It is perhaps unfortunate that these hard-working ships should ever have been called “tramps,” for the word suggests a lack of respectable employment to people ashore, as well as a wandering spirit. Among people ashore a tramp is looked down upon because he is content with hardly more than enough to eat. He produces nothing. He works at nothing. His irresponsibility is ever uppermost, and he is sure to do but one single thing—to keep for ever on the move. But at sea a tramp is a ship that works most diligently. She journeys, it is true, on no set route, and never knows—or seldom—for what port she is likely next to steer. But she works! Every possible moment of her workaday life she works. From the day she has passed her builders’ tests and is turned over to her owners she labours as no man or no man’s beasts of burden were ever worked. Day and night she sails the lonely seas—from Liverpool to Shanghai—from Shanghai to Capetown—from Capetown to Sydney—from Sydney to New York—from New York, perhaps, to Liverpool again—but not for rest. She may, it is true, be docked and repaired, but once afloat again, and noisy, dirty streams of dusty coal pour chokingly into her cavernous holds, and off she goes again, perhaps to Spain, where her coal may be exchanged for a cargo of iron ore, and back she sails, to discharge and load again and sail, until, at last, when years have passed, she has outgrown her usefulness and is flung upon a scrap heap where everything of value is taken from her hulk and she is forgotten—as workmen sometimes are, who through all their lives have laboured, day after day, at forge or bench, making for the world some of the many things it needs, only to find themselves, when they are worn out, forgotten and replaced by a man more new. [Illustration: A TRAMP STEAMER _Perhaps the hardest-working machine ever designed by man, and undoubtedly the most romantic of all steam-driven ships._] These are the ships that make world commerce possible. These are the ships that carry the world’s goods. These are the ships that make a nation’s merchant marine, and these, basically, are the ships that make necessary great navies and great ports. Here, then, lies the modern romance of the sea.