on the High Seas
But we were not quite such an exhibition as the Arrogant. She showed like chemical works in full blast as we swept out of Bantry and headed south for the Scillies. Then up came the Blake (see Note VI.), a beautiful boat, giving easily to the swell that was lifting us already, and she dodged about left and right till we asked: ‘What are you trying to do?’ ‘Trying to get out of your smoke,’ said she, vomiting cascades of her own the while. Meantime the Fleet-rams were doing their best to blind and poison us, and the battleships sagged away to leeward looking like wet ricks ablaze.
It was not the ignominy of the thing—the mere dirt and filth—that annoyed one so much as the thought that there was no power in the State which owes its existence to the Navy whereby a decent supply of State-owned, State-dug coal could be assured to us. There had been a strike, and while masters and men were argle-bargling ashore Her Majesty’s ships were masquerading in the guise of chimney-sweeps on the high seas.
The delay, the disorder, the cruel extra work on stokers, not to mention the engineers, who at all times are worked pitilessly, is in Peace no more than merely brutal. In war it would be dangerous.
Four Hours at Full Speed
As if that were not enough, the swell that the battleships logged as light (Heaven forgive them!) began to heave our starboard screw out of the water. We raced and we raced and we raced, dizzily, thunderously, paralytically, hysterically, vibrating all down one side. It was, of course, in our four hours of full speed that the sea most delighted to lift us up on one finger and watch us kick. From 6 to 10 p.m. one screw twizzled for the most part in the circumambient ether, and the Chief Engineer—with coal-dust and oil driven under his skin—volunteered the information that life in his department was gay. He would have left a white mark on the Assistant-Engineer, whose work lay in the stokehold among a gang of new Irish stokers. Never but once have I been in our engine-rooms; and I do not go again till I can take with me their designer for four hours at full speed. The place is a little cramped and close, as you might say. A steel guard, designed to protect men from a certain toothed wheel round the shaft, shore through its bolts and sat down, much as a mudguard sits down on a bicycle-wheel. But the wheel it sat on was also of steel; spinning one hundred and ninety revolutions per minute. So there were fireworks, beautiful but embarrassing, of incandescent steel sparks, surrounding the Assistant-Engineer as with an Aurora Borealis. They turned the hose on the display, and at last knocked the guard sideways, and it fell down somewhere under the shaft, so that they were at liberty to devote their attention to the starboard thrust-block, which was a trifle loose. Indeed, they had been trying to wedge the latter when the fireworks began—all up their backs.
The thing that consoled them was the thought that they had not slowed down one single turn.
The Naval Engineer
‘She’s a giddy little thing,’ said the Chief Engineer. ‘Come down and have a look.’
I declined in suitable language. Some day, when I know more, I will write about engine-rooms and stokers’ accommodation—the manners and customs of Naval Engineers and their artificers. They are an amazing breed, these quiet, rather pale men, in whose hands lie the strength and power of the ship.
‘Just think what they’ve got to stand up to,’ says Twenty-One, with the beautiful justice of youth. ‘Of course, they are trained at Keyham and all that; but fancy doing your work with an eight-inch steam-pipe in the nape of your neck, an’ a dynamo buzzin’ up your back, an’ the whole blessed shoot whizzin’ round in the pit of your stomach! Then we jump about an’ curse if they don’t give us enough steam. I swear I think they’re no end good men in the engine room!’
If you doubt this, descend by the slippery steel ladders into the bluish copper-smelling haze of hurrying mechanism all crowded under the protective deck; crawl along the greasy foot-plates, and stand with your back against the lengthwise bulkhead that separates the desperately whirling twin engines. Wait under the low-browed supporting-columns till the roar and the quiver has soaked into every nerve of you; till your knees loosen and your heart begins to pump. Feel the floors lift below you to the jar and batter of the defrauded propeller as it draws out of its element. Try now to read the dizzying gauge-needles or find a meaning in the rumbled signals from the bridge. Creep into the stoke-hold—a boiler blistering either ear as you stoop—and taste what tinned air is like for a while. Face the intolerable white glare of the opened furnace doors; get into a bunker and see how they pass coal along and up and down; stand for five minutes with slice and ‘devil’ to such labour as the stoker endures for four hours.
His Hourly Risk
The gentleman with the little velvet slip between the gold rings on his sleeve does his unnoticed work among these things. If anything goes wrong, if he overlooks a subordinate’s error, he will not be wigged by the Admiral in God’s open air. The bill will be presented to him down here, under the two-inch steel deck, by the Power he has failed to control. He will be peeled, flayed, blinded, or boiled. That is his hourly risk. His duty shifts him from one ship to another, to good smooth and accessible engines, to vicious ones with a long record of deviltry, to lying engines that cannot do their work, to impostors with mysterious heart-breaking weaknesses, to new and untried gear fresh from the contractor’s hands, to boilers that will not make steam, to reducing-valves that will not reduce, and auxiliary engines for distilling or lighting that often give more trouble than the main concern. He must shift his methods for, and project himself into the soul of, each; humouring, adjusting, bullying, coaxing, refraining, risking, and daring as need arises.
Behind him is his own honour and reputation; the honour of his ship and her imperious demands; for there is no excuse in the Navy. If he fails in any one particular he severs just one nerve of the ship’s life. If he fails in all the ship dies—a prisoner to the set of the sea—a gift to the nearest enemy.
And, as I have seen him, he is infinitely patient, resourceful, and unhurried. However it might have been in the old days, when men clung obstinately to sticks and strings and cloths, the newer generation, bred to pole-masts, know that he is the king-pin of their system. Our Assistant-Engineer had been with the engines from the beginning, and one night he told me their story, utterly unconscious that there was anything out of the way in the noble little tale.
‘No End Good Men’
It was his business so to arrange that no single demand from the bridge should go unfulfilled for more than five seconds. To that ideal he toiled unsparingly with his Chief—a black sweating demon in his working hours, and a quiet student of professional papers in his scanty leisure.
‘An’ they come into the ward-room,’ says Twenty-One, ‘and you know they’ve been having a young hell of a time down below, but they never growl at us or get stuffy or anything. No end good men, I swear they are.’
‘Thank you, Twenty-One,’ I said. ‘I’ll let that stand for the whole Navy if you don’t mind.’
Notes
Note I. Paint And Gilding
A ship who attempted to dress on her service allowance of paint would in three months be as disreputable as a battery or regiment which kept its mess or band on the strict army footing. Therefore, over and above anything that they may secure by strategy and foresight, the officers must dip into their own pockets to supply the many trifles (none of them cheap) which make for the smartness of a ship. This
