judge it proper to mention aloud, as it were, that they have done well.
It is a memorable occurrence, for in the sea services you are expected
professionally and as a matter of course to do well, because nothing less
will do. And in sober speech no man can be expected to do more than
well. The superlatives are mere signs of uninformed wonder. Thus the
official signal which can express nothing but a delicate share of
appreciation becomes a great honour.

Speaking now as a purely civil seaman (or, perhaps, I ought to say
civilian, because politeness is not what I have in my mind) I may say
that I have never expected the Merchant Service to do otherwise than well
during the war. There were people who obviously did not feel the same
confidence, nay, who even confidently expected to see the collapse of
merchant seamen's courage. I must admit that such pronouncements did
arrest my attention. In my time I have never been able to detect any
faint hearts in the ships' companies with whom I have served in various
capacities. But I reflected that I had left the sea in '94, twenty years
before the outbreak of the war that was to apply its severe test to the
quality of modern seamen. Perhaps they had deteriorated, I said
unwillingly to myself. I remembered also the alarmist articles I had
read about the great number of foreigners in the British Merchant
Service, and I didn't know how far these lamentations were justified.

In my time the proportion of non-Britishers in the crews of the ships
flying the red ensign was rather under one-third, which, as a matter of
fact, was less than the proportion allowed under the very strict French
navigation laws for the crews of the ships of that nation. For the
strictest laws aiming at the preservation of national seamen had to
recognise the difficulties of manning merchant ships all over the world.
The one-third of the French law seemed to be the irreducible minimum. But