It was a good deal as a brine-pickled old British man-o'-wars-man of many years' service said to me a few days ago. "We never had no chance to know the Yanks afore the present, sir. We was allus eyin' each other distrustful like when we was in the same ports, and we was never gettin' much closer than the length o' a bar apart. Result was that we only seed the few things in them that was diff'rent from what we was, and they likewise wi' us. And o' course we never spotted the things in which we was just alike. All that I rec'lect o' the Yanks we used to run into on the China Station was that they was dressed diff'rent from us, talked diff'rent, and even swore diff'rent. The way they cussed struck me most of all. It was so earnest like. That was the thing I remembered 'em best for--as the blokes wot cussed like they was sayin' their prayers."
And so it was that the British and American bluejackets remembered each other for their differences rather than for the traits they had in common. Naturally, the picture was a distorted one on both sides. But when, with the coming of the American ships to European waters, the first chance to get together and become really acquainted was offered, each soon began to see the other in the proper perspective, and from the very first they have become better and better friends with every day that went by.
A good many British sailors have told me during the last few months of the increasing ties of friendship and kinship that were knitting between them and the "Yanks," but perhaps some extracts from an article which has just appeared in the little monthly magazine published by the Lower Deck of one of the battleships of the Grand Fleet will give the best idea of the way things have gone in this respect. It was signed "Bluejacket," and I have learned that the writer is a Seaman Gunner who, like the great majority of his mates, never met any of his cousins from across the Atlantic until the American Battleship Squadron joined the Grand Fleet last winter.
"We had all heard a good deal of the Yankee Fleet," it begins, "and a few of us had seen Yankee ships before in our voyages abroad; but to the most of us their manners and customs were a sealed book; and so many curious glances were cast toward their battleships, after their arrival to take their place beside us, just to catch a glimpse of an American sailor. We all had our various ideas of what they were really like, and I am giving away no secret when I say that we did not expect them to come up to our standard, or to be very much our own kind. This was inevitable owing to the feeling fostered by some sections of the British press during the preceding years of the war in which America had been neutral. Consequently we were more than a little surprised on meeting them ashore for the first time to find them such very good fellows. Perhaps the thing that surprised us most about them was to find that there was less difference between the English that they talked than there was between that of the Cockney and the Scotchman, or the Cornishman and the Yorkshireman, or the Welshman and the Lancashireman. That is to say, it was easier for the run of us to understand them than it was for us to understand each other. But the thing that we liked best about them was the quiet way they had of speaking. This, I must admit again, was also a great surprise to us, for the Yankee of our funny papers and music-halls was invariably very loud-mouthed and boastful. They had some rather fearful and wonderful slang, it is true, but the most of it was so expressive that we had not the least difficulty, first, in following it, and then beginning to adopt it for our own use. For instance, it was as easy to see that 'Some class, those shooting irons on the _Lizzie_,' referred to the 15-inch guns of the _Queen Elizabeth_, as it was to see that 'pretty nifty with his hot footing, hey bo?' referred to the way Charley Chaplin was kicking out with his feet in the movie (there, I have dropped into a 'Yankeeism' myself! Nothing could be more catching) at the Y.M.C.A. hut. We have probably been borrowing more of their language than they have of ours so far, for many of the Yankeeisms seem to go right to the spot so much better than ordinary English.