The flutter of that piece of red bunting showered sentiment on the

nations of the earth. I will not venture to say that in every case that

sentiment was of a friendly nature. Of hatred, half concealed or

concealed not at all, this is not the place to speak; and indeed the

little I have seen of it about the world was tainted with stupidity and

seemed to confess in its very violence the extreme poorness of its case.

But generally it was more in the nature of envious wonder qualified by a

half-concealed admiration.

That flag, which but for the Union Jack in the corner might have been

adopted by the most radical of revolutions, affirmed in its numbers the

stability of purpose, the continuity of effort and the greatness of

Britain's opportunity pursued steadily in the order and peace of the

world: that world which for twenty-five years or so after 1870 may be

said to have been living in holy calm and hushed silence with only now

and then a slight clink of metal, as if in some distant part of mankind's

habitation some restless body had stumbled over a heap of old armour.

II.

We who have learned by now what a world-war is like may be excused for

considering the disturbances of that period as insignificant brawls, mere

hole-and-corner scuffles. In the world, which memory depicts as so

wonderfully tranquil all over, it was the sea yet that was the safest

place. And the Red Ensign, commercial, industrial, historic, pervaded

the sea! Assertive only by its numbers, highly significant, and, under

its character of a trade--emblem, nationally expressive, it was symbolic

of old and new ideas, of conservatism and progress, of routine and

enterprise, of drudgery and adventure--and of a certain easy-going

optimism that would have appeared the Father of Sloth itself if it had

not been so stubbornly, so everlastingly active.

The unimaginative, hard-working men, great and small, who served this

flag afloat and ashore, nursed dumbly a mysterious sense of its

greatness. It sheltered magnificently their vagabond labours under the

sleepless eye of the sun. It held up the Edifice. But it crowned it

too. This is not the extravagance of a mixed metaphor. It is the sober

expression of a not very complex truth. Within that double function the

national life that flag represented so well went on in safety, assured of

its daily crust of bread for which we all pray and without which we would

have to give up faith, hope and charity, the intellectual conquests of

our minds and the sanctified strength of our labouring arms. I may

permit myself to speak of it in these terms because as a matter of fact

it was on that very symbol that I had founded my life and (as I have said

elsewhere in a moment of outspoken gratitude) had known for many years no

other roof above my head.

In those days that symbol was not particularly regarded. Superficially

and definitely it represented but one of the forms of national activity

rather remote from the close-knit organisations of other industries, a

kind of toil not immediately under the public eye. It was of its Navy

that the nation, looking out of the windows of its world-wide Edifice,

was proudly aware. And that was but fair. The Navy is the armed man at

the gate. An existence depending upon the sea must be guarded with a

jealous, sleepless vigilance, for the sea is but a fickle friend.

It had provoked conflicts, encouraged ambitions, and had lured some

nations to destruction--as we know. He--man or people--who, boasting of

long years of familiarity with the sea, neglects the strength and cunning

of his right hand is a fool. The pride and trust of the nation in its

Navy so strangely mingled with moments of neglect, caused by a

particularly thick-headed idealism, is perfectly justified. It is also

very proper: for it is good for a body of men conscious of a great

responsibility to feel themselves recognised, if only in that fallible,

imperfect and often irritating way in which recognition is sometimes

offered to the deserving.

But the Merchant Service had never to suffer from that sort of

irritation. No recognition was thrust on it offensively, and, truth to

say, it did not seem to concern itself unduly with the claims of its own

obscure merit. It had no consciousness. It had no words. It had no

time. To these busy men their work was but the ordinary labour of

earning a living; their duties in their ever-recurring round had, like

the sun itself, the commonness of daily things; their individual fidelity

was not so much united as merely co-ordinated by an aim that shone with

no spiritual lustre. They were everyday men. They were that, eminently.

When the great opportunity came to them to link arms in response to a

supreme call they received it with characteristic simplicity,

incorporating self-sacrifice into the texture of their common task, and,

as far as emotion went, framing the horror of mankind's catastrophic time

within the rigid rules of their professional conscience. And who can say

that they could have done better than this?

Such was their past both remote and near. It has been stubbornly

consistent, and as this consistency was based upon the character of men

fashioned by a very old tradition, there is no doubt that it will endure.

Such changes as came into the sea life have been for the main part

mechanical and affecting only the material conditions of that inbred

consistency. That men don't change is a profound truth. They don't

change because it is not necessary for them to change even if they could

accomplish that miracle. It is enough for them to be infinitely

adaptable--as the last four years have abundantly proved.

III.

Thus one may await the future without undue excitement and with unshaken

confidence. Whether the hues of sunrise are angry or benign, gorgeous or

sinister, we shall always have the same sky over our heads. Yet by a

kindly dispensation of Providence the human faculty of astonishment will

never lack food. What could be more surprising for instance, than the

calm invitation to Great Britain to discard the force and protection of

its Navy? It has been suggested, it has been proposed--I don't know

whether it has been pressed. Probably not much. For if the excursions

of audacious folly have no bounds that human eye can see, reason has the

habit of never straying very far away from its throne.

It is not the first time in history that excited voices have been heard

urging the warrior still panting from the fray to fling his tried weapons

on the altar of peace, for they would be needed no more! And such voices

have been, in undying hope or extreme weariness, listened to sometimes.

But not for long. After all every sort of shouting is a transitory

thing. It is the grim silence of facts that remains.

The British Merchant Service has been challenged in its supremacy before.

It will be challenged again. It may be even asked menacingly in the name

of some humanitarian doctrine or some empty ideal to step down

voluntarily from that place which it has managed to keep for so many

years. But I imagine that it will take more than words of brotherly love

or brotherly anger (which, as is well known, is the worst kind of anger)

to drive British seamen, armed or unarmed, from the seas. Firm in this

indestructible if not easily explained conviction, I can allow myself to

think placidly of that long, long future which I shall not see.

My confidence rests on the hearts of men who do not change, though they

may forget many things for a time and even forget to be themselves in a

moment of false enthusiasm. But of that I am not afraid. It will not be

for long. I know the men. Through the kindness of the Admiralty (which,

let me confess here in a white sheet, I repaid by the basest ingratitude)

I was permitted during the war to renew my contact with the British

seamen of the merchant service. It is to their generosity in recognising

me under the shore rust of twenty-five years as one of themselves that I

owe one of the deepest emotions of my life. Never for a moment did I

feel among them like an idle, wandering ghost from a distant past. They

talked to me seriously, openly, and with professional precision, of

facts, of events, of implements, I had never heard of in my time; but the

hands I grasped were like the hands of the generation which had trained

my youth and is now no more. I recognised the character of their

glances, the accent of their voices. Their moving tales of modern

instances were presented to me with that peculiar turn of mind flavoured

by the inherited humour and sagacity of the sea. I don't know what the

seaman of the future will be like. He may have to live all his days with

a telephone tied up to his head and bristle all over with scientific

antennae like a figure in a fantastic tale. But he will always be the

man revealed to us lately, immutable in his slight variations like the

closed path of this planet of ours on which he must find his exact

position once, at the very least, in every twenty-four hours.

The greatest desideratum of a sailor's life is to be "certain of his

position." It is a source of great worry at times, but I don't think

that it need be so at this time. Yet even the best position has its

dangers on account of the fickleness of the elements. But I think that,

left untrammelled to the individual effort of its creators and to the

collective spirit of its servants, the British Merchant Service will

manage to maintain its position on this restless and watery globe.

FLIGHT--1917

To begin at the end, I will say that the "landing" surprised me by a

slight and very characteristically "dead" sort of shock.

I may fairly call myself an amphibious creature. A good half of my

active existence has been passed in familiar contact with salt water, and

I was aware, theoretically, that water is not an elastic body: but it was

only then that I acquired the absolute conviction of the fact. I

remember distinctly the thought flashing through my head: "By Jove! it

isn't elastic!" Such is the illuminating force of a particular

experience.

This landing (on the water of the North Sea) was effected in a Short

biplane after one hour and twenty minutes in the air. I reckon every

minute like a miser counting his hoard, for, if what I've got is mine, I

am not likely now to increase the tale. That feeling is the effect of

age. It strikes me as I write that, when next time I leave the surface

of this globe, it won't be to soar bodily above it in the air. Quite the

contrary. And I am not thinking of a submarine either. . . .

But let us drop this dismal strain and go back logically to the

beginning. I must confess that I started on that flight in a state--I

won't say of fury, but of a most intense irritation. I don't remember

ever feeling so annoyed in my life.

It came about in this way. Two or three days before, I had been invited

to lunch at an R.N.A.S. station, and was made to feel very much at home

by the nicest lot of quietly interesting young men it had ever been my

good fortune to meet. Then I was taken into the sheds. I walked

respectfully round and round a lot of machines of all kinds, and the more

I looked at them the more I felt somehow that for all the effect they

produced on me they might have been so many land-vehicles of an eccentric

design. So I said to Commander O., who very kindly was conducting me:

"This is all very fine, but to realise what one is looking at, one must

have been up."

He said at once: "I'll give you a flight to-morrow if you like."

I postulated that it should be none of those "ten minutes in the air"

affairs. I wanted a real business flight. Commander O. assured me that

I would get "awfully bored," but I declared that I was willing to take

that risk. "Very well," he said. "Eleven o'clock to-morrow. Don't be

late."

I am sorry to say I was about two minutes late, which was enough,

however, for Commander O. to greet me with a shout from a great distance:

"Oh! You are coming, then!"

"Of course I am coming," I yelled indignantly.

He hurried up to me. "All right. There's your machine, and here's your

pilot. Come along."

A lot of officers closed round me, rushed me into a hut: two of them

began to button me into the coat, two more were ramming a cap on my head,

others stood around with goggles, with binoculars. . . I couldn't

understand the necessity of such haste. We weren't going to chase Fritz.

There was no sign of Fritz anywhere in the blue. Those dear boys did not

seem to notice my age--fifty-eight, if a day--nor my infirmities--a gouty

subject for years. This disregard was very flattering, and I tried to

live up to it, but the pace seemed to me terrific. They galloped me

across a vast expanse of open ground to the water's edge.

The machine on its carriage seemed as big as a cottage, and much more

imposing. My young pilot went up like a bird. There was an idle, able-

bodied ladder loafing against a shed within fifteen feet of me, but as

nobody seemed to notice it, I recommended myself mentally to Heaven and

started climbing after the pilot. The close view of the real fragility

of that rigid structure startled me considerably, while Commander O.

discomposed me still more by shouting repeatedly: "Don't put your foot

there!" I didn't know where to put my foot. There was a slight crack; I

heard some swear-words below me, and then with a supreme effort I rolled

in and dropped into a basket-chair, absolutely winded. A small crowd of

mechanics and officers were looking up at me from the ground, and while I

gasped visibly I thought to myself that they would be sure to put it down

to sheer nervousness. But I hadn't breath enough in my body to stick my

head out and shout down to them:

"You know, it isn't that at all!"

Generally I try not to think of my age and infirmities. They are not a

cheerful subject. But I was never so angry and disgusted with them as

during that minute or so before the machine took the water. As to my

feelings in the air, those who will read these lines will know their own,

which are so much nearer the mind and the heart than any writings of an

unprofessional can be. At first all my faculties were absorbed and as if

neutralised by the sheer novelty of the situation. The first to emerge

was the sense of security so much more perfect than in any small boat

I've ever been in; the, as it were, material, stillness, and immobility

(though it was a bumpy day). I very soon ceased to hear the roar of the

wind and engines--unless, indeed, some cylinders missed, when I became

acutely aware of that. Within the rigid spread of the powerful planes,

so strangely motionless I had sometimes the illusion of sitting as if by

enchantment in a block of suspended marble. Even while looking over at

the aeroplane's shadow running prettily over land and sea, I had the

impression of extreme slowness. I imagine that had she suddenly nose-

dived out of control, I would have gone to the final smash without a

single additional heartbeat. I am sure I would not have known. It is

doubtless otherwise with the man in control.

But there was no dive, and I returned to earth (after an hour and twenty

minutes) without having felt "bored" for a single second. I descended

(by the ladder) thinking that I would never go flying again. No, never

any more--lest its mysterious fascination, whose invisible wing had

brushed my heart up there, should change to unavailing regret in a man

too old for its glory.

SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE LOSS OF THE TITANIC--1912

It is with a certain bitterness that one must admit to oneself that the

late _S.S. Titanic_ had a "good press." It is perhaps because I have no

great practice of daily newspapers (I have never seen so many of them

together lying about my room) that the white spaces and the big lettering

of the headlines have an incongruously festive air to my eyes, a

disagreeable effect of a feverish exploitation of a sensational God-send.

And if ever a loss at sea fell under the definition, in the terms of a

bill of lading, of Act of God, this one does, in its magnitude,

suddenness and severity; and in the chastening influence it should have

on the self-confidence of mankind.

I say this with all the seriousness the occasion demands, though I have

neither the competence nor the wish to take a theological view of this

great misfortune, sending so many souls to their last account. It is but

a natural _reflection_. Another one flowing also from the phraseology of

bills of lading (a bill of lading is a shipping document limiting in

certain of its clauses the liability of the carrier) is that the "King's

Enemies" of a more or less overt sort are not altogether sorry that this

fatal mishap should strike the prestige of the greatest Merchant Service

of the world. I believe that not a thousand miles from these shores

certain public prints have betrayed in gothic letters their

satisfaction--to speak plainly--by rather ill-natured comments.

In what light one is to look at the action of the American Senate is more

difficult to say. From a certain point of view the sight of the august

senators of a great Power rushing to New York and beginning to bully and

badger the luckless "Yamsi"--on the very quay-side so to speak--seems to

furnish the Shakespearian touch of the comic to the real tragedy of the

fatuous drowning of all these people who to the last moment put their

trust in mere bigness, in the reckless affirmations of commercial men and

mere technicians and in the irresponsible paragraphs of the newspapers

booming these ships! Yes, a grim touch of comedy. One asks oneself what

these men are after, with this very provincial display of authority. I

beg my friends in the United States pardon for calling these zealous

senators men. I don't wish to be disrespectful. They may be of the

stature of demi-gods for all I know, but at that great distance from the

shores of effete Europe and in the presence of so many guileless dead,

their size seems diminished from this side. What are they after? What

is there for them to find out? We know what had happened. The ship

scraped her side against a piece of ice, and sank after floating for two

hours and a half, taking a lot of people down with her. What more can

they find out from the unfair badgering of the unhappy "Yamsi," or the

ruffianly abuse of the same.

"Yamsi," I should explain, is a mere code address, and I use it here

symbolically. I have seen commerce pretty close. I know what it is

worth, and I have no particular regard for commercial magnates, but one

must protest against these Bumble-like proceedings. Is it indignation at

the loss of so many lives which is at work here? Well, the American

railroads kill very many people during one single year, I dare say. Then

why don't these dignitaries come down on the presidents of their own

railroads, of which one can't say whether they are mere means of

transportation or a sort of gambling game for the use of American

plutocrats. Is it only an ardent and, upon the whole, praiseworthy

desire for information? But the reports of the inquiry tell us that the

august senators, though raising a lot of questions testifying to the

complete innocence and even blankness of their minds, are unable to

understand what the second officer is saying to them. We are so informed

by the press from the other side. Even such a simple expression as that

one of the look-out men was stationed in the "eyes of the ship" was too

much for the senators of the land of graphic expression. What it must

have been in the more recondite matters I won't even try to think,

because I have no mind for smiles just now. They were greatly exercised

about the sound of explosions heard when half the ship was under water

already. Was there one? Were there two? They seemed to be smelling a

rat there! Has not some charitable soul told them (what even schoolboys

who read sea stories know) that when a ship sinks from a leak like this,

a deck or two is always blown up; and that when a steamship goes down by

the head, the boilers may, and often do break adrift with a sound which

resembles the sound of an explosion? And they may, indeed, explode, for

all I know. In the only case I have seen of a steamship sinking there

was such a sound, but I didn't dive down after her to investigate. She

was not of 45,000 tons and declared unsinkable, but the sight was

impressive enough. I shall never forget the muffled, mysterious

detonation, the sudden agitation of the sea round the slowly raised

stern, and to this day I have in my eye the propeller, seen perfectly

still in its frame against a clear evening sky.

But perhaps the second officer has explained to them by this time this

and a few other little facts. Though why an officer of the British

merchant service should answer the questions of any king, emperor,

autocrat, or senator of any foreign power (as to an event in which a

British ship alone was concerned, and which did not even take place in

the territorial waters of that power) passes my understanding. The only

authority he is bound to answer is the Board of Trade. But with what

face the Board of Trade, which, having made the regulations for 10,000

ton ships, put its dear old bald head under its wing for ten years, took

it out only to shelve an important report, and with a dreary murmur,

"Unsinkable," put it back again, in the hope of not being disturbed for

another ten years, with what face it will be putting questions to that

man who has done his duty, as to the facts of this disaster and as to his

professional conduct in it--well, I don't know! I have the greatest

respect for our established authorities. I am a disciplined man, and I

have a natural indulgence for the weaknesses of human institutions; but I

will own that at times I have regretted their--how shall I say it?--their

imponderability. A Board of Trade--what is it? A Board of . . . I

believe the Speaker of the Irish Parliament is one of the members of it.

A ghost. Less than that; as yet a mere memory. An office with adequate

and no doubt comfortable furniture and a lot of perfectly irresponsible

gentlemen who exist packed in its equable atmosphere softly, as if in a

lot of cotton-wool, and with no care in the world; for there can be no

care without personal responsibility--such, for instance, as the seamen

have--those seamen from whose mouths this irresponsible institution can

take away the bread--as a disciplinary measure. Yes--it's all that. And

what more? The name of a politician--a party man! Less than nothing; a

mere void without as much as a shadow of responsibility cast into it from

that light in which move the masses of men who work, who deal in things

and face the realities--not the words--of this life.

Years ago I remember overhearing two genuine shellbacks of the old type

commenting on a ship's officer, who, if not exactly incompetent, did not

commend himself to their severe judgment of accomplished sailor-men. Said

one, resuming and concluding the discussion in a funnily judicial tone:

"The Board of Trade must have been drunk when they gave him his

certificate."

I confess that this notion of the Board of Trade as an entity having a

brain which could be overcome by the fumes of strong liquor charmed me

exceedingly. For then it would have been unlike the limited companies of

which some exasperated wit has once said that they had no souls to be

saved and no bodies to be kicked, and thus were free in this world and

the next from all the effective sanctions of conscientious conduct. But,

unfortunately, the picturesque pronouncement overheard by me was only a

characteristic sally of an annoyed sailor. The Board of Trade is

composed of bloodless departments. It has no limbs and no physiognomy,

or else at the forthcoming inquiry it might have paid to the victims of

the _Titanic_ disaster the small tribute of a blush. I ask myself

whether the Marine Department of the Board of Trade did really believe,

when they decided to shelve the report on equipment for a time, that a

ship of 45,000 tons, that _any_ ship, could be made practically

indestructible by means of water-tight bulkheads? It seems incredible to

anybody who had ever reflected upon the properties of material, such as

wood or steel. You can't, let builders say what they like, make a ship

of such dimensions as strong proportionately as a much smaller one. The

shocks our old whalers had to stand amongst the heavy floes in Baffin's

Bay were perfectly staggering, notwithstanding the most skilful handling,

and yet they lasted for years. The _Titanic_, if one may believe the

last reports, has only scraped against a piece of ice which, I suspect,

was not an enormously bulky and comparatively easily seen berg, but the

low edge of a floe--and sank. Leisurely enough, God knows--and here the

advantage of bulkheads comes in--for time is a great friend, a good

helper--though in this lamentable case these bulkheads served only to

prolong the agony of the passengers who could not be saved. But she

sank, causing, apart from the sorrow and the pity of the loss of so many

lives, a sort of surprised consternation that such a thing should have

happened at all. Why? You build a 45,000 tons hotel of thin steel

plates to secure the patronage of, say, a couple of thousand rich people

(for if it had been for the emigrant trade alone, there would have been

no such exaggeration of mere size), you decorate it in the style of the

Pharaohs or in the Louis Quinze style--I don't know which--and to please

the aforesaid fatuous handful of individuals, who have more money than

they know what to do with, and to the applause of two continents, you

launch that mass with two thousand people on board at twenty-one knots

across the sea--a perfect exhibition of the modern blind trust in mere

material and appliances. And then this happens. General uproar. The

blind trust in material and appliances has received a terrible shock. I

will say nothing of the credulity which accepts any statement which

specialists, technicians and office-people are pleased to make, whether

for purposes of gain or glory. You stand there astonished and hurt in

your profoundest sensibilities. But what else under the circumstances

could you expect?

For my part I could much sooner believe in an unsinkable ship of 3,000

tons than in one of 40,000 tons. It is one of those things that stand to

reason. You can't increase the thickness of scantling and plates

indefinitely. And the mere weight of this bigness is an added

disadvantage. In reading the reports, the first reflection which occurs

to one is that, if that luckless ship had been a couple of hundred feet

shorter, she would have probably gone clear of the danger. But then,

perhaps, she could not have had a swimming bath and a French cafe. That,

of course, is a serious consideration. I am well aware that those

responsible for her short and fatal existence ask us in desolate accents

to believe that if she had hit end on she would have survived. Which, by

a sort of coy implication, seems to mean that it was all the fault of the

officer of the watch (he is dead now) for trying to avoid the obstacle.

We shall have presently, in deference to commercial and industrial

interests, a new kind of seamanship. A very new and "progressive" kind.

If you see anything in the way, by no means try to avoid it; smash at it

full tilt. And then--and then only you shall see the triumph of

material, of clever contrivances, of the whole box of engineering tricks

in fact, and cover with glory a commercial concern of the most

unmitigated sort, a great Trust, and a great ship-building yard, justly

famed for the super-excellence of its material and workmanship.

Unsinkable! See? I told you she was unsinkable, if only handled in

accordance with the new seamanship. Everything's in that. And,

doubtless, the Board of Trade, if properly approached, would consent to

give the needed instructions to its examiners of Masters and Mates.

Behold the examination-room of the future. Enter to the grizzled

examiner a young man of modest aspect: "Are you well up in modern

seamanship?" "I hope so, sir." "H'm, let's see. You are at night on

the bridge in charge of a 150,000 tons ship, with a motor track, organ-

loft, etc., etc., with a full cargo of passengers, a full crew of 1,500

cafe waiters, two sailors and a boy, three collapsible boats as per Board

of Trade regulations, and going at your three-quarter speed of, say,

about forty knots. You perceive suddenly right ahead, and close to,

something that looks like a large ice-floe. What would you do?" "Put

the helm amidships." "Very well. Why?" "In order to hit end on." "On

what grounds should you endeavour to hit end on?" "Because we are taught

by our builders and masters that the heavier the smash, the smaller the

damage, and because the requirements of material should be attended to."

And so on and so on. The new seamanship: when in doubt try to ram

fairly--whatever's before you. Very simple. If only the _Titanic_ had

rammed that piece of ice (which was not a monstrous berg) fairly, every

puffing paragraph would have been vindicated in the eyes of the credulous

public which pays. But would it have been? Well, I doubt it. I am well

aware that in the eighties the steamship Arizona, one of the "greyhounds

of the ocean" in the jargon of that day, did run bows on against a very

unmistakable iceberg, and managed to get into port on her collision

bulkhead. But the _Arizona_ was not, if I remember rightly, 5,000 tons

register, let alone 45,000, and she was not going at twenty knots per

hour. I can't be perfectly certain at this distance of time, but her sea-

speed could not have been more than fourteen at the outside. Both these

facts made for safety. And, even if she had been engined to go twenty

knots, there would not have been behind that speed the enormous mass, so

difficult to check in its impetus, the terrific weight of which is bound

to do damage to itself or others at the slightest contact.

I assure you it is not for the vain pleasure of talking about my own poor

experiences, but only to illustrate my point, that I will relate here a

very unsensational little incident I witnessed now rather more than

twenty years ago in Sydney, N.S.W. Ships were beginning then to grow

bigger year after year, though, of course, the present dimensions were

not even dreamt of. I was standing on the Circular Quay with a Sydney

pilot watching a big mail steamship of one of our best-known companies

being brought alongside. We admired her lines, her noble appearance, and

were impressed by her size as well, though her length, I imagine, was

hardly half that of the _Titanic_.

She came into the Cove (as that part of the harbour is called), of course

very slowly, and at some hundred feet or so short of the quay she lost

her way. That quay was then a wooden one, a fine structure of mighty

piles and stringers bearing a roadway--a thing of great strength. The

ship, as I have said before, stopped moving when some hundred feet from

it. Then her engines were rung on slow ahead, and immediately rung off

again. The propeller made just about five turns, I should say. She

began to move, stealing on, so to speak, without a ripple; coming

alongside with the utmost gentleness. I went on looking her over, very

much interested, but the man with me, the pilot, muttered under his

breath: "Too much, too much." His exercised judgment had warned him of

what I did not even suspect. But I believe that neither of us was

exactly prepared for what happened. There was a faint concussion of the

ground under our feet, a groaning of piles, a snapping of great iron

bolts, and with a sound of ripping and splintering, as when a tree is

blown down by the wind, a great strong piece of wood, a baulk of squared

timber, was displaced several feet as if by enchantment. I looked at my

companion in amazement. "I could not have believed it," I declared.

"No," he said. "You would not have thought she would have cracked an

egg--eh?"

I certainly wouldn't have thought that. He shook his head, and added:

"Ah! These great, big things, they want some handling."

Some months afterwards I was back in Sydney. The same pilot brought me

in from sea. And I found the same steamship, or else another as like her

as two peas, lying at anchor not far from us. The pilot told me she had

arrived the day before, and that he was to take her alongside to-morrow.

I reminded him jocularly of the damage to the quay. "Oh!" he said, "we

are not allowed now to bring them in under their own steam. We are using

tugs."

A very wise regulation. And this is my point--that size is to a certain

extent an element of weakness. The bigger the ship, the more delicately

she must be handled. Here is a contact which, in the pilot's own words,

you wouldn't think could have cracked an egg; with the astonishing result

of something like eighty feet of good strong wooden quay shaken loose,

iron bolts snapped, a baulk of stout timber splintered. Now, suppose

that quay had been of granite (as surely it is now)--or, instead of the

quay, if there had been, say, a North Atlantic fog there, with a full-

grown iceberg in it awaiting the gentle contact of a ship groping its way

along blindfold? Something would have been hurt, but it would not have

been the iceberg.

Apparently, there is a point in development when it ceases to be a true

progress--in trade, in games, in the marvellous handiwork of men, and

even in their demands and desires and aspirations of the moral and mental

kind. There is a point when progress, to remain a real advance, must

change slightly the direction of its line. But this is a wide question.

What I wanted to point out here is--that the old _Arizona_, the marvel of

her day, was proportionately stronger, handier, better equipped, than

this triumph of modern naval architecture, the loss of which, in common

parlance, will remain the sensation of this year. The clatter of the

presses has been worthy of the tonnage, of the preliminary paeans of

triumph round that vanished hull, of the reckless statements, and

elaborate descriptions of its ornate splendour. A great babble of news

(and what sort of news too, good heavens!) and eager comment has arisen

around this catastrophe, though it seems to me that a less strident note

would have been more becoming in the presence of so many victims left

struggling on the sea, of lives miserably thrown away for nothing, or

worse than nothing: for false standards of achievement, to satisfy a

vulgar demand of a few moneyed people for a banal hotel luxury--the only

one they can understand--and because the big ship pays, in one way or

another: in money or in advertising value.

It is in more ways than one a very ugly business, and a mere scrape along

the ship's side, so slight that, if reports are to be believed, it did

not interrupt a card party in the gorgeously fitted (but in chaste style)

smoking-room--or was it in the delightful French cafe?--is enough to

bring on the exposure. All the people on board existed under a sense of

false security. How false, it has been sufficiently demonstrated. And

the fact which seems undoubted, that some of them actually were reluctant

to enter the boats when told to do so, shows the strength of that

falsehood. Incidentally, it shows also the sort of discipline on board

these ships, the sort of hold kept on the passengers in the face of the

unforgiving sea. These people seemed to imagine it an optional matter:

whereas the order to leave the ship should be an order of the sternest

character, to be obeyed unquestioningly and promptly by every one on

board, with men to enforce it at once, and to carry it out methodically

and swiftly. And it is no use to say it cannot be done, for it can. It

has been done. The only requisite is manageableness of the ship herself

and of the numbers she carries on board. That is the great thing which

makes for safety. A commander should be able to hold his ship and

everything on board of her in the hollow of his hand, as it were. But

with the modern foolish trust in material, and with those floating

hotels, this has become impossible. A man may do his best, but he cannot

succeed in a task which from greed, or more likely from sheer stupidity,

has been made too great for anybody's strength.

The readers of _The English Review_, who cast a friendly eye nearly six

years ago on my Reminiscences, and know how much the merchant service,

ships and men, has been to me, will understand my indignation that those

men of whom (speaking in no sentimental phrase, but in the very truth of

feeling) I can't even now think otherwise than as brothers, have been put

by their commercial employers in the impossibility to perform efficiently

their plain duty; and this from motives which I shall not enumerate here,

but whose intrinsic unworthiness is plainly revealed by the greatness,

the miserable greatness, of that disaster. Some of them have perished.

To die for commerce is hard enough, but to go under that sea we have been

trained to combat, with a sense of failure in the supreme duty of one's

calling is indeed a bitter fate. Thus they are gone, and the

responsibility remains with the living who will have no difficulty in

replacing them by others, just as good, at the same wages. It was their

bitter fate. But I, who can look at some arduous years when their duty

was my duty too, and their feelings were my feelings, can remember some

of us who once upon a time were more fortunate.

It is of them that I would talk a little, for my own comfort partly, and

also because I am sticking all the time to my subject to illustrate my

point, the point of manageableness which I have raised just now. Since

the memory of the lucky _Arizona_ has been evoked by others than myself,

and made use of by me for my own purpose, let me call up the ghost of

another ship of that distant day whose less lucky destiny inculcates

another lesson making for my argument. The _Douro_, a ship belonging to

the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, was rather less than one-tenth the

measurement of the _Titanic_. Yet, strange as it may appear to the

ineffable hotel exquisites who form the bulk of the first-class Cross-

Atlantic Passengers, people of position and wealth and refinement did not

consider it an intolerable hardship to travel in her, even all the way

from South America; this being the service she was engaged upon. Of her

speed I know nothing, but it must have been the average of the period,

and the decorations of her saloons were, I dare say, quite up to the

mark; but I doubt if her birth had been boastfully paragraphed all round

the Press, because that was not the fashion of the time. She was not a

mass of material gorgeously furnished and upholstered. She was a ship.

And she was not, in the apt words of an article by Commander C.

Crutchley, R.N.R., which I have just read, "run by a sort of hotel

syndicate composed of the Chief Engineer, the Purser, and the Captain,"

as these monstrous Atlantic ferries are. She was really commanded,

manned, and equipped as a ship meant to keep the sea: a ship first and

last in the fullest meaning of the term, as the fact I am going to relate

will show.

She was off the Spanish coast, homeward bound, and fairly full, just like

the _Titanic_; and further, the proportion of her crew to her passengers,

I remember quite well, was very much the same. The exact number of souls

on board I have forgotten. It might have been nearly three hundred,

certainly not more. The night was moonlit, but hazy, the weather fine

with a heavy swell running from the westward, which means that she must

have been rolling a great deal, and in that respect the conditions for

her were worse than in the case of the _Titanic_. Some time either just

before or just after midnight, to the best of my recollection, she was

run into amidships and at right angles by a large steamer which after the

blow backed out, and, herself apparently damaged, remained motionless at

some distance.

My recollection is that the _Douro_ remained afloat after the collision

for fifteen minutes or thereabouts. It might have been twenty, but

certainly something under the half-hour. In that time the boats were

lowered, all the passengers put into them, and the lot shoved off. There

was no time to do anything more. All the crew of the _Douro_ went down

with her, literally without a murmur. When she went she plunged bodily

down like a stone. The only members of the ship's company who survived

were the third officer, who was from the first ordered to take charge of

the boats, and the seamen told off to man them, two in each. Nobody else

was picked up. A quartermaster, one of the saved in the way of duty,

with whom I talked a month or so afterwards, told me that they pulled up

to the spot, but could neither see a head nor hear the faintest cry.

But I have forgotten. A passenger was drowned. She was a lady's maid

who, frenzied with terror, refused to leave the ship. One of the boats

waited near by till the chief officer, finding himself absolutely unable

to tear the girl away from the rail to which she dung with a frantic

grasp, ordered the boat away out of danger. My quartermaster told me

that he spoke over to them in his ordinary voice, and this was the last

sound heard before the ship sank.

The rest is silence. I daresay there was the usual official inquiry, but

who cared for it? That sort of thing speaks for itself with no uncertain

voice; though the papers, I remember, gave the event no space to speak

of: no large headlines--no headlines at all. You see it was not the

fashion at the time. A seaman-like piece of work, of which one cherishes

the old memory at this juncture more than ever before. She was a ship

commanded, manned, equipped--not a sort of marine Ritz, proclaimed

unsinkable and sent adrift with its casual population upon the sea,

without enough boats, without enough seamen (but with a Parisian cafe and

four hundred of poor devils of waiters) to meet dangers which, let the

engineers say what they like, lurk always amongst the waves; sent with a

blind trust in mere material, light-heartedly, to a most miserable, most

fatuous disaster.

And there are, too, many ugly developments about this tragedy. The rush

of the senatorial inquiry before the poor wretches escaped from the jaws

of death had time to draw breath, the vituperative abuse of a man no more

guilty than others in this matter, and the suspicion of this aimless fuss

being a political move to get home on the M.T. Company, into which, in

common parlance, the United States Government has got its knife, I don't

pretend to understand why, though with the rest of the world I am aware

of the fact. Perhaps there may be an excellent and worthy reason for it;

but I venture to suggest that to take advantage of so many pitiful

corpses, is not pretty. And the exploiting of the mere sensation on the

other side is not pretty in its wealth of heartless inventions. Neither

is the welter of Marconi lies which has not been sent vibrating without

some reason, for which it would be nauseous to inquire too closely. And

the calumnious, baseless, gratuitous, circumstantial lie charging poor

Captain Smith with desertion of his post by means of suicide is the

vilest and most ugly thing of all in this outburst of journalistic

enterprise, without feeling, without honour, without decency.

But all this has its moral. And that other sinking which I have related

here and to the memory of which a seaman turns with relief and

thankfulness has its moral too. Yes, material may fail, and men, too,

may fail sometimes; but more often men, when they are given the chance,

will prove themselves truer than steel, that wonderful thin steel from

which the sides and the bulkheads of our modern sea-leviathans are made.

CERTAIN ASPECTS OF THE ADMIRABLE INQUIRY INTO THE LOSS OF THE

TITANIC--1912

I have been taken to task by a friend of mine on the "other side" for my

strictures on Senator Smith's investigation into the loss of the

_Titanic_, in the number of _The English Review_ for May, 1912. I will

admit that the motives of the investigation may have been excellent, and

probably were; my criticism bore mainly on matters of form and also on

the point of efficiency. In that respect I have nothing to retract. The

Senators of the Commission had absolutely no knowledge and no practice to

guide them in the conduct of such an investigation; and this fact gave an

air of unreality to their zealous exertions. I think that even in the

United States there is some regret that this zeal of theirs was not

tempered by a large dose of wisdom. It is fitting that people who rush

with such ardour to the work of putting questions to men yet gasping from

a narrow escape should have, I wouldn't say a tincture of technical

information, but enough knowledge of the subject to direct the trend of

their inquiry. The newspapers of two continents have noted the remarks

of the President of the Senatorial Commission with comments which I will

not reproduce here, having a scant respect for the "organs of public

opinion," as they fondly believe themselves to be. The absolute value of

their remarks was about as great as the value of the investigation they

either mocked at or extolled. To the United States Senate I did not

intend to be disrespectful. I have for that body, of which one hears

mostly in connection with tariffs, as much reverence as the best of

Americans. To manifest more or less would be an impertinence in a

stranger. I have expressed myself with less reserve on our Board of

Trade. That was done under the influence of warm feelings. We were all

feeling warmly on the matter at that time. But, at any rate, our Board

of Trade Inquiry, conducted by an experienced President, discovered a

very interesting fact on the very second day of its sitting: the fact

that the water-tight doors in the bulkheads of that wonder of naval

architecture could be opened down below by any irresponsible person. Thus

the famous closing apparatus on the bridge, paraded as a device of

greater safety, with its attachments of warning bells, coloured lights,

and all these pretty-pretties, was, in the case of this ship, little

better than a technical farce.

It is amusing, if anything connected with this stupid catastrophe can be

amusing, to see the secretly crestfallen attitude of technicians. They

are the high priests of the modern cult of perfected material and of

mechanical appliances, and would fain forbid the profane from inquiring

into its mysteries. We are the masters of progress, they say, and you

should remain respectfully silent. And they take refuge behind their

mathematics. I have the greatest regard for mathematics as an exercise

of mind. It is the only manner of thinking which approaches the Divine.

But mere calculations, of which these men make so much, when unassisted

by imagination and when they have gained mastery over common sense, are

the most deceptive exercises of intellect. Two and two are four, and two

are six. That is immutable; you may trust your soul to that; but you

must be certain first of your quantities. I know how the strength of

materials can be calculated away, and also the evidence of one's senses.

For it is by some sort of calculation involving weights and levels that

the technicians responsible for the _Titanic_ persuaded themselves that a

ship _not divided_ by water-tight compartments could be "unsinkable."

Because, you know, she was not divided. You and I, and our little boys,

when we want to divide, say, a box, take care to procure a piece of wood

which will reach from the bottom to the lid. We know that if it does not

reach all the way up, the box will not be divided into two compartments.

It will be only partly divided. The _Titanic_ was only partly divided.

She was just sufficiently divided to drown some poor devils like rats in

a trap. It is probable that they would have perished in any case, but it

is a particularly horrible fate to die boxed up like this. Yes, she was

sufficiently divided for that, but not sufficiently divided to prevent

the water flowing over.

Therefore to a plain man who knows something of mathematics but is not

bemused by calculations, she was, from the point of view of

"unsinkability," not divided at all. What would you say of people who

would boast of a fireproof building, an hotel, for instance, saying, "Oh,

we have it divided by fireproof bulkheads which would localise any

outbreak," and if you were to discover on closer inspection that these

bulkheads closed no more than two-thirds of the openings they were meant

to close, leaving above an open space through which draught, smoke, and

fire could rush from one end of the building to the other? And,

furthermore, that those partitions, being too high to climb over, the

people confined in each menaced compartment had to stay there and become

asphyxiated or roasted, because no exits to the outside, say to the roof,

had been provided! What would you think of the intelligence or candour

of these advertising people? What would you think of them? And yet,

apart from the obvious difference in the action of fire and water, the

cases are essentially the same.

It would strike you and me and our little boys (who are not engineers

yet) that to approach--I won't say attain--somewhere near absolute

safety, the divisions to keep out water should extend from the bottom

right up to the uppermost deck of _the hull_. I repeat, the _hull_,

because there are above the hull the decks of the superstructures of

which we need not take account. And further, as a provision of the

commonest humanity, that each of these compartments should have a

perfectly independent and free access to that uppermost deck: that is,

into the open. Nothing less will do. Division by bulkheads that really

divide, and free access to the deck from every water-tight compartment.

Then the responsible man in the moment of danger and in the exercise of

his judgment could close all the doors of these water-tight bulkheads by

whatever clever contrivance has been invented for the purpose, without a

qualm at the awful thought that he may be shutting up some of his fellow

creatures in a death-trap; that he may be sacrificing the lives of men

who, down there, are sticking to the posts of duty as the engine-room

staffs of the Merchant Service have never failed to do. I know very well

that the engineers of a ship in a moment of emergency are not quaking for

their lives, but, as far as I have known them, attend calmly to their

duty. We all must die; but, hang it all, a man ought to be given a

chance, if not for his life, then at least to die decently. It's bad

enough to have to stick down there when something disastrous is going on

and any moment may be your last; but to be drowned shut up under deck is

too bad. Some men of the _Titanic_ died like that, it is to be feared.

Compartmented, so to speak. Just think what it means! Nothing can

approach the horror of that fate except being buried alive in a cave, or

in a mine, or in your family vault.

So, once more: continuous bulkheads--a clear way of escape to the deck

out of each water-tight compartment. Nothing less. And if specialists,

the precious specialists of the sort that builds "unsinkable ships," tell

you that it cannot be done, don't you believe them. It can be done, and

they are quite clever enough to do it too. The objections they will

raise, however disguised in the solemn mystery of technical phrases, will

not be technical, but commercial. I assure you that there is not much

mystery about a ship of that sort. She is a tank. She is a tank ribbed,

joisted, stayed, but she is no greater mystery than a tank. The

_Titanic_ was a tank eight hundred feet long, fitted as an hotel, with

corridors, bed-rooms, halls, and so on (not a very mysterious arrangement

truly), and for the hazards of her existence I should think about as

strong as a Huntley and Palmer biscuit-tin. I make this comparison

because Huntley and Palmer biscuit-tins, being almost a national

institution, are probably known to all my readers. Well, about that

strong, and perhaps not quite so strong. Just look at the side of such a

tin, and then think of a 50,000 ton ship, and try to imagine what the

thickness of her plates should be to approach anywhere the relative

solidity of that biscuit-tin. In my varied and adventurous career I have

been thrilled by the sight of a Huntley and Palmer biscuit-tin kicked by

a mule sky-high, as the saying is. It came back to earth smiling, with

only a sort of dimple on one of its cheeks. A proportionately severe

blow would have burst the side of the _Titanic_ or any other "triumph of

modern naval architecture" like brown paper--I am willing to bet.

I am not saying this by way of disparagement. There is reason in things.

You can't make a 50,000 ton ship as strong as a Huntley and Palmer

biscuit-tin. But there is also reason in the way one accepts facts, and

I refuse to be awed by the size of a tank bigger than any other tank that

ever went afloat to its doom. The people responsible for her, though

disconcerted in their hearts by the exposure of that disaster, are giving

themselves airs of superiority--priests of an Oracle which has failed,

but still must remain the Oracle. The assumption is that they are

ministers of progress. But the mere increase of size is not progress. If

it were, elephantiasis, which causes a man's legs to become as large as

tree-trunks, would be a sort of progress, whereas it is nothing but a

very ugly disease. Yet directly this very disconcerting catastrophe

happened, the servants of the silly Oracle began to cry: "It's no use!

You can't resist progress. The big ship has come to stay." Well, let

her stay on, then, in God's name! But she isn't a servant of progress in

any sense. She is the servant of commercialism. For progress, if

dealing with the problems of a material world, has some sort of moral

aspect--if only, say, that of conquest, which has its distinct value

since man is a conquering animal. But bigness is mere exaggeration. The

men responsible for these big ships have been moved by considerations of

profit to be made by the questionable means of pandering to an absurd and

vulgar demand for banal luxury--the seaside hotel luxury. One even asks

oneself whether there was such a demand? It is inconceivable to think

that there are people who can't spend five days of their life without a

suite of apartments, cafes, bands, and such-like refined delights. I

suspect that the public is not so very guilty in this matter. These

things were pushed on to it in the usual course of trade competition. If

to-morrow you were to take all these luxuries away, the public would

still travel. I don't despair of mankind. I believe that if, by some

catastrophic miracle all ships of every kind were to disappear off the

face of the waters, together with the means of replacing them, there

would be found, before the end of the week, men (millionaires, perhaps)

cheerfully putting out to sea in bath-tubs for a fresh start. We are all

like that. This sort of spirit lives in mankind still uncorrupted by the

so-called refinements, the ingenuity of tradesmen, who look always for

something new to sell, offers to the public.

Let her stay,--I mean the big ship--since she has come to stay. I only

object to the attitude of the people, who, having called her into being

and having romanced (to speak politely) about her, assume a detached sort

of superiority, goodness only knows why, and raise difficulties in the

way of every suggestion--difficulties about boats, about bulkheads, about

discipline, about davits, all sorts of difficulties. To most of them the

only answer would be: "Where there's a will there's a way"--the most wise

of proverbs. But some of these objections are really too stupid for

anything. I shall try to give an instance of what I mean.

This Inquiry is admirably conducted. I am not alluding to the lawyers

representing "various interests," who are trying to earn their fees by

casting all sorts of mean aspersions on the characters of all sorts of

people not a bit worse than themselves. It is honest to give value for

your wages; and the "bravos" of ancient Venice who kept their stilettos

in good order and never failed to deliver the stab bargained for with

their employers, considered themselves an honest body of professional

men, no doubt. But they don't compel my admiration, whereas the conduct

of this Inquiry does. And as it is pretty certain to be attacked, I take

this opportunity to deposit here my nickel of appreciation. Well,

lately, there came before it witnesses responsible for the designing of

the ship. One of them was asked whether it would not be advisable to

make each coal-bunker of the ship a water-tight compartment by means of a

suitable door.

The answer to such a question should have been, "Certainly," for it is

obvious to the simplest intelligence that the more water-tight spaces you

provide in a ship (consistently with having her workable) the nearer you

approach safety. But instead of admitting the expediency of the

suggestion, this witness at once raised an objection as to the

possibility of closing tightly the door of a bunker on account of the

slope of coal. This with the true expert's attitude of "My dear man, you

don't know what you are talking about."

Now would you believe that the objection put forward was absolutely

futile? I don't know whether the distinguished President of the Court

perceived this. Very likely he did, though I don't suppose he was ever

on terms of familiarity with a ship's bunker. But I have. I have been

inside; and you may take it that what I say of them is correct. I don't

wish to be wearisome to the benevolent reader, but I want to put his

finger, so to speak, on the inanity of the objection raised by the

expert. A bunker is an enclosed space for holding coals, generally

located against the ship's side, and having an opening, a doorway in

fact, into the stokehold. Men called trimmers go in there, and by means

of implements called slices make the coal run through that opening on to

the floor of the stokehold, where it is within reach of the stokers'

(firemen's) shovels. This being so, you will easily understand that

there is constantly a more or less thick layer of coal generally shaped

in a slope lying in that doorway. And the objection of the expert was:

that because of this obstruction it would be impossible to close the

water-tight door, and therefore that the thing could not be done. And

that objection was inane. A water-tight door in a bulkhead may be

defined as a metal plate which is made to close a given opening by some

mechanical means. And if there were a law of Medes and Persians that a

water-tight door should always slide downwards and never otherwise, the

objection would be to a great extent valid. But what is there to prevent

those doors to be fitted so as to move upwards, or horizontally, or

slantwise? In which case they would go through the obstructing layer of

coal as easily as a knife goes through butter. Anyone may convince

himself of it by experimenting with a light piece of board and a heap of

stones anywhere along our roads. Probably the joint of such a door would

weep a little--and there is no necessity for its being hermetically

tight--but the object of converting bunkers into spaces of safety would

be attained. You may take my word for it that this could be done without

any great effort of ingenuity. And that is why I have qualified the

expert's objection as inane.

Of course, these doors must not be operated from the bridge because of

the risk of trapping the coal-trimmers inside the bunker; but on the

signal of all other water-tight doors in the ship being closed (as would

be done in case of a collision) they too could be closed on the order of

the engineer of the watch, who would see to the safety of the trimmers.

If the rent in the ship's side were within the bunker itself, that would

become manifest enough without any signal, and the rush of water into the

stokehold could be cut off directly the doorplate came into its place.

Say a minute at the very outside. Naturally, if the blow of a

right-angled collision, for instance, were heavy enough to smash through

the inner bulkhead of the bunker, why, there would be then nothing to do

but for the stokers and trimmers and everybody in there to clear out of

the stoke-room. But that does not mean that the precaution of having

water-tight doors to the bunkers is useless, superfluous, or impossible.

{7}

And talking of stokeholds, firemen, and trimmers, men whose heavy labour

has not a single redeeming feature; which is unhealthy, uninspiring,

arduous, without the reward of personal pride in it; sheer, hard,

brutalising toil, belonging neither to earth nor sea, I greet with joy

the advent for marine purposes of the internal combustion engine. The

disappearance of the marine boiler will be a real progress, which anybody

in sympathy with his kind must welcome. Instead of the unthrifty,

unruly, nondescript crowd the boilers require, a crowd of men _in_ the

ship but not _of_ her, we shall have comparatively small crews of

disciplined, intelligent workers, able to steer the ship, handle anchors,

man boats, and at the same time competent to take their place at a bench

as fitters and repairers; the resourceful and skilled seamen--mechanics

of the future, the legitimate successors of these seamen--sailors of the

past, who had their own kind of skill, hardihood, and tradition, and

whose last days it has been my lot to share.

One lives and learns and hears very surprising things--things that one

hardly knows how to take, whether seriously or jocularly, how to

meet--with indignation or with contempt? Things said by solemn experts,

by exalted directors, by glorified ticket-sellers, by officials of all

sorts. I suppose that one of the uses of such an inquiry is to give such

people enough rope to hang themselves with. And I hope that some of them

won't neglect to do so. One of them declared two days ago that there was

"nothing to learn from the catastrophe of the _Titanic_." That he had

been "giving his best consideration" to certain rules for ten years, and

had come to the conclusion that nothing ever happened at sea, and that

rules and regulations, boats and sailors, were unnecessary; that what was

really wrong with the _Titanic_ was that she carried too many boats.

No; I am not joking. If you don't believe me, pray look back through the

reports and you will find it all there. I don't recollect the official's

name, but it ought to have been Pooh-Bah. Well, Pooh-Bah said all these

things, and when asked whether he really meant it, intimated his

readiness to give the subject more of "his best consideration"--for

another ten years or so apparently--but he believed, oh yes! he was

certain, that had there been fewer boats there would have been more

people saved. Really, when reading the report of this admirably

conducted inquiry one isn't certain at times whether it is an Admirable

Inquiry or a felicitous _opera-bouffe_ of the Gilbertian type--with a

rather grim subject, to be sure.

Yes, rather grim--but the comic treatment never fails. My readers will

remember that in the number of _The English Review_ for May, 1912, I

quoted the old case of the _Arizona_, and went on from that to prophesy

the coming of a new seamanship (in a spirit of irony far removed from

fun) at the call of the sublime builders of unsinkable ships. I thought

that, as a small boy of my acquaintance says, I was "doing a sarcasm,"

and regarded it as a rather wild sort of sarcasm at that. Well, I am

blessed (excuse the vulgarism) if a witness has not turned up who seems

to have been inspired by the same thought, and evidently longs in his

heart for the advent of the new seamanship. He is an expert, of course,

and I rather believe he's the same gentleman who did not see his way to

fit water-tight doors to bunkers. With ludicrous earnestness he assured

the Commission of his intense belief that had only the _Titanic_ struck

end-on she would have come into port all right. And in the whole tone of

his insistent statement there was suggested the regret that the officer

in charge (who is dead now, and mercifully outside the comic scope of

this inquiry) was so ill-advised as to try to pass clear of the ice. Thus

my sarcastic prophecy, that such a suggestion was sure to turn up,

receives an unexpected fulfilment. You will see yet that in deference to

the demands of "progress" the theory of the new seamanship will become

established: "Whatever you see in front of you--ram it fair. . ." The

new seamanship! Looks simple, doesn't it? But it will be a very exact

art indeed. The proper handling of an unsinkable ship, you see, will

demand that she should be made to hit the iceberg very accurately with

her nose, because should you perchance scrape the bluff of the bow

instead, she may, without ceasing to be as unsinkable as before, find her

way to the bottom. I congratulate the future Transatlantic passengers on

the new and vigorous sensations in store for them. They shall go

bounding across from iceberg to iceberg at twenty-five knots with

precision and safety, and a "cheerful bumpy sound"--as the immortal poem

has it. It will be a teeth-loosening, exhilarating experience. The

decorations will be Louis-Quinze, of course, and the cafe shall remain

open all night. But what about the priceless Sevres porcelain and the

Venetian glass provided for the service of Transatlantic passengers?

Well, I am afraid all that will have to be replaced by silver goblets and

plates. Nasty, common, cheap silver. But those who _will_ go to sea

must be prepared to put up with a certain amount of hardship.

And there shall be no boats. Why should there be no boats? Because Pooh-

Bah has said that the fewer the boats, the more people can be saved; and

therefore with no boats at all, no one need be lost. But even if there

was a flaw in this argument, pray look at the other advantages the

absence of boats gives you. There can't be the annoyance of having to go

into them in the middle of the night, and the unpleasantness, after

saving your life by the skin of your teeth, of being hauled over the

coals by irreproachable members of the Bar with hints that you are no

better than a cowardly scoundrel and your wife a heartless monster. Less

Boats. No boats! Great should be the gratitude of passage-selling

Combines to Pooh-Bah; and they ought to cherish his memory when he dies.

But no fear of that. His kind never dies. All you have to do, O

Combine, is to knock at the door of the Marine Department, look in, and

beckon to the first man you see. That will be he, very much at your

service--prepared to affirm after "ten years of my best consideration"

and a bundle of statistics in hand, that: "There's no lesson to be

learned, and that there is nothing to be done!"

On an earlier day there was another witness before the Court of Inquiry.

A mighty official of the White Star Line. The impression of his

testimony which the Report gave is of an almost scornful impatience with

all this fuss and pother. Boats! Of course we have crowded our decks

with them in answer to this ignorant clamour. Mere lumber! How can we

handle so many boats with our davits? Your people don't know the

conditions of the problem. We have given these matters our best

consideration, and we have done what we thought reasonable. We have done

more than our duty. We are wise, and good, and impeccable. And whoever

says otherwise is either ignorant or wicked.

This is the gist of these scornful answers which disclose the psychology

of commercial undertakings. It is the same psychology which fifty or so

years ago, before Samuel Plimsoll uplifted his voice, sent overloaded

ships to sea. "Why shouldn't we cram in as much cargo as our ships will

hold? Look how few, how very few of them get lost, after all."

Men don't change. Not very much. And the only answer to be given to

this manager who came out, impatient and indignant, from behind the plate-

glass windows of his shop to be discovered by this inquiry, and to tell

us that he, they, the whole three million (or thirty million, for all I

know) capital Organisation for selling passages has considered the

problem of boats--the only answer to give him is: that this is not a

problem of boats at all. It is the problem of decent behaviour. If you

can't carry or handle so many boats, then don't cram quite so many people

on board. It is as simple as that--this problem of right feeling and

right conduct, the real nature of which seems beyond the comprehension of

ticket-providers. Don't sell so many tickets, my virtuous dignitary.

After all, men and women (unless considered from a purely commercial

point of view) are not exactly the cattle of the Western-ocean trade,

that used some twenty years ago to be thrown overboard on an emergency

and left to swim round and round before they sank. If you can't get more

boats, then sell less tickets. Don't drown so many people on the finest,

calmest night that was ever known in the North Atlantic--even if you have

provided them with a little music to get drowned by. Sell less tickets!

That's the solution of the problem, your Mercantile Highness.

But there would be a cry, "Oh! This requires consideration!" (Ten years

of it--eh?) Well, no! This does not require consideration. This is the

very first thing to do. At once. Limit the number of people by the

boats you can handle. That's honesty. And then you may go on fumbling

for years about these precious davits which are such a stumbling-block to

your humanity. These fascinating patent davits. These davits that

refuse to do three times as much work as they were meant to do. Oh! The

wickedness of these davits!

One of the great discoveries of this admirable Inquiry is the fascination

of the davits. All these people positively can't get away from them.

They shuffle about and groan around their davits. Whereas the obvious

thing to do is to eliminate the man-handled davits altogether. Don't you

think that with all the mechanical contrivances, with all the generated

power on board these ships, it is about time to get rid of the hundred-

years-old, man-power appliances? Cranes are what is wanted; low, compact

cranes with adjustable heads, one to each set of six or nine boats. And

if people tell you of insuperable difficulties, if they tell you of the

swing and spin of spanned boats, don't you believe them. The heads of

the cranes need not be any higher than the heads of the davits. The lift

required would be only a couple of inches. As to the spin, there is a

way to prevent that if you have in each boat two men who know what they

are about. I have taken up on board a heavy ship's boat, in the open sea

(the ship rolling heavily), with a common cargo derrick. And a cargo

derrick is very much like a crane; but a crane devised _ad hoc_ would be

infinitely easier to work. We must remember that the loss of this ship

has altered the moral atmosphere. As long as the _Titanic_ is

remembered, an ugly rush for the boats may be feared in case of some

accident. You can't hope to drill into perfect discipline a casual mob

of six hundred firemen and waiters, but in a ship like the _Titanic_ you

can keep on a permanent trustworthy crew of one hundred intelligent

seamen and mechanics who would know their stations for abandoning ship

and would do the work efficiently. The boats could be lowered with

sufficient dispatch. One does not want to let rip one's boats by the run

all at the same time. With six boat-cranes, six boats would be

simultaneously swung, filled, and got away from the side; and if any sort

of order is kept, the ship could be cleared of the passengers in a quite

short time. For there must be boats enough for the passengers and crew,

whether you increase the number of boats or limit the number of

passengers, irrespective of the size of the ship. That is the only

honest course. Any other would be rather worse than putting sand in the

sugar, for which a tradesman gets fined or imprisoned. Do not let us

take a romantic view of the so-called progress. A company selling

passages is a tradesman; though from the way these people talk and behave

you would think they are benefactors of mankind in some mysterious way,

engaged in some lofty and amazing enterprise.

All these boats should have a motor-engine in them. And, of course, the

glorified tradesman, the mummified official, the technicians, and all

these secretly disconcerted hangers-on to the enormous ticket-selling

enterprise, will raise objections to it with every air of superiority.

But don't believe them. Doesn't it strike you as absurd that in this age

of mechanical propulsion, of generated power, the boats of such ultra-

modern ships are fitted with oars and sails, implements more than three

thousand years old? Old as the siege of Troy. Older! . . . And I know

what I am talking about. Only six weeks ago I was on the river in an

ancient, rough, ship's boat, fitted with a two-cylinder motor-engine of

7.5 h.p. Just a common ship's boat, which the man who owns her uses for

taking the workmen and stevedores to and from the ships loading at the

buoys off Greenhithe. She would have carried some thirty people. No

doubt has carried as many daily for many months. And she can tow a

twenty-five ton water barge--which is also part of that man's business.

It was a boisterous day, half a gale of wind against the flood tide. Two

fellows managed her. A youngster of seventeen was cox (and a first-rate

cox he was too); a fellow in a torn blue jersey, not much older, of the

usual riverside type, looked after the engine. I spent an hour and a

half in her, running up and down and across that reach. She handled

perfectly. With eight or twelve oars out she could not have done

anything like as well. These two youngsters at my request kept her

stationary for ten minutes, with a touch of engine and helm now and then,

within three feet of a big, ugly mooring buoy over which the water broke

and the spray flew in sheets, and which would have holed her if she had

bumped against it. But she kept her position, it seemed to me, to an

inch, without apparently any trouble to these boys. You could not have

done it with oars. And her engine did not take up the space of three

men, even on the assumption that you would pack people as tight as

sardines in a box.

Not the room of three people, I tell you! But no one would want to pack

a boat like a sardine-box. There must be room enough to handle the oars.

But in that old ship's boat, even if she had been desperately

overcrowded, there was power (manageable by two riverside youngsters) to

get away quickly from a ship's side (very important for your safety and

to make room for other boats), the power to keep her easily head to sea,

the power to move at five to seven knots towards a rescuing ship, the

power to come safely alongside. And all that in an engine which did not

take up the room of three people.

A poor boatman who had to scrape together painfully the few sovereigns of

the price had the idea of putting that engine into his boat. But all

these designers, directors, managers, constructors, and others whom we

may include in the generic name of Yamsi, never thought of it for the

boats of the biggest tank on earth, or rather on sea. And therefore they

assume an air of impatient superiority and make objections--however sick

at heart they may be. And I hope they are; at least, as much as a grocer

who has sold a tin of imperfect salmon which destroyed only half a dozen

people. And you know, the tinning of salmon was "progress" as much at

least as the building of the _Titanic_. More, in fact. I am not

attacking shipowners. I care neither more nor less for Lines, Companies,

Combines, and generally for Trade arrayed in purple and fine linen than

the Trade cares for me. But I am attacking foolish arrogance, which is

fair game; the offensive posture of superiority by which they hide the

sense of their guilt, while the echoes of the miserably hypocritical

cries along the alley-ways of that ship: "Any more women? Any more

women?" linger yet in our ears.

I have been expecting from one or the other of them all bearing the

generic name of Yamsi, something, a sign of some sort, some sincere

utterance, in the course of this Admirable Inquiry, of manly, of genuine

compunction. In vain. All trade talk. Not a whisper--except for the

conventional expression of regret at the beginning of the yearly

report--which otherwise is a cheerful document. Dividends, you know. The

shop is doing well.

And the Admirable Inquiry goes on, punctuated by idiotic laughter, by

paid-for cries of indignation from under legal wigs, bringing to light

the psychology of various commercial characters too stupid to know that

they are giving themselves away--an admirably laborious inquiry into

facts that speak, nay shout, for themselves.

I am not a soft-headed, humanitarian faddist. I have been ordered in my

time to do dangerous work; I have ordered, others to do dangerous work; I

have never ordered a man to do any work I was not prepared to do myself.

I attach no exaggerated value to human life. But I know it has a value

for which the most generous contributions to the Mansion House and

"Heroes" funds cannot pay. And they cannot pay for it, because people,

even of the third class (excuse my plain speaking), are not cattle. Death

has its sting. If Yamsi's manager's head were forcibly held under the

water of his bath for some little time, he would soon discover that it

has. Some people can only learn from that sort of experience which comes

home to their own dear selves.

I am not a sentimentalist; therefore it is not a great consolation to me

to see all these people breveted as "Heroes" by the penny and halfpenny

Press. It is no consolation at all. In extremity, in the worst

extremity, the majority of people, even of common people, will behave

decently. It's a fact of which only the journalists don't seem aware.

Hence their enthusiasm, I suppose. But I, who am not a sentimentalist,

think it would have been finer if the band of the _Titanic_ had been

quietly saved, instead of being drowned while playing--whatever tune they

were playing, the poor devils. I would rather they had been saved to

support their families than to see their families supported by the

magnificent generosity of the subscribers. I am not consoled by the

false, written-up, Drury Lane aspects of that event, which is neither

drama, nor melodrama, nor tragedy, but the exposure of arrogant folly.

There is nothing more heroic in being drowned very much against your

will, off a holed, helpless, big tank in which you bought your passage,

than in dying of colic caused by the imperfect salmon in the tin you

bought from your grocer.

And that's the truth. The unsentimental truth stripped of the romantic

garment the Press has wrapped around this most unnecessary disaster.

PROTECTION OF OCEAN LINERS {8}--1914

The loss of the _Empress of Ireland_ awakens feelings somewhat different

from those the sinking of the _Titanic_ had called up on two continents.

The grief for the lost and the sympathy for the survivors and the

bereaved are the same; but there is not, and there cannot be, the same

undercurrent of indignation. The good ship that is gone (I remember

reading of her launch something like eight years ago) had not been

ushered in with beat of drum as the chief wonder of the world of waters.

The company who owned her had no agents, authorised or unauthorised,

giving boastful interviews about her unsinkability to newspaper reporters

ready to swallow any sort of trade statement if only sensational enough

for their readers--readers as ignorant as themselves of the nature of all

things outside the commonest experience of the man in the street.

No; there was nothing of that in her case. The company was content to

have as fine, staunch, seaworthy a ship as the technical knowledge of

that time could make her. In fact, she was as safe a ship as nine

hundred and ninety-nine ships out of any thousand now afloat upon the

sea. No; whatever sorrow one can feel, one does not feel indignation.

This was not an accident of a very boastful marine transportation; this

was a real casualty of the sea. The indignation of the New South Wales

Premier flashed telegraphically to Canada is perfectly uncalled-for. That

statesman, whose sympathy for poor mates and seamen is so suspect to me

that I wouldn't take it at fifty per cent. discount, does not seem to

know that a British Court of Marine Inquiry, ordinary or extraordinary,

is not a contrivance for catching scapegoats. I, who have been seaman,

mate and master for twenty years, holding my certificate under the Board

of Trade, may safely say that none of us ever felt in danger of unfair

treatment from a Court of Inquiry. It is a perfectly impartial tribunal

which has never punished seamen for the faults of shipowners--as, indeed,

it could not do even if it wanted to. And there is another thing the

angry Premier of New South Wales does not know. It is this: that for a

ship to float for fifteen minutes after receiving such a blow by a bare

stem on her bare side is not so bad.

She took a tremendous list which made the minutes of grace vouchsafed her

of not much use for the saving of lives. But for that neither her owners

nor her officers are responsible. It would have been wonderful if she

had not listed with such a hole in her side. Even the _Aquitania_ with

such an opening in her outer hull would be bound to take a list. I don't

say this with the intention of disparaging this latest "triumph of marine

architecture"--to use the consecrated phrase. The _Aquitania_ is a

magnificent ship. I believe she would bear her people unscathed through

ninety-nine per cent. of all possible accidents of the sea. But suppose

a collision out on the ocean involving damage as extensive as this one

was, and suppose then a gale of wind coming on. Even the _Aquitania_

would not be quite seaworthy, for she would not be manageable.

We have been accustoming ourselves to put our trust in material,

technical skill, invention, and scientific contrivances to such an extent

that we have come at last to believe that with these things we can

overcome the immortal gods themselves. Hence when a disaster like this

happens, there arises, besides the shock to our humane sentiments, a

feeling of irritation, such as the hon. gentleman at the head of the New

South Wales Government has discharged in a telegraphic flash upon the

world.

But it is no use being angry and trying to hang a threat of penal

servitude over the heads of the directors of shipping companies. You

can't get the better of the immortal gods by the mere power of material

contrivances. There will be neither scapegoats in this matter nor yet

penal servitude for anyone. The Directors of the Canadian Pacific

Railway Company did not sell "safety at sea" to the people on board the

_Empress of Ireland_. They never in the slightest degree pretended to do

so. What they did was to sell them a sea-passage, giving very good value

for the money. Nothing more. As long as men will travel on the water,

the sea-gods will take their toll. They will catch good seamen napping,

or confuse their judgment by arts well known to those who go to sea, or

overcome them by the sheer brutality of elemental forces. It seems to me

that the resentful sea-gods never do sleep, and are never weary; wherein

the seamen who are mere mortals condemned to unending vigilance are no

match for them.

And yet it is right that the responsibility should be fixed. It is the

fate of men that even in their contests with the immortal gods they must

render an account of their conduct. Life at sea is the life in which,

simple as it is, you can't afford to make mistakes.

With whom the mistake lies here, is not for me to say. I see that Sir

Thomas Shaughnessy has expressed his opinion of Captain Kendall's

absolute innocence. This statement, premature as it is, does him honour,

for I don't suppose for a moment that the thought of the material issue

involved in the verdict of the Court of Inquiry influenced him in the

least. I don't suppose that he is more impressed by the writ of two

million dollars nailed (or more likely pasted) to the foremast of the

Norwegian than I am, who don't believe that the _Storstad_ is worth two

million shillings. This is merely a move of commercial law, and even the

whole majesty of the British Empire (so finely invoked by the Sheriff)

cannot squeeze more than a very moderate quantity of blood out of a

stone. Sir Thomas, in his confident pronouncement, stands loyally by a

loyal and distinguished servant of his company.

This thing has to be investigated yet, and it is not proper for me to

express my opinion, though I have one, in this place and at this time.

But I need not conceal my sympathy with the vehement protestations of

Captain Andersen. A charge of neglect and indifference in the matter of

saving lives is the cruellest blow that can be aimed at the character of

a seaman worthy of the name. On the face of the facts as known up to now

the charge does not seem to be true. If upwards of three hundred people

have been, as stated in the last reports, saved by the _Storstad_, then

that ship must have been at hand and rendering all the assistance in her

power.

As to the point which must come up for the decision of the Court of

Inquiry, it is as fine as a hair. The two ships saw each other plainly

enough before the fog closed on them. No one can question Captain

Kendall's prudence. He has been as prudent as ever he could be. There

is not a shadow of doubt as to that.

But there is this question: Accepting the position of the two ships when

they saw each other as correctly described in the very latest newspaper

reports, it seems clear that it was the _Empress of Ireland's_ duty to

keep clear of the collier, and what the Court will have to decide is

whether the stopping of the liner was, under the circumstances, the best

way of keeping her clear of the other ship, which had the right to

proceed cautiously on an unchanged course.

This, reduced to its simplest expression, is the question which the Court

will have to decide.

And now, apart from all problems of manoeuvring, of rules of the road, of

the judgment of the men in command, away from their possible errors and

from the points the Court will have to decide, if we ask ourselves what

it was that was needed to avert this disaster costing so many lives,

spreading so much sorrow, and to a certain point shocking the public

conscience--if we ask that question, what is the answer to be?

I hardly dare set it down. Yes; what was it that was needed, what

ingenious combinations of ship-building, what transverse bulkheads, what

skill, what genius--how much expense in money and trained thinking, what

learned contriving, to avert that disaster?

To save that ship, all these lives, so much anguish for the dying, and so

much grief for the bereaved, all that was needed in this particular case

in the way of science, money, ingenuity, and seamanship was a man, and a

cork-fender.

Yes; a man, a quartermaster, an able seaman that would know how to jump

to an order and was not an excitable fool. In my time at sea there was

no lack of men in British ships who could jump to an order and were not

excitable fools. As to the so-called cork-fender, it is a sort of soft

balloon made from a net of thick rope rather more than a foot in

diameter. It is such a long time since I have indented for cork-fenders

that I don't remember how much these things cost apiece. One of them,

hung judiciously over the side at the end of its lanyard by a man who

knew what he was about, might perhaps have saved from destruction the

ship and upwards of a thousand lives.

Two men with a heavy rope-fender would have been better, but even the

other one might have made all the difference between a very damaging

accident and downright disaster. By the time the cork-fender had been

squeezed between the liner's side and the bluff of the _Storstad's_ bow,

the effect of the latter's reversed propeller would have been produced,

and the ships would have come apart with no more damage than bulged and

started plates. Wasn't there lying about on that liner's bridge, fitted

with all sorts of scientific contrivances, a couple of simple and

effective cork-fenders--or on board of that Norwegian either? There must

have been, since one ship was just out of a dock or harbour and the other

just arriving. That is the time, if ever, when cork-fenders are lying

about a ship's decks. And there was plenty of time to use them, and

exactly in the conditions in which such fenders are effectively used. The

water was as smooth as in any dock; one ship was motionless, the other

just moving at what may be called dock-speed when entering, leaving, or

shifting berths; and from the moment the collision was seen to be

unavoidable till the actual contact a whole minute elapsed. A minute,--an

age under the circumstances. And no one thought of the homely expedient

of dropping a simple, unpretending rope-fender between the destructive

stern and the defenceless side!

I appeal confidently to all the seamen in the still United Kingdom, from

his Majesty the King (who has been really at sea) to the youngest

intelligent A.B. in any ship that will dock next tide in the ports of

this realm, whether there was not a chance there. I have followed the

sea for more than twenty years; I have seen collisions; I have been

involved in a collision myself; and I do believe that in the case under

consideration this little thing would have made all that enormous

difference--the difference between considerable damage and an appalling

disaster.

Many letters have been written to the Press on the subject of collisions.

I have seen some. They contain many suggestions, valuable and otherwise;

but there is only one which hits the nail on the head. It is a letter to

the _Times_ from a retired Captain of the Royal Navy. It is printed in

small type, but it deserved to be printed in letters of gold and crimson.

The writer suggests that all steamers should be obliged by law to carry

hung over their stern what we at sea call a "pudding."

This solution of the problem is as wonderful in its simplicity as the

celebrated trick of Columbus's egg, and infinitely more useful to

mankind. A "pudding" is a thing something like a bolster of stout rope-

net stuffed with old junk, but thicker in the middle than at the ends. It

can be seen on almost every tug working in our docks. It is, in fact, a

fixed rope-fender always in a position where presumably it would do most

good. Had the _Storstad_ carried such a "pudding" proportionate to her

size (say, two feet diameter in the thickest part) across her stern, and

hung above the level of her hawse-pipes, there would have been an

accident certainly, and some repair-work for the nearest ship-yard, but

there would have been no loss of life to deplore.

It seems almost too simple to be true, but I assure you that the

statement is as true as anything can be. We shall see whether the lesson

will be taken to heart. We shall see. There is a Commission of learned

men sitting to consider the subject of saving life at sea. They are

discussing bulkheads, boats, davits, manning, navigation, but I am

willing to bet that not one of them has thought of the humble "pudding."

They can make what rules they like. We shall see if, with that disaster

calling aloud to them, they will make the rule that every steamship

should carry a permanent fender across her stern, from two to four feet

in diameter in its thickest part in proportion to the size of the ship.

But perhaps they may think the thing too rough and unsightly for this

scientific and aesthetic age. It certainly won't look very pretty but I

make bold to say it will save more lives at sea than any amount of the

Marconi installations which are being forced on the shipowners on that

very ground--the safety of lives at sea.

We shall see!

* * * * *

To the Editor of the _Daily Express_.

SIR,

As I fully expected, this morning's post brought me not a few letters on

the subject of that article of mine in the _Illustrated London News_. And

they are very much what I expected them to be.

I shall address my reply to Captain Littlehales, since obviously he can

speak with authority, and speaks in his own name, not under a pseudonym.

And also for the reason that it is no use talking to men who tell you to

shut your head for a confounded fool. They are not likely to listen to

you.

But if there be in Liverpool anybody not too angry to listen, I want to

assure him or them that my exclamatory line, "Was there no one on board

either of these ships to think of dropping a fender--etc.," was not

uttered in the spirit of blame for anyone. I would not dream of blaming

a seaman for doing or omitting to do anything a person sitting in a

perfectly safe and unsinkable study may think of. All my sympathy goes

to the two captains; much the greater share of it to Captain Kendall, who

has lost his ship and whose load of responsibility was so much heavier! I

may not know a great deal, but I know how anxious and perplexing are

those nearly end-on approaches, so infinitely more trying to the men in

charge than a frank right-angle crossing.

I may begin by reminding Captain Littlehales that I, as well as himself,

have had to form my opinion, or rather my vision, of the accident, from

printed statements, of which many must have been loose and inexact and

none could have been minutely circumstantial. I have read the reports of

the _Times_ and the _Daily Telegraph_, and no others. What stands in the

columns of these papers is responsible for my conclusion--or perhaps for

the state of my feelings when I wrote the _Illustrated London News_

article.

From these sober and unsensational reports, I derived the impression that

this collision was a collision of the slowest sort. I take it, of

course, that both the men in charge speak the strictest truth as to

preliminary facts. We know that the _Empress of Ireland_ was for a time

lying motionless. And if the captain of the _Storstad_ stopped his

engines directly the fog came on (as he says he did), then taking into

account the adverse current of the river, the _Storstad_, by the time the

two ships sighted each other again, must have been barely moving _over

the ground_. The "over the ground" speed is the only one that matters in

this discussion. In fact, I represented her to myself as just creeping

on ahead--no more. This, I contend, is an imaginative view (and we can

form no other) not utterly absurd for a seaman to adopt.

So much for the imaginative view of the sad occurrence which caused me to

speak of the fender, and be chided for it in unmeasured terms. Not by

Captain Littlehales, however, and I wish to reply to what he says with

all possible deference. His illustration borrowed from boxing is very

apt, and in a certain sense makes for my contention. Yes. A blow

delivered with a boxing-glove will draw blood or knock a man out; but it

would not crush in his nose flat or break his jaw for him--at least, not

always. And this is exactly my point.

Twice in my sea life I have had occasion to be impressed by the

preserving effect of a fender. Once I was myself the man who dropped it

over. Not because I was so very clever or smart, but simply because I

happened to be at hand. And I agree with Captain Littlehales that to see

a steamer's stern coming at you at the rate of only two knots is a

staggering experience. The thing seems to have power enough behind it to

cut half through the terrestrial globe.

And perhaps Captain Littlehales is right? It may be that I am mistaken

in my appreciation of circumstances and possibilities in this case--or in

any such case. Perhaps what was really wanted there was an extraordinary

man and an extraordinary fender. I care nothing if possibly my deep

feeling has betrayed me into something which some people call absurdity.

Absurd was the word applied to the proposal for carrying "enough boats

for all" on board the big liners. And my absurdity can affect no lives,

break no bones--need make no one angry. Why should I care, then, as long

as out of the discussion of my absurdity there will emerge the acceptance

of the suggestion of Captain F. Papillon, R.N., for the universal and

compulsory fitting of very heavy collision fenders on the stems of all

mechanically propelled ships?

An extraordinary man we cannot always get from heaven on order, but an

extraordinary fender that will do its work is well within the power of a

committee of old boatswains to plan out, make, and place in position. I

beg to ask, not in a provocative spirit, but simply as to a matter of

fact which he is better qualified to judge than I am--Will Captain

Littlehales affirm that if the _Storstad_ had carried, slung securely

across the stem, even nothing thicker than a single bale of wool (an

ordinary, hand-pressed, Australian wool-bale), it would have made no

difference?

If scientific men can invent an air cushion, a gas cushion, or even an

electricity cushion (with wires or without), to fit neatly round the

stems and bows of ships, then let them go to work, in God's name and

produce another "marvel of science" without loss of time. For something

like this has long been due--too long for the credit of that part of

mankind which is not absurd, and in which I include, among others, such

people as marine underwriters, for instance.

Meanwhile, turning to materials I am familiar with, I would put my trust

in canvas, lots of big rope, and in large, very large quantities of old

junk.

It sounds awfully primitive, but if it will mitigate the mischief in only

fifty per cent. of cases, is it not well worth trying? Most collisions

occur at slow speeds, and it ought to be remembered that in case of a big

liner's loss, involving many lives, she is generally sunk by a ship much

smaller than herself.

JOSEPH CONRAD.

A FRIENDLY PLACE

Eighteen years have passed since I last set foot in the London Sailors'

Home. I was not staying there then; I had gone in to try to find a man I

wanted to see. He was one of those able seamen who, in a watch, are a

perfect blessing to a young officer. I could perhaps remember here and

there among the shadows of my sea-life a more daring man, or a more agile

man, or a man more expert in some special branch of his calling--such as

wire splicing, for instance; but for all-round competence, he was

unequalled. As character he was sterling stuff. His name was Anderson.

He had a fine, quiet face, kindly eyes, and a voice which matched that

something attractive in the whole man. Though he looked yet in the prime

of life, shoulders, chest, limbs untouched by decay, and though his hair

and moustache were only iron-grey, he was on board ship generally called

Old Andy by his fellows. He accepted the name with some complacency.

I made my enquiry at the highly-glazed entry office. The clerk on duty

opened an enormous ledger, and after running his finger down a page,

informed me that Anderson had gone to sea a week before, in a ship bound

round the Horn. Then, smiling at me, he added: "Old Andy. We know him

well, here. What a nice fellow!"

I, who knew what a "good man," in a sailor sense, he was, assented

without reserve. Heaven only knows when, if ever, he came back from that

voyage, to the Sailors' Home of which he was a faithful client.

I went out glad to know he was safely at sea, but sorry not to have seen

him; though, indeed, if I had, we would not have exchanged more than a

score of words, perhaps. He was not a talkative man, Old Andy, whose

affectionate ship-name clung to him even in that Sailors' Home, where the

staff understood and liked the sailors (those men without a home) and did

its duty by them with an unobtrusive tact, with a patient and humorous

sense of their idiosyncrasies, to which I hasten to testify now, when the

very existence of that institution is menaced after so many years of most

useful work.

Walking away from it on that day eighteen years ago, I was far from

thinking it was for the last time. Great changes have come since, over

land and sea; and if I were to seek somebody who knew Old Andy it would

be (of all people in the world) Mr. John Galsworthy. For Mr. John

Galsworthy, Andy, and myself have been shipmates together in our

different stations, for some forty days in the Indian Ocean in the early

nineties. And, but for us two, Old Andy's very memory would be gone from

this changing earth.

Yes, things have changed--the very sky, the atmosphere, the light of

judgment which falls on the labours of men, either splendid or obscure.

Having been asked to say a word to the public on behalf of the Sailors'

Home, I felt immensely flattered--and troubled. Flattered to have been

thought of in that connection; troubled to find myself in touch again

with that past so deeply rooted in my heart. And the illusion of

nearness is so great while I trace these lines that I feel as if I were

speaking in the name of that worthy Sailor-Shade of Old Andy, whose

faithfully hard life seems to my vision a thing of yesterday.

* * * * *

But though the past keeps firm hold on one, yet one feels with the same

warmth that the men and the institutions of to-day have their merit and

their claims. Others will know how to set forth before the public the

merit of the Sailors' Home in the eloquent terms of hard facts and some

few figures. For myself, I can only bring a personal note, give a

glimpse of the human side of the good work for sailors ashore, carried on

through so many decades with a perfect understanding of the end in view.

I have been in touch with the Sailors' Home for sixteen years of my life,

off and on; I have seen the changes in the staff and I have observed the

subtle alterations in the physiognomy of that stream of sailors passing

through it, in from the sea and out again to sea, between the years 1878

and 1894. I have listened to the talk on the decks of ships in all

latitudes, when its name would turn up frequently, and if I had to

characterise its good work in one sentence, I would say that, for seamen,

the Well Street Home was a friendly place.

It was essentially just that; quietly, unobtrusively, with a regard for

the independence of the men who sought its shelter ashore, and with no

ulterior aims behind that effective friendliness. No small merit this.

And its claim on the generosity of the public is derived from a long

record of valuable public service. Since we are all agreed that the men

of the merchant service are a national asset worthy of care and sympathy,

the public could express this sympathy no better than by enabling the

Sailors' Home, so useful in the past, to continue its friendly offices to

the seamen of future generations.

Footnotes

{1} Yvette and Other Stories. Translated by Ada Galsworthy.

{2} _Turgenev_: A Study. By Edward Garnett.

{3} _Studies in Brown Humanity_. By Hugh Clifford.

{4} _Quiet Days in Spain_. By C. Bogue Luffmann.

{5} Existence after Death Implied by Science. By Jasper B. Hunt, M.A.

{6} _The Ascending Effort_. By George Bourne.

{7} Since writing the above, I am told that such doors are fitted in the

bunkers of more than one ship in the Atlantic trade.

{8} The loss of the _Empress of Ireland_.