But there was still another school for seamanship, and it was one of the most important sections of the Mercantile Marine, for two reasons: it not merely trained some of our finest officers and men, but it was until late in the nineteenth century a wonderful fleet of coasters, which passed away only at the coming of the steam collier. We refer to those brigs which used to bring coal from the Tyne to the Thames. These little two-masted vessels were manned by crews who were paid by the voyage. The result was that they were interested in making a quick passage. A contemporary writer, who was himself a privateer for a time, regarded these collier crews as the most perfect in working their ships in narrow channels, as the East Indiamen were the finest in the open seas. This was in the eighteenth century, but from the time of the Stuarts these _Geordie_ brigs had been plying their trade and building up a fine body of seamen who formed a kind of pool from which ocean-going ships could obtain officers and crews for bolder enterprises. In this branch of the Mercantile Marine the famous discoverer, Captain Cook, learnt his seamanship, which was to lead to such important events. You may remember that whilst still in his teens he became apprenticed for three years in 1746 to the Whitby owners of the 450-ton vessel which carried coal from Newcastle to London, and after two years he served for a time in the 600-ton collier _Three Brothers_. He then served aboard her in the Norwegian and Baltic trades. In the seventeenth century these “coal cats,” as they were called, were sometimes three-masted vessels with square mainsail, square foresail, lateen mizzen, and sometimes a main topsail, but of course no triangular headsails, which did not come in until later. Captain H. Y. Moffat, who was born in 1844 and served as a boy in the collier-brig _Premium_, has published some interesting facts illustrating this kind of seafaring. His pay was £8—not a week, nor a month, but a year. The second year he was to have £10, and the third year £12. Each of these brigs carried a couple of boys, though the rest of the crew were still paid by the voyage. They lived in a dirty, dark, small fo’c’sle, and during the summer the brig would often run coals across to Hamburg and Rotterdam, but in the winter to London from South Shields. If the surroundings were hardly ideal for a boy, and the pay utterly inadequate, it was a splendid chance for him to learn his seamanship in a rough school. If the brig had a head wind anywhere between Yarmouth and London—that is to say, among all those shoals, these lads were kept busy heaving the lead all the time night and day; for in those times there were no gas-buoys.