Chapter VI: The Master's Qualities

If, as is highly improbable, the average landsman ever thinks anything about the duties of a shipmaster, it would be most interesting to know what he imagines them to be. Most intelligent men and women know that the primary duty of a shipmaster is to take his vessel across the trackless ocean to her destined port and return again as speedily as possible. So far so good, but beyond this first reason for a shipmaster's existence there are a host of other duties, in all of which he is supposed to be more or less proficient. And there are certain qualities which he must also possess. Failing them, he may be perfect in science, full of energy, and faultless in seamanship, but as a commander he is naught. Of these, the ability to _command_ stands unquestionably first. No doubt this quality is hard to define, but the possession or the want of it makes all the difference between a comfortable and a miserable ship. One man will seldom raise his voice during a whole voyage loud enough to be heard by any one except the individual to whom he is speaking; the calmness and placidity of his demeanour is amazing, yet in some mysterious way every one on board is made to feel that the master holds the reins of power with no slack or unready hand, that to disobey one of his orders would be a most dangerous experiment, and that he knows everything that is going on fore and aft.

Such a man fulfilling this perfect attribute of command I once had the pleasure to serve under--an elderly, prosaic-looking figure, who used to come on deck shortly after daybreak every morning, with a moth-eaten Bombay-made dressing-gown flung over his pyjamas, a mangy old fez upon his head, and his bare feet thrust into sloppy slippers. Thus attired, he would pace rapidly up and down the poop for the space of half an hour, taking his constitutional--a most mirth-provoking figure. Yet no one ever laughed, either behind his back, on deck, or in the privacy of the fo'c'sle. When he spoke it was in a velvet voice, but the man spoken to invariably took an attitude of profound respect on the instant. He was old and feeble, and our crew numbered among them some rowdies; but from England to China and back again that old gentleman's commanding personality kept the ship in a quiet state of discipline which was as perfect as it was rare.

On the other hand, I have seen a most stately figure of a man, with a voice like a thunder-peal, unable to obtain respect from his crew. Because in the Merchant Service, as I am never tired of reiterating, respect cannot be enforced; it must come spontaneously, a tribute to the personality of the officer to whom it is due, or it does not come at all; and then that ship is in a bad way.

Another quality, which is only second in importance to the one just mentioned, is self-control. Since the shipmaster has no one above him in his little realm, it is highly important to his whole well-being, as well as to the comfort of the ship, that he should command himself. However irritated he may feel at a mistake on the part of one of his officers, he should be able to conceal it before his crew. And here the Americans have shown British officers a good example. So long as an officer remains an officer on board of American vessels, so long is he upheld by all the authority of the master. There is no sneering comment upon his movements indulged in before the crew, no tacit information conveyed to those keen-witted fellows that the hapless mate, first, second, or third, as the case may be, has lost the confidence and respect of his commander, and that consequently there is little or no danger in them treating him disrespectfully. Perhaps this is one of the hardest lessons that a shipmaster has to learn, especially in a sailing ship. For three, or perhaps four, or even five, months sole monarch of his small kingdom, anxious to make a smart passage, and often sadly hampered by adverse winds and calms, it is no easy thing for a naturally hasty man to discipline himself in such wise as to win the maximum amount of obedience and deference from those around him. Happy man if he have a hobby of some kind--a thirst for learning, a taste for natural history, anything that will exercise the powers of his mind and keep him from the moral dry-rot that always sets in where men are at the top of things, amenable to no authority but their own, and without any definite object whereon they may work and feed that appetite for labour, whether mental or physical, possessed by every healthy human organism.

Patience, perseverance, and a sense of justice are also indicated, as they are, of course, in the leaders in every business or profession, yet to an even greater degree at sea than anywhere else; for where you can neither get rid of your men nor afford to lose their services by punishing them, only the highest expression of these qualities is of any avail. It may perhaps be thought impossible that, except in the rarest instances, such a combination of excellence should be found in any one man. But that impression is not a true one. I am not exaggerating in the least when I say that but for the possession of these qualities in an extraordinary degree by masters, our Mercantile Marine would never have risen to its present splendid height in spite of so many hampering disabilities unfelt by masters of ships under other flags. For, to take one aspect only, the disciplinary. I have slightly indicated the manner in which discipline is maintained in American ships, viz. by the employment of violence, which is forbidden by law, yet is invariably winked at. In the ships of every other nation but the English-speaking ones, the merchant seaman is not only a native of the country to which his ship belongs, but he is never free from the environment of naval law; the same law, that is, which obtains on board of a warship. For every seaman there is a man-o'-war's man, bound to put in so much actual service in a vessel of war, and, as such, under the articles of war; so that disobedience to orders, insolence, or malingering (shamming sickness) are exceedingly expensive practices for the sailor to indulge in, the penalties being not only heavy, but their infliction certain.

In a British ship, on the other hand, a master may unwittingly ship a crew of scoundrels, who have made up their minds to do as little as they can as badly as possible, to refuse the most ordinary forms of respect to their officers, and to either desert or go to gaol at the first port, not because their ship is a bad one, but just by way of a change. And if the master or officers, worried beyond endurance, take the law in their own hands, their punishment and subsequent ruin is almost certain to ensue promptly. The rascals who have made the ship a hell afloat, confident in the tenderness of British law, and its severity towards all forms of oppression, pursue their rejoicing way, and if brought to court _may_ be fined a trifle of wages, which, as they set no value upon money, does not punish them in the least.

Some decent foremast hands may feel that I am here unduly severe upon the rank and file; that, having been an officer, and, besides, left the sea for good, I have, like so many others, turned against my old shipmates. But they would be utterly mistaken. It is the merest platitude to say that every decent man's interest lies in having his eyes wide open to the faults of the class he wishes to benefit. The most of my sea-service was spent in a ship's forecastle, and I can assure my readers that I have never since felt more shame and disgust at the behaviour of some of my watchmates than I did then. I cannot for my life see why the foremast hand should not be as self-respecting, amenable to reason, and competent, as any good workman ashore. Sea life is not brutalizing in itself; it is ennobling, and it is a strange return for the benefits that a life at sea confers upon those who live it that so many of them should gratuitously become brutish. Of course there is more excuse for the unfortunate slaves of steam, the firemen and trimmers. Yet even they can, and do in many instances, rise superior to their hard surroundings and show an example to men in positions where every comfort of life is enjoyed.

Another quality which shipmasters should possess, but whose necessity will be hotly debated by many, is that of being a God-fearing man. Some people will say that this embraces all the rest. That it should do so is undeniable; that it does do so is, unhappily, seldom the case. It is a great pity that in so many otherwise estimable men the spirit of godliness should be accompanied by a weakening of their power to command men. They become afraid lest their necessary acts for the preservation of discipline should be misconstrued into a violation of the principles which they profess. And this often results in their Christian virtues being taken advantage of by unscrupulous subordinates, so that the ship's condition becomes worse, not better, for the fact of a man being in command who is anxious to love his neighbour as himself. Needless to say, perhaps, that such a condition of things is altogether opposed to the true spirit of Christianity, which does not approve of allowing one's subordinates to break rules and defy rulers. This, however, is far too large a question to be more than glanced at here, especially as it is so hotly debated by many excellent seamen who hold that the practice of the Christian religion in the Merchant Service is an impossibility.

A master should be honest. Eyes will open wide at this, no doubt, since all men _should_ be honest; but it must not be forgotten that all men are not so liable to temptations to be dishonest in a perfectly safe way (as far as the law goes) as a shipmaster is. The ports of the world are thronged with scoundrels who tempt shipmasters to betray their trust in a variety of ways. By bribery, the most common form of corruption, they are led into cheating the owner and the crew, into downright robbery. There is the temptation to rob the crew, a perfectly safe operation, and one that can be excused by its perpetrators on the ground that, as Jack will only squander his money upon the vilest forms of debauchery when he gets paid off, a good percentage of it will be much better in their pockets than his. It may be done in a variety of ways, from the ostensible payment of _blood money_ to a San Francisco boarding master or crimp, which is deducted from the seaman's wages and shared by the skipper and his ally, to the commoner form of collusion with bumboatmen, tailors, etc., whereby the sailor is overcharged for everything he buys aboard, in order that a heavy percentage of his spendings may go into the master's pocket. _Of course_ Jack is not compelled to spend anything; but it is unfair that he should be mulcted twenty-five per cent. on such innocent outlayings as for soft bread, eggs, fruit, or clothing. In these latter days the temptations to dishonesty in respect of such larger operations as chartering, towage, etc., are greatly lessened by the multiplication of appointed agencies of the owner's abroad, but they do still exist, and the sailing shipmaster especially is often tempted to be dishonest in out-of-the-way ports of the world, temptations which, for his own sake, he should sternly refuse to countenance.