the officers, finally the passengers. A sailor, dressed up as a clerk, read the indictments, after which the judges pronounced sentence of death. Careri, in his “Voyage Round the World,” explains the purpose of this tomfoolery. “The sentence of death,” says he, “was immediately bought off with money, chocolate, sugar, biscuit, flesh, sweetmeats, wine, and the like. The best of it was that he who did not pay immediately, or give good security, was laid on with a rope’s end, at the least sign given by the President Tarpaulin.” Apparently heavier punishments than rope’s-ending attended the poverty or contumacy of the convicted, for the same author tells of a passenger who was drowned on board a galleon through being keel-hauled for refusing to conform to this singular marine custom. The sport—if sport it can be called—lasted all day, and then at sundown the fines or forfeits were divided among the sailors.

It is possible that out of this old sea-joke rose the stupid and irritating practice of ducking men on their crossing the equator for the first time. This imbecile piece of horse-play was wonderfully popular among seamen down to quite recent days. I don’t think Jack ever saw much humour himself in the mere dressing up as Neptune and acting Jack Pudding in the waist; what he relished was the privilege, by prescription, of lording it over the captain and officers for a few hours, and tarring and soaking people to whom at other times he would have to pull his forelock, with the whole length of the ship between him and their nobility.

Another curious custom was to be found on board Dutch vessels. When a ship entered the 39th parallel “every one,” writes John Nieuhoff (1640), “of what quality or degree soever, that has not passed there before, is obliged to be baptized or redeem himself from it. He that is to be baptized has a rope tied round his middle, wherewith he is drawn up to the very top of the bowsprit, and from thence three times successively tumbled into the water.” A man was at liberty to get another to take his place by paying him. Plenty of money and other good things must have been earned by sailors out of this custom, for one may conceive that a nervous passenger would pay handsomely to escape so formidable a ducking as the tall bowsprits of those days promised, whilst, on the other hand, a seasoned mariner would look upon such sousings as mere child’s play—think no more of it than a man in a regatta now thinks of walking out upon a greasy boom to loose the pig in the sack at the end of it. The practice, however, eventually led to such riots, broils, and bloodshed, that it was forbidden by the Dutch Government.