[Illustration: BEARINGS AND POINTS OF SAILING] But that is no reflection on the sailors of to-day. Their jobs are different and the wide experience and knowledge of the sailor of earlier days would benefit them little. Of what use is the ability to reef a sail to a sailor on a ship where there is nothing made of canvas save tarpaulins and awnings? Why know the intricacies of a sailing ship’s complicated rigging when one comes in contact only with ships on which the rigging is limited to steel masts and cargo booms? Why should one develop an eye for changes in the weather when a barometer can foretell it for one? Some of the old ways still leave their mark, but mechanics are of more service on the ships of to-day than sailors. Here and there one still finds sailors comparable or even superior to the rough-and-ready men of years gone by. The fishermen of Gloucester are such men, but an able captain could more easily take a steamer across the ocean with a crew of mechanics who never before saw the sea, than with a crew of Gloucester fishermen who had had no experience with machinery. All of this was proved during the World War when Britain largely manned her M L’s, those tiny motor cruisers built to hunt for submarines, with men who first went to sea in those unsteady ships of war. And America, in 1917 and 1918, sent across the Atlantic scores of craft only slightly larger—the 110-footers—most of them officered and manned with college boys and others who had had no experience at sea. And of all the scores that went over and came back in the service of the United States Navy, not one was lost because of storm or shipwreck. But I do not mean to imply by this that the need for seamanship is gone. Far from it. Seamanship has changed, not disappeared, and more knowledge, though of a different sort, is needed to operate a steamer than to operate a sailing ship. A sailor still has need to know the many knots that earlier seamen used so constantly. The square knot and the bowline are, perhaps, the most important of the lot, but the fishermen’s bend and the timber hitch, the catspaw and the sheepshank, the single and double Blackwall hitches, the figure of eight, the bowline on a bight, the rolling hitch, and a dozen others are useful still. But nowadays wire rope is commoner than formerly, so thimble eyes and wire rope clips, turnbuckles, shackles, and other apparatus used with wire rope are useful things with which to be familiar. And still it is advisable to know how to splice both hemp and wire rope. But the Turk’s head, the double Matthew Walker, and others of that type are less in evidence than formerly. More rope is used to-day in the movement of cargo than in rigging, but sailors have little to do with the cargoes of ships. Crews are used nowadays merely to handle the ships, while stevedores at every port load and unload, stow and break out the freight that fills the great holds. [Illustration: HOW A FORE-AND-AFT SAIL IS REEFED