The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 03, No. 15, January, 1859

In the old days of the little white-headed farmer's boy's dreams, there were discovery and trading-ships sailing into unknown seas, and finding fairy islands never visited before. There were savages to trade with,—to fight with, it might be. There were a thousand perils and adventures that called for all the manly and ennobling qualities both of generous command and loyal obedience. It was a point of honor to stick by ship and captain while ship and captain remained to stick by; for the success of a voyage depended on such mutual trust and help. But now where is the sea's secret? There is hardly a square league of water which has not been sailed over. Find an island large enough to land a goat upon, and you will find it laid down in the charts,—and, if it be only far enough south, a Stonington sealer at anchor under its lee, or a New Bedford whaler's crew ashore picking up drift-wood. Where are the old dangers of the sea? We are fast learning to calculate for the storms, and to run from them. Steam-frigates have ended forever the pirates of the Spanish Main. The long, low, black schooner, which could sail dead to windward through the pages of the cheap "yellow-covers," and the likeness of which sported its skull and crossbones on the said covers, is to be met with nowhere else. Neither the Isle of Pines nor the numberless West India keys know her or her romantic commander any more.

The relations of trade, too, have changed with the changes of Science. We were once gathered with the group of travellers who are wont to smoke the cigar of peace beside the pilot-house of one of our noble Sound steamers. As we rounded the Battery and sped swiftly up the East River, the noblest avenue of New York, lined with the true palaces of her merchant-princes,—an avenue which by its solid and truthful architecture half atones for the flimsiness of its land structures,—as we passed the ocean steamships lying at the "Hook," the sea-captains about me began to talk of the American triumphs of speed. "They say to the Englishmen now," said one, "that we're going to take the berths out of the 'Pacific.'" (She had just made the then crack passage.) "When the English fellows ask, 'What for?'—they say, 'Because Collins intends to run her for a day-boat.'" This extravaganza raised a laugh; but one of the older brethren shook his head solemnly and sadly. "It's all very well," said he; "but what with a steamer twice a week, and your telegraph to New Orleans, they know what's going on at Liverpool as well as if they were at Prince's Dock. It don't pay now to lay a week alongside the levee on the chance of five cents for cotton."

It was a text that suggested a long homily. The shipmaster was degraded from his old position of the merchant's friend, confidential agent, and often brother-merchant. He was to become a mere conductor, to take the ship from port to port. No longer identified with the honor and success of a great and princely house, with the old historic kings of the Northwest Coast, or of Canton, or of Calcutta, he sinks into a mere navigator, and a smuggler of Geneva watches or Trench embroideries.

We state facts. Thus much has Science done to deteriorate the men of the sea. It has robbed them of all the noblest parts of their calling. It has taken away the spirit of adventure, the love of enterprise, and the manly spirit which braved unknown dangers. It has destroyed their interest by its new-modelling of trade; it has divided labor, and is constantly striving to solve the problem, How to work a ship without requiring from the sailor any courage or head-work, or anything, in short, but mere muscle. It interferes with the healthful relations of officer and man. The docks of Liverpool are a magnificent work, but they necessitate the driving of the seaman from his ship into an atmosphere reeking with pollution. The steam-tugs of New York are a wonderful convenience, but they help to further many a foul scheme of the Cherry-Street crimps and land-sharks.

For all this Science owes a remedy. It must be in a scientific way. We have indicated some of the leading causes of the decline of the seaman's character. The facts are very patent. Step into any shipping-office, or consult any sea-captain of your acquaintance, and you will have full evidence of what we say.

The remedy must not be outside the difficulty. You may build "Bethels" into which the sailor won't come, and "Homes" where he won't stay, distribute ship-loads of tracts, and scatter Bibles broadcast, but you will still have your work to do. The Bethel, the Home, and the Bible are all right, but they are for the shore, and the sailor's home is on the sea. It points an address prettily, no doubt, to picture a group of pious sailors reading their Bibles aloud of a Sunday afternoon, and entertaining each other with profound theological remarks, couched in hazy nautical language. But what is the real truth of the case? It may be a ship close-hauled, with Cape Horn under her lee,—all hands on deck for twelve hours,—sleet, snow, and storm,—the slide over the forecastle hatchway,—no light below by which to make out a line even of the excellent type of the American Bible Society, and on deck a gale blowing that would take the leaves bodily out of any book short of a fifteenth-century folio,—this, with the men now reefing and now shaking out topsails and every other thing, as the gale rages or lulls, in the hope of working to windward of certain destruction.

The remedy, to be effectual, must touch the seaman's calling. It is of no use to appeal to his better nature, if he hasn't any. If you make a drudge and a beast of him, you can't do him much good by preaching at him. The working of the present system is, that there are afloat a set of fellows who are a sort of no-countrymen. Like the beach-combers of the Pacific, they have neither country, home, nor friends, and are as different from the old class of American sailors as the condottiere from the loyal soldier. Let the navigation-laws be enforced first of all, and see that the due proportion of the crews of every ship be native-born. Let the custom-house protections be no longer the farce they are,—where a man who talks of "awlin haft the main tack" is set down as a native of Martha's Vineyard, and his messmate, who couldn't say "peas" without betraying County Cork, is permitted to hail from the interior of Pennsylvania. Let the ship-owners combine (it is for their interest) to do away with the whole body of shipping-agents, middlemen, and land-sharks. Jack will take his pleasure ashore,—you can't help that; and perhaps so would you, Sir, after six months of "old horse" and stony biscuit, with a leaky forecastle and a shorthanded crew. Jack will take his pleasure, and that in ways we may all of us object to; but, for Heaven's sake, break up a system of which the whole object is to degrade the man into the mere hack of a set of shore harpies. Do not leave him in the hands of those whom you are now permitting to combine with you to clear him out as swiftly as possible, and then dispatch him to sea. Let the captains ship their own crews on board the ship, and do away with the system of advances. But, at any rate, do learn to treat the sailor as if he were not altogether a fool. He has sense, plenty of it, shrewd, strong, common sense, and more real gentlemanly feeling than we on shore generally suppose, a good deal of faith, and certain standing principles of sea-morality. But at the same time he has prejudices and whims utterly unaccountable to men living on shore. He will forfeit one or two hundred dollars of wages to run from a ship and captain with which he can find no fault. He will ship the next day in a worse craft for smaller wages. You cannot understand his impulses and moods and grievances till you see them from a forecastle point of view.

It may be that Science will solve the riddle by casting aside the works and improvements of a thousand years,—the "wave line," the spar, the sail, and all,—and with them the men of the sea. It may be that "Leviathans" will march unheedingly through the mountain waves,—that steam and the Winans's model will obliterate old inventions and labors and triumphs. Blake and Raleigh and Frobisher and Dampier may be known no more. The poetry and the mystery of the sea may perish altogether, as they have in part. Out of the past looks a bronzed and manly face; along the deck of a phantom-ship swings a square and well-knit form. I hear, in memory, the ring of his cheerful voice. I see his alert and prompt obedience, his self-respecting carriage, and I know him for the man of the sea, who was with Hull in the "Constitution" and Porter in the "Essex." I look for him now upon the broad decks of the magnificent merchantmen that lie along the slips of New York, and in his place is a lame and stunted, bloated and diseased wretch, spiritless, hopeless, reckless. Has he knowledge of a seaman's duty? The dull sodden brain can carry the customary orders of a ship's duty, but more than that it cannot. Has he hopes of advancement? His horizon is bounded by the bar and the brothel. A dog's life, a dog's berth, and a dog's death are his heritage.

The old illusion still prevails and has power over little towheaded Joseph on the Berkshire interval. It will not prevail much longer. It is fast yielding to the power of facts. The Joes of next year may run from home in obedience to the planetary destiny which casts their horoscope in Neptune, but they will not run to the forecastle. We shall have officers and men of a different class,—the Spartan on the quarter-deck, the Helot in the forecastle. We have it now. A story of brutal wrong on shipboard startles the public. A mutiny breaks out in the Mersey, and a mate is beaten to death, and we wonder why the service is so demoralized. The story could be told by a glance at the names upon the shipping-papers. The officers are American,—the men are foreigners, blacks, Irish, Germans, non-descripts, but hopelessly severed from the chances of the quarter-deck. The law may interpose a strong arm, and keep the officer from violence, the men from mutiny. We may enact a Draconian code which shall maintain a sullen and revengeful order upon the seas, but all fellowship and mutual helpfulness are gone. When the day of trial comes,—the wreck, the fire, the leak,—subordination is lost, and every man scrambles for his own selfish safety, leaving women and children to the flames and the waves. Why is it that ships, dismasted, indeed, but light and staunch, are so often found rolling abandoned on the seas? It is the daily incident of our marine columns. I have been told by an old shipmaster, how, when he was a young mate, his ship was dismasted on the Banks of Newfoundland, on a voyage to Europe. The captain had been disabled and the vessel was leaking. He came into command. But in those days men never dreamed of leaving their ship till she was ready to leave them. They rigged jury-masts, and, under short canvas and working at the pumps, brought their craft to the mouth of Plymouth Harbor. The pilot demanded salvage, and was refused leave to come on board. The mate had been into that port before, was a good seaman and a sharp observer, and he took his vessel safely to her anchorage himself, rather than burden his owners with a heavy claim. Captains and mates will not now-a-days follow that lead, because they cannot trust their men, because with every emergency the morale of the forecastle is utterly gone.

For all this there is of course no universal panacea. Nor do I believe that legislation will much help the matter. The common-law of the seas, well carried out by competent courts of admiralty, is better than many statutes. For emergencies require extraordinary powers and a wide discretion. There can be no divided rule in a ship. But if every man know his place and his duty, and none overstep it, there will come thereof successful and happy voyages. There must be discipline, subordination, and law. The republican theory stops with the shore. "Obey orders, though you break owners," is the Magna Charta of the main. This can be well and wisely carried out only with some homogeneity of the ship's company, with a community of feeling and a community of interest. Everybody who has been off soundings knows, or ought to know, the difference between things "done with a will" and "sogering." If it be important on land to adjust the relations of employer and employed, it is doubly important on the sea, where the peril and the privation are great. For it is a hard life, a life of unproductive toil, that oftenest shows no results while accomplishing great ends. It cannot be made easy. The gale and the lee-shore are the same as when the sea-kings of old dared them and did battle with them in the heroic energy of their old Norse blood. The wet, the cold, the exposure must be, since you cannot put a Chilson's furnace into a ship's forecastle, nor wear India-rubbers and carry an umbrella when you go aloft. But men will brave all such discomforts and the attendant perils with a hearty delight, if you will train up the right spirit in them. Better the worst night that ever darkened off Hatteras, than the consumption-laden atmosphere of the starving journeyman-tailor's garret, the slow inhalation of pulverized steel with which the needle-maker draws his every breath! The sea's work makes a man, and leaves him with his duty nobly done, a man at the last. Courage, loyal obedience, patient endurance, the abnegation of selfishness,—these are the lessons the sea teaches. Why must the shore make such diabolical haste and try such fiendish ingenuity to undo them? The sea is pure and free, the land is firm and stable,—but where they meet, the tide rises and falls, leaving a little belt of sodden mud, of slippery, slimy weeds, where the dead refuse of the sea is cast up to rot in the hot sun. Something such is the welcome the men of the sea get from that shore which they serve. Into this Serbonian bog between them and us we let them flounder, instead of building out into their domain great and noble piers and wharves, upon which they can land securely and come among us.

Some years ago, a young scholar was led to step forth from his natural sphere into the forecastle of a merchantman. No quarrel with the world, no romantic fancy, drove him thither, but a plain common-sense purpose. He saw what he saw fairly, and he has told the tale in a volume which, for picturesque clearness, vigor, and manly truthfulness, will scarcely find its equal this side the age of Elizabeth. He owed it to the sea, for the sea gave him health, self-reliance, and fearlessness, and that persistent energy which saved him from becoming that which elegant tastes and native refinement make of too many of our young men, a mere literary or social dilettante, and raised him up to be a champion of right, a chivalrous defender of the oppressed, whose name has honored his calling. His book was an effort in the right direction. By that we of the land were brought nearer to those to whom this country owes so much, its merchant-seamen. But we want more than the work, however noble, of one man. We want the persistent and Christian interest in the elevation of the seaman of every man who is connected with his calling. We do not want a Miss-Nancyish nor Rosa-Matildan sentimentalism, but a good, earnest, practical handling of the matter. We call our merchants princes. If wealth and lavish expenditure make the prince, they are, indeed, fit peers of Esterhazy or Lichtenstein. But the true princely heart looks after the humblest of its subjects. When the poor of Lyons were driven from their homes by the flooded Rhone, Louis Napoleon urged his horse breast-deep into the tide to see with his own eyes that his people were thoroughly rescued. The merchant whose clippers have coined him gold should spare more than a passing thought upon the men who hung over the yards and stood watchful at the wheel. England's earls can afford to look after the toiling serfs in their collieries; the patricians of New York and Boston might read as startling a page as ever darkened a Parliamentary Blue-book, with a single glance into Cherry and Ann Streets.

For a thousand years the Anglo-Saxon race has been sending its contributions to the nation of the Men of the Sea. Ever since the Welshman paddled his coracle across Caernarvon Bay, and Saxon Alfred mused over the Danish galley wrecked upon his shore, each century has been adding new names of fame to the Vikings' bead-roll. Is the list full? has Valhalla no niche more for them? and must the men of the sea pass away forever? If it must be so,—it must. Che sarà sarà. But if there is no overruling Fate in this, but only the working of casual causes, it is somebody's care that they be removed. In almost all handicrafts and callings the last thirty years have wrought a vast and rapid deterioration of the men who fill them. Machinery, the boasted civilizer, is the true barbarizer. The sea has not escaped. Its men are not what the men of old were. The question is, Can we let them go?—can they be dispensed with among the elements of national greatness?

Passing fair is Venice, but she sits in lonely widowhood in the deserted Adriatic. Amalfi crouches under her cliffs in the shame of her poverty. The harbors of Tyre and Carthage are lonesome pools. They tell their own story. When the men of the sea no longer find a home or a welcome on the shore,—when they are driven to become the mere hirelings who fight the battles of commerce, like other hirelings they will serve beneath the flag where the pay and the provant are most abundant. The vicissitudes of traffic are passing swift in these latter days; and it does not lie beyond the reach of a possible future that the great commercial capitals of the Atlantic coast may be called to pause in their giddy race, even before they have rebuilded the Quarantine Hospital, or laid the capstone of the pharos of Minot's Ledge.

* * * * *

CHICADEE

  The song-sparrow has a joyous note,    The brown thrush whistles bold and free;  But my little singing-bird at home      Sings a sweeter song to me.  The cat-bird, at morn or evening, sings    With liquid tones like gurgling water;  But sweeter by far, to my fond ear,      Is the voice of my little daughter.  Four years and a half since she was born,    The blackcaps piping cheerily,—  And so, as she came in winter with them,      She is called our Chicadee.  She sings to her dolls, she sings alone,    And singing round the house she goes,—  Out-doors or within, her happy heart      With a childlike song o'erflows.  Her mother and I, though busy, hear,—    With mingled pride and pleasure listening,—  And thank the inspiring Giver of song,      While a tear in our eye is glistening.  Oh! many a bird of sweetest song    I hear, when in woods or meads I roam;  But sweeter by far than all, to me,      Is my Chicadee at home.* * * * *

THE ILLUSTRIOUS OBSCURE.

A SECOND LETTER FROM PAUL POTTER, OF NEW YORK, TO THE DON ROBERTO WAGONERO, COMMORANT OF WASHINGTON, IN THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA

22,728, Five Hundred and Fifty-First St., } New York, June 1, 1858. }

Dear Don Bobus,—I see that you have been Christian enough to send my last letter to "The Atlantic Monthly," and that the editors of that famous work have confirmed my opinion of their high taste by printing it. Your disposition of my MSS. I do not quarrel with; although it must be regarded in law as an illegal liberty, inasmuch as the Court of Chancery has decided that a man does not part with property in his own letters merely by sending them; but I ask permission to hint that your conduct will acquire a certain graceful rotundity, if you will remit to me in current funds the munificent sum of money which the whole-souled and gentlemanly proprietors—pardon the verbal habits of my humble calling!—have without doubt already remitted to you. Pecunia prima quaerenda, virtus post nummos. Mind you, I do not expect to be as well paid as Sannazarius.

"Who the deuse was he?" I hear you growling.

My dear Iberian friend, I really thought that you knew everything; but I find that you have set up for an Admirable Crichton upon an inadequate capital. Know, then, that a great many years ago Sannazarius—never mind who he was,—I do not justly know, myself—wrote an hexastich on the city of Venice, and sent it to the potent Senators of that moist settlement. It was as follows:—

  "Viderat Adriacis Venetam Neptunus in undis    Stare urbem et toti ponere jura mari.  Nunc mihi Tarpeias quantumvis, Jupiter, arces,    Objice, et ilia tui moenia Martis, ait;  Sic Pelago Tibrim praefers; urbem aspice utramque,    Illam homines dices, hanc posuisse deos."

Which may be liberally rendered thus:—

  When sea-faring Neptune saw Venice well-founded    And stiffly coercing the Adrian main,  The jolly tar cried, in a rapture unbounded:    "Why, d—ash my eyes, Jove, but I have you again;  You may boast of your city, and Mars of his walling;    But while I'm afloat, I'll stick to it that mine  Beats yours into rope-yarn in spite of your bawling,    Just as snuffy old Tiber is flogged by the brine;  And he who the difference cannot discern  Is a lob-sided lubber from bowsprit to stern.

"Very free, indeed!" you will say. It might have been worse, if I had staid at college a year or two longer, or if I had been elevated to a place in the Triennial Catalogue,—thus:

PAULUS POTTER, LL.D., S.T.D.; Barat.

V. Gubernator, Lit. Hum. Prof.,

e Cong., Praeses Rerumpub. Foed., A.B.

Yal., M.D. Dart., D.D. Dart., P.D.

V. Mon., etc., etc., etc.

I have put myself down stelliger, because it is certain, that, after obtaining all the above honors, if not an inmate of the cold and silent tomb, I should be false to my duties as a member of society, and a nuisance to my fellow-creatures. The little anachronism of translating after being translated you will also pardon; and talking of the tomb, let us return to Sannazarius. I pray that your nicely noble nose may not be offended by the tarry flavor of my version. You will find the Latin in Howell's "Survey of Venice," 1651,—a book so thoroughly useless, and so scarce withal, that I am sure it must be in your library. By the way, as you have written travels in all parts of this and other worlds, without so much as stirring from your arm-chair, and have calmly and coolly published the same, I must quote to you the rebuke of Howell, who says, "He would not have adventured upon the remote, outlandish subject, had he not bin himself upon the place; had he not had practicall conversation with the people of whom he writes." This veracious person very properly dedicated his book to the saints in Parliament assembled, many of whom had, soon after, ample leisure for perusing the fat folio. Nor is it perfectly certain that you have read the book, although you may own it; since it is your sublime pleasure to collect books like Guiccardini's History, which somebody went to the galleys rather than read through.

But let us return, my dear Bobus, to the money question. Know, then, that the Sannazarian performance above quoted, so different from the language of the malignant and turbaned Turks, filled with rapture the first Senator and the second Senator and all the other Senators mentioned in Act I., Scene 3, of "Othello," so that, in grand committee, and, for all I know to the contrary, with Brabantio in the chair, they voted to the worthy author a reward of three hundred zechins, or, to state it cambistically in our own beloved Columbian currency, $1,233.20,—this being the highest literary remuneration upon record, if we except the untold sums lavished by "The New York Blotter" upon the fascinating author of "Steel and Strychnine; or, the Dagger and the Bowl." But as we have had enough of Sannazarius, let us leave him with the gentle hope that his check was cashed in specie at the Rialto Bank, and that he made a good use of the money.

Now, dear Don, in the great case of Virtue vs. Money, I appear for the defendant. Confound Virtue, say I, and the whole tribe of the Virtuous! I am as weary of both as was that sensible Athenian of hearing Aristides called The Just; and if I had been there, and a legal voter, I know into which box my humble oyster-shell would have been plumped. Such was the vile, self-complacent habit of the Athenians, that I suspect the best fellows then were not good fellows at all. And what did the son of Lysimachus make by being recalled from banishment? He died so poor, that he was buried at the public charge, and left a couple of daughters as out-door pensioners upon public charity. The Athenians, I aver, were a duncified race; and it would have pleased me hugely to have been in the neighborhood when Alcibiades rescinded his dog's charming tail,—a fine practical protest, although unpleasant to the dog. Virtue may be well enough by way of variety; but for a good, steady, permanent pleasure, commend me to Avarice! Yes, O my Bobus, I, who was once, as to money, "still in motion of raging waste," and, like Timon, "senseless of expense,"—I, who have many a time borrowed cash of you with amiable recklessness, and have never asked you to take it back again,—I, who have had many a race with the constable, and have sometimes been overtaken,—I, who have in my callow days spoken disrespectfully of Mammon in several charming copies of verses,—I am waxing sordid. I am for the King of Lydia against Solon. How do I know that the insolent Cyras was not blandished out of his bloodthirsty intention of roasting his deposed brother by a little cash which the son of Gyges had saved out of the wide, weltering wreck of his wealth, and had concealed in his boots? Royal palms were not wholly free from pruritus even then. Why has this silly world still persisted in putting long ears upon Midas? I do not know whether he sang better or worse than Apollo; and I am sure it is much better, and bespeaks more sense, to play the flute ill than to play it well. Depend upon it, his Majesty of Phrygia has been very much abused by the mythologists. With that particular skill of his, during an epidemic of the brevitas pecuniaria, (Angl. shorts,) he would have been just the person to coax into one's house of accompt, at five minutes before two o'clock in the afternoon, to work a little involuntary transmutation,—to change the coal-scuttle into ingots, and the ruler into a great, gorged, glittering rouleau. So little would his auricular eccentricity have hindered his welcome, that I verily believe he would have been heartily received, if he had come with ensanguined chaps straight from the pillory, and had left both ears nailed to the post.