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“Yes, seamen, we know, are inured to hard gales;

Determined to stand by each other;

And the boast of the tar, wheresoever he sails,

Is the heart that can feel for another!”

And has not the passenger degenerated too? Is he as fine and enduring a man as his grandfather? is she as stout-hearted as her grandmother? The life of a voyager in the old days of the sailing-ship—I do not include John Company’s Indiamen—was almost as hard as that of the mariner. He had very often to fight, to lend a hand aloft, at the pumps, at the running rigging. His fare was an unpleasant kind of preserved fresh meat—I am speaking of fifty years ago—and such salt pork and beef as the sailors ate. His pudding was a dark and heavy compound of coarse flour and briny fat, and in the diary of a passenger at sea in 1820 it is told how the puddings were cooked: “July 16. As a particular favour obtained a piece of old canvas to make a pudding-bag, for all the nightcaps had disappeared. The pudding being finished, away it went to the coppers, and at two bells came to table smoking-hot. But a small difficulty presented itself; for then, and not till then, did we discover that the bag was smaller at top than at bottom, so that, in spite of our various attempts to dislodge it, there it stuck like a cork in a bottle, till every one in the mess had burnt his fingers, and then we thought of cutting away the canvas and liberating the pudding.” Such experiences as this made a hardy man of the passenger. There was no coddling. Everything was rough and rude; yet read the typical passenger’s writings and you will see he found such poetry and romance in the ocean and the voyage as must be utterly undiscoverable by the spoilt and languid traveller of to-day, sulkily perspiring over nap or whist in the luxurious smoking-room, or reading the magazine—that outruns its currency by a week only in a voyage to New Zealand—propped up by soft cushions in a ladies’ saloon radiant with sunshine and full of flowers. Like the early Jack, the early passenger came comparatively new to the sea and enjoyed its wonders and revelled in its freedom and drank in its inspirations. He was not to be daunted by food, by wet, by delay, by sea-sickness, by coarse rough captains. Why, here before me, in the same passenger’s diary in which the above extract occurs, I find the writer distinctly noting the picturesque in that most hideous of maritime calamities, want of water! “July 2. All hands employed catching rain water, the fresh water having given out. ’Twas interesting and romantic to see them running fore and aft with buckets, pitchers, jars, bottles, pots, pans, and kegs, or anything that would hold water. I was quietly enjoying the scene, when the clew of the mainsail above me gave way from the weight of water that had collected there, and I received the whole contents on my devoted head.” Quietly enjoying the scene! Is not this a very sublimation of the heroic capacity of extracting the Beautiful—not in the Bulwerian sense—out of the Dreadful!