se, or even a
social sense in a seaman. I don't know. It seems to me that a seaman's
duty may be an unconscious compound of these three, something perhaps
smaller than either, but something much more definite for the simple mind
and more adapted to the humbleness of the seaman's task. It has been
suggested also to me that the impalpable constraint is put upon the
nature of a seaman by the Spirit of the Sea, which he serves with a dumb
and dogged devotion.

Those are fine words conveying a fine idea. But this I do know, that it
is very difficult to display a dogged devotion to a mere spirit, however
great. In everyday life ordinary men require something much more
material, effective, definite and symbolic on which to concentrate their
love and their devotion. And then, what is it, this Spirit of the Sea?
It is too great and too elusive to be embraced and taken to a human
breast. All that a guileless or guileful seaman knows of it is its
hostility, its exaction of toil as endless as its ever-renewed horizons.
No. What awakens the seaman's sense of duty, what lays that impalpable
constraint upon the strength of his manliness, what commands his not
always dumb if always dogged devotion, is not the spirit of the sea but
something that in his eyes has a body, a character, a fascination, and
almost a soul--it is his ship.

There is not a day that has passed for many centuries now without the sun
seeing scattered over all the seas groups of British men whose material
and moral existence is conditioned by their loyalty to each other and
their faithful devotion to a ship.

Each age has sent its contingent, not of sons (for the great mass of
seamen have always been a childless lot) but of loyal and obscure
successors taking up the modest but spiritual inheritance of a hard life
and simple duties; of duties so simple that nothing ever could shake the
traditional attitude born from the physical conditions of the service. It
was always the ship, bound on any possible errand in the service of the
nation, that has been the stage for the exercise of seamen's primitive
virtues. The dimness of great distances and the obscurity of lives
protected them from the nation's admiring gaze. Those scattered distant
ships' companies seemed to the eyes of the earth only one degree removed
(on the right side, I suppose) from the other strange monsters of the
deep. If spoken of at all they were spoken of in tones of
half-contemptuous in