“I don’t know what country he hailed from, I’m sure; but, thank the Lord, he wasn’t an Englishman,” said a smacksman, in the most fervent manner, to me the other day, speaking of Osmond Otto Brand, who was executed on the 23rd of May for the murder of an apprentice named William Papper or Pepper. At any other time than this I believe the story of that miscreant’s barbarity would have deeply stirred the public mind; but of late days[C] murder has become a common thing, much talked of and freely practised. People’s capacity of being horrified gets dulled by iteration of shocking news, and the significance of any one item in a blood-red catalogue loses value as a particular impression. Whatever effect, however, may have been produced by Brand’s crime on the lay mind outside the district where the murderer and his victim were known, there can be no doubt of the impression it has made upon smack-owners and smacksman all round the coast. There is scarcely a fisherman who has not the horrible story off by heart, who does not view the atrocious cruelties practised by the foreign smack-master as a foul disgrace to the fishing industries, and who does not indignantly lament that the men who helped Brand to slowly kill the miserable apprentice were not hanged along with their skipper. One result of Brand’s crime was to cause some questions to be asked in the House of Commons. There was also some talk about the whole subject of fishing apprentices being considered by Government. If it is to be dealt with it will be as well, perhaps, first to give the Hull murder time to drop out of memory. To adopt it as a text for legislation would assuredly be to mislead honourable members who vote without looking very deep into the matters on which their opinions are challenged. If the condition of the smack apprentice is an improvable feature of current life, it is not so merely because Brand slowly tortured Pepper to death. We must shelve all thoughts of that murder, and ask questions without the least reference to it. What is the life of a fishing apprentice at sea? What is it ashore? How is he fed and clothed? What is the nature of his relations with the owners’ interests? What is the average character of the men with whom he is thrown? These and other questions I will endeavour to answer from inquiries I have made into the inner or hidden part of the lives of a body of lads of whom the public know less than they know of any other kind of seafaring people.

I once wrote an account of a voyage in a smack in the North Sea. One such journey is enough for a lifetime, and the recollection of it makes me here declare—and I am sure there is not a sailor living who will contradict me—that of all the several forms of seafaring life there is absolutely none comparable in severity, exposure, hardship, and stern peril to that of the smacksman. His vessel is a small one; his cabin a little darksome hole; his working hours are full of harsh toil; he has to give battle to the wildest weather, to struggle on for bread through storm and snow and frost, through the long blackness of the howling winter’s night, through the grey wilderness of a foaming ocean swept by winds as pitiless as the hand of death. No legislation can alter these conditions of his life. Philanthropy will have its cod and sole and turbot. The fish must be caught, but caught in such a manner that those who shoot their trawls for them catch other things besides—a wild roughness of bearing, a defiance of civilized instincts, a sense of outlawed and neglected life that brings with it a fixed conviction of social immunity. “I’m a fisherman myself, sir,” a man once said to me; “and I’ll allow that there are many well-mannered, sober, steady men among us; but, taking us all round, you’ll not find a coarser set of human beings in the world; and, if you want to know the reason, you’ve only got to look at yonder smack, heading away into the North Sea, where, maybe, she’ll be heaving and tossing about for weeks, with ne’er a proper influence in the shape of books or company for the men to come at.”

Take now the fishing apprentice. He comes to this severe, coarse life, himself most often of the coarsest. He is fresh from a reformatory, from a union, or, worse still, from the gutter. His associates are men who were themselves apprentices; lads who came one knows not from where, the refuse of the street manufactured into marine objects by the owner’s boots, and breeches, and coats; and hammered into sprawling, unwieldy smacksmen by the hard blows of their calling. They know all about dandy-bridles and trawl-warps; but they do not know how to read, and they do not know how to write, and they do not know how to think. Their home is the public-house when ashore, and they take the morals of that sort of home to sea with them. The apprentice comes among them, gets knocked about, picks up their oaths and their shore theories, and imitates them masterfully enough to be able to hand on their conditions with an added flourish, when he is out of his time and has boys under him to swear at. Now, what is legislation going to do here? You have the roughest life in the world; the roughest lads in the world recruits its ranks. What is to be done, short of what a few philanthropists are endeavouring to do, to prevent them from being the roughest men in the world? I cannot see that the smack-owners are to blame. They must have apprentices. They will take the best of such boys as they can get; and it is really carrying idealism too high to expect that these men, who have to work hard themselves, who have to be down among their vessels, seeing that their men do not run away, that they are properly engaged in preparing for the voyage, and so forth,—I say you cannot expect that these men, who come home of a night tired out, should turn schoolmaster and parson to their apprentices, and set them to moral jobs, when they are ready to abscond—with their master’s clothes also—if they are not allowed their evening out after being at work all day up to their knees in mud, scrubbing the vessel’s bottom. No one with any knowledge of the smack-owner’s calling, of his hardly earned money, of his risks and anxieties, will envy him. Boys are boys all the world over, and that smack-boys should be peculiarly troublesome is not hard to account for on reference to their antecedents—that is, the antecedents of most of them. “The law has come between us and the boys,” was said to me, “and makes our case harder than it was. We have no remedy now. Time was when we could send a constable after a lad when he was off; but the law has stopped that. We have got to wait a couple of days, and then apply for a warrant, by which time the boy’s t’other end of England. Take the case of a vessel about to start. A boy refuses to turn to. I’m on the spot, and call a policeman, and in his presence repeat the order. Boy still refuses. Policeman then walks him off afore a magistrate, who fines him, and I have to pay the fine if I want to get the vessel to sea; for if I don’t pay then the boy’s locked up, and the vessel detained two or three days whilst I’m seeking another boy.” The hardship is clear enough, though I for one should be heartily sorry to see it rectified by a return to the old and brutal system of locking up lads in gaol at the will of the smack-owner. Let me briefly place the case of the owners before you with regard to their apprentices. To begin with, the lads come from all parts, as I have said, and are bound apprentice for terms of three, five, or six years. If bound by institutions such as workhouses, reformatories, and the like, a certain sum of money is paid with them—in some cases £10, enough to purchase an outfit. I asked a smack-owner what he reckoned to be the average yearly cost of a lad’s clothes, and he said £8. “A pair of sea-boots alone,” said he, “cost £1 16s.” Boys, however, when they first go to sea do not get sea-boots, but “bluchers,” the cost of which is about 12s. a pair. When the lads are in harbour the smack-owner has to house them. In many instances they sleep in his own house, or in lodgings provided for them. If they do not take their meals with their masters they live as well; dining from the same joint and getting much the same fare as he has for tea and breakfast. There may be exceptions to this; but it is a practice so general that it may be taken as a rule. When ashore the owners also keep the boys furnished with a little pocket-money. The lad, for instance, who acts as cook at sea gets, when in harbour, 6d. a night, the deck-boy 9d., and the third-hand apprentice 1s. These payments are made during what is termed “settling time;” but, in addition to this money, the owner gives them the small fish caught during the voyage, called “stocker-bait,” the produce of which yields each lad an average sum of 1s. a week all the year round. Whilst in port the apprentice’s work mainly consists in scrubbing the vessel’s bottom, touching her up with the paint-brush, preparing nets for the next voyage, etc. At sea the lesser duties are assigned him. Suppose a smack carries three boys; the youngest will probably act as cook. When the net is hove up his post is in the hold, where he coils away the trawl-warp, which done he returns to his cooking. The deck-boy’s post is on deck when the men are below taking their meals. He steers the vessel in the morning until noon or 12.30; then gets his dinner, and turns in. The duty of a third-hand apprentice is that of a man. He is commonly within two years of his time; and, though he is still an apprentice, he is generally treated as a well-seasoned and fully developed smacksman. Talking recently with a body of smack-boys, I asked them what sort of grub they got aboard.

“Good enough, master.”

“What do you have for breakfast?” said I.

“Well, we has the choice of tea or coffee or cocoa; we has roast fish and butter and soft tack—as long as it’ll last—and then we has biscuit.”

“And what do you get for dinner?”

“Why, fresh and corned beef for a spell; and when that’s ate up we has fish, and suet pudden, and cabbage—as long as it lasts—and carrots and parsnips when they’re in, and ’taties.”

“And your tea?”

“Tea’s the same as breakfast.”

“Do you get any supper?”

“Ay, master; ’twixt eleven and one, ’cording as the watch is called, we has cheese and pickles and biled fish, or if there’s any cold meat left we has that.”

When it is considered where these lads come from, this fare is scarcely of a kind to justify them in grumbling and running away. Indeed, of all seafarers, smacksmen live the best. When Jack is gnawing upon a piece of junk, and knocking his biscuit upon the deck to get the worms out of it, the fisherman is regaling himself with the best of the produce of his trawls, or fattening himself on hearty fresh beef and—if it be Sunday—on good plum-duff. The apprentice fares just the same. And even in other ways he is better off than if he were in a ship’s forecastle; as, for instance, in the matter of clothes, the owner being obliged to keep him well furnished in that respect, and to equip him with garments a hundredfold warmer and better than those which most sailors take to sea with them. The whole truth is, so far as I can judge, the comfort and happiness and prospects of the smack apprentice depend upon his own conduct. Owners, like all other employers of labour, want the best hands they can get, and smacksmen are glad to have smart and willing lads along with them. It is a rough life—the whole marine calling is a rough life, and there is none rougher than a fisherman’s. If a boy is dull and slow, obstinate and sulky, he will be shoved and kicked about, and that would be his lot in any ship he went aboard of; but if a boy is willing, does his best, lends a hand cheerfully, and is a steady lad, then he will be well treated, the men will like him, the owner favour him, and before long he will find himself in command. He has inducements to persevere and behave well such as no other ship-boy gets that I know of; for if he has served his time honestly, and shown such promise as the smack-owner wants to see, then, when he is out of his time, he is furnished with £20 worth of clothes, and a sovereign or two for his pocket. I am aware that all smack-owners are not so liberal, and I have heard of some men sending their apprentices, when out of their time, adrift in the clothes they stood up in, and forcing them to seek work from other masters. But the rule is to treat a good lad liberally when out of his time.

Whoever has examined into the fishing industry must be well aware that smack-owners have substantial cause of grievance in respect of their treatment by their apprentices. An owner told me that a boy came to him for a berth; the lad was in rags and starving, and so filthy that the owner would not send him to his house where his apprentices were. He walked with him to the Sailor’s Home, had him bathed and scrubbed and fed, paid nearly a pound for him for seven days at the Home, purchased for him some clothes that cost over £2, and then on the morning of the day on which the vessel was to sail the boy ran away, and the smack had to be detained until another lad could be shipped. Instances of such behaviour are numerous, and might really account for, if they should not justify, a very much harsher discipline and sterner kind of treatment than I have been able to discover. For always let us remember that the smack-owner has, as a rule, been a fisherman himself, gone through the mill, suffered all the hardships of the life, and, though ashore, has to work harder for his living than ever he did when at sea. He is in this position, that he is only able to insure for total loss. He belongs to a club whose members subscribe in proportion to the number of vessels they severally enter. “Only yesterday,” said a smack-owner, “one of my vessels came in; she had lost fifteen fathom of warp, two main-bridles, dandy-bridle, trawl-warp tackle, two trawl-heads, a trawl-beam, a ground-rope, mortices, head-line, and other gear. I have to bear all that. There is Mr. ——. In one night of storm his loss amounted, in insurance of other vessels which had foundered, to £245, together with eight sets of gear, valued at £60 a set.” It is a vocation full of risk; scores of men may be beggared by a gale; and, seeing the important part that smack apprentices play in the fishing interests, it is reasonable that we should survey the question from every point of view, before hastily forming conclusions on the basis of such an incident as that of the recent Hull atrocity. Of course, there are savages and bullies among smacksmen, as there are the whole wide world over, whether among landgoers or seafarers. But whatever might have been the state of things in former days, I do not believe that, at the present time, there is half the ill usage to be found aboard smacks that I know exists at sea in other kinds of vessels. The crime of the murderer Brand necessarily gives a malignant colouring to every smack-master’s report of having lost a boy by drowning whilst at sea; but the old salt maxim, “A fisherman’s walk, three steps and overboard,” should go a long way in explanation of many of the disasters that befall smack-boys. An accident aboard a smack happens in a breath. A lad dips over the side for a bucket of water; the vessel is sailing fast, the bucket pulls the lad over the rail, and he is astern and drowned before the fellow at the tiller can sing out. Or a boy goes to look over the stern to see the white water running away; the boom jibes and flings him into the sea. I should very gravely question whether a deliberate murder could be done without some one of the men reporting it. No doubt black deeds have been perpetrated in fishing-smacks. For instance, a story is told of a lad who was frying some fish; through his neglect the fish were burnt, whereupon the skipper, smelling the fumes, bundled below, seized the boy’s hands, and thrust them into the boiling fat. The instant he was released, the boy rushed on deck and flung himself overboard, and was drowned. One might conceive of a man hating another and jogging him into the sea on a dark night. But the statistics of loss of life among smacksmen and smack apprentices at sea must reduce such dreadful possibilities to a very small number; and of that small number it is rare indeed to find one to which any better basis can be furnished than suspicion. So far as the professional life of the smack apprentice goes—his treatment at sea, his food, his clothes, and the like—it is difficult to guess, having regard to the unavoidable roughness and hardship of his calling, how his position is to be improved. You cannot make a drawing-room of a smack; there will be always hard work and hard words where there is hard weather; and there is not much hope of polished airs and genteel behaviour amongst a race of men who sleep in holes at which a blackbeetle might stand aghast, and who are boxed up for many months together in the year in a bit of a fabric whose forecastle is full of raffle, and whose hold is full of dead fish. But ashore no doubt something may be done for the lads to advance them morally, and make real men of them when they come to be men. It would be well if there were a few more Smack-boys’ Homes than there are. There is one in Ramsgate the theory of which is exceedingly good. The manager writes to a school or reformatory for boys, the conditions of acceptance being that the lads are healthy and strong and of good character; also that enough money be paid down to furnish each youth with a fishing outfit and a Sunday suit. The boys being got together in this fashion, the smack-owners are asked to take apprentices from them. This many of them do, I believe, on the understanding that the boys lodge at the Home when in port at a cost of 2s. a day each. By this means the lads are brought under a certain moral influence. They are watched over by the clergy associated with the Home, attend service in a chapel that adjoins the building, and are provided with the means of harmlessly amusing themselves in the evenings. The sole objection is—and it is a commercial one—the expensiveness of the arrangement to smack-owners who have several apprentices. “If I had but one apprentice,” said an owner, “2s. a day would be cheap enough; but I have ten, who at 2s. a day per boy would be a good deal dearer to me at the Home than I find them in my own house.” This is a point I will not deal with, but in all other respects I know of nothing that can be advanced against smack-boys’ homes. Smacksmen make fine sailors; the navy and the merchant service ought to have no better recruiting field than the British fisheries, and therefore something of Imperial significance should enter into consideration of the smack-boy’s moral and material welfare. You are not going to make him a refined person, but you can teach him to write and read, to have a reverence for God, to think of himself as a responsible being. An early training of this kind will not impair his hardiness, but it will put him higher than he is as a human creature. The lower orders of smack-owners let him run loose of a night when he is ashore, he is quite uncared for, and in the prison days he passed a good deal more of his time in gaol than at sea. “Making every allowance for second or third convictions,” says the Rev. J. E. Brennan, of Ramsgate, writing in 1878, “we are not far from the truth in stating that 50 per cent. of these boys go to prison during some part of their service.” These incessant punishments naturally led people to infer the worst of the fishing life. “Think what a calling it must be,” they would say, “when boys actually beg to be sent to prison rather than on board these smacks.” But Mr. Brennan justly, I think, attributes the lads’ defection to their neglected condition, to the absence of all suitable guardianship. “The scenes of drunkenness and sin,” he writes, “of which some of these lads are cognizant I will not describe. Let it suffice to say that many a pure-minded boy has in a few months become utterly corrupted, and his character, it may be, utterly ruined for ever.” He is writing of the boys of one town; but his remarks are equally, and even more, applicable to such places as Grimsby and Hull and Yarmouth. Here, then, is the real evil. It is not that the boys are maltreated at sea to any extent outside the proverbial rough usage of the marine life; it is not that smack-owners—the majority of them certainly—do not feed and clothe them well, nor that they exact unreasonable share of labour from them; it is that, when ashore and during the evenings, they wander about, fall into bad company, acquire habits of intemperance, become unspeakable nuisances to the police, to the inhabitants, and to their own masters, run away, and leave owners in the lurch and practically now without redress; and so, in a large proportion of instances, end in becoming untrustworthy men, worthless sailors, people whom nobody will employ. Smack-owners, as I have said, cannot be expected to look after the morals of the lads; their hands are full of business, they come home wearied, and, even with the best will in the world, they must lack in ways it would take too much space to explain here the opportunities to care for the boys as they are cared for at a Home. What is really wanted is a Home wherever there are fishing-apprentices, an institution conducted with something of the self-sacrificing spirit that characterizes the Ramsgate Home; where the boys can be comfortably housed and tended at a small expense to their employers; where they may be educated and helped and rewarded for their merits as seafaring lads; and any one truly concerned in the welfare of our mercantile marine, and who holds that we should neglect no source from which we may derive the forces that keep our nation dominant upon the sea, will believe that the State could make no wiser disbursement than in helping in the establishment of such institutions, and contributing to them until they become self-supporting.