Seaman

Many moons ago, I was a seaman.

You can put me in jail, but you cannot give me narrower quarters than as a seaman I have always had; you cannot give me coarser food than as a seaman I have always eaten; you cannot make me lonelier than as a seaman I have always been.

Tom is a seaman.

The seaman apprentice, sitting on a stool in a bar, ordered a beer while waiting for his basket of fish and chips.

Sami became an accomplished seaman.

I remained in the study, turning the whole matter over and over in my head, and feeling as sombre as ever I had done in my life. What was the past of this Trevor, pugilist, traveller, and gold-digger, and how had he placed himself in the power of this acid-faced seaman?

It is the 2nd of July of 2015. My friend Yaroslav is from the Ukraine, an ex-Soviet republic, and he grew up in the Soviet Era, when the ruble was money, but communism was the objective. He said that those good ol' childhood years were the best for him, and he feels nostalgic about them. Yaroslav has been a seaman engineer for some years. He has moved to Canada, and he studies English now, Russian being his first language and Ukrainian second. His original hair was near black, but is now whitening. He has blue eyes. He still looks like a big teenager. He is a pizza delivery man now at my local pizzeria, here at Lulu Island. We both discuss many deep, intellectual things at the pizza parlour, whilst he waits to go off for a delivery. He likes reading drama books, like Tolstoy. He likes drama movies, too. Unlike me, whose hobby is speculative fiction and astronomy, Yaroslav talks little of such things. My impression of Soviets were that they were all space-savvy. But he did mention once that within 1000 years, humanity will have to be really serious about space travel and out-of-Earth colonization, because our own Earth may fall into decay. I think that he tried to paraphrase Stephen Hawking the physicist. Yaroslav does not know Star Trek too well. I talked to him about teleportation, which scientists around the world are researching. They think that teleportation is not impossible.

The seaman had to clean the ship down to the copper bolts.

Gabriel was an able seaman.

The seaman is the entry-level rank of Navy crew members, serving aboard various types of ships.