The following consists of the front-matter and Chapter 2 of Sea Scouting and Seamanship for Boys by W. Baden-Powell, K.G., revised by Sir Robert Baden-Powell, Bart., reprinted 1939. Most of the publication is a seamanship manual. Only these sections deal with the nature and history of Sea Scouting.
This book -- Sea Scouting for Boys -- was written by my brother Warington.
It was under his guidance that I, when a youngster, began my Scouting as a Sea Scout.
He was himself both a sailor and a boy at heart and so his teaching told. I have never forgotten those breezy times and the things that I learned under him have had their life-long value for me.
Since the first edition of this book its author has passed to Higher Service, but to the end he remained as he had lived-a sailor and a boy.
It was largely thanks to his interest in boys and in seamanship that Sea Scouting became popular in the early days of our movement, so that when the Great War came suddenly upon the nation the Sea Scouts proved able at once to take over the duties of the Coastguards when these were called away to man the fleet. Thus the Scouts watched our Coasts from John O'Groats to the Land's End during the whole period of the War. Also they provided a considerable contingent of signallers, cooks and bridge boys to man the auxiliary fleet.
They so acquitted themselves that at the end of the war they received the public thanks of the Admiralty and of His Majesty the King himself.
This book by helping more boys in their turn to become handymen for their country will stand as a fitting memorial to the life and character of its author.
"England expects that every man will do his duty." So signalled Admiral Lord Nelson on October 21, 1805, on going into action off Cape Trafalgar.
The reason of this book is to help boys to be prepared to do their duty.
The safety of the whole British Empire depends -- Mother Country, Overseas State and Colony -- on every man being more of less a sailor. "More," that he may be prepared if called upon to do his duty afloat ; "less," that he may have sufficient knowledge of the sea and ships as a landsman to do his duty in preventing his country from relinquishing the command of the sea.
The boy who imbibes the elements of Seamanship and the sailor-touch by making the water, sea, river, or lake, his playground will grow into the man prepared to do his duty to his country, whether in Old England or her Colonies.
I have difficulty in writing on such wide and technical subjects as pertain to the sea and ships, in a manner of sufficiently elementary treatment and condensed form as is necessary for young boys and a small book. What the older boys "don't like they can lump," and what any boy does not understand be can ask of his Scoutmaster, and what the Scoutmaster wants better explanation or further information upon he can find detailed in the Admiralty Manual of Seamanship or Tait's New Seamanship.
This book is intended to be merely a chat with boys upon aquatic matters. It is not intended as a work of instruction for the sea profession, nor for the education of shore-going men into -Sea Scout matters. I have had many kindly meant suggestions made to me to add new and deeper matter ; in short, advanced seamanship and navigation. I would do it, but that I consider it would go beyond the useful limit for boys.
The boy scout movement is, as the merchants say, "a going concern," and sea scouting is merely a branch of the same organisation taking up nautical matters in further development of boy scout training, and it does not necessarily mean the boys taking to the sea as a profession afterwards. Sea scout training, by bringing the boys into intelligent contact with all pertaining to the sea in the attractive manner common to scouting, will give the boy some of the handiness, resourcefulness, pluck, and discipline of the seaman. The handiness which the boy picks up in this way is a form of character education which is certain to be of great value to him in after life, whatever profession he may take up.
The sea scout training will interest the boy and attract him to the study of seamanship, watermanship, and coastguard work. The free open air life of sea coast scouting, boating, and camping, added to his previous shore scout training, will furnish all the manly and character-making qualities that a parent could wish a son to develop.
Sea scout training differs from what is known as training ship education ; there the boy is intended for the sea profession, all else gives place to a life of drills and routine, a day and night, month and year, training with one object only in view, the sea. Should the boy find at the end of his ship schooling, as many do, that the sea life has become distasteful, too difficult, or, perhaps, uncertain, he may also find himself then unfitted for taking up any other line of employment.
With the sea scout, on the other hand, the training is merely his pastime and outing; he learns the sailor's touch and sea-going ways, he learns it as a game or sport, instead of having it drilled into him with irksome and often unintelligible routine of the "Training Ship."
The sea profession is, with our growing fleets both of Royal Navy and Mercantile Marine, being now more carefully nurtured, and the career of the sea will undoubtedly improve in condition and in the security of service the two cardinal faults of two-thirds of the Mercantile Marine service for many years past. The steadily growing demand, even in peace, for men and boys to man the Fleet is pointing out the absolute necessity of a large reserve in the Mercantile Marine to possibly draw from, and unless the conditions of living and security of employment in the Mercantile Marine are sufficiently attractive the quality of the personnel of that service will not be up to the requirements of Naval reserve.
In our oversea Dominions the "call of the sea " is of even greater moment at the present time than it is in the Mother Country, for the Dominions have new navies being built, and the personnel wherewith to man the ships as they come afloat has, to a large extent, yet to be organised and trained, and a reserve formed.
There is no need to sound the "call of the sea" in the ear of the boy scout, his training as a sea scout will put him in touch with the sea and ships, and gradually show him what the sea life is, and that he is soundly qualifying towards a very high foundation of sailor construction, while in no way relinquishing or unfitting himself for other branches or professions of life on shore.
The work of sea scouting will grow with the boy, beyond mere individual knowledge and outing pastime, into collective duties for the public good. The work of coast guarding, life saving, salvage, and so on will be undertaken by boat's crews and companies trained and equipped for the work under the boy scout organisation.
Such a lot of Scouts want to become Sea Scouts that it has become necessary to write a book specially designed to help them. Of course you know all that there is in the book Scouting for Boys. Well all that lot, goes with this, for all the rules and laws of Scouting apply to Sea Scouts. Then there are titles, qualifications, badges, and duties which have nothing to do with Shore Scouts, but everything to do with Sea Scouting.
Of course sailors know something about the sea and ships, but Scouts ought to know all about everything, not only what is going on to-day, but of the old times, the ways and deeds of early voyages, such as of Drake and Raleigh, the ships of Elizabeth's time, Nelson's time, and then our time. There are the stories of pirates, slavers, and privateers, very often drawn a long way off the truth, usually so as to fit the needs of the story of the book; here you will only read the true character of such men, no matter how they appear as heroes in fiction. Though they were Sea Scouts of the finest quality in fighting, or escaping, the pirates never held a single other quality that you know all good Scouts should hold. Take the ten points of Scout Law in your book, the pirate's acts were the exact opposite. He had no such thing as honour. He had no king or country to be loyal to. He never was useful to others, nor helped anyone, he only helped himself out of others. He was the enemy of all, not the friend. However you can read about him later on.
To some extent you may be puzzled by nautical words, but you will soon get to know them, and then you will see that if shore-going words had been written instead of sailors' language you never would learn the language of the sea, and the book would have to be chock-full of explanations; so I shall stick as far as possible, to "Jack's" simple lingo, and if you get hung up over a phrase it will be easy and useful to get it explained by your Scoutmaster.
This little book is not a complete work on seamanship and navigation, nor a history of the world, but, just as far as I can imagine your wants, a collection of the main points a Sea Scout ought to know. Other books going into greater detail will be mentioned, and your headquarters will no doubt get such books in time, and your Scoutmasters will read them, and so be able to instruct you on points you do not understand. But this book is intended to assist the Scoutmaster as well as the coxswain and crew, and also the inland boys; so, you harbour and sea coast boys, who know a lot about ships and boats already, do not go "shaking up in wind," saying, "rot, anyone knows all that," when you read a simple thing explained, remember there are lots of Scouts younger than you, and many inland boys who have scarcely ever seen a boat or a ship.
I am not going to tell you all you should know to be fit to command a battleship, but just enough for you to be able to handle a boat safely and to assist in harbour and coast work and to enable you to give useful and reliable information about your district waters, and about things you see happening, and above all to enable you to be useful in saving life or in preventing casualties occurring.
A Sea Scout must be a Boy Scout; therefore I may take it you have read the official hand-book called Scouting for Boys and also, therefore, you know the Scout Law and Regulations, and have qualified in Morse and semaphore signalling and all the other many requisitions.
Sea Scouting is simply a branch of Boy Scouting, but all your work as a Sea Scout is on or about the water, mostly in boats, It matters little whether your "ship" is a vessel. afloat or a building on shore, provided you can have your boat or boats at the headquarters, and are at the water's edge.
You will see in the official regulations for the "Organisation" all the ratings and qualifications now arranged for Sea Scouts. and you must keep an eye on the Scouter (monthly) for any changes. Uniform and badges also are matters of official settlement.
By far the greater part of your instruction can be done at home, especially if several Scouts meet together, and one who knows helps the others on in all the simple things at once, so as to clear the way and have only difficult things to tackle at the troop or patrol musters.
The training can be done on any kind of water large enough for boating. It would be well for inland companies to be in friendly touch with a seaside company so as to have an occasional outing on the sea coast to get instruction in sea-going work and life saving, etc.
The headquarters or boat-house, with her boats, can be made up by degrees into a jolly waterside camp; of course there must be some money for material, but all the work can be done by the Scouts, and there may be kind friends who will give the company a boat.
A great advantage of a creek for headquarters is that boating and all work can be done even in bad weather; and usually a bit of foreshore would be easily granted for landing stage and for hauling the boats upon, and in such quarters the property can, in most parts of this country, be left unguarded without much risk of loss.
Cruising in boats, perhaps coupled with camping out, is a great feature in Sea Scouting, it gives a splendid healthy outing, and teaches more watermanship in a day than you could learn from books in a month; however, before any cruising is attempted in boats it is of the utmost importance that the whole crew, and especially the person in command, should be thoroughly capable of handling the boat under oars. The crew must be able to row as a crew together, and to do all the work with the oars and boat hooks, head fasts, tow-lines, etc., smartly, quietly, without fault and immediately as may be wanted. Mere rowing, in however good style, is not enough; safety demands expert handling in getting alongside vessels, piers, and landing places, being taken in tow, and many other happening to boats.
No sails should ever be on board until the crew has for some time been perfect at ordinary handling. Nor should sail be hoisted while there is anyone in the boat who cannot swim, and never unless an expert at sailing is in charge of the boat.
Get some knowledge of the ways of the tides, how to rig and unrig the sails, the making a fire and cooking your food, setting a tent or extemporising a tent from sails, how to act in a squall ; in short, a hundred and one things, all of which are mere everyday nature to the real waterman. They are quite easy to learn, but you need at first an expert coxswain to guide the boat's crew, and his word must be unquestionable law ; each Scout must have his own duty of detail, and also his place in the general or combined work, there can be no "passengers." What one can do two will muddle.
In the matter of boats, it is likely that in most cases the first formation of a Sea Scout branch will be only a boat's crew or patrol even if more only with a boat or two. But do not get large boats if you can help ; a small boat that can be be ably handled by boys is much safer and pleasanter to use than a large heavy boat which is so cumbersome that she masters the crew.
A large boat can be quite as easily wrecked as a small one, and only boats that have become unmanageable are wrecked. A large boat undermanned --i.e., by boys-- will probably become unmanageable long before a small boat would, in which the boys are amply able to man her.
Of course there is the ridiculous extreme of putting an inland river skiff to do open sea beach work ; she is too shallow, too lightly built and too crank to do any such work. But you can usually reverse this order of things. An old ship's life-boat, or a "service cutter," which sometimes can be bought for a few shillings, or would, no doubt, be given to Boy Scouts, would make first-class camping boats for river or lake for inland companies of Sea Scouts.
Joining the Sea Scouts does not mean that you are going to take up the sea profession, it means that you are going to make boating, sailing, camping, fishing, sailoring, and watermanship your pastime for your spare time and holiday. As you go on you will see how useful Sea Scouts may be as Scouts, and also how useful the training is for life after you are no longer a Boy Scout; you may then so like the sea as to take up that profession absolutely, or you may join the Naval Volunteer Reserve, but in any event after the Sea Scout as a boy, you will know, and every one will know, that as a man you are a more useful citizen to your country than one who knows nothing beyond his own trade or business.
A seaman's knowledge is as essential to good Sea Scouting to-day as ever it was. The ships have changed, no doubt, and the telegraph conveys an almost instant knowledge of many things out of sight and which could not be known of in old days. But the sea, the winds, the tides, and the difficulties of pilotage are yet with us, and the fighting machine, or the ship of to-day, still needs sailors to handle her. Modern guns, torpedoes, engines, electrical and hydraulic gear need mechanicians to handle them, and no seaman's knowledge (except sea-legs and absence of sea-sickness) is wanted at that work; but the command of the ship and the handling of her gear are as they were of yore-seaman's work-and plus three times the speed, and therefore one-third the time to think.
Though a Sea Scout may usefully know something about everything, it by no means follows that an expert in any, or several branches of mechanics will be of the slightest use as a Sea Scout, unless he be also a seaman; and it is pretty certain that to be a high-class man in any or several of the scientific branches leaves no sufficient time to become also a true sailor. So Boy Scouts should become sailors first and experts when they find time.
Let me here make it clear once for all. By the word "sailor" I don't mean dressed as a sailor, nor drilled with rifle and cutlass, exercised at scrubbing decks, lashing up hammocks, or marching in "fours" astern of a brass band. I mean holding a sound knowledge of all you can learn about ships and seamanship, boats and watermanship, seas, tides, charts, pilotage, lookout work on the coast, saving life, flag signalling and morse semaphore. You get the foundation of these as a boy, and you'll be surprised as you grow how easily the higher knowledge will tumble into its proper place.
Your line is simply that of Boy Scouts who take up the work connected with the sea and rivers, and you add to such seamanship and watermanship all the varied Scout knowledge and backwoodsman's craft you have learned as a Boy Scout, and will still improve in learning. you work on well thought-out, principles, sound high principles of honour, chivalry, unquestioned instant obedience to all above you, self-command, and then unflinching command of all below you. Those are the principles necessary to the safe being of every craft afloat from a sailing boat up to a battleship. If you are sailing in a boat and the cox'n orders you to "let go the halliards," you hesitate and say, "What for, that squall won't come to us"; she's hit by the squall, you all tumble to leeward, somebody on top of you, you can't let go the halliard and the coil is now all foul, the boat fills, and . . . well it's all your fault for not obeying instantly your superior's order. That one moment of neglect may have drowned half the boat's crew, and even if no accident happens you've set a bad example. Always obey first and argue after, if you dare.
Another point, under those governing principles, in order to be able to instantly obey you must learn all you can in seamanship and in watermanship, for one order often covers several minor acts, and there is no time for thinking out or asking. A sailor doesn't think, he acts at once, because lie knows, otherwise he wouldn't be a sailor, he'd be only a lubber or a foreigner. Then, to command, you must go on learning all you can, for when vou are promoted to "coxswain" of the boat it should be your aim and pride that you never give an order that you couldn't carry out yourself.
Though the work of the Sea Scout to-day is merely his peaceful pastime and outing he is certainly useful in lifesaving and many other ways. War may be on in a very short time when least expected, and then indeed the Sea Scouts would be useful all around the coast as coastguards, or in patrol boats, and many other ways. See Scouts would be the "eyes of the coast" to report the appearance of suspicious-looking craft or of enemy's vessels.
So while you are Sea Scouting, whether ashore or afloat, take notice of all around you, and what you don't understand ask your coxswain or other superior about it and look it up afterwards.
Many acts that a seaman performs are the result of a combination of several branches of your training, and a fault in one may spoil the whole. Let us take an instance; you are away for an afternoon boat cruise, you are cox'n in charge, you go well up the creek with a flood tide and land to have a tea camp in a wood that comes down to high-water mark. You ram the boat ashore and make the painter fast to a post, all hands land, the tea camp goes grandly, yarns and songs have gone around and your orders for packing the gear and putting out the fire are obeyed; the sun is getting low and you have a long row back to the guard-ship. Well, what's the matter? Why, the boat is found left high and dry by the tide with a quarter of a mile of soft mud between her and the water. The crew can't walk on the mud, it is too deep to drag the boat; you are done for the night as to the boat, and perhaps are on the wrong side of the creek for getting aboard your guardship, when you try to walk home some miles below.
Now where is the fault? Simply several small things left undone or not noticed, any one of which would have saved the situation. You didn't look out the time of high water in. the tide table before starting. This fault would have been corrected had you noticed as you stepped on shore that the beach was wet for some feet above the line of water, for you know the height of water of a tide in many places actually begins to fall while the flood stream in direction is yet running up in the fairway. Also you didn't notice that schooner at anchor off the camp, swinging to the ebb tide, it was while the kettle was boiling and the sea was the all-absorbing thing of life. Any of these would have told you to get the boat off the bank and keep her afloat, but you had not even left a boat keeper in the boat. All these are unseamanlike neglects, and combined, they stranded your boat on the mud bank.
Then there is a very common fault, viz., full knowledge of a branch of work without knowledge of its application. Your bowman has learnt to make every knot or bend that any rope was ever twisted into, and landing at low water you order him to make the boat fast to the pile at the low-water end of the causeway or "hard." He does with great security. He fastens the end of the boat's painter (the bow rope) securely to the post at low water with the "bend," known as a "round turn and two half hitches," or perhaps a stun'sail halliard bend, fig. 2. Consequently, with a dry rope and a well-tied bend, when the tide rises the fastening becomes wet and very tight on the post. Up floats the boat with the rise of tide; and when you come down on the beach after your shore going and hail for the boat, the slumbering boat keeper wakes to find his rope grandly fast to the post some 6 to 10 feet below water. The seaman would have known almost instinctively that as tide rose it would lift the boat. A "bowline," fig. 3, would be the proper bend to make, for it would travel up the post as the boat floated higher, and so could be cast off any time. Of course, you order the bowman to strip and dive and cast it off the rope, if he can.
Sea Scouting includes such a lot of distinct branches, working one with the other, that it would fill a book to attempt to describe the combinations required for particular acts. But as you go on in training and practice you will soon see how to use the detail knowledge from different branches to carry out a particular object. Such, for instance, as the rescue by your boat from the beach of a small coaster's crew, whose vessel has dragged on to outlying rocks and is in danger of breaking up. The "detail" you bring into use is: --Launching the boat safely, knowledge of the set of the tide to make sure of reaching the wreck, ability in handling the boat under sail or oars, watermanship of how to get alongside with least danger, then also pilotage as to where to take the rescued crew for a safe landing, probably flag signalling to the shore that a tug might salve the vessel, and many more bits of special knowledge all put together act in the success of the object -- the rescue of the schooner's crew.
So you see it need not be all one Scout's knowledge. You have a boat's crew, and someone may know one branch, some another, and between you you make a useful unit.
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