A sailor knows how to do many things besides stand lookout and steer. If a line breaks, he can mend it by splicing the ends together with a tool called a marlinspike. If lines wear thin, he puts in new ones—and lines are needed in a great many places on even the most modern ships.

Sailors know how to tie many different kinds of knots. Each one is good for special kinds of work. For instance, a sheepshank is made in a line to shorten it. Jim calls a bad knot a gilligan hitch.

Painting is something else that sailors do all the time. On one trip Jim painted the mizzenmast. For this job he sat in a bosun’s chair. You’ll see a picture of it on page 31. When he works high above the deck he always has his paint brush tied to his wrist. Then, if it slips out of his hand, it can’t fall and hit anyone below.

All the sailors get their orders from the bosun, whom they call “Boats.” That’s because the real spelling of bosun is boatswain. The bosun gets his orders from the mate on watch who gets his orders from the captain. The captain is in charge of everything. Seamen call him the skipper or the master or the Old Man.

The “Chief” (chief engineer) and his three assistant engineers get orders from the skipper, too. The firemen in the engine room help the engineer carry out the orders. When they are on watch, they look through little peep holes into the oil burning furnaces to make sure the fires are burning just right. They keep an eye on the steam pressure gauges.

At the same time, men called oilers keep every part of the ship’s huge engines and other machinery well oiled. On some ships there is a big piston, like the driving rod on railroad engine wheels. One end of it moves in a circle. The oiler has to squirt oil in a little cup at the end of the piston. Every time the cup swings up where he can reach it, he aims his oil can. He is very careful to aim straight. If he misses the cup, oil splashes all over.

No matter how careful he is, some oil does get spilled and spattered around. It is the job of the oiler to wipe it up and to polish all the brass fixtures, which he calls the brightwork. On deck, ordinary seamen polish the brightwork.

One man is in charge of all the food on a ship. He is the steward, and the cooks work under him, and so do the messmen who are the waiters and dish washers.

The radio man sends and receives all radio messages. He is called sparks.

All the seamen who work on cargo vessels, and on passenger vessels, too, are divided up the same way into the deck department, the engine department and the steward’s department.

As the great engine deep down in Jim’s ship pushes her through the calm blue water of the Mediterranean Sea, he stands watch in the bow. Now he begins to catch sight of small sailing vessels. When his ship enters the port of Alexandria at the mouth of the Nile River in Egypt, he is close to the place where much of the story of ships began.

PAPYRUS REED CANOE. The people of Egypt discovered long ago that bundles of papyrus reed would hold up a man’s weight in the water. Later, they tied the bundles into a canoe shape which was easy to handle.

EGYPTIAN DUGOUT. A log hollowed out in the shape of a reed canoe was stronger, and it lasted longer. By adding boards to a dugout along the top of each side, Egyptians had a vessel that could carry bigger loads. Paddles and their own muscles were all they had for power.

EGYPTIAN SAILING VESSEL. Here the power of wind was added to the power of oarsmen. Luckily the winds of Egypt blew from north to south and helped push sailing vessels up the Nile.

GALLEYS. Greeks and Romans used sail-and-oar vessels called galleys. Slaves, chained to their seats, rowed in rhythm. There were many slaves, so their masters could get extra muscle-power by seating two, three or more banks of oarsmen on each side. A ship with two banks was a bireme; with three, a trireme.

DHOW. Other people around the Mediterranean Sea discovered they could do away with oarsmen by making better use of windpower. They invented triangular sails called lateen sails to take the place of square ones. Lateen-rigged dhows are still used. Columbus had both square and lateen sails on the Santa Maria. All three of his ships together were not as long as Jim’s freighter.

New things begin to happen as Jim’s ship nears port. He goes down into the forepeak under the deck in the bow. There, all around, are neat coils of hawser which is as thick as his arm. He and other sailors shove one end of a hawser up the ladder. Men on deck grab it and wrap it around a sort of spool called a winch head. Now the winch turns the spool and does the work of lifting out the heavy line. The deckhands lay it neatly on the decks ready to use when the ship ties up at a pier.

Next Jim goes up to the bow and helps Chips, the carpenter, break cement out of the hawse pipes. A hawse pipe is a hole in the ship’s side. An anchor chain runs through it. Whenever a ship raises, or weighs, its anchors and starts on a long trip, Chips plugs up the hawse pipes with cement. This keeps water from splashing up through the pipes in a storm.

On modern ships, a machine called a windlass raises and lowers the anchors. In the old days, when sailors had to raise anchors by turning the capstan by hand, they had a phrase for officers who worked their way up from being deckhands. They said these officers came up “through the hawse pipe.” Officers who got their knowledge from going to school and studying books were said to “come in through the cabin window.”

After the cement is out of the hawse pipe, Jim takes the devil’s claws off the anchor chains and releases the riding pawls. These are two brakes on the anchor chain which you can see in the picture. Now only the brake on the windlass holds the anchor chain in position over the wildcat, which is the wheel on the windlass.

The captain signals from the bridge to let go. Chips releases the windlass brake. The big chain rushes up out of the locker, over the wildcat and down the hawse pipe with a terrific roar. Soon the ship is safely anchored. The skipper can wait now until there is a vacant pier where he can tie up.

After the ship ties up, the captain orders watches broken. The men no longer work four hours and rest eight. Now most of them work eight hours during the day and have the remaining time off, just the way shoreside people do. There is no need for the routine of the sea. Egyptian longshoremen will unload the cargo.

Jim puts on a suit he has kept hanging pressed in his locker. Then he and Juan go down the gangplank. They are off to see the sights in the fascinating Egyptian city—and to buy souvenirs.

But before they have gone very far from the waterfront where a tangle of masts and booms and stacks marks the skyline, they meet Lars, an old shipmate of theirs. That’s not so strange as you might think. A sailor often changes ships, and he gets to have many friends who travel just as much as he does. While they eat an Egyptian meal in an Egyptian restaurant, Lars says he’s on a tanker now. She’s in Alexandria getting her rudder repaired. It broke in a storm, but the men fixed up something to take its place. They called it a jury rudder.

Lars’s tanker looks very different from a freighter. She is long and low and has two houses. One is midships, and the officers’ quarters and wheelhouse are there. The crew lives in the other house at the stern.

Between the two houses the deck is so low that waves often wash over it, and so there has to be a high bridge called a walkaway or a catwalk.

Lars says his particular tanker carries “clean” oil. By that he means oil that has been refined into different grades of gasoline. “Dirty” oil is crude oil just the way it comes out of the wells. Lars is a tankerman and a seaman. He has taken a special examination for his job. He knows all the ways to pump different kinds of oil in and out of the tanks on a ship. He knows how to keep gasoline from exploding. He has learned to use special equipment. For instance, he never goes down to clean a tank on his ship without an oxygen mask and a lifeline. The lifeline is tied around him so that a seaman on deck can haul him up if fumes in the tank knock him out.

Like most seamen, Lars has travelled all over the world. In China he has seen junks and sampans. He has seen fishing boats in Portugal with big eyes painted on the bows because sailors thought that helped the boats to see their way. Eyes of the same kind have been painted on ships for hundreds of years in many other places, even in Chesapeake Bay.

OUTRIGGER. Long ago South Sea Islanders sailed great distances, guiding themselves by the stars. The outrigger at the side gives their small vessel balance in rough water.

JUNK. The sails of this Chinese ship are made of bamboo slats braced by bamboo rods. The rudder is so big that often a dozen men have to work on it. Many junks have colored sails.

WEGIAN SHIPS. Old Viking ships that sailed from Norway had both oars and brightly decorated sails. Vikings were such good seamen they crossed the Atlantic in their open ships. Norwegians are still seafarers. Boys who want to be sailors get training on a sailing ship.

Lars used to work on a tanker that brought oil from the Persian Gulf. When he went ashore there, he saw boats just like the earliest ones that men invented thousands of years ago. He saw boats that were really big, round clay pots, built by people in places where there was plenty of clay but very little wood. He saw huge basket boats woven from a kind of grass and waterproofed with a covering of tar. Some of the basket boats were big enough to carry twenty passengers—or several men and three horses!

Smaller basket boats were used as lighters. (A lighter is any craft that helps to unload freight from another.) Here on the Tigris River, the freight was carried on a large raft supported by animal skins blown up like balloons. A little raft floating downstream sometimes carried its owner, his donkey and the grain he had to sell. After selling the grain, the boatman took the skins from under the raft, let the air out, piled them on the donkey’s back and walked back home upriver.

Out at sea, whenever Lars sees a life raft on the top deck, he realizes it is just like the skin-float rafts he saw on the Tigris River. Instead of blown-up skins, water-tight metal containers filled with air hold the life raft up. When Lars puts on his life jacket for lifeboat drill, he is getting ready to use a float, just the way people long ago used bundles of reeds. Even though men have learned so much about ships in all the years since they first started to travel on water, they still use some of the first knowledge they ever acquired.

All of these things interest Lars. He grew up by the sea in Norway, and his people have been seamen since the days of the Vikings. But best of all he likes the clean, modern, comfortable tankers. He is not only going somewhere himself when he is on a tanker. He is also helping to carry a cargo that helps other people to go places.