n, a very vivid comprehension that if I wasn't one
of them I was nothing at all. But what was most difficult to detect was
the nature of the deep impulses which these men obeyed. What spirit was
it that inspired the unfailing manifestations of their simple fidelity?
No outward cohesive force of compulsion or discipline was holding them
together or had ever shaped their unexpressed standards. It was very
mysterious. At last I came to the conclusion that it must be something
in the nature of the life itself; the sea-life chosen blindly, embraced
for the most part accidentally by those men who appeared but a loose
agglomeration of individuals toiling for their living away from the eyes
of mankind. Who can tell how a tradition comes into the world? We are
children of the earth. It may be that the noblest tradition is but the
offspring of material conditions, of the hard necessities besetting men's
precarious lives. But once it has been born it becomes a spirit. Nothing
can extinguish its force then. Clouds of greedy selfishness, the subtle
dialectics of revolt or fear, may obscure it for a time, but in very
truth it remains an immortal ruler invested with the power of honour and
shame.

II.

The mysteriously born tradition of sea-craft commands unity in a body of
workers engaged in an occupation in which men have to depend upon each
other. It raises them, so to speak, above the frailties of their dead
selves. I don't wish to be suspected of lack of judgment and of blind
enthusiasm. I don't claim special morality or even special manliness for
the men who in my time really lived at sea, and at the present time live
at any rate mostly at sea. But in their qualities as well as in their
defects, in their weaknesses as well as in their "virtue," there was
indubitably something apart. They were never exactly of the earth
earthly. They couldn't be that. Chance or desire (mostly desire) had
set them apart, often in their very childhood; and what is to be remarked
is that from the very nature of things this early appeal, this early
desire, had to be of an imaginative kind. Thus their simple minds had a
sort of sweetness. They were in a way preserved. I am not alluding here
to the preserving qualities of the salt in the sea. The salt of the sea
is a very good thing in its way; it preserves for instance one from
catching a beastly cold while one remains wet for weeks together in the
"roaring forties." But in