MANNERS AT SEA.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 61, Issue 41, 28 November 1940, Page 4

MANNERS AT SEA.

“Now I am not a seaman, but I have sailed long enough and far enough to have learned some lessons afloat that I would never have learned ashore,” said Mr Thomas Wood in a recent broadcast talk. “One is this: The first test of civilisation, among seagoing nations, is the way in which they look upon the sea. Take ourselves. We respect it and so we ought, for it made us. We observe its customs and its code of manners, strictly—and so again we ought, for it is the one great international highway. But above all we have learned, through centuries of seafaring, never to take it for granted. It is the sea—the oldest thing in the world, and the most cruel. We know that and wh have paid for knowing it. Year after year, for nearly 250 years now, we have sent out ships of the Royal Navy making charts. They have; gone out in all weathers, into every ocean, through peace and war alike. Those charts are on sale everywhere—to all nations. We haven’t kept them selfishly to ourselves. They are for the use of seamen, no matter what country they belong to, to help, them in their everlasting fight against the sea. If wo had done nothing else but that, we could ask for no bettor memorial. And the Germans? Their memorial is not a set of charts, but the tears of seamen’s widows. In peace they swagger along that international highway flying their colours in a gale, like soldiers behind a big drum; in war they bomb lighthouse crews and shoot them as they drown. By this test of civilisation they are savages.”