Unionism Afloat

I

IT seems like sacrilege to attempt to undermine the popular belief in the glories of ‘life on the rolling wave.' Yet all of us have heard the authenticated stories of brutal floggings at the triangle, and of keelhauling the last man down from aloft, that give the lie at once to those supposed glories. Such treatment of sailors was common enough in most of the navies in the Trafalgar period, the very time when most of the sentimental rubbish in poetry and song was composed. In those days men lived hard, fought hard, and died hard; or, as cynical old sailors have it, ‘Wooden ships were manned by iron men, whereas now iron ships are manned by wooden men.’ We should not criticize too complacently the brutality of that era; it was the almost inevitable accompaniment of t he warlike, adventurous life, both of the men who fought under Nelson and Paul Jones, and of the merchant sailors of that period, who almost without exception were engaged in commerce such as the latter part of the nineteenth century never experienced on the ocean. And it must be said for the men of a century ago that they were not tainted with the commercialism of to-day, nor did they feel the effects of this commercialism, which for refined cruelty is unequaled by floggings at the triangle.

Commercially speaking, the early sixties of the last century were the palmy days of British and American sailing ships. Misfortune in the guise of the Civil War overtook a goodly number of the best American ships and left the British with a crippled competitor. As everybody in America regretfully admits, American ships went to leeward in the race and her superb seamen went with them.

One would suppose that in the sixties t he brutalities of an earlier generation would have been forgotten, and that commercial enterprise, pure and simple, would not admit of methods even remotely resembling those of Nelson’s time. Yet it is a notorious fact that, in nearly every American ship and in numerous British ships, discipline was taught by brute force and maintained by methods more vigorous than polite. Hard-case Yankee packets were a byword in every quarter of the globe to the late nineties of the last century. In such ships, and in British ships as well, men were shackled for days to stanchions in the fore peak or lazarette, with only dry biscuits and water to sustain them, while the rats played havoc with their hair and bare feet. Protest brought only a crack on the cranium with an iron belaying-pin.

The afterguard of a sailing ship — usually the captain and two mates — dominated the whole crowd before the mast. Individual cases of violence with lethal weapons on the officers’ part seldom met with collective resistance. When this did occur, it invariably took the form of mutiny, murder, and scuttling. The possibility of united action against even the most fiendish cruelties and victimizations never seemed to enter the heads of sailing-ship men; from their boyhood they had been used to witnessing, if not actually experiencing, the gentle art of persuasion as practiced by the officers; there were no unions in those days to take the matter up; moreover, in most cases, the law sided with the officers and refused to hear the sailor’s side of the story, or to see the evidence of the manhandling. There were no cowards either among the officers or among the men, for no man can be both a coward and a sailing-ship man; the life will not admit of such freakish contradictions. But there was in the air just enough fear of the consequences of insubordination, of laziness, or of daring to call one’s soul one’s own, to cause respect for the men who paced the poop. Worked, as they were, like dogs in all weathers; practically starved, except in American vessels, where there was always good food; losing sleep as they did by night or day, watch below or watch on deck, the sailors still observed and respected the line of demarcation which the belaying-pin and sometimes a gun in the hip-pocket chalked out.

Men worked until they dropped for want of sleep. As a boy, one had this obligation toward work driven into one’s weary soul even when seasick and homesick on one’s first voyage to sea. The boy who left a mother’s care and a comfortable home, to pig it in a halldeck half awash in bad weather, got no pity even from his apprenticed halfdeck mates; and before the first voyage was over the hardening process had begun and his brutal instincts were set floating top-sides, displacing those finer feelings which contact with women creates. Sailing-ship youngsters never did possess heart, mind, or soul: they were just young, growing, starving animals, without a care in the world save to pack their stomachs with food, no matter how maggoty it might be.

II

Perhaps my first voyage has embittered me against all officers who use violence to boys and men, though there have been times when as an officer I yearned for the days of sail again that I might knock seamanship and discipline into the worthless trash so often found in forecastles to-day.

I well remember, when we had cast off the tug and were sailing along under topsails under the lee of the land, how buoyant I felt at being aboard a sailing ship bound around the Horn. I felt a little bigger in every way than the children I had left behind at home, and I was sorry for t hem. But one cannot always sail in smooth seas under the lee of the land. Very soon I found this out. All through the night I was sick and miserable; and quietly I wept a little for my mother. My watch on deck was to begin at four A.M., —it was my duty to keep time on the poop by striking the time bells, — but I felt too sick to stir, so I stretched out on my seachest.

Very soon the mate, a Liverpool buck, missed me and sang out for me. I, not answering, and not caring what he did, hung on to my sea-chest until his ugly face, with murder in its eyes, appeared at the half-deck door. When he inquired why I was lying down during my watch on deck, I replied that I was seasick. This being no excuse, he ordered me on the poop at once, and as I did not respond in any way to his order, he hauled off with his heavy seabooted leg and kicked me square on the cheek-bone. This so enraged me that I snatched up a sheath knife and slashed him across the back of the neck with it. I followed him up for a second jab, but I could not reach him, for he ran aft at full speed. In my rush after him I exchanged the knife for a boataxe that for some unknown reason lay handy on the booby hatch. Failing to catch him, I flung the thing at him as he turned to face me on the poop, and caught him full on the mouth with the flat of the axe; at the same moment I got a blow on the jaw from apparently nowhere, and went head over heels. At a providential moment the skipper had appeared, and taking in the situation at a glance had fetched me a left-hander. The mate now saw his chance and rounded on me like a tiger. But a big black retriever saved the situation, and added humor to it, by going for the seat of the mate’s trousers and bringing away cloth, skin, and flesh at the first bite.

I was now used up with hunger and seasickness, and was no match for a heavy man in the prime of life. Had I been able to get at him with the axe I should have buried it in his skull, for I saw red that day; but I was helpless on the deck, kicked and bruised all over. It is a great consolation to me still to know that the mate carries today an ugly scar on his neck.

So much for the first contact with discipline experienced by a British boy scarcely out of knickers. Such treatment was practically unknown in American hard-case ships, for on them boys were respected and looked upon as a sacred trust. The law is now less tolerant of such methods of teaching discipline.

But in those days one forgot little incidents of this sort long before land was reached. As apprentice boys were looked upon as future officers, personal contact with a sea-boot was considered a means of gaining experience in teaching discipline. At their most impressionable age, these apprentices were brutalized; their finer instincts were stamped out, and they lost sympathy with the man before the mast because they felt that some day they might have to use forcible measures themselves.

Often it paid very well to treat the hands like dogs: I can well remember cases in which men were hounded out of their ships when their accumulated wages made brutal treatment profitable. I was shipmates once with a Nova Scotian hard-case mate who prided himself on having served five years in jail in Montevideo for driving five men overboard with the help of a boarhound, — three of the men being drowned in their attempt to swim ashore. Nor was this an empty boast. From an unexpected quarter, quite three years afterward, I heard the same story told almost word for word.

It is easy to understand why men who underwent such treatment went in for a round of drunkenness and debauchery as soon as they landed. The reaction from discipline brought no desire to prosecute; voyages were long, the men had little opportunity to talk with people on shore, and there was never any real exchange of ideas between the seamen of the different ships in port, because they were in a muddled condition as often as not; besides, the sharks and prostitutes who lived on the sailors’ money took good care that their wages went with lightning speed.

III

But such treatment and methods were bound to give way before the advance of steam, of free education, — and, later, compulsory education, — and the formation of unions. Steam meant shorter voyages; it also meant more contact between the seamen and shore people, who taught them the value of education and the right way to remedy their grievances. Probably, too, steam has made seamen more sober and self-respecting; we now find a large percentage of them married, while only one in a thousand married in sail. And education had its important results. In my apprentice days there were few men in the forecastle who could read, and still fewer who could sign their own names. Among the older hands, on paying-off day, or signing-on day, the custom was for those who could not write to touch the pen and to mark a cross beside their names. Nowadays there is hardly a middle-aged sailor who has to go through this legal formality. Education taught the men the need of unity and cooperation. With steam came the unions, although like the seamen themselves they were treated as a joke in their infancy, and for some time did neither good nor harm.

The type of man now at sea is so strikingly different from that of a generation or two ago that the adventures, the reckless irresponsibility, and the callousness of the sailing-ship type are hard to understand nowadays. In my boyhood days I, like all my shipmates in the half-deck, looked upon stealing food as a righteous act. We were always hungry, since the legal starvation rations would not keep soul and body together; and as we were accomplished thieves, we stole food upon any and every occasion.

I well remember a pitch-black night off the Plate, — a pampero was blowing, — when one of my half-deck mates decided that we were hungry enough to tackle such luxuries as butter and marmalade. We knew where such things were stowed, and knew also that owing to the inky blackness the second mate, pacing the poop, could not see us at our act of self-preservation. We formed a chain gang between halfdeck and bridge; one of us mounted the shoulders of the tallest boy and reached up to the latticed locker where the tins were stored; he pulled out enough laths to reach the case, and passed down several tins of butter and marmalade, which we passed from boy to boy into the half-deck. In the darkness not one of us had noticed an addition to our party. Suddenly we heard a voice that we all knew and dreaded. It was the captain, who, in his wanderings about the deck, had noticed what was going on and had fallen into line unobserved.

The ‘old man’ was a dear. He had often told us that we could steal as much as we liked, but heaven help us if we were found out. The stuff was taken off us and handed to the steward, who cursed us roundly; and in our watches below we found ourselves kneeling on the deck with sailors’ bibles in our hands, — holystones, — or perched on the main skysail yard like a family of moulting crows. That was considered lenient punishment for a commonplace occurrence of the period.

The unions have made the modern sailor a force to be reckoned with, and a force which holds the key to the transport-workers’ situation and is powerful enough to upset the equilibrium of the shipping world, as well as to affect considerably those t rades which depend on raw materials shipped from foreign ports. But although the present programmes of the various unions of seamen and firemen include many valuable items, many of these remain practically a dead letter and have never been made the issues of any strike. Wages, food, accommodations, and working hours are all the seaman seems to care about. Up to this time, in spite of the unions, he has left severely alone matters that are of more vital importance than animal comforts. He is thoroughly commercialized; and at present he is doing little or nothing to bring about the reforms which will insure great er respect for life and property afloat.

Now that ships have reached a tonnage and length hitherto undreamed of, and now that they carry thousands of passengers as against hundreds in sail, it will be necessary to evolve a new type of sailor to supplant the unseamanlike hybrids who now fill the forecastles on British ships.

To the comparatively ignorant mind and low order of intelligence so prevalent in ships’ forecastles, the sinking of a ship and the drowning of our sailors are ‘acts of God.’ God seems to be blamed because ships are sent to sea undermanned, overloaded, overinsured, and unsea worthy; and disasters, big and small, are looked upon as pieces of hard luck which show the risks of the calling. The truth is that bad management, bad legal supervision, bad laws, and bad shipowners must shoulder most of the blame. Unionism has taught seamen to-day how to fight for higher wages and better conditions of service afloat; but it has not taught them why so many of their number are drowned or maimed, or why so many ships happen to strand on the shoals, miles from their true course. The sailors do not realize that tonnage, class, speed, construction, capacities, and conditions have altered beyond recognition, with awful rapidity, and that the law cannot keep pace with these changing conditions. The unions have done nothing for the safety of passengers afloat because the sailors as a class are still ignorant in the extreme and steeped in the mud of feudalism and hero-worship.

So far all that I have said is meant to apply solely to the man before the mast. With the officers, the case is rather different. In spite of their higher education, their keener perceptions, and their responsibility to the traveling public, false pride bars them from doing any real active work. To unite and fight for vital interests of their own, means to them a loss of dignity incompatible with an officer’s position. Many of them understand to the letter such matters as the Titanic disaster; but so long as they can pace the bridge like peacocks or glorified hall-porters, such things can ‘ go to pot.’ I have been long enough an officer, dressed like a glorified hall-porter, to know that this is the case and that the feeble attempts at unionism have failed simply because as officers we are content to form an apathetic guild with a dignified t itle that awes nobody and amuses many, rather than get together and tackle questions which vitally concern the helpless traveling public. But it is not my object in this paper to discuss the officers; we shall leave them to their dreams of feudalism. They have done little for or against unionism.

IV

It is to far-away Australia that we must turn to see what unionism can do for the sailor. Here we find intelligent, educated, and self-respecting seamen, who appreciate keenly the value of practical labor politics when applied to questions of travel and trade at sea; who call for and command respect; who know what they want, and get what they want; and who understand fully the ethics and aims of unionism and the good and bad in it. Australia never possessed sailing-ship men, and the vast majority of her seamen are of the steamboat breed, but they are of a comparatively high type: the mechanical and commercial age has produced in Australia mechanical and commercial seamen who are backed up in their public endeavors to lessen the risks of the sea by a labor government quite in sympathy with labor movements, and not handicapped by party politics of the English sort. Australian seamen do not believe in ‘acts of God’; they know that mismanagement accounts for an overwhelming percentage of the tragedies of the sea; and their unions are doing something about it. Life and property in Australian ships enjoy an immunity from accident unknown in Western waters.

In order of intelligence the American sailor comes next — coaster or deepwater man, native or naturalized. The American product of the age of steam is, as a rule, more intelligent and farsighted than the British. The native element, plus the naturalized Scandinavian, plus a republican form of government, goes far toward making the issues of strikes broader than one finds them in England. American sailors take an important part in the international conferences; at a recent one held in London, for instance, the American delegate, who was a naturalized Scandinavian, was one of the most practical, hard-headed representatives present.

But, on the whole, unionism has failed at sea, because it has not grasped its opportunity to fight for things which it could and should help to secure, and which are more important than wages and hours of work. Years before the Titanic was constructed, it knew that such ships carried only enough lifeboats to save less than one third of the passengers in case of a wreck; but it did nothing. Nor did it take action to prevent passenger steamers from carrying inflammable cargoes. In England, unionism not only left the installation of wireless apparatus to the generosit y of shipowners instead of making it compulsory, but ignored the value of hydrostatic tests of fire-pumps and hose. In no country has it worked to secure the installation aboard ship of the excellent mechanical systems of firecontrol which have long been on the market. It has looked calmly on while ships were built with interior fittings which were far from fireproof. Every day it shirks its responsibility for the terrible fires which are bound to occur at sea so long as conditions remain unchanged.

It allows ships to be manned by coolies who do not understand their officers’ language and who run amuck when trouble confronts them. It watches vessels putting out to sea overloaded, undermanned, and unseaworthy. The burning of the Volturno and its passengers, the sinking of the Titanic and the drowning of over a thousand innocent travelers, are signal proofs of the failure of unionism afloat.

In the Seamen’s Union of Great Britain, to be more specific, certain high union officials have never smelt salt water as seamen. The union has not been careful enough to demand ability and efficiency on the part of its members; it has no examinations to test a man’s ability to pull an oar, sail a boat, or steer a ship; it gives no lectures on stability, buoyancy, and construction; it gives no demonstrations to show the inflammability of cargoes and of the materials used in the construction of most vessels. It has given its members the impression that only wages matter.

Not long ago I saw a ship passing though the docks on her way to sea, with a hole bigger than a man’s head in one of the lifeboats. The hole was an old one. A government nautical surveyor, standing beside me, pointed the hole out to me. He was powerless to interfere, since the matter lay beyond his jurisdiction. Such cases as this are as plentiful as berries, and yet unionism has made no fight for better legal supervision and inspection. So long as its ranks are swollen with paid-up members who are too ignorant to think of anything except agitating for higher wages, unionism seems to care not a straw for the efficiency of these members and for the safety of the traveling public.

As an officer aboard a British ship, a keen unionist and socialist, I deplore the fact that sheer inertia and apathy may any day contribute toward another ocean tragedy. The sailors must not be left to fight the battle alone. Their efforts are spasmodic; they lack tenacity of purpose; they understand the situation only dimly, and unionism has taught them little. The unions having failed, the public must act, and see to it that the awful accidents of the past few years are not repeated and classed as ‘acts of God.’