The whole story bears out this decision; and, the assessors’ judgment being unquestionably correct, what are we to think of the surveyors who could allow the brig to go to sea leaking like a sieve and then come into court and speak well of the vessel on the grounds that they had superintended the repairing of her and had even pointed out what should be done? In this case, happily, no lives were lost; the brig went ashore and her people left her. But, suppose she had gone down and drowned her crew out of hand, would not the Board of Trade, in the person of their representative, have been morally guilty of the death of the men? Assuredly they accepted the responsibility of that brig being in a fit condition to go to sea, as they accept the responsibility of every vessel which their representatives pass being seaworthy. This consideration ought surely to give significance to the system of supervision they now practise; and to make them ask themselves whether, having regard to the weight and solemnity of their self-imposed obligations, they have any right, as servants of the public, to persist in multiplying the perils of the deep by a sham and hollow method of inspection. There is not a shipmaster in the country who is not sensible of the necessity of a speedy reform in this matter; and there is not a passenger who would not eagerly join in the cry for reformation were even but a very little bit of the truth published in language which should be intelligible to the landsman.[79]
This was written five years ago. In five years, at the present rate of living, many changes happen; yet I do not find a single statement made in this paper that I can expunge or modify as a fact of to-day, as it was a fact five years since.
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I will not say that the Chinese junk is a handsomer and handier ship than the three-masted top-sail lug-rigged French smack that hails from Boulogne or Gravelines or Calais; but, viewed from a distance, they are not at all unlike. In truth, the horizon of these seas really offers nothing more gaunt, primitive, and cumbersome than the French lugger-rigged smack with her immensely round bows, great spring forward, raking pole-masts crowned with fantastic vanes, brown sails almost as square at the head as at the foot, and cut with an inclination towards the bows like those of a junk, showing more freeboard than many a seven hundred ton steam collier goes to sea with, her decks full of men dressed in a queer kind of blouses, huge sprawling boots and immense earrings, six sweeps or long oars perhaps over either side, an old man steering, and half a dozen women in red or blue petticoats and handkerchiefs tied over their heads, bustling about—the whole of them, from the ancient chap at the tiller to the small boy gutting fish on the forecastle, talking at once, and dropping their various jobs of sweeping, repairing nets, stringing fish, and the like, to gesticulate.