speaking, an adventurer may be expected to have
courage, or at any rate may be said to need it. But courage in itself is
not an ideal. A successful highwayman showed courage of a sort, and
pirate crews have been known to fight with courage or perhaps only with
reckless desperation in the manner of cornered rats. There is nothing in
the world to prevent a mere lover or pursuer of adventure from running at
any moment. There is his own self, his mere taste for excitement, the
prospect of some sort of gain, but there is no sort of loyalty to bind
him in honour to consistent conduct. I have noticed that the majority of
mere lovers of adventure are mightily careful of their skins; and the
proof of it is that so many of them manage to keep it whole to an
advanced age. You find them in mysterious nooks of islands and
continents, mostly red-nosed and watery-eyed, and not even amusingly
boastful. There is nothing more futile under the sun than a mere
adventurer. He might have loved at one time--which would have been a
saving grace. I mean loved adventure for itself. But if so, he was
bound to lose this grace very soon. Adventure by itself is but a
phantom, a dubious shape without a heart. Yes, there is nothing more
futile than an adventurer; but nobody can say that the adventurous
activities of the British race are stamped with the futility of a chase
after mere emotions.

The successive generations that went out to sea from these Isles went out
to toil desperately in adventurous conditions. A man is a worker. If he
is not that he is nothing. Just nothing--like a mere adventurer. Those
men understood the nature of their work, but more or less dimly, in
various degrees of imperfection. The best and greatest of their leaders
even had never seen it clearly, because of its magnitude and the
remoteness of its end. This is the common fate of mankind, whose most
positive achievements are born from dreams and visions followed loyally
to an unknown destination. And it doesn't matter. For the great mass of
mankind the only saving grace that is needed is steady fidelity to what
is nearest to hand and heart in the short moment of each human effort. In
other and in greater words, what is needed is a sense of immediate duty,
and a feeling of impalpable constraint. Indeed, seamen and duty are all
the time inseparable companions. It has been suggested to me that this
sense of duty is not a patriotic sense or a religious sen