V

SHIPPING COMPANIES

F a man has gone to sea with a serious purpose of getting ahead and making a life's job of it he gives a great deal of thought at first as to whether he shall pick out a good ship and settle down with her or shall go roaming. When he leaves his seaman's ratings and becomes an officer the same consideration is even more pressing upon him. There are good arguments both ways for a man so long as he is a sailor, and there are good arguments both ways for a man while he is a young officer. By the time he is thirty and a senior watch officer or captain he almost surely is settled with his company and perhaps with his ship, although that is not inevitably the case, and is less the case than ever right now, when losses at sea in the merchant marine during the war have shaken so many good men out of affiliations that four years ago they supposed were good

their lives long. That is a transitory condition, however, and will be stabilized during the next five years.

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The analogy with shore jobs is fairly sound. Sometimes a man makes an awfully good thing by sticking by and getting fixed in a job early. He is in on the ground floor and grows with the firm." Sometimes he comes an unrealized cropper by such a line of action. It becomes a line of inaction, and he becomes a "stick in the mud," finds himself in a blind alley with a good enough salary to keep him going, but no development open for him and the years of monotonous routine stretching ahead of him. Sometimes a man free-lances around, acquires the habit of restlessness, and becomes a rolling stone that gathers no moss. Or, again, a man deliberately adopting a policy of drift for a few years sees good chances he never would have suspected in the old home town, and if he ever does return there is ten times more valuable for all the background he has of outside experience. It is so at sea. If a man is just a drifter he becomes a mental and physical vagabond, unhappy with any job that lasts too long. But if he uses his head while he drifts he knows more seamanship, realizes the good points and bad

points of the company with which he finally establishes himself, is apt to be more contented or more intelligent in the discontents that come upon him, and by his readiness and aptitudes is likely to get ahead in a ship or with a company faster than the man who lives more or less by the company's rote and has no standards of comparison and not so much initiative.

Shipping companies and ships' officers like men who stick. But they recognize the natural wandering tendency of a man to whom sea life appeals and are aware of the advantages a good man gets by trying all the companies, all the ships, and all the routes, and are pretty considerate of the good man who comes back after a look around and wants to get placed again. The only thing for a man to do, whether sailor or young officer, is to size himself up and see what risks he personally runs from each of these two courses, whether he needs to discipline himself to stay hitched or needs to develop his initiative and resourcefulness by knocking about. Some pretty good men's greatest drawback is a stodginess that, in spite of constant industry, doesn't get them ahead in a company's esteem as fast as some other man who doesn't seem, to the stodgy man,

as conscientious as he is. On the other hand, many a dashing, brilliant man is too expensive because his judgment is not sober enough. His mistakes of one voyage wipe out all his rapid achievements of preceding voyages. He plays too much with luck and not system for a partner.

The list below shows the names and the size of the principal shipping companies in early 1919. Theoretically all the ships were still under the control of the United States Shipping Board, which ran some of the ships outright itself through the New York office of its Division of Operations, but turned over the greater number of ships to private companies for either management or operation. By "management" was meant that the steamship company provided the crew and attended to the upkeep of the vessel and assumed the management of all the business. By "operation" was meant that the shipping company only handled the discharging and collection of freight. But assignments were made on the natural basis of the company's previous scope, so these names, taken without rhyme or reason from a fairly complete list of all United States shipping companies, give a fair idea of the whole field of employment: