eans so bitter or so sustained. The
reasons for this are two.

In the first place, the navigating officers of a merchantman are
merely the employees of civilians--the shipowners. In the second
place, the Board of Trade, by compelling shipowners to carry a certain
number of navigators and engineers holding certificates of competency,
have placed them on one professional level. Nevertheless, the
animosity between the mates and the shrewd, greasy, sea-going engineer
was keen enough, sharpened no doubt by the preponderating wages of the
latter. Again, the former's habits of deference and mute obedience to
the master, at once navigator, agent, and magistrate of the ship,
were not readily assimilated by the engineer, whose democratic
consciousness was just then rising into being, and whose mechanical
instincts were outraged by the sailor's ignorant indifference to the
knowledge and unremitting vigilance demanded by the machinery in his
care.

It is in this fashion that a class of men like my Chief have
developed. Born of the lower middle class, the artisan class,
apprenticed to their trade at twelve or thirteen years of age, and,
on going to sea, suddenly finding themselves in possession of a
definite uniform and rank with a fixed watch and routine, their
natural instinct leads them to do their utmost to "live up" to their
new dignity. In course of time, after a certain minimum of sea
service, and an unbroken record of efficiency and good behaviour, the
Board of Trade examiner affixes his stamp on the finished product, and
the youth ventures on matrimony and indulges in dreams of rising in
the world. His travelling has given his mind a certain shallow breadth
of outlook; he will discuss Italian art with you, although his
knowledge of Italy is confined to the low parts of Genoa and Naples,
with perhaps a visit to the Campo Santo of the former. He has acquired
the reading habit, perforce, at sea, though his authors would be
considered dubious by the educated; and a smattering of some other
language, generally Spanish, is, in his own opinion, good reason for
holding himself above the common mechanic ashore. His salary as a
chief engineer enables his wife to keep a servant and buy superior
garments; he puts money by, and in the course of time solidifies his
position as a genuine bourgeois. In the meantime he exhales Smiles. He
believes in Rising in the World. He would blot out a perfectly
inoffensive, if ignoble, ancestry, and