The mysteriously born tradition of sea-craft commands unity in a body of workers engaged in an occupation in which men have to depend upon each other.  It raises them, so to speak, above the frailties of their dead selves.  I don’t wish to be suspected of lack of judgment and of blind enthusiasm.  I don’t claim special morality or even special manliness for the men who in my time really lived at sea, and at the present time live at any rate mostly at sea.  But in their qualities as well as in their defects, in their weaknesses as well as in their “virtue,” there was indubitably something apart.  They were never exactly of the earth earthly.  They couldn’t be that.  Chance or desire (mostly desire) had set them apart, often in their very childhood; and what is to be remarked is that from the very nature of things this early appeal, this early desire, had to be of an imaginative kind.  Thus their simple minds had a sort of sweetness.  They were in a way preserved.  I am not alluding here to the preserving qualities of the salt in the sea.  The salt of the sea is a very good thing in its way; it preserves for instance one from catching a beastly cold while one remains wet for weeks together in the “roaring forties.”  But in sober unpoetical truth the sea-salt never gets much further than the seaman’s skin, which in certain latitudes it takes the opportunity to encrust very thoroughly.  That and nothing more.  And then, what is this sea, the subject of so many apostrophes in verse and prose addressed to its greatness and its mystery by men who had never penetrated either the one or the other?  The sea is uncertain, arbitrary, featureless, and violent.  Except when helped by the varied majesty of the sky, there is something inane in its serenity and something stupid in its wrath, which is endless, boundless, persistent, and futile—­a grey, hoary thing raging like an old ogre uncertain of its prey.  Its very immensity is wearisome.  At any time within the navigating centuries mankind might have addressed it with the words:  “What are you, after all?  Oh, yes, we know.  The greatest scene of potential terror, a devouring enigma of space.  Yes.  But our lives have been nothing if not a continuous defiance of what you can do and what you may hold; a spiritual and material defiance carried on in our plucky cockleshells on and on beyond the successive provocations of your unreadable horizons.”

Ah, but the charm of the sea!  Oh, yes, charm enough.  Or rather a sort of unholy fascination as of an elusive nymph whose embrace is death, and a Medusa’s head whose stare is terror.  That sort of charm is calculated to keep men morally in order.  But as to sea-salt, with its particular bitterness like nothing else on earth, that, I am safe to say, penetrates no further than the seamen’s lips.  With them the inner soundness is caused by another kind of preservative of which (nobody will be surprised to hear) the main ingredient is a certain kind of love that has nothing to do with the futile smiles and the futile passions of the sea.