I had the honour of dining on the Flagship next night, and so contagious
is the naval spirit that I went there, as it were, annoyed and uneasy
over the matter of the misread signal. One cannot regard an Admiral in
the exercise of his duty as a mere human. It is in his power to make you
get up an anchor by hand if he thinks you are slack; he can stop your
coaling and bid you man and arm boats in the middle of the grimy mess;
he can make you repeat a certain business till you are sick and dizzy; or
he can raise you to high honour by signalling: ‘Well done, So-and-so.
Evolution creditably performed.’ He blocks up all the horizon when
he appears on it. At six miles off, across the windy blue, the spirit
may move him to chat with you, and if your best signalman have not his
best telescope at his best eye, and the Admiral be forced to repeat his
remarks, you will hear about it at closer range.
THE ISOLATION OF AN ADMIRAL
The loneliness of a Captain is society beside the isolation of an
Admiral. He goes up on the after-bridge, and moves some £10,000,000
worth of iron and steel at his pleasure. No man can stop him, few dare
even suggest. Then comes the sea, as it did round the Orkneys, and a
little roaring ‘roost’ marked with a few hair-lines on the chart—a
tide-rip racing between ledges—buffets his stately galleons, and drives
them lightly out of all formation. One never connects a clergyman with
St. Paul; but one cannot look at an Admiral without speculating on our
apostolic Succession of the Sea. With these powers were clothed Nelson
and the rest—‘Admirals all.’ And this particular piece of flesh and
blood is of the same order, and rank, and breed, and responsibility—the
Admiral in command of the Channel Fleet. And now it is peace. (‘Yes,
I have enjoyed my visit very much, thank you, sir.’) But if War came
to-morrow? What would he do? How would he think? What does he think
about now? He would go up on the bridge with the Flag-Lieutenant, and the
ships would be cleared for action. (‘No, I’ve never seen a Temperley
transporter at work.’) And then—and then . . . .?
It was a strange dinner for one guest at least—with its flowers and
crystal and quiet conversation; the band playing on deck, and the lights
of the Fleet twinkling all down the Bay.
There was a Prince in it who was also a Flag-Captain, and he set one
thinking; and there were Commanders and Lieutenants in it, and it was all
very pretty and gracious; but between me and the _menu_ rose a vision of
last year’s play-war—a battleship cleared for action, naked and grim,
like a man swimming with a knife between his teeth—a wet and streaming
hull thundering through heavy, rain-hammered seas.
DINNER IN A GUN-ROOM
‘Well, now you’ve done that,’ said Twenty-One, ‘suppose you
come and dine in a Gun-room.’ (We have none on the cruiser, being
all ward-room, with a cabin apiece.) ‘I’ll chaperon you to the best
disciplined Gun-room in the Fleet. _We’ll_ show you.’
So we went, Twenty-One and me, to another huge battleship, precisely
like the Admiral’s; but this time Captains, Commanders, and Lieutenants
were invisible, or showed only as superior luminaries far along the
decks. We dealt with nothing above the rank of Sub-Lieutenant, and the
greetings of that grade are cordial and warm. Down below—it was twice
the size of our ward-room—we found their Gun-room, which differs in
appointments and fittings from everything Marryat conceived, but I think
the old unquenchable spirit persists. Of the twenty odd inhabitants, a
dozen at least were Midshipmen, and therefore, as Twenty-One explained,
‘didn’t count.’ They talked among themselves in subdued eager
whispers, dropping in to the meal as they came off duty. The senior
Sub-Lieutenant (quite nineteen years old) was responsible for the justly
vaunted discipline; and it is no small thing to reduce to silence boys
of sixteen to eighteen, all full of natural and acquired deviltry. But
it was done according to the custom of the Navy and the etiquette of the
Gun-room, whose laws change not.
MIDSHIPMEN
Here the young Nelson learns to obey, in silence and at a run. He has
been broken in on the _Britannia_, but the Gun-room gives him enduring
polish. The Admiral knows a Midshipman rather as the Almighty knows a
blackbeetle; the Captain knows him as the Head of Harrow might know a
babe in a perambulator; the First Lieutenant knows him as the Head of the
Games knows a fag in the Lower Third; but the senior Sub-Lieutenant of the
Gun-room knows him as a brand to be snatched from the burning; and works
over him accordingly. In return, the Midshipman patronises the Admiral
at a safe distance; is blandly superior to his Captain—also at a safe
distance; sings time-honoured lampoons about the First Lieutenant at a
very safe distance; but most strictly obeys the senior Sub-Lieutenant. For
seven years, counting his time in the _Britannia_, he dresses at a chest
and sleeps in a hammock, getting to know himself and his associates with
that deadly stark intimacy that only flourishes in the Navy. There are no
excuses in his Service. He must not answer back; and he must do what he
is told—not immediately, but sooner, much sooner. These are the years
that weed out those that have mistaken their calling. The incompetents
go home, and curse the Navy evermore. The virtuous stay on and learn
to steal brass boiler-tubes for their boats; learn to smoke secretly in
the fighting-tops (they are forbidden tobacco till eighteen); fall into
and out of all manner of tight places that require dexterity and a cheek
of cold-drawn brass; pick up more than they learn under the Instructor
from the talk of the Warrant Officers and men and the carefully-watched
mistakes of their elders; and when they reach commissioned rank impart
their lore to their successors with a dirk-scabbard.
A REPUBLIC AND A DESPOTISM
If ‘White Jacket’ had not served before the mast, what a picture
he might have given us of the Gunroom! It is at once a Republic and a
Despotism—the Extreme Left and the unswerving Centre of old tradition.
Individually it is always in hot water; collectively it can and does
criticise with point and freedom anything and everything on its horizon,
from Fleet Manœuvres to the fit of an Instructor’s collar. Pungent,
merciless, indomitable is the Gunroom, but it preserves discipline. The
senior Sub-Lieutenant (one could not help thinking of O’Brien when he
cured Peter of the sea-sickness) stuck a fork into the equivalent for a
beam overhead. Ere it ceased vibrating the Midshipmen had gone, flitting
like bats; had flung themselves backwards from their seats, and were
through the door.
‘That’s when we think the conversation might hurt their little
morals,’ said my host. ‘But they can move much quicker than that.’
‘Make ’em do it again,’ said Twenty-One—a Midshipman three years
ago. ‘You’re getting awfully slack, _I_ think. What do you do
when——?’ he presented a contingency.
‘Oh, then we——’ The Sub-Lieutenant described the course of action
with minute particularity, adding: ‘Wouldn’t you like to see it
done?’
Set it to my account that I saved somebody’s darling from being
butchered to make a Gun-room holiday. But the Midshipmen have an asylum
of their own in the School-room, where, I was assured, they were worked
within an inch of their lives. The remnant seemed unusually healthy, for
when we went out to visit a big smoking-concert on the Flagship I caught
glimpses of limber youths racketting in dumb show round their hammocks.
Not being privileged to have speech with them, I asked Twenty-One what
the ‘protective diplomacy’ of Midshipmen might be. He gave me to
understand that stirring a hornets’ nest with the bare toe was tame and
pale beside too thoroughly irritating the junior members of the Gun-room.
Had himself been concerned in such revolutions.
‘We got licked, of course,’ he concluded cheerfully, ‘but the
seniors let us alone after that. Wasn’t it a beautifully disciplined
Mess, though? I wish you could see ’em at sea in weather. There’s a
Midshipman (he used the other term) told off to every scuttle to open it
between waves. If he lets in any water of course he catches it. I had
about five years of that sort of thing. Well, now we’ll go over to the
concert.’
‘UNCLE HENRY’S’ SMOKING CONCERT
Said a shrill voice casually: ‘Are you goin’ to patronise our Uncle
Henry’s show to-night?’
‘I think I ought to. I don’t want him to think I’m cutting him.
Besides, he’d like to meet one zealous an’ efficient officer. It
’ud cheer him up.’
I whipped round, to see two small boys of blank countenances studying
the deck-beams. It was humanly conceivable that ‘Uncle Henry’ might
be the Admiral’s nickname, but could two Midshipmen—? I fled lest
the ship should blow up under me, and left those zealous and efficient
ones to their dignity.
Imagine a quarter-deck seventy-five feet wide and a hundred and twenty
long, awninged over, decked with flags and a triple row of white and
purple electrics, the massed bands of the Fleet at the far end, and all
the rest, from the stern to the snowy barbette, a whirl of uniforms of
all ranks: Captains with and without aiguillettes; Commanders, Officers of
Marines, in their blue-faced mess-jackets, with the laurelled globe on the
lapel, Engineers, Paymasters, Clerks, and the others—a shifting carpet
of blue and gold and red and black. The muzzles of the forty-six ton
guns sheered up above us, and high over all, on the top of the barbette,
which was disguised with flags and carpets, sat the Admiral. It was an
amazing spectacle—the Fleet at play, and for some reason, it made me
choke. One recovered here men last met at the other end of the world—at
Gaspé, Bermuda, Vancouver, Yokohama, Invercargill, or Bombay—rovers
and rangers in Her Majesty’s men-of-war. Then we danced; for this also
is the custom of the Navy, that when a man has been working like several
niggers all day he should, on chance given, dance. And that is why the
Naval man dances so well. He begins, as I have seen, on the _Britannia_,
whose decks are fairly open. Then he dances on such occasions as these,
in and out among all the fittings of a battleship’s deck.
‘Makes us awfully handy with our feet,’ said Twenty-One, mopping
himself in the pauses of a waltz. ‘Won’t you take a turn? No end good
exercise.’
‘No, I’m afraid of the ladies,’ I replied.
‘They _are_ rather solid,’ said Twenty-One reflectively, as a
Post-Captain reversed on to his toes. ‘My partner doesn’t protect me
as a gentleman should. He threw me at a Paymaster just now.’
How in the course of their work they had saved up enough energy for this
diversion was beyond me. They danced, fair heel and toe, unsparingly a
couple of hours, for the sheer, downright exercise of it. And they were
by no means all youths in the game either. We dropped panting into the
boats, and saw behind us the whole gay show fade, flicker, and twinkle
out. The Flagship had returned to her ordinary business. To-morrow she
would take us back to Portland on our speed trials.
* * * * * * *
NO. 2 WELSH COAL
‘Isn’t it scandalous? Isn’t it perfectly damnable?’ said an
officer after we had got under way, pointing to the foul, greasy columns
of smoke that poured from every funnel. ‘Her Majesty’s Channel
Squadron, if you please, under steam, burning horse-dung.’
Truthfully, it was a sickening sight. We could have been seen thirty
miles off, a curtain of cloud, spangled and speckled with bits of burning
rubbish and lumps of muck. The First Lieutenant looked at the beach of
clinkers piling up on his hammock-nettings and blessed the Principality
of Wales. The Chief Engineer merely said, ‘You never know your luck in
the Navy,’ put on his most ancient kit, and was no more seen in the
likeness of a Christian man. Fate had hit him hard, for, just as his
fires were at their pink of perfection, a battleship chose to get up her
anchor by hand, delaying us an hour, and blackening the well-cherished
furnaces. ‘No. 2 Welsh’ (this must have been an Admiralty jest) needs
a lot of coaxing.
CHIMNEY-SWEEPS ON THE HIGH SEAS
But we were not quite such an exhibition as the _Arrogant_. She showed
like chemical works in full blast as we swept out of Bantry and headed
south for the Scillies. Then up came the _Blake_ (_see_ Note VI.), a
beautiful boat, giving easily to the swell that was lifting us already,
and she dodged about left and right till we asked: ‘What are you trying
to do?’ ‘Trying to get out of your smoke,’ said she, vomiting
cascades of her own the while. Meantime the Fleet-rams were doing their
best to blind and poison us, and the battleships sagged away to leeward
looking like wet ricks ablaze.
It was not the ignominy of the thing—the mere dirt and filth—that
annoyed one so much as the thought that there was no power in the
State which owes its existence to the Navy whereby a decent supply
of State-owned, State-dug coal could be assured to us. There had been
a strike, and while masters and men were argle-bargling ashore Her
Majesty’s ships were masquerading in the guise of chimney-sweeps on the
high seas.
The delay, the disorder, the cruel extra work on stokers, not to mention
the engineers, who at all times are worked pitilessly, is in Peace no
more than merely brutal. In war it would be dangerous.
FOUR HOURS AT FULL SPEED
As if that were not enough, the swell that the battleships logged as
light (Heaven forgive them!) began to heave our starboard screw out of
the water. We raced and we raced and we raced, dizzily, thunderously,
paralytically, hysterically, vibrating all down one side. It was, of
course, in our four hours of full speed that the sea most delighted to
lift us up on one finger and watch us kick. From 6 to 10 p.m. one screw
twizzled for the most part in the circumambient ether, and the Chief
Engineer—with coal-dust and oil driven under his skin—volunteered
the information that life in his department was gay. He would have left
a white mark on the Assistant-Engineer, whose work lay in the stokehold
among a gang of new Irish stokers. Never but once have I been in our
engine-rooms; and I do not go again till I can take with me their
designer for four hours at full speed. The place is a little cramped and
close, as you might say. A steel guard, designed to protect men from a
certain toothed wheel round the shaft, shore through its bolts and sat
down, much as a mudguard sits down on a bicycle-wheel. But the wheel it
sat on was also of steel; spinning one hundred and ninety revolutions
per minute. So there were fireworks, beautiful but embarrassing, of
incandescent steel sparks, surrounding the Assistant-Engineer as with
an Aurora Borealis. They turned the hose on the display, and at last
knocked the guard sideways, and it fell down somewhere under the shaft,
so that they were at liberty to devote their attention to the starboard
thrust-block, which was a trifle loose. Indeed, they had been trying to
wedge the latter when the fireworks began—all up their backs.
The thing that consoled them was the thought that they had not slowed
down one single turn.
THE NAVAL ENGINEER
‘She’s a giddy little thing,’ said the Chief Engineer. ‘Come down
and have a look.’
I declined in suitable language. Some day, when I know more, I will write
about engine-rooms and stokers’ accommodation—the manners and customs
of Naval Engineers and their artificers. They are an amazing breed, these
quiet, rather pale men, in whose hands lie the strength and power of the
ship.
‘Just think what they’ve got to stand up to,’ says Twenty-One, with
the beautiful justice of youth. ‘Of course, they are trained at Keyham
and all that; but fancy doing your work with an eight-inch steam-pipe in
the nape of your neck, an’ a dynamo buzzin’ up your back, an’ the
whole blessed shoot whizzin’ round in the pit of your stomach! Then we
jump about an’ curse if they don’t give us enough steam. I swear I
think they’re no end good men in the engine room!’
If you doubt this, descend by the slippery steel ladders into the
bluish copper-smelling haze of hurrying mechanism all crowded under
the protective deck; crawl along the greasy foot-plates, and stand with
your back against the lengthwise bulkhead that separates the desperately
whirling twin engines. Wait under the low-browed supporting-columns till
the roar and the quiver has soaked into every nerve of you; till your
knees loosen and your heart begins to pump. Feel the floors lift below
you to the jar and batter of the defrauded propeller as it draws out of
its element. Try now to read the dizzying gauge-needles or find a meaning
in the rumbled signals from the bridge. Creep into the stoke-hold—a
boiler blistering either ear as you stoop—and taste what tinned air is
like for a while. Face the intolerable white glare of the opened furnace
doors; get into a bunker and see how they pass coal along and up and
down; stand for five minutes with slice and ‘devil’ to such labour
as the stoker endures for four hours.
HIS HOURLY RISK
The gentleman with the little velvet slip between the gold rings on his
sleeve does his unnoticed work among these things. If anything goes wrong,
if he overlooks a subordinate’s error, he will not be wigged by the
Admiral in God’s open air. The bill will be presented to him down here,
under the two-inch steel deck, by the Power he has failed to control. He
will be peeled, flayed, blinded, or boiled. That is his hourly risk. His
duty shifts him from one ship to another, to good smooth and accessible
engines, to vicious ones with a long record of deviltry, to lying engines
that cannot do their work, to impostors with mysterious heart-breaking
weaknesses, to new and untried gear fresh from the contractor’s hands,
to boilers that will not make steam, to reducing-valves that will not
reduce, and auxiliary engines for distilling or lighting that often give
more trouble than the main concern. He must shift his methods for, and
project himself into the soul of, each; humouring, adjusting, bullying,
coaxing, refraining, risking, and daring as need arises.
Behind him is his own honour and reputation; the honour of his ship and
her imperious demands; for there is no excuse in the Navy. If he fails
in any one particular he severs just one nerve of the ship’s life. If
he fails in all the ship dies—a prisoner to the set of the sea—a gift
to the nearest enemy.
And, as I have seen him, he is infinitely patient, resourceful, and
unhurried. However it might have been in the old days, when men clung
obstinately to sticks and strings and cloths, the newer generation,
bred to pole-masts, know that he is the king-pin of their system. Our
Assistant-Engineer had been with the engines from the beginning, and one
night he told me their story, utterly unconscious that there was anything
out of the way in the noble little tale.
‘NO END GOOD MEN’
It was his business so to arrange that no single demand from the bridge
should go unfulfilled for more than five seconds. To that ideal he toiled
unsparingly with his Chief—a black sweating demon in his working hours,
and a quiet student of professional papers in his scanty leisure.
‘An’ they come into the ward-room,’ says Twenty-One, ‘and you
know they’ve been having a young hell of a time down below, but they
never growl at us or get stuffy or anything. No end good men, I swear
they are.’
‘Thank you, Twenty-One,’ I said. ‘I’ll let that stand for the
whole Navy if you don’t mind.’
NOTES
NOTE I
PAINT AND GILDING
A ship who attempted to dress on her service allowance of paint would
in three months be as disreputable as a battery or regiment which kept
its mess or band on the strict army footing. Therefore, over and above
anything that they may secure by strategy and foresight, the officers
must dip into their own pockets to supply the many trifles (none of them
cheap) which make for the smartness of a ship. This was forcibly brought
home to me when I admired a shield and scroll-work at the bows of a
large cruiser. ‘Yes,’ said a friend, ‘it takes about fifty books
(of gold-leaf) to gild that decently.’
‘No. Seventy,’ said another.
‘How d’you know?’
‘Well, somebody’s got to gild it, and the Yard don’t give you
seventy books for nothing,’ was the significant reply.
If there were any means of reckoning, the tax-payer would be somewhat
astonished at the sums spent by Navy and Army for the privilege of
serving the Queen. Both services have curious and crusted tales bearing
on this head.
NOTE Ia.
As the comfort and efficiency of the ship, not to mention the Captain’s
peace of mind, depend on the First Lieutenant, the Captain as a rule takes
good care to pick his own man. Here are a few of the First Lieutenant’s
duties. He must act as a strainer between the Captain and the ship; holding
back the unessential, passing on the vital. That is to say, he must be
a subtle and discriminating editor. He must make all his arrangements;
for the ordering and disposition of every soul aboard, through the next
day, week or month; with the cheerful foreknowledge that the bulk of them
will be knocked into a naval cocked hat by the exigencies of the service.
He must then retire into himself with a pack of printed cards, one for
each man, and work out the whole puzzle afresh. At the same time he must
not allow his own irritation to affect his dealings with the Wardroom,
whose official head he is, and whose members are (a) his subordinates,
and (b) gentlemen of leisure assembled of an evening for a quiet rubber.
He must get the utmost out of them, not by the menace of his authority,
because that means a smash-up sooner or later, but because of their
genuine liking for him as an individual. The Wardroom is young, very
male, and unable to avoid meeting itself every day and all day long. You
will concede that a certain amount of tact may be necessary in handling
it? He must, further, see with those eyes which he is authorised to wear
at the back of his head, that no warrant or petty officer, no ship’s
corporal, or master-at-arms is abusing authority to spite some man or
boy. He must still further see that no official, yielding to a natural
desire for popularity, is quietly letting down the discipline of the
lower-deck. He must know the Captain’s mind seventeen and two-thirds
seconds before the Captain opens his mouth, because he will need that
time to think out arrangements to meet the order. He must be the soul of
rectitude and honour, but he must grasp the inwardness and frustrate the
outwardness of every trick and trap sprung on him twenty times a day.
In the Captain’s absence he is the visitors’ host and chaperone,
and as visitors in harbour may range from Royalty to ragamuffins, his
manners must be in the widest sense of the word, adaptable. Finally, at
all crises, where the “blue” goes there must he lead: leaping the
larger abyss; standing nearer to the danger; walking the more slippery
foothold, passively enduring longer the exposure; and through it all he
must keep the cool eye and balanced
head of authority.
And the public is surprised when a naval officer proves that he is a
diplomat!
NOTE II
COXSWAINS AND GALLEYS
The Captain’s coxswain is always an important person. As a rule the
Captain has known him for a long time, often for ten or fifteen years,
and the man follows his superior’s fortunes with unswerving loyalty,
till he blossoms into the dignity of coxswain of the Admiral’s barge,
beside whom dukes are not even three a penny. He is, by virtue of
his office, the smartest man in the ship, and by training becomes a
clean-shaved miracle of tact and discretion. Each boat’s crew have
a life of their own, a little world, into which they enter, picking up
where they left off, so soon as cutter or whaler leaves the ship’s
side; but I fancy the _esprit de corps_ is most strongly developed in
the Captain’s galley. On one occasion we had been out all day fishing,
and the wind forced us to row the long seven miles back to the fleet,
against the tide, round rocky points fringed with conflicting currents.
It was a lumpy and disheartening sea, leaden grey in the twilight
except where the shoals cast up wisps and smudges of half-phosphorescent
white—a three hours’ journey, enlivened by the incessant dry roar
and rattle of the surf around Roancarrig and the answering growl of
the waves on the mainland. I watched the untiring machine digging out
over the steep-pitched cross-waters; eight pair of shoulders rising and
falling against the first stars and the smoke of spray about the bows;
till every muscle in me ached out of sympathy. Thrice they were invited
to rest themselves, for they had been ten hours at work, and there was
six hundred pounds’ dead weight of fish in the boat; and thrice they
replied: ‘Oh, we can jog on like this, sir.’ So they jogged with
never a quiver or a falter through all the tumble, and when we reached
still water, under the lee of the ships, they spurted up the avenue as
though returning from a call on the flagship half a mile away. I demanded
of the coxswain how this thing was done.
‘Oh, you get used to it,’ said he. ‘Besides, that wasn’t anything
particular. Sometimes you have the boat half full of water, jumping out
and coming down like a hammer. That’s the time you learn to row.’
‘I see. Why didn’t some of you miss your stroke in that tumble coming
round the point when we took the water over the bows?’
‘Well,’—still the same smile—‘if you did that—why, you
wouldn’t be in the galley. There’s all the other boats to practise
_that_ in. You’ve never seen her properly under sail, have you?’
For sheer luxury of motion, commend me to a galley which has just
“taken on” a brother captain’s craft for a small walk down the bay.
The rig is simplicity itself: there is a man to every rope that vitally
communicates with anything: and the most highly trained shifting-ballast
in the world, spread low between the thwarts, obeys the wave of the hand.
NOTE III
THE ART OF GUNNERY
Many men will tell you that our ships are under-gunned. So they are—on
paper: but on paper a gun merely represents a tube sticking out of the
side. One does not see the little group of from three to nine men who
work it in action; the ammunition hoist that feeds it; or the pile of
live shell and cartridge that would lie beside it. These things take
up space, and the more space you supply, the less will the gun be
disconcerted by its own or a neighbour’s disaster. Our people do not
like to work in crowds. They prefer, as we do ashore, to manage their
own little shows alone. The effect of wounded men kicking and hiccoughing
in a crowded secondary battery is bad for cool aiming; besides which,
idlers, cooks and servants might be jostling the workers in their efforts
to get the wounded below. On an open deck, with fair intervals between
the guns, the wounded can be moved out of the way at once; and if the
gun itself, by any chance, be dismounted, there is a margin of safety
for its inboard collapse, and room for a working-party to take charge of
it. I am speaking now of light armaments behind shields. The knowledge
that one lucky shot might wreck two or three guns together does not make
for happiness. This is why our guns are comparatively few in number, but
exceedingly handy to work. A ship knows, of course, exactly where the
crowd would of necessity be gathered in any craft opposed to her. Two or
three shots in a nest of crowded guns, open ammunition-hoists, and piles
of ‘ready’ cartridges, will do more moral and intellectual damage
than the effacement of one or two guns in a line strung evenly from bow
to stern.
NOTE IV
OMDURMAN
You must understand here that the Flagship was not only our central
authority, but Reuter’s Agency as well; and that between orders for
drills were sandwiched little pieces of news from the world ashore. One
peaceful morning the Yeoman of Signals came to the captain’s cabin
at the regulation pace, but with heightened colour and an eye something
brighter than usual. ‘Signal from the flagship, sir,’ said he,
reading off the slate. ‘Omdurman fallen: killed so many, and wounded
so many.’ ‘Thank you,’ said the captain. ‘Tell the men.’ On
this, I went forward to see how the news would be received. We were busy
painting some deck-houses, and the work continued to an accompaniment
of subdued voices—the hushed tones of men under the eye of authority.
Word was passed to the lower deck and the stokehold: and the hum of
talk rose, perhaps, half a note. I halted by the painters. Said one,
dipping deep in the white lead: ‘Um, ah! This ought to make the French
sickish. Almost ’ear ’em coughin’, can’t you?’ Said another,
reaching out for the broadest and slabbiest brush: ‘I say, Alf, lend
us that Khartoum brush o’ yours.’ After a long pause, stepping back
to catch the effect of a peculiarly juicy stroke—head a little aside
and one eye shut: ‘Well, we’ve waited about long enough, ’aven’t
we?’ Bosun’s mate with a fine mixture of official severity and human
tolerance: ‘What _are_ you cacklin’ for over there! Carry on quiet,
can’t you?’ And that was how we took the news of the little skirmish
called Omdurman.
NOTE V
BOAT-RACING
Our whaler would go out between lights under pretence of practising, but
really for the purpose of insulting other whalers whom she had beaten
in inter-ship contests. Boat-racing is to the mariner what horse-racing
is to the landsman. The way of it is simple. When your racing crew is in
proper condition, you row under the bows of the ship you wish to challenge
and throw up an oar. If you are very confident, or have a long string of
victories to your credit, you borrow a cock from the hen-coops and make
him crow. Then the match arranges itself. A friendly launch tows both of
you a couple of miles down the bay, and back you come, digging out for
the dear life, to be welcomed by hoarse subdued roars from the crowded
foc’sles of the battleships. This deep booming surge of voices is most
moving to hear. Some day a waiting fleet will thus cheer a bruised and
battered sister staggering in with a prize at her tail—a plugged and
splintered wreck of an iron box, her planking brown with what has dried
there, and the bright water cascading down her sides. I saw the setting
of such a picture one blood-red evening when the hulls of the fleet
showed black on olive-green water, and the yellow of the masts turned
raw-meat colours in the last light. A couple of racing cutters spun down
the fairway, and long after they had disappeared we could hear far-off
ships applauding them. It was too dark to catch more than a movement of
masses by the bows, and it seemed as though the ships themselves were
triumphing all together.
NOTE VI
THE BEAUTY OF BATTLESHIPS
Do not believe what people tell you of the ugliness of steam, nor join
those who lament the old sailing days. There is one beauty of the sun
and another of the moon, and we must be thankful for both. A modern
man-of-war photographed in severe profile is not engaging; but you should
see her with the life hot in her, head-on across a heavy swell. The
ram-bow draws upward and outward in a stately sweep. There is no ruck of
figure-head, bow-timbers or bowsprit-fittings to distract the eye from
its outline or the beautiful curves that mark its melting into the full
bosom of the ship. It hangs dripping an instant, then, quietly and cleanly
as a tempered knife, slices into the hollow of the swell, down and down
till the surprised sea spits off in foam about the hawse-holes. As the
ship rolls in her descent you can watch curve after new curve revealed,
humouring and coaxing the water. When she recovers her step, the long
sucking hollow of her own wave discloses just enough of her shape to make
you wish to see more. In harbour, the still waterline, hard as the collar
of a tailor-made jacket, hides that vision; but when she dances the Big
Sea Dance, she is as different from her Portsmouth shilling photograph
as is a matron in a macintosh from the same lady at a ball. Swaying
a little in her gait, drunk with sheer delight of movement, perfectly
apt for the work in hand, and in every line of her rejoicing that she
is doing it, she shows, to these eyes at least, a miracle of grace and
beauty. Her sides are smooth as a water-worn pebble, curved and moulded
as the sea loves to have them. Where the box-sponsioned, overhanging,
treble-turreted ships of some other navies hammer and batter into an
element they do not understand, she, clean, cool, and sweet, uses it
to her own advantage. The days are over for us when men piled baronial
keeps, flat-irons, candlesticks, and Doré towers on floating platforms.
The New Navy offers to the sea precisely as much to take hold of as the
trim level-headed woman with generations of inherited experience offers
to society. It is the provincial, aggressive, uncompromising, angular,
full of excellently unpractical ideas, who is hurt, and jarred, and
rasped in that whirl. In other words, she is not a good sea-boat and
cannot work her guns in all weathers.
End.