ea and
storm are minor enterprises to the sack of cities and the clash of arms
at sea. Unlike the Naval Service, we merchants' men hold few recorded
titles to our keystone in the national fabric. The deeds and documents
may exist, but they are lost to us and forgotten in the files of musty
ledgers. The fruits of our efforts stand in the balances of commercial
structure, and are perhaps more enduring than a roll of record. But, if
we are insistent in our search, we may borrow from the naval charters,
and read that not all the glory of our sea-history lies with the thunder
of broadsides and the impact of a close boarding. Engagement with the
elements--a contest with powers more cruel and implacable than keen
steel--efforts to further able navigation, the standard of our
seamanship--drew notable recruits to the humbler sea-life. The small
crews and less lavish gear on the freighters brought the essentials of
the sea-trade to each individual of the ship's company. Idlers and
landsmen learned quickly and bitterly that their only claim to existence
on a merchant's ship lay in a rapid acquisition of a skill in
seamanship. The lessons and the threats and enforcements did not come
wholly from their superiors, to whose tyranny they might expose a sullen
obstinance, and gain, perhaps, a measure of sympathy from their rude
sea-fellows. Then--as later, in the keen sailing days of our clipper
ships--their hardest taskmasters were foremast hands, watchmates, the
men they lived with and ate with and worked with--bitter critics,
unpersuadable, who saw only menace and a threat to their own safety in
the shipping of a man who could not do man's work. On the decks and
about the spars of a merchant vessel, each man of the few seamen carried
two lives--his own and a shipmate's--in his ability to 'hand, reef, and
steer.' There was no place on board for a 'waister,' a 'swabber,'
longshoreman, or sea labourer. Every man had quickly to prove his
ability: the unrelenting sea gave time for few essays.

Fertility of resource, dexterity to serve at all duties, skill at
handling ship and canvas, were the results of sea-ship training. In the
merchantmen great opportunities offered for advancement in all branches
of the seaman's art. Long voyaging was better exercise for a progression
in navigation than the daily pilotage of the war vessels. Blake, in his
early days as a merchant supercargo, learnt his seafaring on rough
trading voyages, and his traini