The promotion of the admiral Author:Morley Roberts Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE POLICY OF THE POTLUCK. CONCERNING the permanent and immutable characteristics of ships, the unhappy man who has never had his limited range of vision broa... more »dened by a trip in a sailing ship must of necessity know little. He probably falls into the fallacy, common even among those who follow the sea, that a partial or entire clearance of her " crowd " will quite alter her nature ; whereas sailors being sailors— that is, people of certain fairly definite attributes —any given environment makes them much the same as those who preceded them. But entire changes in the personnel of a vessel rarejy take place. The officers change, but the crew remains: the crew goes, but officers stay. Or more frequently some few men are favourites of one or two of the officers, and they mingle with the new crew like yeast, till the ancient fermentation is visible once more. Ships (to speak thus of their companies) talk of the same subjects over a million miles of changing seas : they have a permanent stock of subjects. These include all which are perennially of interest to seafaring men, such as homes versus boarding-houses, but they include also something more individual, something more intimately connected with the essence of that particular vessel. And the one unending topic of interest on board the Pot luck was foreign politics. How this came about no one knew, though many theories were set afloat and sunk again every Sunday afternoon. Some said that the first captain of the Potluck was called Palmer- stone, and that he introduced the subject of England versus the world as soon as he came on board. Others swore that they had been told by a clerk in the employ of the firm that there had been a discussion over her very keel concerning the introduction into her frame of foreign oaks. ...« less