Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/203

 men are continually in companionship only with men; where solitudes, duty and the battles of the elements emphasize masculine nearness. There is the necessary abstinence from women, the bachelor-state common to the sailor, the tendency to idealize in the finer-natured seaman; the sense of living in a mysterious elemental relation to Nature herself, of being only vaguely bound by conventional human notions—if bound at all. These conditions may not create the emotion of man-love; but they stimulate it. It has been said that "every sailor in two or three" is more or less homosexual. Certainly sailors criticize lightly the homosexual ties in constant existence round them. It is a sort of sea-secret. And it can level even rank. Incidents of uranianism point out the naval officer and the common sailor, as Uranian or Dionian-Uranian in "friendships". The theory that a sailor's sexuality turns him toward having 'a wife in every port' is notably wrong. It would sometimes be better to say 'a wife in every—ship'.

Distinguished navigators and sea-warriors, daring pirates, storm-defying Wikings, bronzed captains in the merchant-services of the world, have been also uranian lovers. Some names are historic. We find one such Dionian-Uranian in Yasco da Gama. Another, according to accusation, was Cornelis van Tromp, the son of Martin van Tromp. Such too was Magellan (Fernâo de Magalhaes, one of whose descendants not long dead, the Brazilian diplomat and litterateur Domingo Magalhaes (1811-1882) was professedly Uranian, and the authour of the sometime famous "Urania" poem (Vienna, 1862). One of the most eminent of English naval commanders of the century just closed was prominent in an homosexual scandal, suppressed vigorously on account of the high personages involved, but disconcertingly general at its date.

That the British navy long ago was remarked for