It appeared from his discursive answer that she had not much of a name one way or another.  She was not very fast.  It took no fool, though, to steer her straight, he believed.  Some years ago he had seen her in Calcutta, and he remembered being told by somebody then, that on her passage up the river she had carried away both her hawse-pipes.  But that might have been the pilot’s fault.  Just now, yarning with the apprentices on board, he had heard that this very voyage, brought up in the Downs, outward bound, she broke her sheer, struck adrift, and lost an anchor and chain.  But that might have occurred through want of careful tending in a tideway.  All the same, this looked as though she were pretty hard on her ground-tackle.  Didn’t it?  She seemed a heavy ship to handle, anyway.  For the rest, as she had a new captain and a new mate this voyage, he understood, one couldn’t say how she would turn out. . . .

In such marine shore-talk as this is the name of a ship slowly established, her fame made for her, the tale of her qualities and of her defects kept, her idiosyncrasies commented upon with the zest of personal gossip, her achievements made much of, her faults glossed over as things that, being without remedy in our imperfect world, should not be dwelt upon too much by men who, with the help of ships, wrest out a bitter living from the rough grasp of the sea.  All that talk makes up her “name,” which is handed over from one crew to another without bitterness, without animosity, with the indulgence of mutual dependence, and with the feeling of close association in the exercise of her perfections and in the danger of her defects.

This feeling explains men’s pride in ships.  “Ships are all right,” as my middle-aged, respectable quartermaster said with much conviction and some irony; but they are not exactly what men make them.  They have their own nature; they can of themselves minister to our self-esteem by the demand their qualities make upon our skill and their shortcomings upon our hardiness and endurance.  Which is the more flattering exaction it is hard to say; but there is the fact that in listening for upwards of twenty years to the sea-talk that goes on afloat and ashore I have never detected the true note of animosity.  I won’t deny that at sea, sometimes, the note of profanity was audible enough in those chiding interpellations a wet, cold, weary seaman addresses to his ship, and in moments of exasperation is disposed to extend to all ships that ever were launched—­to the whole everlastingly exacting brood that swims in deep waters.  And I have heard curses launched at the unstable element itself, whose fascination, outlasting the accumulated experience of ages, had captured him as it had captured the generations of his forebears.