The Sea: Its Stirring Story of Adventure, Peril, & Heroism (Vol. 1-4). Frederick Whymper
which concerns impressing has never been abolished, although there is no fear that it will ever again be resorted to in these days of naval reserves, training-ships, and naval volunteers.
The altered circumstances of the age, arising from the introduction of steam, and the greatly increased inter-commercial relations of the whole world, have made the Jack Tar pure and simple comparatively rare in these days; not, we believe, so much from his disappearance off the scene as by the numbers of differently employed men on board by whom he is surrounded, and in a sense hidden. A few A.B.’s and ordinary seamen are required on any steamship; but the whole tribe of mechanicians, from the important rank of chief engineer downwards, from assistants to stokers and coal-passers, need not know one rope from another. On the other hand, the rapid increase of commerce has apparently outrun the natural increase of qualified seamen, and many a good ship nowadays, we are sorry to say, goes to sea with a very motley crew of “green” hands, landlubbers, and foreigners of all nationalities, including Lascars, Malays, and Kanakas, from the Sandwich Islands. A “confusion of tongues,” not very desirable on board a vessel, reigns supreme, and renders the position of the officers by no means enviable. To obviate these difficulties, and furnish a supply of good material both to the Royal Navy and Mercantile Marine, training-ships have been organised, which have been, so far, highly successful. Let these embryo defenders of their country’s interests have the first place.
Of course, at all periods the boys, and others who entered to serve before the mast, received some training, and picked up the rest if they were reasonably clever. The brochure of “an old salt,”35 which has recently appeared, gives a fair account of his own treatment and reception. Running away from London, as many another boy has done, with a few coppers in his pocket, he tramped to Sheerness, taking by the way a hearty supper of turnips with a family of sheep in a field. Arrived at his destination, he found a handsome flag-ship, surrounded by a number of large and small vessels. Selecting the very smallest—as best adapted to his own size—he went on board, and asked the first officer he met—one who wore but a single epaulet—whether his ship was “manned with boys?” He was answered, “No, I want men; and pray what may you want?” “I want to go to sea, sir, please.” “You had better go home to your mother,” was the answer. With the next officer—“a real captain, wearing grey hair, and as straight as a line”—he fared better, and was eventually entered as a third-class boy, and sent on board a guard-ship. Here he was rather fortunate in being taken in charge by a petty officer, who had, as was often the case then, his wife living on board. The lady ruled supreme in the mess. She served out the grog, too, and, to prevent intoxication among the men, used to keep one finger inside the measure! This enabled her to the better take care of her husband. She is described as the best “man” in the mess, and irresistibly reminds us of Mrs. Trotter in “Peter Simple,” who had such a horror of rum that she could not be induced to take it except when the water was bad. The water, however, always was bad! But the former lady took good care of the new-comer, while, as we know, Mrs. Trotter fleeced poor Peter out of three pounds sterling and twelve pairs of stockings before he had been an hour on board. Mr. Mindry tells the usual stories of the practical jokes he had to endure—about being sent to the doctor’s mate for mustard, for which he received a peppering; of the constant thrashings he received—in one case, with a number of others, receiving two dozen for losing his dinner. He was cook of the mess for the time, and having mixed his dough, had taken it to the galley-oven, from the door of which a sudden lurch of the ship had ejected it on the main deck, “the contents making a very good representation of the White Sea.” The crime for which he and his companions suffered was for endeavouring to scrape it up again! But the gradual steps by which he was educated upwards, till he became a gunner of the first class, prove that, all in all, he had cheerily taken the bull by the horns, determined to rise as far and fast as he might in an honourable profession. He was after a year or so transferred to a vessel fitting for the West Indies, and soon got a taste of active life. This was in 1837. Forty or fifty years before, the guard-ships were generally little better than floating pandemoniums. They were used partly for breaking in raw hands, and were also the intermediate stopping-places for men waiting to join other ships. In a guard-ship of the period described, a most heterogeneous mass of humanity was assembled. Human invention could not scheme work for the whole, while skulking, impracticable in other vessels of the Royal Navy, was deemed highly meritorious there. A great body of men were thus very often assembled together, who resolved themselves into hostile classes, separated as any two castes of the Hindoos. A clever writer in Blackwood’s Magazine, more than fifty years ago, describes them first as “sea-goers,”—i.e., sailors separated from their vessels by illness, or temporary causes, or ordered to other vessels, who looked on the guard-ship as a floating hotel, and, having what they were pleased to call ships of their own, were the aristocrats of the occasion, who would do no more work than they were obliged. The second, and by far the most numerous class, were termed “waisters,” and were the simple, the unfortunate, or the utterly abandoned, a body held on board in the utmost contempt, and most of whom, in regard to clothing, were wretched in the extreme. The “waister” had to do everything on board that was menial—swabbing, sweeping, and drudging generally. At night, in defiance of his hard and unceasing labour, he too often became a bandit, prowling about seeking what he might devour or appropriate. What a contrast to the clean orderly training-ships of to-day! Some little information on this subject, but imperfectly understood by the public, may perhaps be permitted here.
THE “CHICHESTER” TRAINING-SHIP.
It is not generally known that our supply of seamen for the Royal Navy is nowadays almost entirely derived from the training-ships—first established about fourteen years ago. In a late blue-book it was stated that during a period of five years only 107 men had been entered from other sources, who had not previously served. Training-ships, accommodating about 3,000, are stationed at Devonport, Falmouth, Portsmouth, and Portland, where the lads remain for about a year previous to being sent on sea-going ships. The age of entry has varied at different periods; it is now fifteen to sixteen and a half years. The recruiting statistics show whence a large proportion come—from the men of Devon, who contribute, as they did in the days of Drake and Hawkins, Gilbert and Raleigh, the largest quota of men willing to make their “heritage the sea.”
Dr. Peter Comrie, R.N., a gentleman who has made this matter a study, informs the writer that on board these ships, as regards cleanliness, few gentlemen’s sons are better attended to, while their education is not neglected, as they have a good schoolmaster on all ships of any size. He says that boys brought up in the service not merely make the best seamen, but generally like the navy, and stick to it. The order, cleanliness, and tidy ways obligatory on board a man-of-war, make, in many cases, the ill-regulated fo’castle of most merchant ships very distasteful to them. Their drilling is just sufficient to keep them in healthy condition. No one can well imagine the difference wrought in the appearance of the street arab, or the Irish peasant boy, by a short residence on board one of these ships. He fills out, becomes plump, loses his gaunt, haggard, hunted look; is natty in his appearance, and assumes that jaunty, rolling gait that a person gifted with what is called “sea-legs” is supposed to exhibit. Still, “we,” writes the doctor, “have known Irish boys, who had very rarely even perhaps seen animal food, when first put upon the liberal dietary of the service, complain that they were being starved, their stomachs having been so used to be distended with large quantities of vegetables, that it took some time before the organ accommodated itself to a more nutritious but less filling dietary.”
You have only got to watch the boy from the training-ship on leave to judge that the navy has yet some popularity. Neatly dressed, clean and natty, surrounded by his quondam playmates, he is “the observed of all observers,” and is gazed at with admiring respect by the street arab from a respectful distance. He has, perhaps, learned to “spin a few yarns,” and give the approved hitch to his trousers, and, while giving a favourable account of his life on board ship, with its forecastle jollity and “four bitter,” is the best recruiting-officer the service can have. The great point to be attended to, in order to make him a sailor, is that “you must catch him young.”36 That a good number have been so caught is proved by the navy estimates, which now provide for over 7,000 boys,