WOMEN AS SEA CAPTAINS

Ladies' Mirror, Volume 3, Issue 9, 2 March 1925, Page 55

WOMEN AS SEA CAPTAINS

By Arc Old Salt

nTHE Board of Trade has told the Merchant Service Guild that there is nothing to prevent women from qualifying as master mariners and mates. There never has been. But there are very few women sea captains in the world, and none, I think, in Great Britain. Any woman of average intelligence could pass the navigation part of the examination. Lots of women who are fond of boating and the sea might manage to get through the seamanship tests. But how many could qualify to sit for the examination ? To qualify one has to be apprenticed for four years, or serve four years before the mast. A captain's wife or daughter, sailing with him, might qualify by being "signed on" technically as a forecastle hand, but I doubt if she would satisfy the examiners. There was, for instance, a famous examiner at Cardiff whose pet trick it was, as soon as a candidate entered the room, to yell out in full quarter-deck style: "All fiat aback forrard! What would yon do, sir?" Many an experienced youngster failed to pass that test, simple as it was. There would be no hope at all for a girl who had only technically qualified. * * * JPRANKLY, in the old sailing ship days a woman could not possibly have taken her "ticket." It may be somewhat different in steam.

Your old sailing ship sailor will tell you that steamship hands are merely housemaids, and that is largely true. They wash down decks, scrub paintwork, and occasionally rig an awning. Of sailor craft they know practically nothing. Out of curiosity once I asked a deckhand in a liner to show me how to make a Turk's head. He said he would try to find out from one of the quartermasters! A woman might well be able to hold a job like that for four years but even a housemaid's job in an under-found tramp in a full gale of wind is something that would test the nerve of any woman. Then, too, the men of the sea, whether in sail or steam, are still the hard citizens of the world, who at times have to be driven at the point of the fist, or the toe of the boot, or the blunt end of a belaying pin. I cannot, somehow, see a woman handling any crew with which I have ever sailed. Even a skipper's wife has a difficult time of it, although she does not come into direct contact with the men, and, as a general rule, her husband must be a good man-driver before he dare take her afloat. But to imagine a woman, unaided, trying to make a tough crowd of Liverpool "dock-rats" jump lively when the decks are awash and the cargo adrift, below— candidly, it is beyond me!