THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 



193 



and. more than 28,000 inexperienced 

 youths have been enrolled for training as 

 merchant mariners. Seven thousand re- 

 cruiting offices, located mainly in each 

 unit of a great chain of drug stores 

 whose chief executive has lent every pos- 

 sible assistance of time and fortune to 

 the government, are supplying from 500 

 to 600 new students daily for the appren- 

 tice schools for seamen maintained on a 

 fleet of 12 training ships. 



schools For skippers and seamen 



More than 1,600 men are today attend- 

 ing the officers' schools, fitting themselves 

 for the duties of mate, engineer, etc. In 

 the navigation schools the course of in- 

 struction is six weeks ; the engineers' 

 course is completed in one month. But 

 both schools require of their students 

 previous navigation or engineering ex- 

 perience of two years at sea or its equiva- 

 lent. That equivalent in the case of engi- 

 neers may have been special training in 

 technical schools, experience as a locomo- 

 tive engineer, or engineer of a stationary 

 engine. 



The apprentice course is for six weeks, 

 at the end of which time the successful 

 pupil receives a rating as ordinary sea- 

 man and is placed on board a merchant 

 ship. The ratio of apportionment in 

 crews is not more than four graduates of 

 the apprentice schools to every six able 

 seamen', an able seaman being one who 

 has followed the sea for two years or 

 who has secured his advanced rating by 

 passing an examination at the end of his 

 first twelve months. 



Like the pupil in the riveting classes of 

 the shipyards, the apprentice receives a 

 salary while he is fitting himself for im- 

 portant work — a stipend of $30 a month, 

 plus quarters and food which would 

 arouse the envy of every man who ever 

 sailed before the mast in the old days of 

 American supremacy at sea. , 



When the 288 hours of instruction have 

 been completed (eight hours a day, six 

 days a week, with one instructor for 

 every ten men), the newly created sailor, 

 cook, steward, oiler, coal-passer, or 

 water-tender — whichever branch he has 

 chosen — begins work at from $60 to $75 

 a month, with 50 per cent additional 

 should he be sent into the war zone. 



In order to be enrolled in an officers' 

 or an apprentice school, the applicant 

 must pass a thorough physical examina- 

 tion and must be an American citizen. 



The strength of the personnel of the 

 merchant marine at the present time is in 

 the neighborhood of 75,000. If the war 

 ends in 1920 and we have by then a mer- 

 chant fleet of 3,500 ships, as is now the 

 reasonable prospect, we shall need an ad- 

 ditional 100,000 men, besides the number 

 which must be recruited as replacement 

 crews to take the places of those men who 

 will return to shore life at the end of the 

 war. 



THE REMAINING MAJOR TASK 



Having mobilized and trained the nec- 

 essary man power for the task of build- 

 ing a vast merchant fleet ; having pro- 

 vided the workmen with satisfactory sur- 

 roundings and with the material which 

 goes into the making of those ships ; hav- 

 ing begun to launch and fit out the ships 

 themselves with something approaching 

 quantity production ; having organized 

 machinery for the recruiting and school- 

 ing of officers and crews to man those 

 ships, and having actually developed an 

 appreciable number of such officers and 

 seamen, the remaining major task of the 

 United States Shipping Board lay in the 

 direction of expanding the facilities of 

 our ports and harbors in order to elimi- 

 nate the woeful congestion which existed 

 and still exists, and which would have be- 

 come still worse as the number of ships 

 increased. 



James J. Hill, that great phrase-maker 

 of commercial life, once defined a seaport 

 as the funnel through which a country's 

 commerce flows, and added the truism 

 that the volume of traffic which a line can 

 carry (be it a railway line or a steamship 

 line) cannot exceed the capacity of its 

 terminals. 



Every one admits today that the con- 

 ditions, both at our own chief seaports 

 and in France, at the time American 

 troops first landed Over There were 

 "pretty bad." It may be that there was 

 some exaggeration in the story that the 

 great freighter Nansemond, formerly the 

 German ship Pennsylvania, a cargo-car- 

 rier of 15,000 tons, lay alongside a dock 

 at Brest for three weeks and then had to 



