The Daily News. TUESDAY, JUNE 11, 1911. THE SEAFARERS.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 14, 11 July 1911, Page 4

The Daily News. TUESDAY, JUNE 11, 1911. THE SEAFARERS.

When a disturbance takes place on a sailing ship that lias come across the world it seems to be a source of unctuous satisfaction to numbers of people that the seamen are "foreigners." The assumption seems to be that as the men •were not born under the British flag their fightableness, their bad language, and their indiscipline are explained. It is a comforting theory, but it "won't hold water." In the first place, angel men are very little use for the intolerable strain put upon them during a long sea voyage, with no society but that of their kind, none of the small things of everyday shore life that makes the wheels of existence run smoothly, and none of the refining influences of the wife, the mother or the daughter. The disturbances that set all tongues talking of these desperate foreigners in a small port are a part of the. daily routine of a great port. Foreign authorities have to deal with violent British seamen every day. Of course, the British seaman is regarded in foreign ports as a dangerous savage in the same degree as the foreign seaman is considered a desperate, character in British ports. It is all a matter of mental and physical reaction whether men are Scotch, Dutch, Italian, French, English, Russian or Norwegian. When you blame seafarers for not being saints you have probably led a sheltered kind of life and have had no temptation to "break out." All groups of men, irrespective of nationality, and who have been removed from civilisation, act similarly at times. We lift our hands in horror at the bushman who for a year has slogged strenuously in the lonely desolation of the forest and who is therefore mentally and physically unable to resist reactionary impulses when he gets to civilisation. We expect powerful men boiling over with physical energy to be cooped up for a third of a year on a ship and to behave like lambs; we wonder why the men who do the great things of the world —the explorers, prospectors, navigators, sailors, soldiers and engineers--"get off the handle," never having had the temptation to do it ourselves. When the strenuous ones of the world become anaemic and lamb-like, angelic and perfectly tame, the age of discovery, adventure, progress and exploration will cease. We need not admire the passions of the evil-doers, but we can try to understand the phenomenon of reaction. And if we want to get, in close touch with the feeling, we shall have to lose ourselves in the wilderness and return to the city, take a long* voyage with a small community of our owii sex and get to a port; wander for months in hills looking for minerals and return to a capital; or put in a period with an army which endures every kind of privation and is execrated by the armchair kind of person when its "members reach civilisation and are not angels. And we may sometimes Tcmcmber that reaction comes to those of our own blood as well as to foreigners.