Books: The Making of a Seaman

NEW CHUM — John Masefield — Moc-millan ($2.50).

In the autumn of 1886 an excited, nervous boy of 13 (who had every inten tion of becoming a first mate and no thought whatever of becoming a poet laureate) stepped into a cutter at the Liverpool docks and was rowed to H.M.S.

Conway, Britain’s famed training ship for officers of the merchant fleet. Aboard, he was confronted by a “ruddy, tanned and dirty old hand” who had reached the awe-inspiring age of 1 6. Squirting tobacco juice through his broken teeth and swell ing out “a chest like a rag-bag,” the vet eran questioned the newcomer: “Ah, chum; what’s your name?” He was told it was John Masefield. “What’s your father?” “I haven’t got one.” “What’s your mother, then?” “I haven’t got one.” “Oh, you’re a orphan, then; the same as me.” And the old hand passed on the news: “He says he’s a orphan.” “Well, tell the orphan he’ll soon be a sailor sick aboard this hooker.” But John Masefield’s two years on the Conway turned out to be one of the most fascinating periods of his varied life. A few years ago, in another autobiographical chapter called In the Mill (TIME, Aug. 11, 1941), Masefield showed that he could distill romance even from the job he once held in a Yonkers, N.Y. carpet factory (1895). With a deck instead of a rug under his feet, Britain’s 67-year-old Poet Laureate puts his memories, in pure and simple descriptive prose, to better use than ever. Like its great predecessor Life on the Mississippi (which Author Mase field has reread once a year for decades), New Chum has the freshness of a story that never grows old — the story of a boy’s initiation into a man-sized job.

Old Ship, Old Hands. The warship Conway was one of the last of England’s “wooden walls.” Her antiquity was a planned part of her function as a training ship. Conway boys were meant to learn seamanship without the help of modern conveniences, and the heavy old cannon that still glowered through the square gun ports were part of a boy’s lessons in naval history. To the greenhorn the Conway also looked grimly bare — until he discovered that in exactly ten minutes her crew could let down canvas walls, swing out hundreds of folding desks, blackboards and benches, and turn her decks into floating classrooms for 800 boys.

“You’ll Get Used to It.” New Chum Masefield had no time to marvel. His first day swept by in a hurricane of piercing whistles, pipes and clanging bells. He labored away on some engine (he was assured it was a pump) until his arms hung like strings; he hauled on a rope as thick as his ankle—hauled so well that until his head hit the deck some yards away he didn’t know that his 80 mates were hauling in the opposite direction.

By evening the new chum’s uniform hung on him like a sack. He was run over by the crew of the foretop in a rush for hammocks and, when he staggered to the fo’c’sle with his own bursting hammock, was coldly asked by an officer if he was “carrying guts to a bear.” After making up the hammock with non-regulation sheets as large as small sails, he fell out of it twice.

“You’ll get used to it,” said the kindly old hand in the next hammock (“a mixture of Phoebus Apollo, Leonardo da Vinci, Sophocles, Sir Isaac Newton and Captain Cook”). Then, languidly raising his hairy legs and wagging them like flags, the old hand semaphored a request for jam to a pal in the port mizzen.

“You will be in the Fourth Class, under Mr. Foxley,” said the chaplain next morning, after hungry pirates had stolen Mase-field’s breakfast. Versatile Mr. Foxley taught not only Navigation and The Day’s Work, but also arithmetic, algebra, English, history, geography, scripture and “similar easy problems.” Along with the new chums in the Fourth Class were beefy veterans who could do anything with their hands, but nothing with their heads. Morose and humiliated, they spent their school hours practicing complicated knots under their desks and sticking pins into new chums’ backsides.

Lessons of the River. The River Mersey had as many lessons to teach as the Conway. “At all seasons, at all states, the River was beautiful. At dead low water, when great sandbanks were laid bare, to draw multitudes of gulls; in calm, when the ships stood still above their shadows; in storm, when the ferries beat by, shipping sprays, and at full flood, when shipping put out and came in, the River was a wonder to me. Sometimes, as I sat aloft … I thought how marvellous it was, to have this ever-changing miracle about me, with [a view] of mountains, smoky, glittering cities, the clang of ham mers, the roar and hoot of sirens; the miles of docks … all … seemingly only noticed by me, [for] everybody else seemed … to have other things to do.” On shore leave, Masefield and his mates explored the ships of the whole world : the 18th-Century Hispaniola, which had been sailed by “men with pigtails, who drank rum from pannikins”; wonder ships from Oregon which could suddenly discharge streams of mighty logs from holes in their bows; barques from Norway, with wind mills pumping water from the bilge; un loading fruit tramps which smeared the dockside with thousands of squashed and trodden oranges; cotton-carriers, whose white bales sometimes burst open and re leased into a strange land snakes, birds, animals and butterflies which had some how survived the “whining, whickering sea-passage” from the South.

The Look of High Endurance. Most impressive to the small boy were the sea men who came ashore after sailing halfway around the world. “They had the inde scribable look of high endurance, which used to mark the sailing-ship seamen.

During war [I have seen] the same look on the faces of some of the infantry, [but] on no other faces.” Nonetheless, “these men were like children, from being so long way from the land.” As they stepped ashore they were seized and carried off by waiting harpies — “maggots of corruption” who, by morning, would have drugged the men and robbed them of every penny of their terrible year’s wages. This everyday sight remained one of the most horrifying of Masefield’s many memories.

One morning the Conway’s chief petty officer called huskily for “Three Cheers for Going Home next Month,” and Mase field realized that not only was his first term drawing to a close but that now he could lash and carry his hammock with out panic, and interpret the “yow yows” of the petty officer’s pipe. When a bunch of new chums came aboard soon after, Old Hand Masefield rubbed his eyes.

“Could it be that I had looked like these, with my cap jammed over my eyes [and] a doddering walk?” “You can help lick them into shape,” barked Masefield’s in structor. And sure enough, Masefield did, with a good deal of tolerance. “Poor creatures!” he reflected, “after all, it was not wholly their fault.”