Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/271

 Maid exclaims:

An English classic poet has written an amusing bit of verse on "The Lady at Sea." Experiences of marine travel discourage first ideas that feminine sailorship could ever be of much practical use. As a matter of fact, a considerable proportion of sailors have been curiously like Uraniads, in merchant-marines, and even war-service. In some countries industrious in coast-fisheries, women take a liberal share of the regular work of navigating craft; often on voyages of duration and hard weather. In Brittany, Normandy, Norway, Denmark and Sweden, in Finland and along the North Sea, and in several Eastern ports, the ships are womened, as well as manned. About forty certificates now are held by Frenchwomen, as being "able seamen", folly experienced in their calling. On the Brittany coast nearly three-thousand women are officially certified as competent seamen, with no concealment of their sex, but under the restriction from the French government, against promotion to any command. One steamer in the Turkish coast-service, is wholly "manned" by women-sailors, though not entirely so officered. In Denmark, the occupation of a pilot is followed by numerous women, under due legal certificates. On the Greek island of Himla, near Rhodes, the majority of the women are sailors for a livelihood, pari passu with the men of the place; and rival the latter as divers. In this Greek island prevails too the curious custom that a girl is not quite marriagable till she has made three voyages, and has attested her skill in sponge-fishery. In Santa-Barbara, another community abundant in female sailors, an appropriate fact has been the care of the lighthouse by the old mother of a family of thirteen women, each one a sailor! In Japan and China,