UNIV. OF

OPPORTUNITIES

IN MERCHANT SHIPS

I

WHY TO GO TO SEA AND WHY NOT TO GO

OME boys want to go to sea for a fling,

SOME

and some for a job. A lot of them go for a combination of both. They figureand they are probably right—that they can afford to gamble with a year or two of their lives if they start early enough, and find out what the conditions and chances are at sea, then make up their minds whether or not they want to stick. If they don't want to there's no harm done to themselves or anybody else. There is a good deal of sense in this way of looking at the thing. Still, a young fellow needs to do a little more figuring than that about it if he has other chances ashore that perhaps he ought to be getting ready for, or if he is going to have

VIMU

people dependent on him for either his company or his earnings before he is very much older. A lad with a real hunch that he is cut out for a seaman does well to get to sea by the time he is sixteen, or even fifteen or fourteen. Some do it earlier than that. The finest sea-captain I know, employed with one of the blue-ribbon lines, was sent to sea at thirteen to cure him of his hankerings, and has never left it. I know a third mate twenty-four years old who has spent eleven years at sea already, nine of them in sailingships. I remember a kid on the Galveston docks who at fourteen despised shore life and steamships with equal scorn. He was "a sailing-ship man." But if a kid goes to sea at that age it means cutting out schooling that he really ought to have and being away from lots of chances that offer ashore as boys are growing up. Mighty few boys, once they have broken away from school, have strong enough will and purpose to go back again. It always seems to them that it will be too embarrassing for them in school, because they will be a grade or two behind all the other fellows of their age who have stuck it out. Then they have grown used to earning and having all the say about how they shall spend their spare time, and they haven't any

hankering for being "run" any more by their parents and their teachers. I've only known one fellow in my life who left school when he was fifteen to go to sea and then had the gumption to quit the sea after a year and a half, although he was enjoying it, in order to finish high school, so that in the end he would be a better ship's officer than a lot of men he saw getting ahead at sea just by rule of thumb. He figured he had been broken in to the sea, had a line on its possibilities, liked it, and so would leave it for a while in order to enjoy it all the more when he returned to it, because he would have easier command of all its possibilities, be in the best of shape for getting all it had to offer. Most boys aren't like that, though, and if they quit school too early they've quit for good and all, and will seem to have an advantage until they're about twentyfive, and then they'll see the fellows with a better education forging ahead into the jobs that call for head-work, while at the same time they've picked up the handiness about a ship,

too.

Nowadays, especially, a lot of men who aren't kids any longer, but grown to be twenty-five or six or even thirty, yes, and some at thirty-five, are thinking about going

to sea. They stand a better chance than ever before, because so many men are making these shifts of jobs as a result of the late war that it is taken for granted more than it used to be, and a man doesn't feel so odd about it as he would have once on a time, and ships' officers expect to teach a man that old in a way they wouldn't have expected to before the war. Besides, a man that age does less skylarking, naturally, than a kid, and learns faster because he sets himself to it harder. He is at some disadvantage. There is a liveliness and a certainty in rigging, a quickness and handiness at the wheel, a nimbleness with the marlinspike and all kinds of knotting and splicing, a grip at the oar, that a man does always best who has learned it young. But, take it by and large, the saving thought for any man who thinks he's a little old to start in on a new job is that, as things run, if you know the rudiments of a job and do them well nobody knows, who hasn't been with you when you started in, whether you've been at the thing six months or six years. If you're handy at a thing, you pick up the necessary things to do in the course of three months or six. After that most men are content to hold their own, adding a little to their capabilities from time

to time. A man who throws himself into the thing and throws his whole weight on the oar instead of letting up can make large allusions to his long sea experiences at the end of a year when he newly joins some ship where nobody knows him, if he has imagination and wants to and his conscience will let him, and if he isn't too much of a braggart nobody will know or care whether he started his sea life at sixteen or twenty-eight, provided, of course, he has shed the mannerisms unfitted to the sea that may have characterized his earlier jobs. It's the first six months that are always the hardest.

So the kid of sixteen, the young man of twenty-three, the grown man of thirty, has to ask himself what there is in sea life for him, what there is in him for sea life, what he might have instead on shore, whether he is foot-free or must think of others as well as himself, and how his plans will fit into their lives, and whether he is going just for a look 'round or to start a career.

If a man for any reason, because he is young or because he is foot-free for a time, is going to sea just as a fling, he has both the navy and the merchant marine to choose from. Conditions of life are apt to be easier for him in the navy, and he will see more of