The Merchant Marine and the Young Fellow

I

IN the fall of 1919 the American Merchant Marine presented, to the eye of the nautical stranger, a singular spectacle. The general impression was that everybody was rapidly taking leave of his senses. The whole personnel of a ship seemed to have abandoned for good all those principles of vigilance and thrift, the jealous care of matériel and frugal consumption of stores, which is the hallmark of the bona fide merchant mariner worth the name of any nation. Maximum pay for minimum effort, an air of jocose contempt for anyone who retained any of the old-time moral conscience, and a feeling that they were in the mainstream of a flood of wealth — these were the marks of a period that is looked back upon with shuddering wonder, a period dramatized for us by the coalpasser’s silk shirt, worn over a dirty skin in the bunkers.

But it must not be imagined that the madness lay only upon the lower ranks of the seagoing community. It appeared in executives ashore in purchasing departments and directorates. Though they were the first to recover and seize the brake handles, there was a time when even executives regarded measures of economy and discipline as wildly utopian and not to be achieved. They recovered first; yet it was a timid and ineffectual attempt in the beginning. Looking back, the moral courage to take in sail to change the course for a safe port is seen to have been born of indignation. While all shared in the tremendous flood of prosperity, while markets (to use the business jargon of the time) remained unsaturated, little could be done to direct the thoughts of men to the rottenness of the substructure upon which they were having their joy ride. But when the coalpasser not only wore his silk shirt in the bunker, and took two hours, at sixty cents an hour each overtime, to dump a couple of tons of ashes, but began to demand the same bill of fare as the first-class passengers; when wages went up and up and the wage-earner ceased to do anything at all for the money; when sailors gathered the crew about them on deck and gave talks on the dictatorship of the proletariat, then public opinion began to harden. It was discovered that in government ships, by an astute abuse of overtime, juniors were making more money than their chiefs, and oilers more than professors of economics at universities. Public opinion hardened. The turn came. The markets were announced to be ‘saturated.’ Unwise or unfortunate merchandizes were trapped with immense stocks of silk shirts and similar rubbish which they were unable to move, and wages and prices began to tumble.

The joke, as regards the merchant marine, was that its problem remained as acute as ever. Bodies of thinkers, political parties, and patriotic men generally, were committed to the proposition that the country needed a merchant marine. Its astonishing growth during the war was felt to be too good a chance to miss, to create and establish a prosperous maritime industry. The newspapers industriously played up the remarkable features of remarkable ships Figures were published revealing the stability of the business and the profits to be made. It was understood that the merchant marine had to be ‘sold’ to the public. It is not an attractive expression, but it is of value because of the light it sheds upon the mentality of those who deemed themselves competent to make the merchant marine an integral part of the national life and enterprise.

Very few people were aware at that time four years ago that the American merchant marine had very little actuality. The public could not be blamed for imagining that the job was already done. The American flag was in every port, the tonnage total was enormous, orders from abroad came so thick and fast that they were perforce ignored or turned over to other firms. It looked easy. For a time it was easy. Then came the crash and the avalanche of repudiated obligations.

The point of these remarks lies in the identity of the weakness throughout the whole structure. Just as the financial and commercial edifice of seagoing transportation was based on unusual and artificial conditions arising out of the war; just as the ships themselves were largely temporary contraptions unsuited for regular trading; so the personnel was not composed of men out of whom could be evolved a sound and dependable service.

It was inevitable, during hostilities, with so great a demand for belligerents and so great a stigma attaching to those who sought refuge as embusqués, that undesirable and incompetent men should manage to enter the sea service by way of transports and auxiliary craft. But it was not so much the undesirables who were to be feared, because it is a truism at sea that adequate rope always enables such gentry to hang themselves. It was the young fellows who, in the hurlyburly of war, had chosen a maritime career and who were growing up in an atmosphere in which indolence and inefficiency were rendered intolerable by impudence toward superiors, and, more often than not, by pilfering, broaching cargo, and petty larceny.

Into this state of affairs, it must be repeated, came a gleam of sanity and an attempt to put the business of seafaring upon a sounder basis.

During this period of reconstruction it must be feared that the young fellow, the youth whose feet were set upon the long and difficult path to command, was not considered very much. He was confused with the riffraff who filled the ranks of unskilled labor, and who were bellowing for more and yet more pay. The cadet was unable to help himself, since the regular societies refused to recognize him without a licence, and temperament and dignity prevented him from affiliating himself with sailors’ and firemen’s unions. Our problem is to discover what happened to him at this juncture, and what has happened to him since. Because with his numbers dwindling and newspaper editorial voices continually uplifted in laudation of the American Merchant Marine, it is obviously necessary to discover why, in spite of all this editorial clamor, and the prodigious efforts being made to ‘sell’ the merchant marine to the American public, young Americans refuse to go to sea.

We cart glance, in the first place, at the type which has, in spite of numerous difficulties, persisted in the original determination to follow the sea as a career. It may be taken as an axiom that the youths whom we need most in the merchant marine, youths whose parents occupy positions of reasonable affluence and responsibility, have the most difficulty in persuading those same parents to regard seafaring with favor. We are, indeed, in a cleft stick. We are advertising our merchant marine as an indispensable and glorious adjunct of our new dignity as a great maritime power. We have cut wages, from captain to scullion, an even thirty per cent. We need very strongly the youths of good professional stock to officer the ships. And we have to comince the parents that the possible prospect of three hundred a month at forty years of age is adequate remuneration for their sons.

It is not an easy problem.

The young fellow, however, is getting not three hundred, but perhaps one hundred dollars or less a month. This of course is, ‘all found.’ But the problem arises at once, whether such a scale does not tend to promote celibacy, and whether the sort of men we desire to produce can be evolved on a wage that compares very unfavorably with that of plasterers and such highly organized union labor. It is a question whether it would not be a sound policy to subsidize the married officer, in order to counteract the recent ‘set’ away from the sea into the ranks of commerce. There is certainly a very powerful drag on the seaman’s ambitions, for American women of to-day do not include a class such as may be found in the ports of the maritime countries of Europe — women who come of sea-roving stock and who accept with fortitude the sombre destiny of those whose men go down to the sea in ships. To the modern wife a separation of a month is a matter of bitter complaint; and under modern conditions of living in large cities, conditions that put fidelity and frugality to an unendurable strain, the idea of a man taking up a profession in which he may quite conceivably remain absent for a year at a time, savors of insanity. Young men do not consider such a prospect as practicable, and abandon a profession that leads neither to wealth nor to domestic security. And we are left very much as we were, with our problem.

Let us look at the question from the shipowners’ and operators’ point of view. It is of course largely a financial matter. If the ships do not pay, the wages must come down accordingly. That is accepted by all concerned. But the question we desire to solve here is not whether the shipowner wishes to keep out of the bankruptcy court, but whether he regards the personnel on board his vessels in the same light as operatives in a factory, or whether he visualizes them, and especially the officers, as members of a guild or profession, with an ethic that obliges them to put duty before comfort, and makes them responsible, without the aid of time-clocks or such contrivances, for the security of his enterprise. This is important because the behavior of the young fellow following the sea will be modified by the attitude of his employer.

The young fellow himself, with his second-mate’s licence, let us say, does not make it very easy for us to discover what his ideas are upon the subject of his profession. It has become a wearisome and irritating convention among all classes of men to run down their own calling. The seaman most of all tends to overdo this foolish custom. Only fools and drunkards, we are assured, go to sea. This is so exactly the opposite of the truth and the facts, that it may be cited as an example of the seaman’s inaccurate thinking. The merchant marine would have more than enough to man the ships if the fools and drunkards all went to sea.

Seagoing, our young friend might admit in the right mood, is not at all a bad business until you want to get married. We come here upon the problem of divided loyalty. A ship has a habit of usurping all that is worth while in a man’s character. From the ship to the employ is a short and inevitable step, and it is generally taken very early by those who enter the service of a company controlled by a body of men with some abstract ideal of service in their minds. And when that conception of loyalty to the cloth, together with a pardonable vanity in the particular employ in which he spends his years, is opposed to severed home-ties and the conventional loyalty to the microcosm of shore life it is easy to prophesy what will happen.

II

Coming to the immediate conditions before us now, the young fellow is confronted by a perplexing confusion in the status of his calling. He does not know exactly what lie is supposed to be. He tends, naturally, to accept the view that he belongs to a learned profession which should be adequately remunerated. The fact is, the young fellow overestimates this aspect of his calling. His value lies, whatever department of sea life he may work in, not in scientific attainments but in fidelity and vigilance. He is, in his own austere and simple phraseology, a watch-keeper, and by his qualities in keeping a watch he is weighed in the balance. Even when he assumes command he in no sense departs from the rôle. As commander or head of his department his anxiety extends to the whole twenty-four hours of the day. With the advance of scientific apparatus and perfection of machinery, the importance of vigilance grows rather than diminishes. Success in this humble sphere depends largely upon temperament. Many there are who are mentally incapable of enduring the tedium of a watch-keeping existence. The brilliant army of youths whose photographs appear in the popular magazines attached to legends describing the number of dollars per month they earn for soliciting subscriptions, would find sea life, with its many restrictions and its apparently altruistic basis, flat, stale, and unprofitable.

The problem, then, as it emerges for us amid the many difficulties of a confusing period of transition, is in reality very old and very simple. The editors who call for a merchant marine at all costs, the owners who are trying to run the merchant marine at a reasonable cost that will leave them a profit, and the public, who like to read about the Leviathan but who are not greatly concerned about the merchant marine outside of illustrated supplements, have all forgotten one cost which cannot be paid in cash. Ships are all right, says Mr. Conrad’s sailor — it ‘s the men in them. Virtue cannot be ‘sold’ to a community. One is entitled to doubt whether the business of advertising is the short route to a successful and solvent merchant marine. The cost the country must pay is the dedication of a class of men to the service of the sea as ‘a calling’ and not as a means of acquiring wealth.

We here encounter a number of difficulties in presenting this idea of a dedicated class to a populous and prosperous nation living for the most part far from the scene of our labors. When they come to us, these prosperous and good-hearted folk, bound upon a vacation to Europe or the West Indies, it is our duty and our privilege to show them the pleasant side of ocean life, to make their time of travel as nearly as possible like the comfortable homes they have left. They often have sons who have, much to the family amusement, got the idea of coming to sea. But when these competent and affluent executives, these merchants and professional men, learn what their sons may expect in the future as to ultimate prospects and rewards, they regard the scheme with less amusement. In a country where individual effort meets with so generous a recompense, where none start so low that they may not hope to reach the highest position in the enterprise, the life of a ship’s officer is not attractive. In common parlance, there is nothing in it. Yet they are unable to avoid a feeling of regret that so honorable a calling should not. carry with it remuneration more in keeping with the type of man it demands.

That is our first difficulty, and it seems insuperable. We have to confess that commerce and the more learned professions provide higher rewards than seafaring, and it remains to propose an alternative. The present writer does this in full consciousness that it conflicts with the prevailing unspoken creed of all grades in America. But the only possible way to build up a merchant marine independent of foreign assistance is the formation of a class of men dedicated to the sea, and the enlightenment of the general public as to the true nature of the shipping business.

This latter, because of the peculiar character of publicity in the United States, is not easy. America is a country on a very large scale, and for many years the estimation of an enterprise has been based upon its size. Moreover, since so few, comparatively, of the citizens see the sea before they have become sufficiently prosperous to sail on it as first-class passengers, the prevailing custom is to regard seafaring from a pseudoromantic standpoint. Bankers have expressed to the present writer a wistful desire to be sailors. Letters written by people in all walks of life voice a sentimental regard for the sea.

Now we are here on the wrong track. This sort of emotion has no bearing on the case. The young fellow who goes to sea, who elects to be of the dedicated company of which we have spoken, must have a very different attitude. This is not to decry the landsman’s sentiment, but to put it in its place as sentiment and nothing more. The young seaman in this case needs a very definite call to his profession, since he is not likely to come from a seagoing family, as so often happens in England, in France, Holland, and the Scandinavian countries. He will quite possibly find his family benevolently antagonistic, and his sweetheart, if he have one, is not likely to consider a ship otherwise than as a rival. He has to cultivate, in spite of these distractions and the inconvenience of a modest salary, a spirit, of loyalty and neverending vigilance. He must in most cases resign the great prizes of business life to those who select other careers. He must discover in some way best suited to his own character the solution of many problems that never arise for those who live their pleasant lives in civic communities. He must be forever prepared for emergencies that may never arise. He must become intelligently aware that his usefulness consists, not. in knowing more than his commander, or even in knowing very much at all, but in being competent to carry out the routine of the work. Perhaps in no profession in the world is the brilliant intellect and efficiencymonger regarded with more suspicion. Nor is there any walk of life where stark, silent competence is more valued. Hence what is commonly known as character not only is indispensable but is the main requisite for success. It becomes mysteriously apparent to all on board as soon as its owner arrives. Men so illiterate that the very word psychology would defeat them in a spelling-match are instantly cognizant of the subtle psychological implications in a gesture, a tone of voice, a turn of a phrase, a glance of the eye. It seems impossible to simulate virtue on the ocean. And while a goodly portion of the stories of personality in a commander inspiring universal devotion are fabrications, it is singular how this principle of rectitude extorts respect and affection from the most unpromising material.

It is not too much to say that this is not only valuable in a practical and immediate sense, but a source of happiness to its possessor, which the alert profiteer cannot possibly comprehend. It is a justification of existence, a guaranty that life is keeping faith with us in our bargain. The young man who earns the silent approval of commanders who are not famous for extravagant eulogies will probably place more value himself upon silence than upon publicity. This is mentioned because it will throw up, in sharp relief, the salient quality of his character, and explain the necessity of dedicating a special class of men for this service of the sea. For a seaman is bound to be alienated from the modern theory that if a thing is not advertised it does not exist. It is otherwise on the ocean.

Another happy result of developing a seagoing class will be the elimination of the transient. Perhaps the present writer should avoid this subject since he has been occasionally absent from the sea, but he can claim that no matter how hard he may endeavor ‘to swallow the anchor,’ it persists in sticking in his throat. The transients referred to are those troublesome folk who drift about the world engaged in ‘bettering themselves.’ It is a luscious phrase, and is found nowhere so often as in the mouths of those who, if they have bettered themselves, must have been originally forlorn indeed. They come and they go, ‘having no continuing city ‘ — here a trip as quartermaster, there as a wireless operator, now a junior purser, and again in some light capacity in the engineroom. For them there is no fidelity to an enterprise or to a profession. For them there is but the phantom landlight burning in some imaginary harbor, the will-o’-the-wisp of ‘bettering themselves. ‘ They are, from any point of view save that of a sudden emergency, an undesirable feature of seagoing life. They can never be an adequate substitute for a body of men dedicated by proclivity and training to the service of ships. The young men who assume this responsibility and forgo the more adventurous careers on shore would be more steadfast in their resolve if they could discover in the world of publicity a more balanced comprehension of their problems and sacrifices. And in considering him as he faces the uncertain future of an abused service, it is necessary to remember that while a romantic disposition may send a boy to sea it will not keep him there; nor is it sufficient nourishment for the souls and bodies of men who, if they do their duty, make many sacrifices for those who are privileged to retain illusions concerning the sea and a life afloat.