It was the Captain’s coxswain (_see_ Note II.)—precise, immaculate,
and adequate as ever—who met the returning guest at Devonport a year
later—September, 1898. This time my cruiser was not with the Fleet,
but on urgent private affairs. A misguided collier had seen fit to sit on
her ram for a minute or so in Milford Haven, a few days before, and had
twisted it thirteen inches to starboard. The collier was beached as soon
as possible, and the Admiral he said to us (this I got from the coxswain
as we drove to North Corner, by night, through blue-jacketed Devonport):
‘Can you go round to Plymouth with your nose in that state?’ ‘Lord
love you, yes,’ said we, or words to that effect. ‘Very good,’
said the Admiral, ‘then you go.’ This we did at an average speed of
sixteen knots, through a head-sea, with a collision-mat over our nose
(‘Same mat we used when we tied up the _Thrasher_, sir’), and we ran
her up to eighteen point two for a few hours to see how the bulkhead would
stand it. The carpenter and the carpenter’s mate (‘Yes, they’re
the same as last year, sir’) sat up to watch,
but nothing happened.
‘An’ now we’re under orders to go back and join the Fleet at
Bantry. We’ve been cruising all round England since August.’
THE RECORD OF A YEAR
Once aboard the lugger the past twelve months rolled up like a chart
that one needs no longer. The ‘commodious coffee-grinder’ welcomed
me as a brother, for by good luck no one had been changed; the same
faces greeted me in the little ward-room, and we fell to chattering like
children. Had I seen the new fore and aft bridge that we had managed to
screw out of the Dockyard? A great contraption—a superior contraption.
We had worked in a little extra deck under the forebridge, so that now
the signalman had a place to stand in, which I would remember was not the
case last year. Had I heard of our new coaling record? Nearly fifty tons
per hour, which for a third-class cruiser represented four times that
amount for a battleship. Had I heard of the zephyr that blew at Funchal;
of unrecorded evolutions in Minorca Bay; of the First Lieutenant’s
great haul of paint; of a recent target-practice when nothing was left
of the target; of the influenza that overtook the steam-whistle; and a
hundred other vital matters?
The record of a year with the Channel Fleet is not to be told in two
hours, but I gathered a good deal ere I dropped into my well-remembered
berth that joyous night. We departed at noon the next day, unhampered by
signals. A liner leaves Plymouth in one style; a cruiser snakes out from
Devonport in quite another, which was explained to me on the ‘’igh
an’ lofty bridge’ as we skated round buoy after buoy, courteously
pulled out a little not to interfere with a yacht race, and ran through
the brown-sailed Plymouth fishing fleet. It was divine weather—still,
cloudless, and blue—and the bridge was of opinion that he who had a
farm should sell it and forthwith go to sea.
OUR NOBLE SELVES
The Cornwall coast slid past us in great grey-blue shadows, laid out
beyond the little strip of sail-dotted blue; but my eyes were all
inboard considering our noble selves. We had accumulated all sorts of
small improvements since last year. She had shaken into shape, as a new
house does when one has decided where to put the furniture. The First
Lieutenant, as usual, explained that we were in no sense clean; that
twenty ton at least of the four hundred we had just taken in lay about
the deck in dust, and that it would cost a fortnight to put any appearance
on her.
‘We’re supposed to be burning No. 2 Welsh. It’s road sweepings and
soot really. That’s on account of the Welsh Coal Strike. Isn’t it
filthy? We smoked out the whole of the Fleet and the Rock of Gibraltar
the other day. But wait till you see some of the others. They’re worse.
Isn’t she a _pukka_ pigsty?’
From the landsman’s point of view she seemed offensively clean, but
it is hard to please a First Lieutenant. Ours utilised the delay at
Devonport to touch her up outside; and the perfect weather at Bantry to
paint her thoroughly inside. The only time he left her was to pull round
her in a boat and see how she looked from various points of view. Then
I think he was satisfied—for nearly half a day.
RASH INTEREST IN GUN PRACTICE
Over against Falmouth we found the sea sufficiently empty for gun practice,
and went to work at two thousand six hundred yards on the little,
triangular, canvas target, all splintered and bepatched from past trials.
This year the three-pounders were using up some black powder ammunition,
and with the wind behind us we were villainously wrapped in smoke. But
for all that the shots were very efficiently placed on and about the tiny
mark. One shrapnel burst immediately above the thing, and the deep was
peppered with iron from above. It looked like the cloud-wristed hand of
a god (as they draw it in the Dutch picture-books) dropping pebbles into
a pond. The more one sees of big gun practice the less one likes it; but
a big yacht of the R.Y.S. thought otherwise, streaming down on us of a
sudden with all the rash interest of a boy in next-door’s fireworks.
‘She thinks the target is a derelict,’ said the bridge. ‘She’s
coming for salvage. She’ll be right in the middle of it in a minute.’
‘No, she won’t. Starboard bow Maxim there—thirteen hundred yards.’
The little demon set up the ‘irritating stammer’ that the nine point
two gun found so objectionable, and spattered up the blue all about the
canvas, as a swizzle-stick works up a cocktail.
Our friend turned on her heel with immense promptitude and scuttled to
windward.
Later on I heard some interesting tales of craft—excursion steamers
for choice—anchoring between a man-of-war and her target because their
captains had heard that there would be gun practice, and the passengers,
at a shilling a head, wished to see the fun.
‘But they didn’t think,’ said my informant, ‘that _I_ was the
man who’d have been hung, drawn, and quartered if a life was lost. They
anchored slap behind the Island I was firing at—experimental firing
at a dummy gun, if you please, with six-inchers, twelve-pounders, and
Maxims all turned loose together. They were angry when we told ’em to
go away!’
* * * * * * *
Out of the strong-shouldered Atlantic swell—bluer than sapphires—rose
the double-fanged rock of the Fastnet. We were close enough to see its
steps and derricks and each wave as it shot thirty feet up the rocks—the
Fastnet in fair weather. It was like meeting a policeman in evening
dress. One does not think of the Fastnet save as a blessed welcoming wink
of light through storm and thick weather.
BIG ATLANTIC ROLLERS
The Irish coast is a never-failing surprise to the big Atlantic rollers.
They trip and ground—you can see them check—on the shallows; fling up
a scornful eyebrow and then lose their temper and shape in great lashings
of creamy foam.
‘That’s Berehaven,’ said the bridge, indicating an obscure aperture
in the jagged coast-line. ‘We shall find the Fleet round the corner.
The tide’s setting us up a little. Did you ever read “The Two Chiefs
of Dunboy?” We shall open Dunboy House in a minute round the corner.’
‘And a half-nine!’ sang the leadsman, cursing the long-stocked
port-anchor under his breath, for he had to cast to one side of it and
it stuck out like a cat’s whiskers.
We were between two rocky beaches, split and weathered by all the gales
of the Atlantic, black boulders embroidered with golden weed, and beryl
bays where the rollers had lost their way and were running in rings.
Behind them the green, tiny-fielded land, dotted with white cottages,
climbed up to the barren purple hills.
‘Ah! The _Arrogant's_ here anyhow. See her puff!’
THE STRONGEST FLEET IN THE WORLD.
A monstrous plume of black, heavy smoke went up to the sky. We whipped
round a buoy and came on the Fleet. There were eight battleships alike
as peas to the outsider; and four big cruisers. They were not cruising
or manœuvring just then; but practising their various arts and crafts.
The Marines fell in on the poop, and with bugles and all proper
observances we paid our compliments as we ran past the sterns of the
cruisers, waiting the Admiral’s word to moor.
‘He’s given us a billet of our own. Under his wing too.’ An officer
shot down on to the foc’sle, while the yeoman of signals, whose nose
is that of a hawk, kept an unshut eye on the Flag.
‘Isn’t there a four-foot patch somewhere about here?’ said a calm
and disinterested voice. The Navigator having brought her in did not need
to wrestle with cables; and our anchors with their low, cramped davits
are no treat.
‘We told ’em about our anchors in the Dockyard,’ said the bridge.
‘We told ’em so distinctly, and they said: “We’re very much
obliged to you for the information, and we’ll make the changes you
recommend—in the next boat of your class.” That’s what I call
generosity.’
‘Does that ship always behave like that?’ I asked. From all three
funnels of a high, stubby cruiser the smoke of a London factory insulted
the clean air.
‘Oh, no; she’s only burning muckings like the rest of us. She’s
our “chummy” ship. She’s a new type—she and the _Furious_. Fleet
rams they call ’em. Rather like porcupines, aren’t they?’
The two had an air of bristling, hog-backed ferocity, strangely out of
keeping with the normal reserve of a man-of-war.
The _Blake_, long and low, looked meek and polite beside them, but I was
assured that she could blow them out of the water. Their own Captains,
of course, thought otherwise.
ASHORE IN IRELAND
All Ireland was new to me, and I went ashore to investigate Castletown’s
street of white houses, to smell peat smoke and find Dan Murphy, owner
of a jaunting car and ancient friend of the ward-room. In this quest
me and the Navigator mustered not less than half the male population of
Cork County, the remainder being O’Sullivan’s; but we found Dan at
last—old, grizzled, with an untameable eye, voluble and beautifully
Celtic.
‘Will I meet ye to-morrow at Mill Cove at nine-thirty? I will. Here’s
my hand an’ word on it. Will I dhrive ye to Glenbeg for the fishing?
I will. There’s my hand an’ word on it. Do I mean it? Don’t I know
the whole livin’ fleet, man an’ boy, for years?’
He appeared at the appointed hour with a raw-boned horse and wonderful
yarns of trout taken by ‘the other gentlemen’ in Glenbeg, the lough
of our desire, fourteen miles across the hills. It was a cloudless day
with a high wind—bad for trout but good for the mere joy of life;
and the united ages of my companions reached forty-five. We were quite
respectable till we cleared Castletown, and such liberty-men as might
have been corrupted by our example. Then we sang and hung on to the
car at impossible angles, and swore eternal fidelity to the bare-footed
damosels on the road, they being no wise backward to return our vows;
and behaved ourselves much as all junior officers do when they escape on
holiday. It was a land of blue and grey mountains, of raw green fields,
stone-fenced, ribbed with black lines of peat, and studded with clumps
of gorse and heather and the porter-coloured pools of bog water. Great
island-dotted bays ran very far inland, and bounding all to Westward
hung the unswerving line of Atlantic. Such a country it was as, without
much imagination, one could perceive its children in exile would sicken
for—a land of small holdings and pleasant green ways where nobody did
more work than was urgent.
ROARING DAY OF SUN AND WIND
At last we came on an inky-black tarn, shut in by mountains, locked and
lonely and lashed into angry waves by a downward-smiting blast.
There was no special point in the fishing; not even when the Sub-Lieutenant
tried to drown himself; but the animal delight of that roaring day of sun
and wind will live long in one memory. We had it all to ourselves—the
rifted purple flank of Lackawee, the long vista of the lough darkening
as the shadows fell; the smell of a new country, and the tearing wind
that brought down mysterious voices of men from somewhere high above us.
None but the Irish can properly explain away failure. We left with our
dozen fingerlings, under the impression—Mister Cornelius Crowley gave
it—that we had caught ten-pounders.