style="font-size:15px;"> Poor improvident Jack! – poor thoughtless, incorrigible fellow! – it was necessary for the Government of his country to look after him, in order to protect him against his own want of forethought, and the result has been to run the ship into shoal water, and go hopelessly to wreck without so much as salvage money.
Jack ashore! Don't we all still look at the sailor in the light of the evil war-times, when the king's men were said to draw pocketsful of prize-money and to spend it in low debauchery or wild wanton folly? Even now we repeat the stories of frying watches along with beefsteaks and onions, or eating bank-note sandwiches. Nay, to this day in the fo'c's'le of merchant vessels some of the melancholy old songs in which sailors are wont to satirise themselves are occasionally sung, telling how
"When his money is all spent,
And there's nothing to be borrowed and nothing to be lent,
In comes the landlord with a frown,
Saying, 'Jack! get up, and let John sit down,
For you are outward bound.'"
There's a world of meaning in that grim suggestive summary; but, thank God! it has less meaning now than it once had. Until quite lately, sailors of merchant ships could be kept for days waiting to be paid, and, sickened with lingering for long weary hours about the office of the broker or agent who withheld their money, fell into the hands of the harpies who were, and still are constantly on the look-out to plunder them. Men with all the pure natural longing for home and reunion with those near and dear to them, were compelled to loiter about the foul neighbourhood of the dock where their ship discharged its cargo, lodging in some low haunt with evil company, and liable to every temptation that is rife in such places, till too often so large a portion of their hardly-earned wages had been forestalled, that in a dreary and desperate madness of dissipation they were tempted to fling away the small balance remaining to them, and to awake to reason only when, naked and nearly destitute, they were compelled to go to sea again, with a slender stock of clothes, and a week's board and lodging paid for with advance notes.
From long confinement and monotony on shipboard, the sailor even now comes to a sense of temporary freedom, giddy with the unaccustomed sense of solid ground and the wild toss and uproar of the ocean of life in a great city. What are still the influences which in many seaports await him directly his foot touches the shore, and sometimes even before he has come over the vessel's side? With a boy's recklessness, a man's passions, and the unwonted excitement of possessing money and boundless opportunities for spending it, a shoal of landsharks are lying ready to batten on him. The tout, the crimp, and all the wretches, male and female, who look upon him as their prey, will never leave him from the time when they watch him roll wonderingly on to the landing-stage, till that desperate minute when he flings his last handful of small change across the tavern counter, and calls for its worth in drink, since "money is no use at sea."
This was far more frequently the termination of mercantile Jack's spell ashore, before the new regulations as to prompt payment of seamen's wages came into force. At that time you had only to take a morning walk across Tower Hill, where the bluff lay figure at the outfitter's door stands for Jack in full feather, and thence to America Square, or the neighbourhood of the Minories and Rosemary Lane, to see dozens of poor fellows lounging listlessly about the doors of pay-agents, waiting day after day at the street-corners, with an occasional visit to the public-house, and the perpetual consumption of "hard" tobacco. It was easy afterwards to follow Jack to Ratcliffe, Rotherhithe, Shadwell, and the neighbourhood, where his "friends" lay in wait for him to spend the evening; in the tap-rooms of waterside taverns, where he sat hopelessly drinking and smoking during a hot summer's afternoon; to frowsy, low-browed shops of cheap clothiers, to hot, stifling dancing-rooms, to skittle-alleys behind gin-shop bars, where a sudden brawl would call out knives, and the use of a "slung-shot" as a weapon would make a case of manslaughter for the coroner; to very minor theatres, where he could see absurd caricatures of himself in the stage sailors, dancing hornpipes unknown at sea; to the dreadful dens of Bluegate Fields and Tiger Bay – to any or all of these places you might have followed Jack; and may even yet follow his fellows who have not yet been redeemed from the evil ways of those bad times, when there were no homes for sailors amidst the bewildering vice and misery of maritime London, and other seaport towns of this great mercantile island.
It so happened that I made my first intimate acquaintance with the one real, publicly representative "Sailors' Home" in Well Street, near the London Docks, after having seen Jack under several of the terrible conditions just referred to, so that, with this painful knowledge of him and his ways, it was with a kind of delighted surprise that I suddenly walked into the great entrance-hall of the institution, where he and his fellows were sitting on the benches by the wall with the serious, contemplative, almost solemn air which is (in my experience) the common expression of sailors ashore, and during ordinary leisure hours. There they were, a good ship's crew of them altogether, sitting, as I have already said, in true sailor fashion – stooping forward, wrists on knees, lolling on sea-chests and clothes-bags, taking short fore-and-aft walks of six steps and a turn in company with some old messmate, smoking, growling, chatting, and generally enjoying their liberty; not without an eye, now and then, to the smart officer who had come in to see whether he could pick up a brisk hand or two for the mail service.
This was some five or six years ago, and it is a happy result of the plan on which the Home was first established (which was intended ultimately to make the institution self-supporting, if the cost of building were defrayed) that the whole scheme has been so enlarged since that time, that anybody who would see what our mercantile seamen are like, may now go and see them, in a largely increasing community, in this great institution. So many come and go and reappear at intervals represented by the length of their voyages, that 10,120 officers and men had partaken of its inestimable benefits during the year from the first of May, 1872, to the end of April, 1873.
But the institution itself was founded in earnest faith, and built with the labour that is consecrated by prayer. Both to the Home and to its companion institution, the Refuge for Destitute Seamen – we will pay a visit on our next meeting.
WITH THEM WHO WERE READY TO PERISH
On the 28th of February, 1828, a very terrible calamity happened in the place known as Wellclose Square, Whitechapel. A new theatre called the Brunswick, had been erected there on the site of a former building, known as the Old Royalty. It had been completed in seven months, and three days afterwards, during a rehearsal, the whole structure gave way and fell with a crash, burying ten persons amidst the ruins, and fearfully injuring several others. Such a catastrophe was very awful, and the people of the neighbourhood looked with an almost solemn curiosity at the wreck of an edifice in which they themselves might have met with death suddenly.
Very soon, however, they began to regard the heap of ruins with surprise, for early one morning there appeared two officers of the Royal Navy, surrounded by a gang of labourers with picks and shovels, and before these men (some of whom were Irish Roman Catholic) began to work they listened attentively while one of the officers offered up an earnest prayer to God for a blessing on the results of the labour they were about to undertake. Morning after morning their labour was thus sanctified, and evening after evening it was celebrated by the voice of thanksgiving, till at length the ground was cleared, and on the 10th of June, 1830, the first stone of a new building was laid. The building was to be a Home for Sailors, and as a necessary adjunct to the Home, it was intended to establish a Destitute Sailors' Asylum.
The two naval officers were Captain (now Admiral) George C. Gambier, and Captain Robert James Elliot, now gone to his rest, who with Lieutenant Robert Justice afterwards Captain, and now with his old comrade, in the heavenly haven, had been seeking how to ameliorate the condition of seamen, numbers of whom were to be seen homeless, miserable, and frequently half naked and destitute, in that foul and wretched neighbourhood about the Docks and beyond Tower Hill.
The task was a difficult one, and might have daunted less brave and hopeful men, for
