Training Ships

THE MAKING OF A SAILOR--Alan J. Villiers--Morrow ($4).

On a Baltic cruise in 1937, Alan John Villiers, author of The Cruise of the Conrad and of many a lyric tribute to the beauty of sailing vessels, was surprised to see six fine full-rigged ships in one week. Two were Swedish, two Danish, one was Norwegian, one Polish. Because four square-rigged grain ships had been lost that year, Author Villiers had almost given up hope for them when the six vessels in the Baltic raised his spirits. They were schoolships.

Built and maintained by public subscription or private endowment, to train Scandinavian and Polish boys in seamanship, they carried from 80 to 100 youngsters on cruises on which the boys did all the work--"hand, reef, and steer, and keep the ship up." Because there were no able-bodied seamen aboard, the ships lay at anchor for the first part of the cruise, until the boys learned to handle them. Almost all the world's navies now train sailors on sailing vessels, but only in the Baltic countries are citizens interested enough to provide such training for the merchant marine, to subscribe funds, maintain schoolships, trust their boys aboard them.*

As might be expected, a sailing enthusiast as hearty as Author Villiers is all for it. In The Making Of a Sailor he expresses his enthusiasm in a few pages of miscellaneous facts about schools and 191 photographs of sailing vessels: These show cadets at work, studying navigation, shooting the sun, splicing, reefing (also glimpses apparently included only because they make nice pictures of the Joseph Conrad at Tahiti, Sydney, the Sargasso Sea). Typical schoolship facts: of 4,000 boys trained in the Danish schoolship Georg Stage, 2,000 are in the Danish merchant marine, most of them officers. In 50 years as a schoolship the Georg Stage had only one accident, lost 22 boys when she was run down by a steamship in 1905.

*For an account of three U. S. boys who provided their own sea training see p. 41.

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