The modern austere critic of the condition of the seamen of the mercantile marine is somewhat of an infliction.  He slays the present-day sailor with virulent denunciation, and implores divine interposition to take us back to the good old days of Hawkins, Drake, Howard, Blake and the intrepid Nelson.  He craves a resurrection of the combined heroism and piety of the sixteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries.  The seaman of those periods is, to his mind, a lost ideal.  And without doubt the men trained and disciplined by Hawkins and Drake were the glory of Britain and the terror of other nationalities.  Their seamanship and heroism were matchless.  They had desperate work to do, and they did it with completeness and devotion.  And the same credit may be given to the sailors of still later times under altered conditions.  But Nelson’s and Collingwood’s men did great deeds in different ways from those of Hawkins and Drake.  Both sets of seamen were brave and resourceful, but they were made use of differently, and were drafted from different sources.  The latter were seamen and piratical rovers by choice, and warriors very often by necessity.  They were willing, however, to combine piety, piracy, and sanguinary conflict in the effort to open out new avenues of commercial enterprise for the mutual benefit of themselves and the thrifty lady who sat upon the throne, and who showed no disinclination to receive her share of the booty valiantly acquired by her nautical partners.

The race of men which followed the Trans-Atlantic, Pacific, and Mexican buccaneers of Cadiz, San Juan and Armada fame has been different only in so far as transitional circumstances have made it so.  Indeed, the period which elapsed from the time of the destruction of the Armada up to the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century had evolved innumerable changes in modes of commerce which changed our seamen’s characteristics as well.  But although the circumstances of the sailors’ avocation had changed, and they had to adapt themselves to new customs, there is no justification for the belief that the men of the sixteenth were any more capable or well behaved than those of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries.  Nor is it justifiable to assume that because of the rapid changes which have taken place during the last fifty years by the introduction of steamers, the seamen who man the steamers are inferior to those who, a generation before, manned sailing vessels, or who man what is left of sailing vessels now.  The steamer seamen of to-day are mentally, physically and mechanically as competent to do the work they are engaged to do as were any previous race of seamen, and, taking them in the aggregate, they are better educated than their predecessors and quite as sober.  Their discipline may not be all that could be desired, but that is not the fault of, nor need it even be considered a defect in, the seaman himself.  It is a defect