From a close study of those records which have been handed down to us of maritime incidents and affairs, I am convinced that the seaman-character has always been much the same. It makes but little difference whether its possessor commanded a Viking ship or a Spanish galleon. To-day in any foreign port, granted that both parties have a working knowledge of each other’s language, you will find that there is a closer bond between shipmen of different nationalities than there is between, say, a British seaman and a British landsman. For seamen, so to speak, belong to a nation of their own, which is ruled not by kings or governments, but by the great forces of nature which have to be respected emphatically. Therefore the crews of every ship are fellow-subjects of the same nationality, no matter whether they be composed of a mingled assemblage of Britishers, Dagoes, “Dutchmen,” and niggers. [Illustration: OLD-FASHIONED TOPSAIL SCHOONER. After E. W. COOKE.] So, as we proceed with our study, we shall look at the doings of different ships and sailors with less regard for the land in which they happened to be born than for that amazing republic which never dies, which exists regardless of the rise and fall of governments, which for extent is altogether unrivalled by any nationality that has ever been seen. We shall look into the characteristics, the customs, and the manifold activities of this maritime commonwealth, which is so totally different from any of our land institutions and which has always had to face and wrestle with problems of a kind so totally different from those prevailing on shore. “That art of masts, sail-crowded, fit to break, Yet stayed to strength, and back-stayed into rake, The life demanded by that art, the keen, Eye-puckered, hard-case seamen, silent, lean, They are grander things than all the art of towns, Their tests are tempests and the sea that drowns.” CHAPTER II THE BIRTH OF THE NAUTICAL ARTS Of all the activities of human nature few are so interesting and so insistent on our sympathy as the eternal combat which goes on between man on the one side and the forces of Nature on the other. Conscious of his own limitations and his own littleness, man has nevertheless throughout the ages striven hard to overcome these forces and to exercise his own freedom. But he has done this not so much by direct opposition as by employing Nature to overcome Nature; and there can be no better instance of this than is found in the art of tacking, whereby the mariner harnesses the wind in order to enable him to go against the wind.