19th June. the days when we had two or three hundred sailing ships in this harbour at once, the British merchant seaman was very much in evidence in Shanghai. A large section of the community lived on him in various ways, and we were all of us constantly brought into more or less pleasurable contact with him. He gave point to many of the stories that lightened the monotony of the dinner table; to the British merchant seaman we owe the immortal story of the late Mr. John Markham's denunciation of justice. We see little of him now. The coasting work is all done nowadays by steamers, whose crews are all natives, and the ocean liners carry as few men as possible before the mast, and those mostly picked men. The kerosene oil ships belong generally to the Nova Scotia variety, and they have such an unfavourable reputation that it would be unfair to the service to take their crews as types of the British merchant seaman.
The pessimists tell us that the British merchant seaman has ceased to exist, and that his place has been taken by foreigners of all kinds, chiefly Scandinavians, who are more comprehensively known as "Dutchmen," Some few years ago a nautical light in the House of Commons, Captain Bedford Pim, told the astonished House that our ships were so exclusively mauned by foreigners, that in the event of a war we should lose the whole of our merchant navy, which would be at once sailed the crews straight into the enemy's ports. The statement was not much more ridiculous than most of Captain Pim's deliverances, but it had not even a substratum of truth. Captain Pim was one of that small band who still regret the repeal of the old Navigation Laws, which limited the num. ber of foreigners who might be employed in any British ship to one-fourth of the crew. It is interesting to see what the proportion now actually is, and more interesting still to find as we do, that it has never come up since the repeal of the law even to the 25 per cent, which that law authorised. In 1851 it was 4 per cent., in 1872 11.24 per cent., in 1883 16.42 per cent., and it has now fallen again to 14 percent. We take these figures from Lord Brassey's re~ cent article on "Our Merchant Seamen" in the Nineteenth Century for March. Moreover it is to be noted that "the foreign seamen in the British service are chiefly from the North of Europe, of the same race and almost. of the same language as ourselves." In the most desirable branches of the service the proportion of foreign seamen employed is naturally much less than 14 percent. "Mr. John Burns reported to Mr. Gray that there had been entered and discharged in a single year in the Cunard fleet and home services about 40,000 men. Of these 1,600 were foreigners, or not more than four per cent. of the whole body." It is note: worthy that the stokers and firemen on British steamers are almost exclusively British subjects, except in steamers working in the tropics in which Arabs and Chinese are employed. The hardest, work is done in the stoke-holds, and it this the foreigner cannot compete with the Englishman, The fact still remains that there is a larger proportion of foreigners employed in our merchant service than in any other occupation under Britishemployers. The reason is that it is the worst paid employment. Lord Brassey takes the total earnings of a merchant seaman, including the value of his board and lodging which are found for him, at £60 ayeer. The average earnings of artisans on shore are £80, Besides the extra risk to life and limb, the sailor has to bear numberless privations, the hardest being the long separation from home. As to the contrast between the life of the sailor and of the artisan Lord Brassey makes the following quotation The artisan works fifty-four hours weekly, goes home every night to a room with a comfortable dry bed, has fresh fuad daily, unbroken rest at night, as much outside society as he wishes, together with books and newspapers to any extent, always rests on Sundays, and, speaking in general terms, is well paid, well fed and well housed, well clad, well cared for—much, very much better off than the sailor. But as the hours worked and remuneration earned by sailors and workmen of the same social grade ashore cannot be compared, so neither can the relative comforts of the one be placed against those of the other. In these the seaman is altogether at " disadvan If sick or hurt by accident there solutely no provision made for even ordinary care and atten ti captain may or may not know about the drugs he administers, and, with the help of the carpenter, may or may not be able to seta broken limb. "The space in which a dozen men are huddled is probabl; no larger than the one room to which eac man retires at night on shore. Jack is nite ready to face cheerfully all the unavoidable hardships and dangers of his profession, such as exposure to extremes of heat or cold, wet and hunger. Being drenched to the skin for weeks together, his bed wet and the galley-fire drowned out, are viewed as the common lot of humanity afloat. 'Imprisonment with a chance of drowning' has no terrors for him. He does feel, however, that being out of sight,' he hus somehow been ' out of mind,' and that he has got behind in the race of life in consequence. He feels himself to possess many fine and noble qualities, but somehow or other they are not marketable. All this depresses and disheartens the best men; they either turn to other occupations, or, remaining at sea, become discontented To the question whether the British seaman has deteriorated of late years, and the irresponsible verdict would be that he has, the answer of responsible witnesses is unanimous that. he has not deteriorated. A residuum there is, and always has been, and always will be, of men who are bad sailors and bad messmates, but the collective verdict of the Commission on Loss of Life at Sea was:—" After giving our best attention to the subject
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.