THE SEA TRADER.* .
To those who love sea-lore Mr. David Hannay has done a real service in writing this book. It is a genuine pleasure to a reviewer to find invariably in Mr. Hannay's work the freshness and zest of the curiosity that delves down into origins. A journalist, whose work tends to absorb him in effects, might be excused if he had neither the taste nor time for the examination of causes, but if he retains his enthu- siasm for the causes in spite of all he is doubly to be praised. Mr. Hannay through many years of journalism never fell out of touch with the scholarship of his sub- jects. No doubt when he was writing the lives of Blake, Rodney, and others, he was struck over and over again by the comparatively small amount of detailed evidence there was as to the daily lives lived on shipboard by the seamen of past ages. He thus was set on the track of his present subject. The reason why there is not much evidence is intelligible enough. Many seamen wrote of their voyages, from the point of view of what they achieved or discovered, but it did not occur to them that it could be of any interest to their readers to have a full description of the daily life of the quarter-deck or the forecastle. Among professional sailors there has never been talk of the small circumstances which in the aggregate compose the magical atmosphere of the sea life for the layman. The magic is more visible to those who watch that life at a remove and do not know very much about it. We have thought sometimes that if a sailor on board the vessel in which St. Paul was wrecked had written the account of the voyage be would have passed very quickly indeed over the nautical parts—the casting out of the four anchors, the night of anxiety, the running before the wind into the creek, and so forth—as commonplace incidents, and would have lingered with wonder and superstitious awe upon the portent of the viper which came out of the fire made by the crew on shore and fastened upon St. Paul's hand. Drury described the barbarous country he visited, but not the routine of the mariner's life ; Bather described his adventures as a privateer, but not the daily life of a privateer for whom battles were after all occasional events; John Newton recounted his sea experiences only "as a thread on which to string his spiritual experiences." Frezier, in his Voyage to Peru, gives us pictures of harbours and of Araucans, but not so much as a sketch of his ship, of the forecastle, of the deck, or of the crew at work.
Perhaps because the material was elusive it has pleased Mr. Hannay the more, with the true collector's spirit, to pursue it. The reader will discover a very vivid contrast between the coastwise navigation which was universal before the ocean routes were opened up—before, say, the annul mirabilis 1492 —and the navigation with the nautical instruments of to-day. In classical times the seaman never willingly went out of sight of the land. His apparatus for making a good landfall was of the roughest or non-existent. Whenever it was possible he followed the coast, and though the sight of it may have inspired a sort of confidence its proximity was in reality a terrible danger. If a strong on-shore wind sprang up he was at once in difficulties. With the sails of those days it was impossible to claw off a lee shore against the wind. For that reason navigation was almost suspended during the winter, when the weight of the wind was more than could be overcome by rowing. The narrative of St. Paul's voyage in "The Acts" gives a very good idea of the outlook of the Roman sailor upon his task. The vessel would have spent the winter in a Cretan harbour if a soft breeze had not tempted the master to venture forth in search of a more convenient place. Where the use of modern instruments has not been forced on seamen by necessity, the old method of coasting within sight of the land is sometimes still followed In the Malay Archipelago, for instance, as Mr. Hannay says
The Sea Trader : His Friends and Enemies. By David Hannay. Illus- trated. London : Harper and Brothers. [15s. net.] the traders have not departed from the customs of their fathers. Of course the transition from the condition of having no instruments to that of having the complete modern apparatus was not a sudden one. The astrolabe for taking
the altitude of stars, which Hipparchus is said to have been the first to use, though the brass astrolabe of navigation
was not introduced till the fifteenth century, and the back- staff (so called because the seaman in using it turned his back to the sun) preceded the quadrant, octant, and sextant.
It is often said that the Chinese invented the mariner's compass, but, as Mr. Hannay points out., a mere magnetized needle does not make a compass. Very likely the Chinese early discovered that a magnetized needle would point to the north, but if they did not suspend it in an instrument that would counteract the violent shocks of the sea, and thus keep it steady and save it from demagnetization, they had no more invented the compass than a man who merely watched steam lifting the lid of a pot had invented the steam engine.
One very interesting point made by Mr. Hannay is that the medieval sailor was more fortunate in his circumstances than his immediate successor.
"He came from a small community, and went back to it. The corporate feeling, the guild-brotherhood sentiment, was strong in his time. So was the bond of kinship. The men of Yarmouth or LSbeck, of Venice, Genoa, Barcelona, were not the casual unstable population of a great modern seaport, who drift together no man cares from whence, and float away no man knows or asks whither. The fishermen of Brigham, with their widely distributed interest in the lordship of the manor, form a real representation of the maritime populations of the Middle Ages. The fact that a man could defend himself if a blow was prolonged to a beating was some protection. His right to appeal to the judgment of his mates counted for more. The common table, at which master and men messed, tended to good comradeship. They belonged to the same religion. No obligation to learn even the beggarly rudiments. of the science of navigation obstructed his rise to master. He was encouraged to thrive by trading ventures. The order of his day was doomed to pass when knowledge had increased and the ocean routes had been explored, or to survive only locally, as, for instance, in the English coal trade. Its weak point was that it tended to hand the vessel over to a debating society."
Mr. Hannay shatters a good many boyish illusions in his discussion of the psychology of the pirate. Incidentally he remarks that the end of each war was the signal for a strong revival of piracy. It is easy to understand why. All the nations employed privateers, and the privateer, as Nelson said, was always half a pirate. When his more respectable occupation was taken from him he almost
instinctively turned pirate. We Englishmen have always used the word "corsair" as synonymous with pirate, but we believe it is a fact that the Barbary rulers took quite a different view of their corsairs, and regarded them as regular naval forces. There was at all events honesty in the logic of the barbarians if in nothing else. Mr. Hannay has no opinion of the pirate as such. He says:— "It must be confessed that when the pirate is looked at by the Tight of authentic records he cuts a miserable figure. The romantic corsair of Lord Byron, a hero of 'one virtue and a thousand crimes,' was an invention. The melodramatic pirate captain of lgarryat or Michael Scott was the offspring of what ill-conditioned persona have called the lying spirit of romance.' The real pirate was a sneaking thief and an arrant coward. I have met no instance in which he put up a good fight. He did not even accumulate a treasure to be hidden away and sought for, like Xidd's hoard in Poe's Gold Beg. A couple of thousand pounds was Avery's share of the loot of the • Oansway,' and he was exceptionally lucky. A sluttish idleness and freedom to drink were the real attractions of the life."
Well, we cannot give up Kidd, or Avery (who inspired Defoe), or Bartholomew Roberts—the pirate sans reproche, so to speak —quite so thoroughly as Mr. Hannay does. Each was a villain,
of course, but was he not sometimes brave as well as wicked P The illustrations showing the arrangements for stowing (as one may fairly say) the slaves on board a slave trader are very striking and horrible. Mr. Hannay can mention only one instance of humane treatment of the slaves by a master of a trader. It was the custom to think of slaves as having no more feelings than fish thrown into the bottom of a boat. Probably John Newton pursued his meditations in the midst of his suffering human cargo without a qualm.
"Our ancestors had but little humanity even to their own countrymen. Soldiers were crowded into transports in the pro- portion of three to two tons. They naturally showed even less regard to the blacks, and for them the proportion was five to two tone. Remember that the miserable captives spent the greater part of every twenty-four hours in these overcrowded quarters, and that in bad weather they were confined to them for days together. They suffered horribly from sea-sickness, aggravated by the horse-beans and 'slabber' sauce of palm-oil, flour, water, and pepper, they were forced to eat. The reader who needs the details given by Faloonbridge to realize to what a condition of stench, heat, and lack of air the between-decks were regularly reduced would need actual experience to enlighten him. Most ships did not even set up a windsail to provide ventilation. We can well believe Falconbridge when he says that the surgeon on going his rounds in the morning generally found some of the cargo dead, that the average loss on a voyage was from a quarter to a third of every cargo, and that a number of the survivors were at death's door when they reached their destination. There were men of business in the Indies who made a trade of buying these sick blacks for small sums, and tending them till they were sufficiently recovered to be sold at a remunerative figure. Most of their purchases died on their hands, and sometimes all did. Such was the slave trade, and each it had always been, and was to be so long as it lasted."
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