of them seemed to be a man qualified in any
way to sacrifice a crew to him, the heathen
deity of a thousand years ago, he would set
a mark upon his wrist. Often we found
crews weak and worthless; two or three
good seamen to a dozen louts. Sometimes
the captain then was marked, before we
went among the men in dingy offices who sat
before great books, and whose accounts the
sea god seemed to have a great facility in
auditing. Wherever he found friends, in
men who did not shrink from sacrifice of life
with Christian horror, he pressed his mark
of a dead white hand with a hard clutch
upon their shoulders, and left the form of
a drowned sailor to keep night watch by
their beds.

Our long procession, growing as we went,
we circled in this way the British coast, and
came in a dark cloud up the Thames to
Westminster. There are still old women
cherishing the past belief concerning spirits
of men

"That in crossways and flood have burial,"

how they must wander to and fro as ghosts
during a hundred years. Are the old legends
true? With phantom images of all drowned
people who have perished on the British
coast, for the last century, methought I,
landing at Westminster, followed King
Neptune to St. Stephen's. He went in state, and
in words that never reached ears of the flesh
returned thanks to his faithful Commons for
supplies furnished to him during the past
year.

Now, let this dream be broken by a touch
of hard reality which might, one would think,
awaken all the sleepers in the land. On the
wreck chart of Great Britain, our seas are to
be found absolutely blackened by the dots that
indicate disaster. Wreck follows wreck, and
every slight gale kills one or two, if it does
not kill hundreds of our countrymen. We
do not always kill by twos or twenties. Men,
women, and children are sent out crowded in
passenger vessels, to be wrecked by hundreds
—two, three, four, five hundred at a time.
If they be sent out in vessels that cannot be
worked, or if they be sent with crews that
cannot work them, or with masters unskilled
to direct the crews, such men may as fairly
be said to be sent to their death as to their
own intended destination.

I do not speak with reference to any single
case, but to all cases. A great wreck rarely
happens that was not preventible by
something less than superhuman forethought and
exertion—by mere common prudence. If
mariners learn to be rash through much
familiarity with wind and wave, if shipowners
find rashness cheaper than discretion, and
accordingly prefer it, stern help from without
is necessary to assist their erring judgments.
The wreck of an emigrant vessel and the loss
of hundreds of lives, is an event at least
equal in horror to the burning of an English
village, and a massacre of all its inmates.
The property destroyed is not less, the life
destroyed is not less, the agonies inflicted are
not less, and not less should be held the
tremendous responsibility of those upon whom
it depends to prevent or produce such
catastrophes.

We do not sufficiently look upon
shipwrecks and upon everything else that afflects
ships carrying English passengers and sailors,
as home incidents. Deaths on board ship are
liable to trifling inquisition: murders may be
committed—I do not say that they are, but
they may be—committed in very many cases
with impunity; by the most culpable
misconduct hundreds of men and women may
be drowned together without much more
inquiry than suffices for the wise and
comfortable discovery that no one is to blame. Owners
lie snug from censure. The world is very slow
to connect a respectable citizen of Liverpool
with a wreck happening in the Bermudas,
while he sat at tea in his own parlour,
innocently happy with his wife and family. Such
people are so remote from the spot, and from
the whole story, that their names are often
passed over by readers of the newspaper
report as pure impertinences—details with
which memory refuses to be taxed. Of
captains again, whose vessels have been lost:
even if they have been very rash, we say,
they have been punished for their rashness.
We forgive them, because they were upon the
spot, they shared the danger, they endured
terrible responsibility, saw fellow-creatures
dying round about them, exerted themselves
to save life, stuck by the wreck. Even if they
really were to blame, would it not be cruel to
tell them so—savage and barbarous to punish
them again, as grave offenders? So, as the
blame cannot belong to any man—absent or
present—we lay it on the ship's compasses,
and there let it remain.

Should, by chance, a vessel sail out of an
English port, bound on a voyage half across
the globe: a ship of faultless sailing powers;
should she be towed into one of our channel
seas, and, presently encountering rough wind
and fog, be found unequal to the first common
emergency; should she have a crew
aboard, consisting of the smallest legal
complement, and even that made up of Chinese,
Frenchmen, Italians, and others, who, though
Englishmen, were skulking lubbers; should
there be some of these unable to understand
the language in which orders were addressed
to them, others slinking below when they
ought to be at work on deck, and others at
work unable so much as to pull together;
should it be found true of that ship that of
three compasses which she carries, no two
agree; should the captain, under such
circumstances, and observations being rendered
impossible to be taken by the fog, see no
reason why he should not run her straight
a-head for fourteen hours, in the dark, just
knowing generally that he is butting at a line