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and very good craftsmen; a Swede, the most scientific sailmaker I ever met; another Swede, a steward, who really might have been called a British seaman since he had sailed out of London for over thirty years, a rather superior person; one Italian, an everlastingly smiling but a pugnacious character; one Frenchman, a most excellent sailor, tireless and indomitable under very difficult circumstances; one Hollander, whose placid manner of looking at the ship going to pieces under our feet I shall never forget, and one young, colourless, muscularly very strong German, of no particular character.  Of non-European crews, lascars and Kalashes, I have had very little experience, and that was only in one steamship and for something less than a year.  It was on the same occasion that I had my only sight of Chinese firemen.  Sight is the exact word.  One didn’t speak to them.  One saw them going along the decks, to and fro, characteristic figures with rolled-up pigtails, very dirty when coming off duty and very clean-faced when going on duty.  They never looked at anybody, and one never had occasion to address them directly.  Their appearances in the light of day were very regular, and yet somewhat ghostlike in their detachment and silence.
    But of the white crews of British ships and almost exclusively British in blood and descent, the immediate predecessors of the men whose worth the nation has discovered for itself to-day, I have had a thorough experience.  At first amongst them, then with them, I have shared all the conditions of their very special life.  For it was very special.  In my early days, starting out on a voyage was like being launched into Eternity.  I say advisedly Eternity instead of Space, because of the boundless silence which swallowed up one for eighty days — for one hundred days — for even yet more days of an existence without echoes and whispers.  Like Eternity itself!  For one can’t conceive a vocal Eternity.  An enormous silence, in which there was nothing to connect one with the Universe but the incessant wheeling about of the sun and other celestial bodies, the alternation of light and shadow, eternally chasing each other over the sky.  The time of the earth, though most carefully recorded by the half-hourly bells, did not count in reality.
    It was a special life, and the men were a very special kind of men.  By this I don’t mean to say they were more complex than the generality of mankind.  Neither were they very much simpler.  I have already admitted that man is a marvellous creature, and no doubt those particular men were marvellous enough in their way.  But in their collective capacity they can be best defined as men who lived under the command to do well, or perish utterly.  I have written of them with all the truth that was in me, and with an the impartiality of which I was capable.  Let me not be misunderstood in this statement.  Affection can be very exacting, and can easily miss fairness on the critical side.  I have looked upon them with a jealous eye, expecting perhaps even more than it was strictly fair to expect.  And no wonder — since I had elected to be one of them very deliberately, very completely, without any looking back or looking elsewhere.  The circumstances were such as to give me the feeling of complete identification, a very vivid comprehension that if I wasn’t one of them I was nothing at all.  But what was most difficult to detect was the nature of the deep impulses which these men obeyed.  What spirit was it that inspired the unfailing manifestations of their simple fidelity?  No outward cohesive force of compulsion or discipline was holding them together or had ever shaped their unexpressed standards.  It was very mysterious.  At last I came to the conclusion that it must be something in the nature of the life itself; the sea-life chosen blindly, embraced for the most part accidentally by those men who appeared but a loose agglomeration of individuals toiling for their living away from the eyes of mankind.  Who can tell how a tradition comes into the world?  We are children of the earth.  It may be that the noblest tradition is but the offspring of material conditions, of the hard necessities besetting men’s precarious lives.  But once it has been born it becomes a spirit.  Nothing can extinguish its force then.  Clouds of greedy selfishness, the subtle dialectics of revolt or fear, may obscure it for a time, but in