Once in a great while there will be a purser, or some chap accompanying a special shipment of merchandise, perhaps one of Frank Buck's men with a flock of animals. In a blue moon you'll book with a Captain who has his wife aboard for a cruise, listing her as stewardess in the crew roster. But stewardess and supercargoes are the exception rather than the rule. On a deluxe cruise you’ll have twenty officers and two hundred to a thousand passengers, or ten passengers to one officer at best. On a freighter there are never more than twice as many passengers and usually the official family outnumbers the paying guests.
Anyone with the money to buy a ticket may sit next to you at dinner on a cruise, but when you go to meals on certain freighters, you'll be next to or opposite one of the officers. You know he'll be an interesting chap. The braid on his coat means he has worked hard to get where he is - no handsome cruise director, expert at inventing games, but a real he-man. Officers on freighters spend years climbing to their positions; the weaklings, the dullards and the inefficient are lost on the way up. You never need be afraid to introduce the officers to your acquaintances. The Captains may not be sprightly young blades, and occasionally the Chief Engineer will have a burr in his speech, but they're real men, men who have climbed to the top through their own efforts, men who face difficulties and conquer them, men who know themselves as well as they know the people of the world.
On one boat in three you'll meet a yarn-spinner, a salty old seagoing chap of the fiction type. But these fellows are rapidly fading out of the picture. The average ship Captain today is first a businessman, second a sailor. To call them ‘diamonds in the rough’ is unfair. Some of the most polished diplomats in the world sail the seven seas on freighters.
They aren't all salty, and they aren't all bowing and scraping polite young naval reserve officers. You can't classify the commanders you meet on boats, any more than you classify the men you meet at the heads of other business enterprises. That's one of the interesting things about freighter traveling. Each set of officers is as different as the line for whom they work, each ship is as different as the men who operate her. There are still a lot of old-fashioned 'characters' among the seafaring men of the maritime nations, but more and more a new race is coming to the fore. Once practically every ship had a buckaroo Mate and a tale-spinning Captain: today you will have to travel on two or three freighters before you find one of the old-fashioned characters out of Dana's ‘Two Years Before the Mast.’
You may see much, or little, of your ship's ruler. Your voyage may be aboard a vessel where the Captain stays very much to himself retiring because of lack of your language or for other reasons; or he may be a talkative old gent ready to escort you on a tour of the ship, or drive you to your cabin to escape his stories of the proper ways to raise sweet corn. Your officers may be rough and ready chaps, or polished reserved officers scraping and bowing at every opportunity, constantly the souls of politeness, speaking a dozen languages and entertaining in them all. You may find one kind or another, but no matter. Of one thing you can be sure, you’ll like them. And they'll like you, unless you go out of your way to be objectionable.” |
