About My Father's Business

WITH THEM THAT GO DOWN TO THE SEA IN SHIPS

It is possible that those portions of the sacred history which have reference to the association of our Lord Jesus Christ with ships, and the wonderful portions of the great narrative where the Divine Voice seems, as it were, to come from the sea, may have a special attraction for us who live in an island and claim a kind of maritime dominion.

Surely the words "Lord, save me, or I perish," and the instant response of the outstretched hand of the Saviour of men, must have been read with an awful joy by many a God-fearing sailor on the homeward voyage. "It is I, be not afraid," must have come with an intensity of meaning to many a heart which has known the peril of the storm, wherein the voice of man to man has been almost inaudible.

There is something very solemn in the prayers we send up for those at sea. Most of us feel a heart-throb when we lie awake listening to the mighty murmurs of the wind, and waiting for the shrill shriek with which each long terrible blast gathers up its forces – a throb which comes of the sudden thought of lonely ships far out upon the ocean, where men are wrestling with the elements, and looking with clenched lips and straining eyes for the lingering dawn.

Yet, with all this, it is a national reproach to us that until a comparatively recent date we have done little or nothing for our sailors – little for those who have been ready to maintain the old supremacy of our fleet – almost nothing for that greater navy of the mercantile marine to which we are indebted for half the necessaries and for nearly all the luxuries which we enjoy.

A national reproach, because not only have charitable provisions for destitute, sick, infirm, or disabled sailors been neglected, but subscriptions demanded by the State from seamen of the merchant service were never properly applied to relieve the distress of those for whom they were professedly received. Considerably over a million of money has been contributed by merchant seamen, by deductions of sixpences from their monthly pay for the maintenance of Greenwich Hospital, and in addition to this there have been accumulated in the hands of the Government the examination fees of masters and mates passing the Board of Trade examination, and the penny fees paid by common seamen on shipment and unshipment, while the unclaimed wages and effects of seamen dying abroad are calculated at about £8000 a year.

Now there can be no doubt that Greenwich Hospital was originally intended to include merchant seamen in its provisions, for the preamble to the original scheme of William III. recites, "Whereas the King's most excellent Majesty being anxiously desirous to promote the Trade, Navigation, and Naval strength of this Kingdom, and to invite greater numbers of his subjects to betake themselves to the sea, hath determined to erect a hospital," &c. For this purpose sixpence per man per month was to be paid out of the wages of all mariners to the support of the Hospital, and every seaman was to be registered. Why? That the charity might be "for the relief, benefit, or advantage of such the said registered Marines, or Seamen, Watermen, Fishermen, Lightermen, Bargemen, Keelmen, or Seafaring Men, who by age, wounds, or other accidents shall be disabled for future service at sea, and shall not be in a condition to maintain themselves comfortably; and the children of such disabled seamen; and the widows and children of such of them as shall happen to be slain, killed, or drowned in sea service, so far forth as the Hospital shall be capable to receive them, and the revenue thereof will extend."

So far as words went, therefore – and subsequent Acts of Parliament confirmed them – Greenwich Hospital was open to all registered seamen. The fact has always been, however, that it was barely able to meet the claims made by the disabled and infirm sailors of the Navy alone, and therefore the mercantile marine was practically excluded, while the payments were still demanded.

Now let us see what past Governments did for the relief of those old, infirm, or disabled men who having "seen wonders on the great deep," came home and sought help.

A charitable trust, called the "Merchant Seamen's Fund," had been established by merchants and shipowners of the City of London, who gave large sums to it, in order to try to make up for the injustice by which these sailors were virtually excluded from Greenwich Hospital, to which the men of the mercantile marine still had to pay sixpence a month. By a remarkably knowing piece of legislation, an Act was passed (the 20th of George II.) which incorporated the Merchant Seamen's Fund, appointed president and governors, and gave authority to purchase land for building a hospital, to help pay for which another sixpence a month was claimed from the pay of merchant seamen and masters of merchant vessels.

Not till the year 1834, by an Act passed in the reign of William IV., were the merchant sailors relieved from compulsory payment to Greenwich. They had contributed to the hospital for 138 years without having derived any direct benefit from it; and though they were not unwilling to subscribe for their brethren in the Royal Navy, the injustice which demanded their contributions, though their own fund was inadequate to pay for the promised building for which it was intended, became too glaring to be continued. It was therefore determined that a grant of £20,000 should be made to Greenwich Hospital out of the Consolidated Fund, and that the merchant sailors should go on paying their shilling a month for their own benefit (masters paying two shillings), and that a provision for widows and children should be included in the charity, the benefits of which were to be extended to Scotland and Ireland.

The hospital never was built. The Board of Trade taking the management of the contributions, appointed trustees, who were altogether incompetent, and did their duty in a perfunctory or careless manner. In 1850, only £20,000 was distributed among old, infirm, and disabled seamen, while £41,000 was bestowed on widows and children; the allowances varying at different ports from £1 to £7, each place having its own local government. Of course a collapse came. The fund was bankrupt; and in the following year an Act was passed for winding it up – for, says the Board of Trade Report, "the Government has had no control over the matter. The London Corporation and the trustees of outports could not by any management have prevented the insolvency of the fund, as long as they were guided by the principles which the several Acts of Parliament laid down … the whole system was vicious."

By the winding-up Act of 1851 compulsory contributions ceased; but those who chose to continue to subscribe voluntarily might do so. It is hardly to be wondered at that the merchant seamen lost confidence in the paternal protection of the Board of Trade. A few thousand pounds were left from the compulsory contributions, and when this came to be inquired for, nobody knew anything about it. It had somehow slipped out of the estimates, and nobody could tell what had become of it.

That is what past governments have done for poor mercantile Jack.

What has the great British public done for him? Not so very much after all. The truth is, that the sailor, who has always been spoken of as "so dreadfully improvident," has been practically regarded as being most self-helpful. All the time that we have been shaking our solemn heads, and lifting up our hands at the improvidence, the folly, and the extravagance of these frequently underpaid and sometimes overworked men, we have made even the help that we were willing to extend to them in their deeper necessities partially dependent on their own constant and regular subscription to the same end.

Poor improvident Jack! – poor thoughtless, incorrigible fellow! – it was necessary for the Government of his country to look after him, in order to protect him against his own want of forethought, and the result has been to run the ship into shoal water, and go hopelessly to wreck without so much as salvage money.

Jack ashore! Don't we all still look at the sailor in the light of the evil war-times, when the king's men were said to draw pocketsful of prize-money and to spend it in low debauchery or wild wanton folly? Even now we repeat the stories of frying watches along with beefsteaks and onions, or eating bank-note sandwiches. Nay, to this day in the fo'c's'le of merchant vessels some of the melancholy old songs in which sailors are wont to satirise themselves are occasionally sung, telling how

There's a world of meaning in that grim suggestive summary; but, thank God! it has less meaning now than it once had. Until quite lately, sailors of merchant ships could be kept for days waiting to be paid, and, sickened with lingering for long weary hours about the office of the broker or agent who withheld their money, fell into the hands of the harpies who were, and still are constantly on the look-out to plunder them. Men with all the pure natural longing for home and reunion with those near and dear to them, were compelled to loiter about the foul neighbourhood of the dock where their ship discharged its cargo, lodging in some low haunt with evil company, and liable to every temptation that is rife in such places, till too often so large a portion of their hardly-earned wages had been forestalled, that in a dreary and desperate madness of dissipation they were tempted to fling away the small balance remaining to them, and to awake to reason only when, naked and nearly destitute, they were compelled to go to sea again, with a slender stock of clothes, and a week's board and lodging paid for with advance notes.

From long confinement and monotony on shipboard, the sailor even now comes to a sense of temporary freedom, giddy with the unaccustomed sense of solid ground and the wild toss and uproar of the ocean of life in a great city. What are still the influences which in many seaports await him directly his foot touches the shore, and sometimes even before he has come over the vessel's side? With a boy's recklessness, a man's passions, and the unwonted excitement of possessing money and boundless opportunities for spending it, a shoal of landsharks are lying ready to batten on him. The tout, the crimp, and all the wretches, male and female, who look upon him as their prey, will never leave him from the time when they watch him roll wonderingly on to the landing-stage, till that desperate minute when he flings his last handful of small change across the tavern counter, and calls for its worth in drink, since "money is no use at sea."

This was far more frequently the termination of mercantile Jack's spell ashore, before the new regulations as to prompt payment of seamen's wages came into force. At that time you had only to take a morning walk across Tower Hill, where the bluff lay figure at the outfitter's door stands for Jack in full feather, and thence to America Square, or the neighbourhood of the Minories and Rosemary Lane, to see dozens of poor fellows lounging listlessly about the doors of pay-agents, waiting day after day at the street-corners, with an occasional visit to the public-house, and the perpetual consumption of "hard" tobacco. It was easy afterwards to follow Jack to Ratcliffe, Rotherhithe, Shadwell, and the neighbourhood, where his "friends" lay in wait for him to spend the evening; in the tap-rooms of waterside taverns, where he sat hopelessly drinking and smoking during a hot summer's afternoon; to frowsy, low-browed shops of cheap clothiers, to hot, stifling dancing-rooms, to skittle-alleys behind gin-shop bars, where a sudden brawl would call out knives, and the use of a "slung-shot" as a weapon would make a case of manslaughter for the coroner; to very minor theatres, where he could see absurd caricatures of himself in the stage sailors, dancing hornpipes unknown at sea; to the dreadful dens of Bluegate Fields and Tiger Bay – to any or all of these places you might have followed Jack; and may even yet follow his fellows who have not yet been redeemed from the evil ways of those bad times, when there were no homes for sailors amidst the bewildering vice and misery of maritime London, and other seaport towns of this great mercantile island.

It so happened that I made my first intimate acquaintance with the one real, publicly representative "Sailors' Home" in Well Street, near the London Docks, after having seen Jack under several of the terrible conditions just referred to, so that, with this painful knowledge of him and his ways, it was with a kind of delighted surprise that I suddenly walked into the great entrance-hall of the institution, where he and his fellows were sitting on the benches by the wall with the serious, contemplative, almost solemn air which is (in my experience) the common expression of sailors ashore, and during ordinary leisure hours. There they were, a good ship's crew of them altogether, sitting, as I have already said, in true sailor fashion – stooping forward, wrists on knees, lolling on sea-chests and clothes-bags, taking short fore-and-aft walks of six steps and a turn in company with some old messmate, smoking, growling, chatting, and generally enjoying their liberty; not without an eye, now and then, to the smart officer who had come in to see whether he could pick up a brisk hand or two for the mail service.

This was some five or six years ago, and it is a happy result of the plan on which the Home was first established (which was intended ultimately to make the institution self-supporting, if the cost of building were defrayed) that the whole scheme has been so enlarged since that time, that anybody who would see what our mercantile seamen are like, may now go and see them, in a largely increasing community, in this great institution. So many come and go and reappear at intervals represented by the length of their voyages, that 10,120 officers and men had partaken of its inestimable benefits during the year from the first of May, 1872, to the end of April, 1873.

But the institution itself was founded in earnest faith, and built with the labour that is consecrated by prayer. Both to the Home and to its companion institution, the Refuge for Destitute Seamen – we will pay a visit on our next meeting.

WITH THEM WHO WERE READY TO PERISH

On the 28th of February, 1828, a very terrible calamity happened in the place known as Wellclose Square, Whitechapel. A new theatre called the Brunswick, had been erected there on the site of a former building, known as the Old Royalty. It had been completed in seven months, and three days afterwards, during a rehearsal, the whole structure gave way and fell with a crash, burying ten persons amidst the ruins, and fearfully injuring several others. Such a catastrophe was very awful, and the people of the neighbourhood looked with an almost solemn curiosity at the wreck of an edifice in which they themselves might have met with death suddenly.

Very soon, however, they began to regard the heap of ruins with surprise, for early one morning there appeared two officers of the Royal Navy, surrounded by a gang of labourers with picks and shovels, and before these men (some of whom were Irish Roman Catholic) began to work they listened attentively while one of the officers offered up an earnest prayer to God for a blessing on the results of the labour they were about to undertake. Morning after morning their labour was thus sanctified, and evening after evening it was celebrated by the voice of thanksgiving, till at length the ground was cleared, and on the 10th of June, 1830, the first stone of a new building was laid. The building was to be a Home for Sailors, and as a necessary adjunct to the Home, it was intended to establish a Destitute Sailors' Asylum.

The two naval officers were Captain (now Admiral) George C. Gambier, and Captain Robert James Elliot, now gone to his rest, who with Lieutenant Robert Justice afterwards Captain, and now with his old comrade, in the heavenly haven, had been seeking how to ameliorate the condition of seamen, numbers of whom were to be seen homeless, miserable, and frequently half naked and destitute, in that foul and wretched neighbourhood about the Docks and beyond Tower Hill.

The task was a difficult one, and might have daunted less brave and hopeful men, for it was intended to demolish the piratical haunts where the enemies of the sailor lay in wait for his destruction; where crimps and thieves and the keepers of infamous dens held their besotted victims in bondage, while they battened on the wages that had been earned during months of privation and arduous toil.

It was necessary, therefore, first to provide a decent and comfortable lodging-house for the reception of sailors coming into port, – a place where they might safely deposit their clothes and their wages, and where they could "look out for another ship" without the evil intervention of crimps or pretended agents. It was a part of the intended plan also to establish a savings bank, for securing any portion of their wages which they chose to lay by, or for safely transmitting such sums as they might wish to send to their relations. In short, the design was to provide a home for the homeless, and hold out helping hands to those who were ready to perish.

Those ruins of the theatre stood on the very spot for such an establishment, and the two captains, Gambier and Elliott, began by buying the ground and the wreck that stood upon it, not by asking for public subscriptions, but mostly with their own money, to which was added a few contributions from any of their friends who desired to join in the good work.

It is impossible to use more earnest or touching words than those in which the late Rear-Admiral Sir W. E. Parry spoke of the labours of his friend and fellow-supporter of the Sailors' Home, in an address to British seamen at Southampton, in 1853. "And now," he said, "let me just add that, from the first moment in which Captain Elliot stood among the ruins of the Brunswick Theatre, till it pleased God to deprive him of bodily and mental energy, did that self-denying Christian man devote all his powers, his talents, his influence, and his money, to this his darling object of protecting and providing for the comfort of sailors. Connected with a noble family, and entitled by birth, education, and station, to all the advantages which the most exalted society could give hm, he willingly relinquished all, took up his abode in a humble lodging, surrounded by gin-shops, near the 'Home:' denied himself most of the comforts, it may almost be said some of the necessaries of life, in order the more effectually to carry out his benevolent design; and for eighteen years of self-denial and devotion, made it the business of his life to superintend this institution."