SHIPS "MANNED" BY WOMEN.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 7678, 11 April 1903, Page 3

SHIPS "MANNED " BY WOMEN.

(English Vttper.)

■ The discovery at Bristol the other day that a young woman had been in the habit of shipping from that port as a sailor before tho mast caused considerable comment and no little surprise. Yet at about the same time the Austrian steamer Zora arrived at Philadelphia from Alexandretta "manned" by a crew of Turkish women. According to the captain, too, they proved excellent sailors. Only a week or two back, again, the French -Minister of Marine issued, quite as a matter of course, to a woman living in a Normandy fishing village, a permit to ship on board a fishing smack as a member of the- crew, tbe said permit being tyie sixty -third in a series of similar ones signed by that official during the past year.

It is computed that altogether there are some three thousand women earning their living in this fashion along the wild Breton coast. They must, each and every one of them, obtain official permission, as indi-' cated above, before taking up their hazardous and laborious calling ; but this once obtained they rank, as regards wages and work, exactly as do the other members of

the crew,

In one respect only, bub that a very important one, are they inferior to their male co-toilers. Each holder of a permit receives also a second official document, boldly printed in red ink, which expressly forbids her ever aspiring to the coveted position of skipper of the craft.

In Norway, Sweden and Finland, women are frequently shipped as sailors without any demur being made, and do their work excellently ; while in Denmark large numbers of women are employed by the State as pilots. They go far out to se_. in their tiny boats to meet incoming vessels, and having nimbly climbed on board and shown their official diploma, they take charge of the ship in the usual affably overbearing manner aifected by pilots the world over, and skilfully steer her into port. All the girls inhabiting the' Island of Himla, near Rhodes, are bold and skilful mariners, and are, in 'addition, excellent divers. They are bound io be, in fact, if they aspire to the dignity of wifehood ; for they are not allowed to marry until they have brought up a specified number of sponges, each taken from a certain depth. The people of the island, it should be explained, all get their living by sponge-fish-biß. Santa Barbara, too, boasts of a colony of women mariners, amongst whom are thirteen sisters, the daughters of one mother. The latter has never been to sea, but for the past thirty-one years she has kept the lighthouse there ; and during all that long period she has climbed the. tower and attended to tbe light herself every night, with the exception of three weeks twenty years ago. She is now very old and infirm, but she stubbornly refuses to listen to the oft-re-peated suggestion that she should resign her post. "My girls," said the old lady, " follow a hazardous calling. Be it my part to lessen the hazard as far as possible by keeping the beacon-light burning as long as I live."

At Yokohama crews of women are kept by most of the native boarding-house masters, in readiness to ship on any tramp coasting steamer that may be in want of hands. They do not go aloft, but for all the other work of a steamship, even that of stoking and trimming, they are said to be excellent.

Iu their spare time on shore they frequently take on a coaling contract, at which laborious occupation, strange though it may seem, they are rather superior than inferior to men. Indeed, until quite recently, the world's record for coaling an ironclad was held "by a gang of Japanese "seawomen," all of whom were of small stature and under twenty-one years of age. Of course, thero are any number of instances on record of women sailing ships into port single-handed when compelled thereto by some exceptional stress of circumstances.

A typical case is that of the brigantine Moorburg, cholera-stricken in the autumn of 1877, while on a voyage from China to Australia.

'ihe only one that escaped the pestilence was the captain's wife, and she was handicapped by having a baby in arms to suckle, and attend to. Nevertheless, she navigated the vessel into Brisbane, a voyage of some seven weeks' /Juration, reefing, steering, and generally performing tha work of a full crew, while tenderly nursing the sick during her spare moments. *