Australian Tales - Setis

have a good ship and a good offing, you care no more for the equinoctial
gales than an albatross. But hold on a small bit, mates! I am sorry to
prognosticate bad cheer, but I must be faithful, or I should not be your
true friend. By-and-by old Time will make most of you shiver in the
wind. Old age comes prematurely to the sailor, and is frequently attended
with an unwelcome train of disorders, especially induced by hardship
and exposure, and sometimes by culpable neglect, and excesses of
various kinds. Rheumatism, and other painful affections of that class,
will probably coil round you, and disqualify you for able seamen's duty.
At the call of the boatswain — ‘all hands reef topsails’ you could no
more take your old place at the weather earing, than you could dance a
hornpipe on your head. Perhaps all your bones will ache as if you had
been under a coal shoot for twenty minutes, or been caught in a hurricane
in a cocoa-nut plantation. As a sailor, you will not be worth your beef
and biscuit; and if you are not fortunate enough to get a berth in the
galley as cook or cook's mate, you will be roused ashore like an old rusteaten
cable, or a sprung spar that can't be fished. Then if you have not
friends, who are able and willing to give you daily rations, and a place to
sling your hammock for the rest of your life, you must steer for the
Benevolent Asylum; or else wander about the streets, without home or
habitation, picking up a precarious meal where you can; sleeping under
gateways, or doorways, or under the trees in the Domain, with the dark
clouds for your blanket; varied only by a night's lodging, now and then,
in the watchhouse, by way of a luxury.
Shipmates! this is no overdrawn picture from imagination; and if you
doubt it, just pay a visit to the Benevolent Asylum any day in the week,
or get up early on any Sunday morning in the year, and go to the
Temperance Hall, to the breakfast for destitute outcasts. You would see
many poor old sailors, jury-rigged, stagger into those places, the latter
place in particular, deplorable looking objects, without a shot in the
locker, without a cover from the storm by night or by day; ill-clad,
hungry, diseased, and friendless. Poor old tars, whose best years have
been spent in hard service; but now, disabled and unfit for sea, they are
cast ashore like drift wood, or sea-weed, to be tossed about on the rocky
strand of poverty, by the surges of misfortune, till death terminates their
earthly sufferings, and they are rattled away to a pauper's grave.
I repeat it; this is no flight of fancy, but a sadly accurate, every-day
picture from real life, of which any of my readers, be they seamen or
landsmen, may satisfy themselves, without much trouble.
Messmates, help a brother sailor! All you able seamen can lend a hand
to some of these poor old disabled brother tars, if you have the will, and
many of them would be very grateful if you would throw them a tow-line
or a cork fender. But my present object is not so much to appeal to you
on their behalf as it is to warn you to look out for yourselves, and make a