OPPORTUNITIES

IN MERCHANT SHIPS

UNIV. OF CALIFORNIA

OPPORTUNITIES

IN MERCHANT SHIPS

I

WHY TO GO TO SEA AND WHY NOT TO GO

SOME boys want to go to sea for a fling,

and some for a job. A lot of them go for a combination of both. They figure— and 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

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people dependent on him for either his com-
pany 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 sailing-
ships. I remember a kid on the Galveston
docks who at fourteen despised shore life and
He was
steamships with equal scorn.
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