Chapter 6

SAFETY AND COMFORT AT SEA

The present-day sailor has a princely life compared with that of his predecessors of the beginning and middle of the last century. Those men were ill-paid, ill-fed, and for the most part brutally treated. The whole system of dealing with seamen was a villainous wrong, which stamps the period with a dirty blot, at which the British people should be ashamed to look. What awful crimes were permitted by the old legislatures of agricultural plutocrats! Ships were allowed to be sent to sea in an unseaworthy condition. Men were forced to go in them for a living, and scores of these well-insured coffins were never seen or heard of again after leaving port. Their crews, composed sometimes of the cream of manhood, were the victims of a murderous indifference that consigned them to a watery grave; and the families who survived the wholesale assassination were left as legacies of shame to the British people, who by their callousness made such things possible. Whole families were cast on the charity of a merciless world, to starve or survive according to their fitness. Political exigencies had not then arisen. The people were content to live under the rule of a despotic aristocracy, and so a devastating game of shipowning was carried on with yearly recurring but unnoticed slaughter. In one bad night the billows would roll over hundreds of human souls, and no more would be heard of them, except, perhaps, in a short paragraph making the simple announcement that it was feared certain vessels and their crews had succumbed to the storms of such and such dates. "Subscription lists for sailors' wives, mothers, and orphans! Good heavens! What is it coming to? _They_ have no votes! What, then, do they want with subscriptions?" "But you subscribe for colliery, factory, railroad, and other shore accidents. What difference does it make how the bereavement occurs?" "Votes make the difference--the importance of that should not be overlooked!"

In disdain of the commonest rights of humanity this nefarious business was allowed to flourish triumphant. The bitter wail of widows and orphans was silenced by the clamour for gold until all nature revolted against it. The earth and the waters under the earth seemed to call aloud for the infamy to be stayed. The rumbling noise of a vigorous agitation permeated the air. Strenuous efforts were made to block its progress. Charges of an attempt to ruin the staple industry of the country were vociferously proclaimed and contemptuously unheeded. Parliament was made the centre of intrigue, whereby it was expected to thwart the plans of the reformers, and throw legislation back a decade, but the torrent rushed along, with a spirit that broke through every barrier. Even the great Jew, Benjamin Disraeli, funked further evasion and opposition, after the memorable evening when Samuel Plimsoll electrified the House, and stirred up the nation, by charging the Prime Minister with the responsibility of proroguing Parliament in order that shipping legislation should be evaded, and further charged him with indifference to the loss of life at sea! The onslaught was so fierce and irresistible that it became a necessity not only to listen but to act. Thus it came to pass that a hitherto obscure gentleman, who had no connection whatever with the sea, was the means of carrying into law one of the most beneficent pieces of legislation that has ever been introduced to the House of Commons; and his name will go down to distant ages, with renown unsurpassed in the pages of Mercantile History. And shame to him who would detract from the great reformer his share in the act which has been the means of saving the lives of multitudes of seamen, and which has stamped upon it the immortal name of Samuel Plimsoll.

Drastic reforms cannot be brought about without causing inconvenience and even suffering to some one; and I am bound to say a vast amount of unnecessary hardship was caused in condemning unseaworthy vessels, many of which belonged to poor old captains who had saved a bit of money, and invested it in this way long before there was any hint of the coming legislation which was to interfere, and prevent them from being sailed unless large sums of money were expended on repairs. Scores of these poor fellows were ruined. Many of them died of a broken heart. Many became insane; not a few ended a miserable existence by taking their own lives; or died in almshouses, and under other dependent conditions. Of all classes of men, I do not know any who have such an abhorrence for the poorhouse as the sailor class. They will suffer the greatest privations in order to avoid it. It was a hard, cruel fate to have the earnings of a lifetime, and the means of livelihood, taken from them by a stroke of the pen, without compensation; and England again degraded herself by substituting one crime for another. These fine old fellows had been at one time a grand national asset; some of them had fought our battles at sea; but even apart from this some compensation should have been voted to all those who were to be affected by legislation that was sprung upon them, and passed into law for the public good. It may be said that any scheme of compensation must face heavy difficulties, but that is not a sufficient reason for not grappling with the question.

Compensation to the cattle-owners during the cattle plague was difficult no doubt to adjust. Indeed all revolutionary schemes are surrounded with complexities that have to be got over; but in the hands of skilled, willing workmen they can be carried out. Not very long ago a political party introduced a scheme for compensating the publicans--ostensibly because drunkenness would be diminished. It bubbled over with difficulties, but it would have been passed into law had the other party of the state not intervened in such a way as to prevent it. The same political party which thought it right that the publicans should be compensated, were not unmindful of some more of their friends, and voted something like five million sterling per annum to be distributed among landowners, parsons, &c. When the poor old sailors, withered and broken by hard usage, pleaded, for pity's sake, not to be ruined, their appeals were ruthlessly ignored.

A most extraordinary feature of the agitation to prevent loss of life at sea was the attitude of some shipmasters. They believed it to be an undue interference with their sacred rights. At the time when Mr. Plimsoll was vigorously pushing his investigations into the causes for so many vessels foundering, he went to Braila and Galatz, and examined every English steamer he was allowed to visit. Some owners, hearing that he was on a tour of investigation, instructed their captains not to allow him admittance; and I heard at the time that these instructions in some cases were rudely carried out. One forenoon he paid a casual visit to the steamer "_A----_," and entered into conversation with a person whom he assumed to be the commander. He chatted some time with him upon general topics, and soon discovered that the captain was not of the same political faith as himself. Shipmasters who take political sides are generally conservative. Up to that time he had carefully avoided making known his identity. At last he ventured to approach the object of his visit. He said, "Now, Captain, we have had a pleasant little chat; I should like to have your views before I go, on the Plimsoll agitation. They may be of value to me. I should like you to state also what you think of Plimsoll. I have heard varied opinions of him."

"Well," said the captain, in broad North Shields dialect, "you ask what I think of the agitation. My opinion is that all the skallywags who are taking part in it should be locked up, and have the cat every morning at five o'clock, and every hour of the day after, until they abstain from meddling with what they know nothing about! And as for Plimsoll, I would tie one end of a rope round his neck, and attach the other to a fire bar, and chuck him in there," pointing to the ebbing stream of the Danube!

"Then," said Mr. Plimsoll, "you are not in sympathy with the movement?"

"No," said the infuriated skipper, "and nobody but a ---- fool would be!"

"But don't you think, Captain," said Mr. Plimsoll, "that the measures you suggest are somewhat extreme, for after all they are only trying to improve the condition of the seamen?"

"Seamen be d----d," said this meteoric Northumbrian. "We don't want ships turned into nurseries, and that's what it's coming to!"

There were indications that the interview should cease. Mr. Plimsoll thereupon prepared to take his leave. He apologised to the captain for having taken up so much of his time, handed him his card, and proceeded to land. The gallant captain looked at the card, and called for his distinguished visitor to wait, so that he might make known to him that he was ignorant of his identity, otherwise he would have saved him the pain of disclosing his opinions!

"And your method of putting a stop to agitation?" interjected Plimsoll.

"Well," said the rollicking mariner, laughing at the joke that had been played upon him, "we sailors express ourselves _that way_, but we have no bad intentions!"

"I apprehend that is the case, Captain," said Plimsoll.

So ended an interview which is memorable to at least one person; and not least notable for the friendship Mr. Plimsoll showed towards his would-be executioner! The story was told to me about two months after the interview occurred by the captain himself. It is very odd that even one man, especially a shipmaster, should have been found disagreeing with a reform that was to be of so much benefit to all classes of seafaring men.

Up to that time vessels were sent to sea scandalously overladen. There was no fixed loadline as there is now. Cargoes were badly stowed; no bagging was done. The fitting of shifting boards was left pretty much to the caprice of the master, who never at any time could be charged with overdoing it, but rather the reverse. I am speaking now more particularly of steamers, though to some extent the same reckless disregard for human safety existed among sailing vessels. It was necessary, however, that commanders of "windjammers" should be more painstaking in the matter of having their cargoes thoroughly stowed, and that adequate bulkheads and shifting boards should be fitted; for the shifting of a sailing vessel's cargo was accompanied with the possibilities of serious consequences. Sailing vessels cannot be brought head-on to wind and sea, as steamers can, and the weather may be so boisterous as to make it impossible to get into the holds; and even if these are 'accessible, the heavy "list" and continuous lurching prohibit the trimming of the cargo to windward.

But the great loss of life was not altogether caused by allowing rotten, leaky, badly equipped sailing vessels to go to sea, nor by the neglect of commanders of both sailers and steamers to adopt reasonable precautions for the purpose of avoiding casualty. At the very time when the whole country was ablaze with excitement over the harrowing disclosures that investigation had brought to light, Lloyds' Classification Committee was allowing a type of narrow-gutted, double-decked, long-legged, veritable coffins to be built, that were destined to take hundreds of poor fellows to their doom. Their peculiarity was to capsize, or continuously to float on their broadsides. Superhuman effort could not have kept them on their legs. Neither bagging transverse or thwartship bulkheads were of any avail. Scores of them that were never heard of after leaving port found a resting-place, with the whole of their crews, at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. They lie there, unless enormous pressure has crushed them into mud; and their tombs, could they be revealed, would give ghastly testimony to the incompetence of naval architects. No amount of precautionary measures could have made this type of craft seaworthy. They were not shaped to go to sea. My own impression is, apart from the crankiness of these rattletraps, there was a vast amount of overloading which was the cause of many vessels being sent to the bottom; so many, indeed, that it became a common saying among seamen who were employed in the Baltic trade that if the North Sea were to dry up it would resemble a green field, because of the quantity of green steamers that had perished there. Perhaps the phrase was merely a picturesque figure of speech, as the North Sea makes no distinction as to the claim it has on its victims, and the colour of paint does neither attract nor repel its favour. Notwithstanding the startling evidence which proved that there was something radically wrong in the design and construction of what was known as the "three-deck rule" type, Lloyds' Classification and the Board of Trade officials adhered to the idea of their superiority over every other class. The Hartlepool Well-decker became the object of hostility. It was pronounced by dignified theorists to be unsafe. The long wells combined with a low freeboard lacerated their imaginations. They could not speak of it without exhibiting strong emotion. "Suppose," said they, "a sea were to break into the fore well and fill it, the vessel would obviously become overburdened. Her buoyancy would be _nil_, and she would succumb to the elements."

But practical minds had provided against such an eventuality. These objects of aversion had what is called a raised quarter-deck; two ends which stood boldly out of the water, and of course a big "sheer." Heavy seas rarely came over their bows or sterns, and when they did the bulk of the water did not remain or seem to affect their buoyancy. The heaviest water was taken aboard amidship, when they were running with a beam sea or scudding before a gale; but owing to their great sheer it gravitated in a small space against the bridge bulkhead, the structure of which was strong enough to stand excessive pressure. They were considered to be the finest and safest tramps afloat by men who sailed in them. Vessels of two thousand tons deadweight, with only eighteen to twenty-four inches freeboard, would make winter Atlantic passages without losing a rope-yarn, while many of the three-deckers with six or seven feet freeboard never reached their destination. Still the theorists kept up their unreasoning opposition to the Well-deckers, and the Hartlepool men were driven to take the matter up vigorously. They would have no indefinite, haughty assertions. They demanded investigation; and the result of it proved that the theorists were wrong, and the men of practical ideas were right. It was proved that there were singularly few cases of foundering among these vessels, and that fewer lives were lost in them than in any others. This is not the only instance in which Lloyds' Classification Committee have been proved wrong in their opinions. They refused in the same way, for some time, to class Turrets. I was obliged to give up a conditional contract which I had made with Messrs. Doxford and Sons, of Sunderland, for the first built of these, in consequence of their refusal to class. But Turrets have now been well tested, and prove very superior sea-boats. Underwriters, indeed, could not have better risks; and, what is as good a test as any of a vessel's seagoing qualities, is the readiness of seamen to join and their reluctance to leave it.

But each successive depression in shipping unrolls the resources of the mind, and there are evolved new ideas which disclose advantages hitherto unknown. They may not be great, but they are usually sufficient to make it possible to carry on a profitable trade instead of stopping altogether or working at a loss. It was this that brought the Switchback into existence: a vessel, by the way, which has a short, deep well forward; a long bridge; raised after deck; and a long well and poop aft. Then came the Turret, and then the Trunk; and last, the Single Decker on the "three-deck rule." I do not believe it possible that any of these will ever founder if they are properly handled, if their cargoes are properly stowed, and if no accident to machinery or stearing-gear occurs. They may come into collision with something, run on to a sand-bank or reef, and then founder, but not by force of hard buffeting. I am persuaded that the chances are a thousand to one in favour of them pulling through any storm in any ocean. But this is not all that can be said of them. The men that compose the crew have spacious, comfortable, healthy quarters, whereas in the old days, besides the prospect of being taken to Davy Jones's locker, men were housed in veritable piggeries: leaky, insanitary hovels, not good enough to bury a dead dog in.