Each age has sent its contingent, not of sons (for the great mass of seamen have always been a childless lot) but of loyal and obscure successors taking up the modest but spiritual inheritance of a hard life and simple duties; of duties so simple that nothing ever could shake the traditional attitude born from the physical conditions of the service.  It was always the ship, bound on any possible errand in the service of the nation, that has been the stage for the exercise of seamen’s primitive virtues.  The dimness of great distances and the obscurity of lives protected them from the nation’s admiring gaze.  Those scattered distant ships’ companies seemed to the eyes of the earth only one degree removed (on the right side, I suppose) from the other strange monsters of the deep.  If spoken of at all they were spoken of in tones of half-contemptuous indulgence.  A good many years ago it was my lot to write about one of those ships’ companies on a certain sea, under certain circumstances, in a book of no particular length.

That small group of men whom I tried to limn with loving care, but sparing none of their weaknesses, was characterised by a friendly reviewer as a lot of engaging ruffians.  This gave me some food for thought.  Was it, then, in that guise that they appeared through the mists of the sea, distant, perplexed, and simple-minded?  And what on earth is an “engaging ruffian”?  He must be a creature of literary imagination, I thought, for the two words don’t match in my personal experience.  It has happened to me to meet a few ruffians here and there, but I never found one of them “engaging.”  I consoled myself, however, by the reflection that the friendly reviewer must have been talking like a parrot, which so often seems to understand what it says.

Yes, in the mists of the sea, and in their remoteness from the rest of the race, the shapes of those men appeared distorted, uncouth and faint—­so faint as to be almost invisible.  It needed the lurid light of the engines of war to bring them out into full view, very simple, without worldly graces, organised now into a body of workers by the genius of one of themselves, who gave them a place and a voice in the social scheme; but in the main still apart in their homeless, childless generations, scattered in loyal groups over all the seas, giving faithful care to their ships and serving the nation, which, since they are seamen, can give them no reward but the supreme “Well Done.”

TRADITION—­1918

“Work is the law.  Like iron that lying idle degenerates into a mass of useless rust, like water that in an unruffled pool sickens into a stagnant and corrupt state, so without action the spirit of men turns to a dead thing, loses its force, ceases prompting us to leave some trace of ourselves on this earth.”  The sense of the above lines does not belong to me.  It may be found in the note-books of one of the greatest artists that ever lived, Leonardo da Vinci.  It has a simplicity and a truth which no amount of subtle comment can destroy.