of the system they live under, the responsibility for which must rest with those whose duty it is to train them.  It often happens that those who declaim so cynically against the shortcomings of the present-day sailor are incompetent to make a suitable selection of captains and officers who may be entrusted with the task of establishing proper discipline and training aboard their vessels.  Very frequently the seamen are blamed when the captain and officers ought to be held responsible.  If captains and officers are not trained properly in their graduating process themselves, and have not the natural ability to make up for that misfortune when given the opportunity of control, it is inevitable that disorder must follow.  There are, however, exceptional cases where, for example, an officer may have been reared in a bad, disorderly school, and yet has become a capable disciplinarian.  An instance of this kind seldom occurs; but the merchant service is all the richer for it when it does.  It must not be supposed that I have any intention of defending the faults of our seamen.  I merely desire that some of the responsibility for their faults and training should be laid on the shoulders of those critics who shriek unreasonably of their weaknesses, while they do nothing to improve matters.  Many of these gentlemen complain of Jack’s drunken, insubordinate habits, while they do not disapprove of putting temptation in his way.  They complain of him not being proficient, and at the same time they refuse to undertake the task of efficient training.  They cherish the memory of the good old times.  They speak reverently of the period of flogging, of rotten and scanty food allowance, of perfidious press-gangs, and of corrupt bureaucratic tyranny that inflicted unspeakable torture on the seamen who manned our line of battleships at the beginning of the century—­seamen who were, for the most part, pressed away from the merchant service.

In my boyhood days I often used to hear the old sailors who were fast closing their day of active service say that there were no sailors nowadays.  They had all either been “drowned, killed, or had died at home and been decently buried.”  I was impressed in those days with the opinions of these vain old men, and thought how great in their profession they must have been.  As a matter of fact, they were no better nor any worse than the men against whom a whimsical vanity caused them to inveigh.  Many years have passed since I had the honour of sailing with them and many, if not all of them, may be long since dead; but I sometimes think of them as amongst the finest specimens of men that ever I was associated with.  Their fine manhood towered over everything that was common or mean, in spite of their wayward talk.

CHAPTER II

PECULIAR AND UNEDUCATED