near, although it was midnight. How characteristic is that flash of
insight into the sea-faring instinct, and how true! They sounded and
got twenty fathoms, and in a little while found the water had shoaled
to fifteen. Then they performed a piece of seamanship which may be
continually seen in execution on the East African coast to-day--they
let the anchors down to their full scope of cable and prayed for
daylight. The Arabs do it in fair weather or foul--lower the sail,
slack down the anchor, and go to sleep. She will bring up before she
hits anything.
Unfortunately, space will not admit of further dealing with this
great story of the sea, so familiar and yet so little understood. The
sailors’ cowardly attempt at escape, the discipline of the soldiers
foiling it, the arrangements for beaching her by the aid of what is
here called a foresail, but was probably only a rag of sail rigged up
temporarily to get the ship before the wind, and the escape of all as
foretold by St. Paul, need much more space for dealing with than can
be spared.
But the one thing which makes this story go to the heart of every
seaman is its absolute fidelity to the facts of sea-life; its
log-like accuracy of detail; its correct use of all nautical terms.
In fact, some old seamen go so far as to aver that St. Paul, having
kept an accurate record of the facts, got the captain of the ship to
edit them for him, as in no other way could a landsman such as Paul
was have obtained so seaman-like a grip of the story, both in detail
and language.
_Note._--It will of course be noted that while the general opinion
is in favour of assigning to Luke the authorship of the narrative
commented upon above, I have credited Paul with it. I have my
reasons, but because of controversy I refrain from stating them.
THE POLITY OF A BATTLESHIP
Among the many interesting features of life at sea, few afford
studies more fruitful in valuable thought than the internal economy
of that latest development of human ingenuity--a modern battleship.
It is not by any means easy for a visitor from the shore, upon coming
alongside one of these gigantic vessels, to realise its bulk; the
first effect is one of disappointment. Everything on board is upon
a scale so massive, while the limpid space whereon she floats is so
capacious that the mind refuses to take in her majestic proportions.
And a hurried scamper around the various points of chief interest
on board leaves the mind like a palimpsest where one impression is
superimposed upon another so swiftly that the general effect is but
a blur and no detail is clear. Besides, in such a flying visit the
guide naturally makes the most of those wonders with which he himself
is associated in his official capacity, and thus the visitor is apt
to get a very one-sided view of things. Again, in the course of a
hurried visit in harbour the mind gets so clogged with wonders of
machinery and design, that the human side, always apt to keep itself
in the background, receives no portion of that attention which is
its due. From all of which causes it naturally follows that the only
way in which to obtain anything like a comprehensive notion of the
polity of a battleship is to spend at least a month on board, both
at sea and in harbour, and waste no opportunity of observation of
every part of the ship’s daily life that may be presented. Such
opportunities, naturally, fall to the lot of but few outside the
Service, and from the well-known modesty of sailors, it is next
to hopeless to expect them to enlighten the public upon the most
interesting details of their daily lives.
The mere statement of the figures which belong to a modern battleship
like the _Mars_, for instance, is apt to have a benumbing effect
upon the mind. She displaces 14,900 tons at load draught, is 391
ft. long, 75 ft. wide, and nearly 50 ft. deep from the upper deck
to the bottom. She is divided into 232 compartments by means of
water-tight bulkheads, is protected by 1802 tons of armour, is lit by
900 electric lights, steams 16½ knots, carries 82 independent sets
of engines, mounts 54 different cannon and 5 torpedo tubes, and is
manned by 759 men.
Now it is only fair to say that such a hurried recapitulation of
statistics like these gives no real hint as to the magnitude of
the ship as she reveals herself to one after a few days’ intimate
acquaintance. And that being so, what is to be said of the men, the
population of this floating cosmos, the 759 British entities ruled
over by the Captain with a completeness of knowledge and a freedom
from difficulty that an Emperor might well envy? As in a town, we
have here men of all sorts and professions, we find all manner of
human interests cropping up here in times of leisure, and yet the
whole company have one feeling, one interest in common--their ship,
and through her their Navy.
First of all, of course, comes the Captain, who, in spite of the
dignity and grandeur of his position, must at times feel very lonely.
He lives in awful state, a sentry (of Marines) continually guarding
his door, and although he does unbend at stated times as far as
inviting a few officers to dine with him, or accepting the officers’
invitation to dine in the ward-room, this relaxation must not come
too often. The Commander, who is the chief executive officer, is
in a far better position as regards comfort. He comes between the
Captain and the actual direction of affairs, he has a spacious cabin
to himself, but he takes his meals at the ward-room table among all
the officers above the rank of Sub-Lieutenant, and shares their
merriment; the only subtle distinction made between him and everybody
else at such times being in the little word “Sir,” which is dropped
adroitly in when he is being addressed. For the rest, naval _nous_ is
so keen that amidst the wildest fun when off duty no officer can feel
that his dignity is tampered with, and they pass from sociability to
cast-iron discipline and back again with an ease that is amazing to a
landsman. The ward-room of a battleship is a pleasant place. It is a
spacious apartment, taking in the whole width of the ship, handsomely
decorated, and lit by electricity. There is usually a piano, a good
library, and some handsome plate for the table. It is available
not only for meals, but as a drawing-room, a common meeting-ground
for Lieutenants, Marine officers, surgeons, chaplain, and senior
engineers, where they may unbend and exchange views, as well as enjoy
one another’s society free from the grip of the collar. A little
lower down in the scale of authority, as well as actually in the hull
of the ship, comes the gun-room, the affix being a survival, and
having no actual significance now. In this respect both ward-room and
gun-room have the advantage over the Captain’s cabin, in which there
are a couple of quick-firing guns, causing those sacred precincts
to be invaded by a small host of men at “general quarters,” who
manipulate those guns as if they were on deck. The gun-room is the
ward-room over again, only more so--that is, more wildly hilarious,
more given to outbursts of melody and rough play. Here meet the
Sub-Lieutenants, the assistant-engineers and other junior officers,
_and_ the midshipmen. With these latter Admirals in embryo we find a
state of things existing that is of the highest service to them in
after life. Taking their meals as gentlemen, with a senior at the
head of the table, meeting round that same table at other times for
social enjoyment, once they are outside of the gun-room door they
have no more privacy than the humblest bluejacket. They sleep and
dress and bathe--live, in fact--_coram publico_, which is one of the
healthiest things, when you come to think of it, for a youngster of
any class. Although they are now officers in H.M. Navy, they are
still schoolboys, and their education goes steadily on at stated
hours in a well-appointed schoolroom, keeping pace with that sterner
training they are receiving on deck. The most grizzled old seaman on
board must “Sir” them, but there are plenty of correctives all around
to hinder the growth in them of any false pride.
On the same deck is to be found the common room of the warrant
officers, such as bo’sun, carpenter, gunner; those sages who have
worked their difficult way up from the bottom of the sailor’s ladder
through all the grades, and are, with the petty officers, the
mainstay of the service. Each of them has a cabin of his own, as is
only fitting; but _here_ they meet as do their superiors overhead,
and air their opinions freely. But, like the ward-room officers, they
mostly talk “shop,” for they have only one great object in life,
the efficiency of their charge, and it leaves them little room for
any other topics. Around this, the after part of the ship, cluster
also another little body of men and lads, the domestics, as they are
termed, who do their duty of attendance upon officers and waiting
at table under all circumstances with that neatness and celerity
that is inseparable from all work performed in a ship-of-war.
Body-servants of officers are usually Marines, but the domestics
are a class apart, strictly non-combatant, yet under naval law and
discipline. Going “forrard,” the chief petty officers will be found
to make some attempt at shutting themselves apart from the general,
by arrangements of curtains, &c., all liable and ready to be flung
into oblivion at the first note of a bugle. For the rest, their
lives are absolutely public. No one has a corner that he may call
his own, unless perhaps it is his “ditty box,” that little case
of needles, thread, and etceteras that he needs so often, and is
therefore allowed to keep on a shelf near the spot where he eats.
Each man’s clothes are kept in a bag, which has its allotted place
in a rack, far away from the spot where his hammock and bed are
spirited off to every morning at 5 A.M., to lie concealed until the
pipe “down hammocks” at night. And yet by the arrangement of “messes”
each man has, in common with a few others, a settled spot where they
meet at a common table, even though it be not shut in, and is liable
to sudden disappearance during an evolution. So that a man’s mess
becomes his rallying-point; it is there that the young bluejacket or
Marine learns worldly wisdom, and many other things. The practice
of keeping all bedding on the move as it were, having no permanent
sleeping-places, requires getting used to, but it is a most healthy
one, and even if it were not it is difficult to see how, within the
limited space of a warship, any other arrangement would be possible.
Order among belongings is kept by a carefully graduated system of
fines payable in soap--any article found astray by the ever-watchful
naval police being immediately impounded and held to ransom. And as
every man’s kit is subject to a periodical overhaul by officers any
deficiency cannot escape notice.
Every man’s time is at the disposal of the Service whenever it is
wanted, but in practice much leisure is allowed for rest, recreation,
and mental improvement. Physical development is fully looked after
by the rules of the Service, but all are encouraged to make the best
of themselves, and no efforts on the part of any man to better his
position are made in vain. Nowhere, perhaps, is vice punished or
virtue rewarded with greater promptitude, and since all punishments
and rewards are fully public, the lessons they convey are never lost.
But apart from the Service routine, the civil life of this little
world is a curious and most interesting study. The industrious man
who, having bought a sewing-machine, earns substantial addition to
his pay by making every item of his less energetic messmates’ clothes
(except boots) for a consideration, the far-seeing man who makes his
leisure fit him for the time when he shall have left the Navy, the
active temperance man who seeks to bring one after the other of his
shipmates into line with the ever-growing body of teetotalers that
are fast altering completely the moral condition of our sailors, the
religious man who gets permission to hold his prayer-meeting in some
torpedo-flat or casemate surrounded by lethal weapons--all these go
to make up the multifarious life of a big battleship.
And not the least strange to an outsider is the way in which all
these various private pursuits and varied industries are carried on
in complete independence of each other, often in complete ignorance
of what is going on in other parts of the ship. News flies quickly,
of course, but since every man has his part in the ship’s economy
allotted to him, it naturally follows that he declines to bother his
head about what the other fellows are doing. Sufficient for him that
his particular item is to hand when required, and that he does it as
well and as swiftly as he is able. If he be slack or uninterested in
what concerns himself many influences are brought to bear upon him.
First his messmates, then his petty officer, and so on right up to
the Captain. And through all he is made to feel that his _laches_
affects first the smartness of his ship, then the reputation of the
great British Navy. So the naval spirit is fostered, so the glorious
traditions are kept up, and it continues to be the fact that the
slackest mobilised ship we can send to sea is able to show any
foreign vessel-of-war a lesson in smartness that they none of them
are able to learn. And in the naval battle of the future it will be
the few minutes quicker that will win.
THE PRIVACY OF THE SEA
Whether expressed or implied, there is certainly a deep-rooted idea
in the minds of shore-dwellers that the vast fenceless fields of
ocean are in these latter days well, not to say thickly, populated
by ships; that, sail or steam whither you will, you cannot get away
from the white glint of a sailing ship or the black smear along the
clean sky of a steamship’s smoke. There is every excuse for such an
attitude of mind on the part of landward folk. Having no standard of
comparison against which to range the vast lonely breadths of water
which make up the universal highway, and being mightily impressed
by the statistics of shipping owned by maritime nations, they can
hardly be blamed for supposing that the privacy of the sea is a
thing of the past. One voyage in a sailing ship to the Australasian
Colonies or to India, if the opportunities it afforded were rightly
used, would do far more to convince them of the utterly wrong notion
possessing them than any quantity of writing upon the subject could
effect. But unhappily, few people to-day have the leisure or the
inclination to spend voluntarily three months upon a sea passage that
can be performed in little more than one. Even those, who by reason
of poverty or for their health’s sake do take such passages, almost
invariably show signs of utter weariness and boredom. As day after
day passes, and the beautiful fabric in which they live glides gently
and leisurely forward, their impatience grows until in some it almost
amounts to a disease. This condition of mind is not favourable, to
say the least, to a calm study of the characteristic features of
ocean itself. Few indeed are the passengers, and fewer still are the
sailors who will for the delight of the thing spend hour after hour
perched upon some commanding point in wide-eyed, sight-strengthening
gaze out upon the face of the sea.
Upon those who do there grows steadily a sense of the most complete
privacy, a solemn aloofness belonging to the seas. The infrequent
vessel, gentle though her progress may be through the calm waters of
the tropics, still strikes them as an intruder upon this realm of
silence and loneliness. The voices of the crew grate harshly upon the
ear as with a sense of desecration such as one feels upon hearing
loud conversation in the sacred peace of some huge cathedral. And
when a vessel heaves in sight, a tiny mark against the skyline, she
but punctuates the loneliness, as it were--affords a point from which
the eye can faintly calculate the immensity of her surroundings.
Quite differently, yet with its own distinctive privacy, do the
stormy regions of the ocean impress the beholder. In the fine zones
the wind’s presence is suggested rather than felt, so quiet and
placid are its manifestations. Its majestic voice is hushed into a
murmur undistinguishable from the musical rippling of the wavelets
into which it ruffles the shining sea-surface. But when beyond those
regions of perpetual summer the great giant Boreas asserts himself
and challenges his ancient colleague and competitor to a renewal of
the eternal conflict for supremacy, there is an overwhelming sense
of duality which is entirely absent in calmer seas. As the furious
tempest rages unappeasable, and the solemn ocean wakes in mighty
wrath, men must feel that to be present at such a quarrel is to be
like some puny mortal eavesdropping in full Sanhedrim of the High
Gods. Apart altogether from the imminent danger of annihilation,
there is that sense of intrusion which is almost sacrilege, of daring
thus to witness what should surely be hidden from the profane eyes
of the sons of men. All thoughtful minds are thus impressed by the
combat of gale and sea, although their impressions are for the most
part so elusive and shadowy that any definite fixing thereof is
hopeless. Especially is this form of the solemn privacy of the sea
noticeable in the Southern Ocean. Along the line, untraced by mortal
hand except upon a Mercator’s Chart, favoured by the swift sailing
ships between South America and Australasia, the vastest stretch of
ocean known is dotted only at enormous intervals by the fleets of
civilisation. Day succeeds day, lengthening into weeks, during which
the brave intruder is hurled upon her headlong way at the rate of
eight or nine degrees of longitude in the twenty-four hours without
a companion, with no visible environment but sea and sky. And do what
the intelligent novice will, he cannot divest himself of the notion,
when drawing near the confines of New Zealand, seeing how minute that
beautiful cluster of islands appears upon the chart, that it would be
so easy to miss them altogether, to rush past them under compulsion
of the mighty west wind, and waste long painful days struggling
against its power to get back again to the overrun port.
Once in the writer’s own experience an incident occurred that seemed
almost to justify such a fear. Only sixty days had elapsed since
leaving Plymouth with four hundred emigrants on board, and during the
last fortnight the west wind had blown with terrific violence (to
a landsman). But the master, in calmest satisfaction, with fullest
confidence in the power of his ship, had steadfastly refused to
shorten sail. He seldom left the deck, the spectacle of his beautiful
command in her maddened rush to the east being to him apparently
sufficient recompense for loss of rest. At last we flew past the
Snares, those grim outliers of the Britain of the South, and it
became necessary to “haul up” for Port Lyttelton. To do this we must
needs bring that great wind full upon our broadside, and that, with
the canvas we were carrying, would have meant instant destruction. So
all hands were called, and the work of shortening her down commenced.
Several of the lighter sails, at the first slackening from their
previously rigid tension, gave one despairing flap and vanished to
join the clouds. But furious toil and careful skill through long
hours of that dense night succeeded in reducing the previously
great sail area down to three lower-topsails, reefed fore-sail, and
fore-topmast staysail. Then after much careful watching of the waves
that came fatefully thundering on astern until a lull momentarily
intervened, the helm was suddenly put down, and the gallant vessel
swung up into the wind. Nobly done, but as she wheeled there arose
out of the blackness ahead a mountainous shape with a voice that
made itself heard above the gale. Higher and higher it soared until
smiting the bluff of the bow it broke on board, a wave hundreds of
tons in solid weight. The stout steel ship trembled to her keelson,
but she rose a conqueror, while the avalanche of white-topped
water rushed aft dismantling the decks, and leaving them, when it
had subsided, in forlorn ruin. But she was safe. Justifying the
faithfulness and skill of her builders, she had survived where a
weaker ship would have disappeared, beaten out of the upper air
like a paper boat under a stone flung from the bank. Slowly and
laboriously we fore-reached to the northward, until under the lee of
the land the wind changed, and we entered port in triumph.
This sense of solitude induced by contemplation of the ocean is
exceedingly marked even on the best frequented routes and the most
crowded (?) waters. To enter into it fully, however, it is necessary
to sail either in a cable ship, a whaler, or an old slow-going
merchant sailor that gets drifted out of the track of vessels.
Even in the English Channel one cannot but feel how much room there
is. In spite of our knowledge of the numbers of ships that pass and
repass without ceasing along what may truthfully be termed the most
frequented highway in the watery world, there is an undoubtedly
reasonable sense induced by its contemplation that however much
the dry land may become overcrowded the sea will always be equal
to whatever demands may be made upon it for space. There are many
harbours in the world, at any rate landlocked bays that may rightly
be called harbours, wherein the fleets of all the nations might lie
in comfort. And their disappearance from the open sea would leave no
sense of loss. So wide is Old Ocean’s bosom. Perhaps this is even
now more strongly marked than it was fifty years ago. The wonderful
exactitude with which the steam fleets of the world keep to certain
well-defined tracks leaves the intermediate breadths unvisited from
year to year. They are private places whither he who should desire
to hide himself from the eyes of men might hie and be certain that
but for the host of heaven, the viewless wind, and the silent myriads
beneath, he would indeed be alone. They are of the secret places of
the Almighty.
Occasionally the great steamships that lay for us the connecting
nerves of civilisation penetrate these arcana, for their path must be
made on the shortest line between two continents, heedless of surface
tracks. And the wise men who handle these wonderful handmaids of
science know how private are the realms through which they steadily
steam, leaving behind them the thin black line along which shall
presently flash at lightning speed the thought-essence of mankind.
The whaler, alas! is gone; the old leisurely South Seaman to whom
time was a thing of no moment. Her ruler knew that his best prospect
of finding the prey he sought was where no keel disturbed the
sensitive natural vibrations of the wave. So these vessels saw more
of sea solitude than any others. Saw those weird spaces unvisited
even by wind, great areas of silky surface into whose peaceful glades
hardly rolled a gently undulating swell bearing silent evidence
of storms raging half a world away. So too upon occasion did, and
does, a belated sailing-ship, such as one we met in the Southern
Seas bound from the United Kingdom to Auckland, that had been then
nine months on her passage. Into what dread sea-solitudes she had
intruded. How many, many days had elapsed during which she was the
solitary point rising from the shining plain into the upper air. Her
crew had a wistful look upon their faces, as of men whose contact
with the world they dimly remembered had been effectually cut off.
And truly to many, news of her safety came in the nature of a message
of resurrection. Books of account concerning her had to be reopened,
mourning garments laid aside. She had returned from the silences, had
rejoined the world of men.
All the tracks along which ships travel are but threads traversing
these private waters, just little spaces like a trail across an
illimitable desert. And even there the simile fails because the track
across the ocean plain is imaginary. It is traced by the passing keel
and immediately it is gone. And the tiny portion of the sea-surface
thus furrowed is but the minutest fraction of the immeasurable spaces
wherein is enthroned the privacy of the sea.
THE VOICES OF THE SEA