o see a
ship being hauled up the river foot by foot with a warp and a kedge; yet
we do not get cheap coals now, for all our science, and we have lost our
seamen. The old inhabitants of the eastern seaports never cease to
lament the progress of steam. They point out that all the money made in
the brig colliers goes into few hands, and is carried away to be spent
in London and Torquay, and Cannes, and Paris, by the great coalowners.
They say, too, that the new race of seamen are unsocial beings who do no
good to any town that the steamers run from. The modern "hand" comes
into the river, say, at dusk; sees his vessel put under the coal spout,
jumps ashore to buy a loaf and a few herrings, and then goes off to sea
by three in the morning. This goes on all the year round, and if the
sailor gets four-and-twenty hours to spend at home, he thinks himself
wonderfully lucky. The sailor-men of old times seldom worked in the
winter. All the colliers were laid up in the river, and the men lived on
their summer earnings, so that multitudes of small tradesmen, who are
now unable to live, fared very comfortably then.

These complaints may not be very logical or well founded, but the people
who make them speak with perfect belief. Whatever may be thought of the
social aspect of the question, the nautical aspect is not to be
mistaken; for our school of seamen is undoubtedly departed.

The old collier sailor was a man of one faculty: he could handle a ship
to perfection, but he could do nothing else, and he knew nothing else.
On shore he was a child of the most innocent description, and the world
that lay outside the regular line traversed by his old black tub, was a
place beyond his conception. It is true that he sometimes went to such
far-off regions as the Baltic, but even that extent of travel failed to
open his mind. The worthy man who said that the four quarters of the
globe were "Russia, Prussia, Memel, and Shields," was the type of the
travelled collier captain. It is hardly possible to understand the
complete ignorance of some of those fine sailors, or to conceive the
methods on which they worked their ships. A man who could neither read
nor write would take his vessel without a mistake from port to port. The
lights on the coast were his only books, and his one intellectual
exercise consisted in calculating the set of the ebb and the flood. With
all the phenomena that he was used to observe in his ordinary life, he
could deal p