a relic of the past,—­a monstrous compound out of the imperfect gleanings of the Wapping dramatists of the last century.  Yet all those who deal with this character of the sailor begin upon the same false notion.  In their eyes the seaman is a good-natured, unsophisticated, frank, easy-going creature, perfectly reckless of money, very fond of his calling, unhappy on shore, manly, noble-hearted, generous to a degree inconceivable to landsmen.  He is a child who needs to be put in leading-strings the moment he comes over the side, lest he give way to an unconquerable propensity of his to fry gold watches and devour bank-notes, a la sandwich, with his bread and butter.

With this theory in view, all sorts of nice schemes are set forward for the sailor, and endless are the dull and decorous substitutes for the merriment or sociability of his favorite boarding-house, and wonderful are the schemes which are to attract the nautical Hercules to choose the austere virtue and neglect the rollicking and easy-going vice.  Beautiful on paper, admirable in reports, pathetic in speeches,—­all pictorial with anchors and cables and polar stars, with the light-house of Duty and the shoals of Sin.  But meanwhile the character of the merchant-marine is daily deteriorating.  More is done for the sailor now by fifty times than was done fifty years ago; yet who will compare the crews of 1858 with those of 1808?

There are many reasons for this change, and one is Science.  That which always makes the rich richer and the poor poorer, and which can be made to restore the lost equilibrium in a higher civilization only by the strong pressure of an enlightened Christianity, has been at work upon the sea.  Columbus sailed out of Palos in a very different looking craft from the “Great Republic.”  The Vikings had small knowledge of taking a lunar, and of chronometers set by Greenwich time.  Sir Humphrey Gilbert, when he so gallantly and piously reminded his crew that “heaven was as near by sea as on land,” was sitting in the stern of a craft hardly so large as the long-boat of a modern merchantman.  Yet the modern time does not give us commanders such as were of old, still less such seamen.  Science has robbed the sea of its secret,—­is every day bearing away something of the old difficulties and dangers which made the wisest head and the strongest arm so dear to their fellows, which gave that inexpressible sense of brotherhood.  Science has given us the steamship,—­it has destroyed the sailor.  The age of discovery is closing with this century.  Up to the limits of the ice-fields, every shore is mapped out, every shoal sounded.  Not only does Science give the fixed, but she is even transferring to her charts the variable features of the deep,—­the sliding current, the restless and veering wind.