Such are some of the safeguards which modern science and organization have provided for the sailor in pursuit of his always hazardous calling.  Many others of course could be enumerated.  The service of the weather bureau, by which warning of impending storms is given to mariners, is already of the highest utility.  The new invention of wireless telegraphy, by which a ship at sea may call for aid from ashore, perhaps a thousand miles away, has great possibilities.  Modern marine architecture is making steamships almost unsinkable, more quickly responsive to their helms, more seaworthy in every way.  Perhaps with the perfection of the submarine boat, ships, instead of being tossed on the boisterous surface of the waves, may go straight to their destination through the placid depths of ocean.  But whatever the future may bring, the history of the American sailor will always bear evidence that he did not wait for the perfection of safety devices to wrest from the ocean all that there was of value in the conquest; that no peril daunted him, nor was any sea, however distant, a stranger to his adventurous sail.

Much has been said and written of the improvidence of the sailor, of his profligacy when in port, his childlike helplessness when in the hands of the landsharks who haunt the waterside streets, his blind reliance upon luck to get him out of difficulties, and his utter indifference to all precautionary provisions for the proverbial rainy day.  Perhaps the sailor has been getting a shade the worse of it in the literature on this subject, for he, himself, is hardly literary in his habits, and has not been able to tell his own story.  The world has heard much of the jolly Jack Tars who spend in a few days’ revel in waterside dives the whole proceeds of a year’s cruise; but it has heard less of the shrewd schemes which are devised for fleecing poor Jack, and applied by every one with whom he comes in contact, from the prosperous owner who pays him off in orders that can only be conveniently cashed at some outfitter’s, who charges usurious rates for the accommodation, down to the tawdry drab who collects advance money on account of half a dozen sailor husbands.  The seaman landing with money in his pocket in any large town is like the hapless fish in some of our much-angled streams.  It is not enough to avoid the tempting bait displayed on every side.  So thick are the hooks and snares that merely to swim along, intent on his own business, is likely to result sooner or later in his being impaled on some cruel barb.  Not enough has been said, either, of the hundreds of American lads who shipped before the mast, made their voyages around Cape Horn and through all the Seven Seas, resisted the temptations of the sailors’ quarters in a score of ports, kept themselves clean morally and physically, and came, in time, to the command and even the ownership of vessels.  Among sailors, as in other callings, there are the idle and the industrious apprentices, and the lesson taught