Adelaide: July
We reached Adelaide on a Saturday night, and on Sunday morning I went on shore and saw for the first time the dark-brown colouring, the scrub, and the gum-trees of Australia. It was supposed to be winter; but it was what we call in England early spring, because the almond trees were in full bloom. The atmosphere was dazzingly clear but cold. The whole colour and nature of the place, with its dark evergreens, brown earth, luxuriant winter vegetation, and its blue and lilac hills in the distance, and its limpid sky, reminded me of the south of France in winter; but Australia has a peculiar atmosphere of its own which, if properly painted, ought to make the fortune of a painter. There are some very clever Australian painters.
Adelaide is called the “Garden City” of Australia. It deserves the name, for it looks like a garden even in winter. The hotels are good, the streets spacious and wide boulevards, and there is the most beautifully situated steeplechase course I have ever seen. It being Sunday, everything was shut: this made occupation in the city less interesting than it might have been, and it was too cold to motor into the hills.
At Adelaide fourteen firemen left the ship forever. The trouble about firemen on the mail steamers that go to Australia is that they are white men. They cannot stand the heat of the tropics and they do not earn a living wage.
“Who,” as the chief engineer said to me, “would not be a fireman in the Red Sea in July, when the temperature is 120 in the shade? And who would not be a man who has to look after firemen?”
One cannot travel on a big liner without being amazed, or rather aghast, at the conditions under which the crew and the stewards live in the merchant service, and the terms under which the officers serve, so that one wonders how it happens that any one goes to sea; and one is inclined almost to agree with Dr. Johnson’s opinions on the subject.
“A ship,” he said, “is worse than a gaol. There is in a gaol better air, better company, better conveniences of every kind; and a ship has the additional disadvantage of being in danger. When men come to like a sea-life they are not fit to live on land.”
“Then,” said Boswell, “it would be cruel in a father to breed his son to the sea.”
“It would be cruel,” said Johnson, “in a father who thinks as I do. Men go to sea before they know the unhappiness of that way of life; and when they come to know it, they cannot escape from it, because it is then too late to choose another profession; as, indeed, is generally the case with men when they have once engaged in any particular way of life.”
But what is wrong with the officer’s life in the merchant service? it will be asked.
The answer is that he is miserably underpaid. In some cases he gets less than an able seaman gets in Australia. He has to buy linen, his uniform, many pairs of whites. His work is one of great responsibility. A captain when he has worked for twenty years gets no pension. Talk with any officer in the merchant service and his advice to any one who thinks of going to sea is, “Don’t.”
As to the men, a sailor’s life in a liner is about the same as a sailor’s life anywhere, but the accommodation of the stewards is miserable. The “glory-hole” where they sleep crowded together has an almost incredible insufficiency of space and air. And a first-class steward has to keep himself neat and clean: besides which he is extremely hard-worked.
Talking of the recent dock strike in London with one of the stewards, he told me they didn’t want to come out in sympathy with the strikers, because they got absolutely nothing by it. They were most of them made to come out on strike, with no prospect of any betterment in matters which concerned them.
I don’t believe the stewards’ accommodation in a ship is a bit better than it was forty years ago.