Sea Songs by W. Clark Russell

Considering that Great Britain is an island, that immense numbers of the / inhabitants live in seaports, that the sea is within at hour or two of / the metropolis, that there is always an abundance of sailors "knocking / about" ashore, and that pretty nearly all our wealth as a nation is / owing to our seamen and our shipping, it must be owned that many of / those notions of Jack and his life ashore and at sea which may be found / among the greatest maritime people on the face of the earth, are in the / highest degree extraordinary. Is it possible that the sailor is still / supposed to have nothing to do at sea but to sit down with a pipe in his / mouth and let the wind blow him along? Are there people yet living who / imagine that on Saturday nights at sea cans of grog are handed about, / roaring nautical songs sung, and wives and sweethearts toasted? Is it / even in this day of steamboats believed that a sailor cannot express / himself without loading his language with marine terms; that he cannot / speak of "walking," but of "steering; " that the right-hand side ashore / is the "starboard; " and that he cannot step backwards without making / "sternway"?

Where do these highly nautical fellows live when they are at home? I / never have the luck to come across them. In some seaports you may still / see here and there, over a public-house, the sign of the Jolly Tar: a / figure in flowing breeches, tarpaulin hat on "nine hairs," a bottle of / grog in one hand, and a great red nose, set in the midst of a shining / face. Who was the original of that fellow? He is not a man-of-war's man, / and most certainly he is not a merchantman. I take it that he is nothing / more nor less than the embodiment of the landsman's notion of the sailor / obtained to a large extent from marine novels, but mainly from the / English sea songs. You might walk the whole of Great Britain over / without meeting with the counterpart of that effigy, unless it lay in / some turnpike impostor who gets a living by swearing he has been / shipwrecked. If the merchant seaman is to be typified, he must not be / dressed in loose breeches and an open-breasted shirt. If his language is / to be imitated, it must not altogether consist of "hard-a-lee" and "haul / the bowline. " And if his life at sea is to be pictured, one must drop / all reference to cans of grog, and have nothing whatever to say about / Saturday nights and sweethearts and wives.