THE DISAPPEARING SAILOR.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXI, Issue 29, 19 September 1911, Page 4

THE DISAPPEARING SAILOR.

Dr. Johnson said that no man would ho a sailor who could be any tiling rise, for in a ship you were in a gaol with the added possibility of being drowned. This thoroughly Cockney and landlubberish opinion of the sea is truer of the Britons of to-day than of those if J)r. Johnson’s time—truer vet cf present-day Americans. The native American lias practically disappeared from the high seas, says “Collier’s Weekly.” Boys no longer run away to that once romantic element—they would as soon think of running away to a rolling-mill or to bo a cable gripman. Steam, steel, and commercial combination have changed everything. An ordinary thrifty merchant would as soon think of embarking alone in foreign trade in the old-fashioned way as he would of building a railroad alone. Yankee skippers of the type of old Captain Luther Little of Salem, for instance, who ran away to sea as a boy, and after lighting his way up (and life on the sea was a fight then) and living the life of a dozen Robinson Crusoes, came hack for another vigorous forty years on the ancestral farm, and sat down at eighty-five to w rite an autobiography that makes the sailor stories of to-day look thin and pale—they are as extinct as flintlocks. Yet with all the changes on

sou mid hind, the- conditions of the man in the forecastle '• have changed ’nit little.