routes. Their reputation among seamen is one of praise without dissent. They are a great influence on both coasts, have a bank in New York City, and are undoubtedly the eminent United States example of a varied merchant company owning and using shipping rather than a shipping company that seeks merchandise for cargoes and goes into some shore manufacturing or trafficking businesses in order to be sure of cargoes. Their advertisement reads like a prose poem of the seas in all its shipping and merchanting liveliness. They announce that W. R. Grace & Co. are "Exporters of all American products, including especially iron and steel, salmon, flour, canned goods, dried fruits, chemicals, lumber, and machinery; also nitrate, with direct shipments from Chilean nitrate ports to Japan and other Far East destinations, and coffee; and importers of all raw materials from South and Central America, Japan, and Far East, including wool, cotton, hides, and skins; all ediblesrice, beans, cocoanuts, peanuts, tapioca, pepper, cassia, and tea; oils, copra, rubber, jute, and hemp. Direct freight and passenger service from San Francisco and Puget Sound ports to Paita, Salavery, Callao, Mollendo, Arica, Iquique, Antofagasta, Valparaiso, Co

quimbo, Coronel, Eten, Quayaquil, Pacasmayo, Punta Arenas, Talcahuano, and other ports as inducements offer."

So the talk will run. You will gradually come to know about the individual companies, and about the individual ships of each company, and about the tempers and seamanship of individual officers long established in this or that ship. More attention is being paid to seamen's needs and comforts and officers' needs and comforts in both the designing and operating of ships than ever before, but the life of a ship is a long life, and the best shipping company in the world can't make an old ship over to have all the points of comfort that are common now in newly built ships.

VI

GETTING THE THEORY

A MAN starting at sea should go after his

seamanship first of all. He must learn to be handy about a ship in all her regular routine and ready for the emergencies that come upon her. But before many months he will be curious to get started understanding why certain things work out as they do with a ship, how the captain determines her position at noon each day, and what each of the officers does through the day and through the night in making observations of one kind and another that give the captain "checks" for his official fixing of position each noontime. He will be curious to learn how steam works and how childish, how almost humanly perverse, some part of the engines can be unless you know the one little theoretical thing that will nurse it back into good working shape again. Off-watch in his bunk or lounging in a corner of the deck, somewhere the sailor or fireman will

commence to dip into the inevitable books and to talk, such chances as he can get without invading discipline, with a deck officer or an engineer. The very fact that you have to watch the compass day by day, aye, and hour by hour, to see to it that variation and deviation do not betray you by playing unobserved monkey-shines with the way the needle points is a good illustration of how promptly you are dependent on theory in the simplest process of getting a ship from port to port.

It pays a man to buy Lecky's Wrinkles in Practical Navigation. It is not a book to be read through chapter by chapter, but a book to dip into almost any place it opens and read on till your inclination is gone. You'll have something to repay you for the time you spend on it. The book is expensive, costs six dollars in England and twelve dollars here, but it is a good companion for a beginner, just as it is the trusted associate of veterans, and it has a place of peculiar affection among seamen such as no other book can ever hope to have. It is a book for the deck department, not for the engineroom. Then there are several books that cost fifty cents or thereabouts, such as the Mariners' Handbook, published by the Inter

national Correspondence Schools and sold to anybody without having to be enrolled for a course with them, and a book published in England for a shilling (twenty-five cents) called Questions and Answers in Navigation that, for the deck, is almighty useful. The great United States book on theoretical navigation is Bowditch's American Practical Navigator, and it is a great book and a good book to own, but a little over-technical for a man just getting his grip. In the end you'll have to turn to it, but it will baffle you at the first.

You will want to buy a sextant after you have been at sea a few months to train yourself in just the cleverness necessary for handling the instrument, taking observations in all kinds of weather. This isn't theory, but a knack of eye and hand that requires considerable practice before your mind is left free for the theory of which a sextant is the instrument.

The supervising engineer of the greatest civilian fleet that ever has operated under the United States flag says that to his mind the best book a young coal-passer or fireman can have in his sea-bag is McAndrews's Floating School, published by the International Marine Engineering Company, and that the next