August 17, 1916 
LAND & WATER 
•15 
To British Merchant Captains 
By Lewis R. Freeman 
A LL yesterday evening I came upon little knots 
/% of sailor men gathered along the quay or at 
/ % the corners of the streets of Harwich and Dover- 
^ .^.court. Their weather-beaten parchment-brown 
faces were drawn and troubled, and they spoke in the 
jerkily lowered voices of men not wont to hold their 
tongues or passions in restraining leash. There was 
something in the half-stunned, half-angry looks isugges- 
tive of the expressions I had seen on the faces of the sailors 
at a North Wales port on the evening that a carelessly 
framed despatch had tricked them into transient belief that 
the British Fleet had been beaten by the Germans in the 
North Sea. But I had been with naval men all afternoon, 
and knew that there was nothing fresh to report from 
behind the grey fog-curtain to the north. The trouble 
was of another kind, but from past experience I knew 
that the moment when the British sailor man spoke 
through clenched teeth in those jerkily lowered tones, 
with his brow corrugated in mahogany wrinkles of 
perturbation and his blue eyes fixed absently on the 
lingers of his working hands, was not the one for even 
the most sympathetically curious to intrude upon him. 
Enhghtenment came later, when I asked the maid 
who lowered the shutters and drew the double curtains 
of my room in the little hotel on the Dovercourt cliff, 
why it was that the children playing in a narrow street 
that branched off diagonally below my window hushed 
their voices and tiptoed as they came down toward 
the seaward end, and why many of even belated and hurry- 
ing delivery carts were pulling up and taking another 
way on their clattering rounds. 
" Is somebody sick ? " I asked, " or is one of the 
neighbours dead ? " 
" Didn't you know, Sir ? " faltered the girl. " That 
is Captain Fryatt's 'ome down there. It's the httle red 
brick 'ouse — the fourth or fifth from the corner. Sir. 
We all o' us 'ere knew 'im, sir, an' loved 'im ; an'— you'll 
excuse me, sir " (her voice broke for a moment and the 
starting tears glistened in the flickering light of her 
candle)' — " but I was thinkin' 0' the missus an' the 
nippers. They's waitin' down there for more news 
from Belg'um. I hates to think o' 'em, sir. It makes me 
want to scream an' — an' to fight. I'll be going now, 
sir ; it gets me all wrought up w'en I talks about it." 
It came to me all at once what those stunned, angry 
sailors on the street were talking of, and the hot wave 
of indignation — checked for an hour or two by the ex- 
citement of meeting and boarding a returning submarine 
— that had surged over me that afternoon when I first 
read the news of Captain Fryatt's execution in the paper, 
welled up anew inside me and throbbed against my 
temples. I was conscious of the passing of one of a 
class of men whom I had learned to know and love dur- 
ing many years of intimate association — in craft stout 
and frail, on seas fair and stormy— and the fact that the 
death of this man had been compassed with a cold-blooded 
cynicism scarcely paralleled in modern liistory brought 
the significance of it home to me with especial poignancy. 
In a dull sort of way I had been conscious of a similar 
feeling every time I had read of the loss of merchant 
officers and crews from the inauguration of the submarine 
campaign, but only now had I come to understand how 
much of a hold these same sailor men had on my affec- 
tion, what parts they had played in scores of the vivid 
incidents of my life that I cared most to dwell upon in 
memory. 
Three of the last ten years of my life had been spent 
upon the sea, I reflected, and of this time perhaps six 
months had been put in on one or another of the " float- 
ing palaces " of the main tourist routes, and not more 
than that aboard ships under the German, French, 
Dutch or American flag. That left a good two years- 
more than seven hundred days and nights — spent aboard 
the smaller British merchantmen — tramps, coasters, 
colliers, traders, flat-bottomed river stern-wheelers — in 
out-of-the-way water-lanes of the world. 
Two years of my life — ahd what treasured years they 
were, too — spent in the care of the bold, bluff, bronzed 
British merchant captains who drove " the swift shuttles 
of an Empire's loom." What strange seas they had 
steered me through, and what strange corners in the ports 
that served those seas ! And what adventures they had 
run me into, and what scrapes got me out of ! And 
what courtesy, what consideration — aye, even what 
tenderness in times of misadventure and sickness — had 
I not enjoyed at their hands ! 
Pulling on my cardigan jacket, I " stood-by " as 
the hour of eleven — midnight by the sun-time by which 
the ships of the sea still sail — and at the instant when the 
steamers in the harbour would have been sounding 
" Eight Bells " had there been no lurking Zeppelins to 
guard against, leaned out of the open window till the in- 
drifting fog blew sharp against my face and be^an my 
" watch." 
Just so — with a rough blue sleeve brushing against my 
own — had I leaned over the bridge or taffrail of a hurtdred 
steamers, plowing a hundred sea-ways, and now, with 
the familiar breath of the sea in my nostrils and the 
familiar mist of the/ sea damping my hair again, old 
friends of other days strode on the corridors of memory 
and ranged themselves, one at a time, by my side. At 
first I tried to muster them chronologically, in the order 
I had known tliem from my first tentative coastal voyages 
in the Pacific — (B — of the Vancouver-Seattle packet, 
who let me sleep on his cabin couch one night when the 
rooms were all taken in order that I might be rested for 
the tennis tournament I was engaging in at Tacoma 
on the morrow ; R — of the old Alaska " Inland Passage " 
coaster, who taught me to " box " the compass and 
awoke the slumbering love o' the sea in my blood with 
tales of the Victoria seahng fleet ; P^, of the Mexican 
trader, who smuggled me out of Guaymas when the 
Sonora authorities were trying to arrest me for landing 
on Tiburon without a permit) but presently the magnet 
of my quickened memory began drawing them forward 
out of turn, and ere long they were crowding on like 
guests at a reception. 
Now I would think of the bravery of them, and in- 
stantly a series of pictures took shape before my eyes, a 
score of names leapt to my lips, a score of hands — hard 
brown hands, with a world of warmth in their steady grip 
— reached out to clasp my own. \A'ho was the bravest 
among men that had all been brave ? I asked myself, 
and then how the pictures formed and dissolved as one 
stirring incident after another flashed across my mind 1 
What could have been finer than the way Captain K — , 
of that cranky clipper-bowed old " C.N." steamer, had 
stuck out that typhoon off Taiwan, lashed to the bridge 
for three days, and subsisting on coffee and rum and 
pilot bread ? I could see his brine-white face (as I saw 
it when I took a timid peep upihe companion way on the 
day the " twister " began to die down) taking shape out 
there in the drifting fog even as the recollection of that 
fearsome storm crystallised in my memory, and then 
fancy turned another cog, and it was a sun-bHstered 
South Pacific trader that I seemed to see, with a sallow, 
fever-wracked figure at the wheel, and two or three dozen 
naked blacks writhing in agony on the forrard deck. 
How old B^ — , of the Cora Andrews, took his load of 
plague-stricken Papuans through the Barrier Reef and 
into the quarantine station at TownsviUe is a South 
Sea epic. 
Then came memories with a more personal touch, and 
I dwelt for a few moments over the shifting scenes of the 
mix-up I started the time I tried to take a flashhght of 
the smokers in the " Opium Den " of the old Yo San, 
plying on the Hongkong-Bangkok run. Some of the 
Chinese crew were smuggUng opium that voyage, and. 
taking me for a Secret Service officer on search, started 
to wipe up the deck with my protesting anatomy. 
Curled round my camera under a bunk in the corner of 
the opium den, with nothing but the fact that my assail- 
ants were so numerous that they got in each other's 
way saving me from instant annihilation, and expecting 
every moment that one of them- would gather his wits 
together sufficiently to pounce down on me through the 
