CHAPTER III
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SAILORS.—“SOGERS.”—BOOKS.—ANECDOTES.
[Sidenote: _OUR SHIP’S CREW._]
If the purport of my title would permit it, I should like to write a long chapter on our ship’s crew, and the general subject of American officers and seamen. I will, however, but give, in this one word, my testimony, as one having had some experience as to the tyranny, barbarity, and lawlessness with which in most of our merchant ships the common seamen are treated; and the vice, misery, and hopelessness to which, as a body, they are left on our shores, by the neglect or ill-judged and parsimonious assistance of those who compass sea and land to make proselytes of the foreign heathen.
Our ship’s crew, as is usual in a Liverpool packet, are nearly all foreigners—English, Scotch, Irish, Danes, French, and Portuguese. One boasts of being “half-Welsh and half-Heelander,” judging from this specimen, I have not a very high opinion of the cross. The mate is a Dane, the second and third mates, Connecticut men. The captain, also, is from somewhere down east. He is a good and careful seaman, courteous in his manners, and a religious man, much more consistently so than pious captains I have known before proved to be, after getting on blue water. He never speaks to the seamen, or directly has any thing to do with them. In fact, except when he is taking observations, or in bad weather, or an emergency, you would never see in him any thing but a floating-hotel keeper. It is plain, nevertheless, that his eye is everywhere, and a single incident will show that the savage custom of the sea has not been without the usual influence upon him. He went to the kitchen the other day and told the cook he must burn less wood than he had been doing. The cook, who is a peculiarly mild, polite, peaceable, little Frenchman, replied that he had along been careful not to use more than was necessary. The captain immediately knocked him down, and then quietly remarking, “You’ll take care how you answer me next time,” walked back to join the ladies. The cook fell on the stove, and was badly burned and bruised.
The men complain that their food is stinted and poor, and they are worked hard, at least they are kept constantly at work; men never exert themselves much when that is the case. It has been evident to me that they all _soger_ systematically. (_Sogering_ is pretending to work, and accomplishing as little as possible.) It is usually considered an insult to accuse one of it, but one day I saw a man so evidently trying to be as long as he could at some work he had to do in the rigging, that I said to him,—
“Do you think you’ll _make eight bells_ of that job?”
He looked up with a twirl of his tongue, but said nothing.
“Have you been at it all the watch?”
“Ay, sir, I have.”
“A smart man would have done it in an hour, I should think.”
“Perhaps he might.”
“Do you call yourself a soger?”
“Why, sir, we all sogers, reg’lar, in this here craft. D’ye see, sir, the capten’s a mean man, and ’ould like to get two days’ work in one out on us. If he’d give us _watch-and-watch_, sir, there’d be more work done, you mote be sure, sir.”
[Sidenote: _SAILORS’ ETHICS._]
Sunday is observed by sparing the crew from all labour not necessary to the sailing of the ship, but as it is the only day in which they have watch-and-watch, or time enough to attend to such matters, they are mostly engaged in washing and mending their clothes. We had selected a number of books at the Tract-house, which we gave away among them. They were received with gratitude, and the pictures at least read with interest. The printed matter was read somewhat also; I noticed three men sitting close together, all spelling out the words from three different books, and speaking them aloud in a low, monotonous tone. If they had come to a paragraph in Latin, I doubt if they would have understood what they read any less. The truth is, as I have often noticed with most sailors, _a book is a book_, and they read it for the sake of reading, not for the ideas the words are intended to convey, just as some people like to work out mathematical problems for the enjoyment of the work, not because they wish to make use of the result. I saw a sailor once bargaining with a shipmate for his allowance of grog, offering him for it a little book, which he said was “first-rate reading.” After the bargain was closed I looked at the book. It was a volume of Temperance tales. The man had no idea of making a practical joke, and assured me with a grave face, that he had read it all through. One Sunday, in the latter part of a passage from the East Indies, one of my watchmates, an old sea-dog, closed a little carefully preserved Testament, and slapping it on his knee, said, with a triumphant air, as if henceforth there was laid up for him a crown of glory and no mistake,—“There! I’ve read that book through, every word on’t, this voyage; and, damme, if I ha’nt got more good out on’t than I should ’a got going aft long with the rest on ye, to hear that old pharisee (the captain) make his long prayers.” Then, after gazing at it a few moments, he added, musingly, as if reflecting on the mutability of human affairs, “I hookt that book from a feller named Abe Williams, to the Home, down to Providence, ’bout five year ago. His name was in’t, but I tore it out. I wonder what’s become on him now; dead,—as like as not” (puts it up and takes out his pipe); “well, God’ll have mercy on his soul, I hope.”
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