Page:The Blight of Insubordination.djvu/26

18 I may be forgiven, even if I quote at some length from a Blue Book, 'Reports from certain foreign and Colonial ports respecting the desertion of seamen from British ships, 1899. Thus I find in a memorandum by Mr. J. H. Longford, H.M. Consul at Nagasaki, the following, which he assumes to be applicable only to sailing ships, but is equally applicable here, in my opinion, to steamers, l^e question of total abstinence is one of so controversial a nature that it can scarcely be expected that any suggestion for the removal of its enforcement on the merchant seaman would meet with unanimous approval from those who are most ready to consider his interests. But longer experience has only served to confirm my previous opinion that tiie issue of a daily dole of spirits to merchant seamen who cared to take it would have the best effects in the cause of temperance. At present seamen in sailing ships frequently never taste spirits or malt liquors for continuous periods of from four to six months or longer. The consequence is that on arrival in port the fullest indulgence is given to a craving intensified by long deprivation; whole outfits of clothes are exchanged for the vilest spirits either on shore or over the ship's side, and the most degrading exhibitions given of drunkenness in its worst forms."

Again:

Further on Mr. Longford writes of the sailor:

"He is more often than not a sea lawyer, with a keen sense of what privileges or rights the law gives him, but with an equally keen sense of how few and limited those rights and privileges are.

"Once committed to a sea life other openings are practically closed to him, and for better or worse he is bound to it as long as he lives. Its hardships, its rapid changes of climate, with total absence of provisions for adapting himself to these changes, renders his life comparatively short, but it is no longer a merry one. Now and then a drunken spree, a short space of liberty, lawful or unlawful—if the latter, enjoyed only as a hunted fugitive and purchased by the sacrifice of what it has taken months of hard and dangerous work to earn—are its sole bright spots, and the inevitable end is, if not an early death, too often the workhouse.

"It is a far cry from England to India, further still to Japan, so we hark back and find under our very noses such evidence as may be used from abroad being sadly but truly and constantly corroborated.

"Alan Oscar (Capt. W. B. Whall) in his new book, School and Sea Days, devotes a chapter to 'The Sailor and his Ways,' and states