wrecked vessel. If babies in short clothes
wanted to go out as mariners with short
wages, and their mothers would let 'em,
there would be no want of owners careless
enough to entrust vessels to their keeping.
The consequence of all this carelessness is, as I
find in my blue books, that of every seventeen
sailors who die, twelve are drowned or lost
by shipwreck. Two thousand of us go to the
bottom yearly; and I should like somebody
to count how many women have the thought
of a dead sailor curled up in their hearts, and
how many sailors' orphans there are in the
workhouses and gutters.

I am advised to speak by book, for the
Committee says to me, "We are ignorant
men, and the public may suppose it to be
ignorance that makes us grumble. Give them
out some of your learning, Cockle." Now,
I've been thumbing an official report, in
which I find the evidence of a gentleman who
spoke exactly what we know—an honourable
captain who had served both in the navy and
the merchant seaman's service—he was a man
to be well informed, and so he was. Well,
what did he say? "No one," he said, "can go
into the City, or have transactions with the
fitting out of merchant ships, without
witnessing, in daily transactions, the fatal extent
of the carelessness which prevails in the
selection of the master, officers and men, and
in the equipment of merchant vessels. Any
man who can procure a loading for the vessel
from any foreign port will seldom be refused
the appointment of master, or have any
inquiry made into his character. I have even
known a Portsmouth publican who
commanded a vessel trading from Lisbon to
London." Now, what do you think of that? Not
but what a publican's business is exceedingly
respectable; but, because he had sold wine
in a sea-port town, was that brother victualler
to be considered qualified to take a ship to
Lisbon. He had not, it is farther said, the
most distant conception of his duty as a
captain, but he trusted in such knowledge as
had been picked up at sight by one of the
common seamen-who sailed with him. The
same witness and honourable captain, who
had often crossed the seas as a passenger,
able to observe with a professional eye the
doings of the sailors, gave an edifying list of
his experiences, such as might be given by
any man equally qualified to criticise, who
travels much on the high seas. He sailed
once from London with ninety persons in a
steam-vessel (of course, highly insured)
commanded by an ignorant sot, whose character
could never have endured an hour's inquiry.
At the request of officers and crew the naval
passenger took the command out of his
hands; and the commander appointed by the
owners, when he got ashore, cut his throat in
a fit of drunken delirium. The honourable
captain came home from Cape Finisterre to
London once in a brig of two hundred tons,
and found the second mate the only man on
board who knew a morsel about navigation.
The vessel made Cape Clear instead of the
Land's End. The honourable captain once
came to England in a brig so disgracefully
undermanned, that it could afford only two
hands to each watch. In a squall at night
the helmsman often was obliged to leave the
ship unsteered, while he went forward to let
go ropes. In a moderate gale off Cape St.
Vincent a fore-topsail had to be cut away
from the yard, because, with three men and
two boys in a vessel of two hundred and fifty
tons, it was not possible to furl it. These are
bits of the experience of a single gentleman.
If an able mariner took notes in that way of
the manning and seamanship on board every
merchant vessel, and the tales of all the
vessels were to be told once a twelvemonth,
we should only wonder that the yearly loss
of property by shipwreck should be so little
as three million, that the loss of British
trading vessels should not be much greater
than one in twenty-four; that, out of every
seventeen sailors, there should be as many as
five who are not lost on the broad sea, but
die like other people. Twenty thousand
sailors, every ten years, is a mere trifle of men
to have cut off in the prime of life—tumbled
from mast-heads, cast among savages, or
drowned among the smash of ships, ill-
mastered and ill-manned.

I think therefore, and our committee
thinks, that the wish expressed by the tar in
your honoured journal, for the establishment
of a system of compensation for every
preventible mishap on board ship, for every life
lost in a ship proved to be badly navigated,
or defective in its make or manning, would
compel owners to look alive, as nothing else
will. Sympathy is too cheap; people don't
mind having to sympathize, where they would
not at all like having to pay. I would make
every man responsible in his pocket for the
loss he inflicts on others by neglecting proper
precautions against damage to his fellow-
creatures in the carrying on of his business,
or in the doing of anything whatever that he
may do. Whether they be railway directors,
builders, manufacturers, farmers, or ship-
owners, let them be compelled to make good
to widows or children of men killed or
damaged in their service, the money value of
the support thus taken from them. I see by
my books that there is a rule of this kind in
the French Civil Code, which has three
articles as follows:

"Art. 1382. Every act whatsoever of the
man who occasions a damage to another,
obliges him by whose fault it happens to
repair it.

"Art. 1383. Every one is responsible for
the damage he has caused, not only by his
act, but by his "negligence or by his
imprudence.

"Art. 1384. A man is responsible not only
for the damage occasioned by his own act,
but also for that which is occasioned by the