Incidentally, it shows also the sort of discipline on board
these ships, the sort of hold kept on the passengers in the face of the
unforgiving sea. These people seemed to imagine it an optional matter:
whereas the order to leave the ship should be an order of the sternest
character, to be obeyed unquestioningly and promptly by every one on
board, with men to enforce it at once, and to carry it out methodically
and swiftly. And it is no use to say it cannot be done, for it can. It
has been done. The only requisite is manageableness of the ship herself
and of the numbers she carries on board. That is the great thing which
makes for safety. A commander should be able to hold his ship and
everything on board of her in the hollow of his hand, as it were. But
with the modern foolish trust in material, and with those floating
hotels, this has become impossible. A man may do his best, but he cannot
succeed in a task which from greed, or more likely from sheer stupidity,
has been made too great for anybody's strength.
The readers of _The English Review_, who cast a friendly eye nearly six
years ago on my Reminiscences, and know how much the merchant service,
ships and men, has been to me, will understand my indignation that those
men of whom (speaking in no sentimental phrase, but in the very truth of
feeling) I can't even now think otherwise than as brothers, have been put
by their commercial employers in the impossibility to perform efficiently
their plain duty; and this from motives which I shall not enumerate here,
but whose intrinsic unworthiness is plainly revealed by the greatness,
the miserable greatness, of that disaster.
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