United States, running a triangular service from New York to Frisco, and Seattle, with package freight, then out to the Hawaiian Islands for a cargo of sugar to bring around through the Panama Canal to Atlantic ports again. They have a fleet of twenty-five to thirty ships, and all the ships are fine, up-todate craft, which sometimes makes a good deal of difference in a sailorman's accommodations. It is impossible, with the best of will or a company's part, to make an old ship like a new ship. The shipping-office for American-Hawaiian line crews is 8 Bridge Street, New York City, down near the Battery.

The American line, one of the properties of the International Mercantile Marine, is principally four fast ships on the New YorkLiverpool or Southampton run. The ships of the line are old ships, blue-ribboners of their day, but due now to be relegated for new liners sure soon to be forthcoming. Life in these ships is different from life on a freighter, a coastwise passenger-ship, or even a slower transatlantic liner. There is more formality and sharper discipline. Some men don't like the life on them because of that, though it is the very thing that will do a lot of men who dislike it the good they need. The

quarters are relatively poor for both sailors and firemen. They are fixed up to the best of the line's ability, but the ships are twentyfive to thirty years old, and both the working conditions and the quarters are inescapably below the standard of newer ships where more modern ideas have had a chance. This, of course, will not be true of the new ships the line is bound to have. The ships are fast, which has advantages and disadvantages. You have frequent pay-days, but small ones because of their frequency, and you get ashore one side or another so often that unless you have good control of yourself your money trickles away without your knowing what it has gone for. Men are secured for them at 399 West Street, the Seamen's Christian Association, conducted by Mr. Stafford Wright.

The Kerr Steamship Company is a big company that is expanding rapidly. It operates in a good many trades, to Brazil and the River Plate, into the Mediterranean, to Spain and Belgium, and has a considerable number of ships.

W. R. Grace & Co. is one of the greatest shipping companies in the country, with a dominating influence in Pacific trade and important operations along the Atlantic

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