SMALL-BOAT SAILING


A sailor is born, not made. And by "sailor" is meant, not the average
efficient and hopeless creature who is found to-day in the forecastle of
deepwater ships, but the man who will take a fabric compounded of wood
and iron and rope and canvas and compel it to obey his will on the
surface of the sea. Barring captains and mates of big ships, the small-
boat sailor is the real sailor. He knows--he must know--how to make the
wind carry his craft from one given point to another given point. He
must know about tides and rips and eddies, bar and channel markings, and
day and night signals; he must be wise in weather-lore; and he must be
sympathetically familiar with the peculiar qualities of his boat which
differentiate it from every other boat that was ever built and rigged. He
must know how to gentle her about, as one instance of a myriad, and to
fill her on the other tack without deadening her way or allowing her to
fall off too far.

The deepwater sailor of to-day needs know none of these things. And he
doesn't. He pulls and hauls as he is ordered, swabs decks, washes paint,
and chips iron-rust. He knows nothing, and cares less. Put him in a
small boat and he is helpless. He will cut an even better figure on the
hurricane deck of a horse.

I shall never forget my child-astonishment when I first encountered one
of these strange beings. He was a runaway English sailor. I was a lad
of twelve, with a decked-over, fourteen-foot, centre-board skiff which I
had taught myself to sail. I sat at his feet as at the feet of a god,
while he discoursed of strange lands and peoples, deeds of violence, and