American Merchant Ships and Sailors by Willis J. Abbot

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[Illustration: THE EXCITING MOMENT IN THE PILOT'S TRADE]

Professional pride no less than hope of profit makes the pilot take every
imaginable risk to get to his ship. He draws no regular salary, but his
fee is graduated by the draft of the vessel he pilots. When a ship is
sighted coming into port, the pilot-boat makes for her. If she has a blue
flag in her rigging, half way up, by day, she has a pilot aboard. At
night, the pilot-boats show a blue flare, by way of query. If the ship
makes no answer, she is known to be supplied, and passes without slowing
up; but if in response to signal she indicates that she is in need of a
pilot, the exciting moment in the pilot's trade is at hand. Perhaps the
night is pitchy dark, with a gale blowing and a heavy sea on: but the
pilot slips on his shore clothes and his derby hat--it is considered
unprofessional to wear anything more nautical--and makes ready to board.
The little schooner runs up to leeward of where the great liner, with her
long rows of gleaming portholes, lies rolling heavily in the sea. Sharp up
into the wind comes the midget, and almost before she has lost steerage
way a yawl is slid over the side, the pilot and two oarsmen tumble into
it, and make for the side of the steamship. To climb a rope-ladder up the
perpendicular face of a precipice thirty feet high on an icy night is no
easy task at best; but if your start is from a boat that is being tossed
up and down on a rolling sea, if your precipice has a way of varying from
a strict perpendicular to an overhanging cliff, and then in an instant
thrusting out its base so that the climber's knees and knuckles come with
a sharp bang against it, while the next moment he is dropped to his
shoulders in icy sea-water, the difficulties of the task are naturally
increased. The instant the pilot puts his feet on the ladder he must run
up it for dear life if he would escape a ducking, and lucky he is if the
upward roll does not hurl him against the side of the ship with force
enough to break his hold and drop him overboard. Sometimes in the dead of
winter the ship is iced from the water-line to the rail, and the task of
boarding is about equivalent to climbing a rolling iceberg. But whatever
the difficulty, the pilot meets and conquers it--or else dies trying. It
is all in the day's work for them. Accidents come in the form of boats run
down by careless steamers, pilots crushed against the side or thrown into
the sea by the roll of the vessel, the foundering of the pilot-boat or its
loss on a lee shore; but still the ranks of the pilots are kept full by
the admission to a long apprenticeship of boys who are ready to enter this
adventurous and arduous calling. Few occupations require a more assiduous
preparation, and the members of but few callings are able to guard
themselves so well against the danger of over-competition. Nevertheless
the earnings of the pilots are not great. They come under the operation of
the rule already noted, that the more dangerous a calling is, the less are
its rewards. Three thousand dollars a year is a high income for a pilot
sailing out of New York harbor, and even this is decreasing as the ships
grow bigger and fewer. Nor can he be at all certain as to what his income
will be at any time, for the element of luck enters into it almost as much
as into gambling. For weeks he may catch only small ships, or, the worst
ill-luck that can befall a pilot, he may get caught on an outbound ship
and be carried away for a six weeks' voyage, during which time he can earn
nothing. But the pilot, like the typical sailor of whatever grade, is
inured to hard luck and accustomed to danger.

Such are some of the safeguards which modern science and organization have
provided for the sailor in pursuit of his always hazardous calling. Many
others of course could be enumerated. The service of the weather bureau,
by which warning of impending storms is given to mariners, is already of
the highest utility. The new invention of wireless telegraphy, by which a
ship at sea may call for aid from ashore, perhaps a thousand miles away,
has great possibilities. Modern marine architecture is making steamships
almost unsinkable, more quickly responsive to their helms, more seaworthy
in every way. Perhaps with the perfection of the submarine boat, ships,
instead of being tossed on the boisterous surface of the waves, may go
straight to their destination through the placid depths of ocean. But
whatever the future may bring, the history of the American sailor will
always bear evidence that he did not wait for the perfection of safety
devices to wrest from the ocean all that there was of value in the
conquest; that no peril daunted him, nor was any sea, however distant, a
stranger to his adventurous sail.

Much has been said and written of the improvidence of the sailor, of his
profligacy when in port, his childlike helplessness when in the hands of
the landsharks who haunt the waterside streets, his blind reliance upon
luck to get him out of difficulties, and his utter indifference to all
precautionary provisions for the proverbial rainy day. Perhaps the sailor
has been getting a shade the worse of it in the literature on this
subject, for he, himself, is hardly literary in his habits, and has not
been able to tell his own story. The world has heard much of the jolly
Jack Tars who spend in a few days' revel in waterside dives the whole
proceeds of a year's cruise; but it has heard less of the shrewd schemes
which are devised for fleecing poor Jack, and applied by every one with
whom he comes in contact, from the prosperous owner who pays him off in
orders that can only be conveniently cashed at some outfitter's, who
charges usurious rates for the accommodation, down to the tawdry drab who
collects advance money on account of half a dozen sailor husbands. The
seaman landing with money in his pocket in any large town is like the
hapless fish in some of our much-angled streams. It is not enough to avoid
the tempting bait displayed on every side. So thick are the hooks and
snares that merely to swim along, intent on his own business, is likely to
result sooner or later in his being impaled on some cruel barb. Not enough
has been said, either, of the hundreds of American lads who shipped before
the mast, made their voyages around Cape Horn and through all the Seven
Seas, resisted the temptations of the sailors' quarters in a score of
ports, kept themselves clean morally and physically, and came, in time, to
the command and even the ownership of vessels. Among sailors, as in other
callings, there are the idle and the industrious apprentices, and the
lesson taught by Hogarth's famous pictures is as applicable to them that
go down to the sea in ships as to the workers at the loom. It is doubtful,
too, whether the sailor is either more gullible or more dissolute when in
port than the cowboy when in town for a day's frolic, or the miner just in
camp with a pocket full of dust, after months of solitude on his claim.
Men are much of a sort, whatever their calling. After weeks of monotonous
and wearing toil, they are apt to go to extremes when the time for
relaxation comes. Men whose physical natures only are fully developed seek
physical pleasures, and the sailor's life is not one to cultivate a taste
for the quieter forms of recreation.

But the romance that has always surrounded the sailor's character, his
real improvidence, and his supposedly unique simplicity have, in some
slight degree, redounded to his advantage. They have led people in all
lands to form organizations for his aid, protection, and guidance,
hospitals to care for him in illness, asylums and homes to provide for the
days of his old age and decrepitude. Best known of all these charitable
institutions for the good of Jack Tar is the Sailor's Snug Harbor, whose
dignified buildings on Staten Island look out across the finest harbor in
the world to where New York's tall buildings tower high above the
maintop-gallant mast of the biggest ship ever built. This institution,
founded just one hundred years ago by the will of Captain Robert R.
Randall, himself an American sailor of the old type, who amassed his
fortune trading to all the countries on the globe, now has an income of
$400,000 annually, and cares for 900 old sailors, each of whom must have
sailed for at least five years under the American flag.

* * * * *

A new chapter in the story of the American sailor is opening as this book
is closed. The period of the decadence of the American merchant marine is
clearly ended, and everything gives assurance that the first quarter of
this new century will do as much toward re-establishing the United States
flag on the high seas as the first quarter of the nineteenth century did
toward first putting it there. As these words are being written, every
shipyard in the United States is busy, and some have orders that will tax
their capacity for three years to come. New yards are being planned and
small establishments, designed only to build pleasure craft, are reaching
out after greater things. The two biggest steamships ever planned are
building near New London, where four years ago was no sign of shipyard or
factory. The Great Lakes and the Pacific coast ring with the sound of the
steel ship-builder's hammer.

But will the American sailor share in the new life of the American ship?
The question is no easy one to answer. Modern shipping methods offer
little opportunity for ambitious lads to make their way from the
forecastle to the owner's desk. The methods by which the Cleavelands,
Crowninshields, Lows, and their fellows in the early shipping trade won
their success, have no place in modern economy. As I write, the actual
head of the greatest shipping concern the world has ever known, is a Wall
Street banker, whose knowledge of the sea was gained from the deck of a
private steam yacht or the cabin _de luxe_ of a fast liner, and who has
applied to the shipping business only the same methods of stock
manipulating that made him the greatest railroad director in the world
before he thought to control the ocean as well. With steam, the sailor has
become a mere deckhand; the captain a man of business and a
disciplinarian, who may not know the names of the ropes on a real ship;
the owner a corporation; the voyages mere trips to and fro between
designated ports made with the regularity and the monotony of a
sleeping-car's trips between Chicago and San Francisco. Until these
conditions shall materially change, there is little likelihood that the
sea will again attract restless, energetic, and ambitious young Americans.
Men of the type that we have described in earlier chapters of this book do
not adopt a life calling that will forever keep them in subordinate
positions, subject to the whims and domination of an employing
corporation. A genial satirist, writing of the sort of men who became
First Lords of the Admiralty in England, said:

"Mind your own business and never go to sea,
And you'll come to be the ruler of the Queen's navee."

Perhaps a like situation confronts the American merchant marine in its new
development.

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