The difficulty discovered, it must be localized. A hush falls over the ship. Down to the testing room go the experts. Seconds, minutes, hours crawl by. At last some one leaves the consultation for a brief space, frowning heavily and apparently deep in thought. No one dares address him, or ask the questions all are longing to have answered, and when his lips move silently we know that he is muttering over galvanometer readings to himself. During this time everyone talks in whispers, and not always intelligently, of the electrostatic capacity of the cable, absolute resistances, and the coefficients of correction, while the youngest member of the expedition neglects her beloved poodle, sonorously yclept “Snobbles,” and no longer hangs him head downward over the ship’s rail.
At last the fault is discovered, cut out, and a splice made, the tests showing the cable as good as new, whereupon the women return to their chiffons, the child to her games, and the men, not on duty, to their cigars, until the cessation of noise from the cable machinery, or the engine-room bell signalling “full speed astern” warns us something else may be amiss.
In the testing room, that Holy of Holies on board a cable-ship, the fate of the Burnside hangs upon a tiny, quivering spark of light thrown upon the scale by the galvanometer’s mirror. If this light jumps from side to side, or trembles nervously, or perhaps disappears entirely from the scale, our experts know the cable needs attention, and perhaps the ship will have to stop for hours at a time until the fault is located. If the trouble is not in the tanks, the paying-out machinery must be metamorphosed into a picking-up apparatus, and the cable already laid will be coiled back into the hold until the fault appears, when it will be cut out and the two ends of cable spliced. After this splice grows quite cool, tests are taken, and if they prove satisfactory, we again resume our paying out, knowing that while the spot of light on the galvanometer remains quietly in one position, the cable being laid is electrically sound, and we can proceed without interruption.
As may be imagined everyone on the ship got to think in megohms, and scientific terms clung to our conversation just as the tar from the cable tanks clung to our wearing apparel, while few among us but had wild nightmares wherein the cable became a sentient thing, and made faces at us as it leapt overboard in a continuous suicidal frenzy.
The cable-ship Burnside, as some may remember, was one of the first prizes captured in the Spanish War. She had been a Spanish merchant ship, the Rita, trading between Spain and all Spanish ports in the West Indies, and when captured by the Yale, early in April, 1898, was on her way to Havana with a cargo of goods. There is little about her now, however, to suggest a Spanish coaster, save the old bell marked “Rita” in front of the captain’s cabin. The sight of this bell always brings to mind the wild patriotism of those early days of our war with Spain, when love of country was grown to an absorbing passion which made one eager to surrender all for the nation’s honour, and stifled dread of impending separation—a separation that might be forever—despite the rebel heart’s fierce protest. The Rita’s bell reminds one also of a country less fortunate than our own, and sometimes when looking at it, one can almost fancy the terror and excitement of those aboard the Spanish coaster when the Yale swept down upon her on that memorable April afternoon. But it is a far cry from that day to this, and the Burnside, manned by American sailors, flying Old Glory where once waved the red and yellow of Spain’s insignia, and laying American cable in American waters, is a very different ship from the Rita, fleeing before her pursuers in the West Indies.
When the Burnside left Manila on December 23, 1900, for the cable laying expedition in the far South Seas, there were eight army officers aboard, six of whom belonged to the Signal Corps, the seventh being a young doctor, and the eighth a major and quartermaster in charge of the transport. Besides these there were civilian cable experts, Signal Corps soldiers, Hospital Corps men, Signal Corps natives, and the ship’s officers, crew, and servants. The only passengers on the trip were women, two and a half of us, the fraction standing for a young person of nine summers, the quartermaster’s little daughter, whom we shall dub Half-a-Woman, letting eighteen represent the unit of grown-up value.
Half-a-Woman was the queen of the ship, and held her court quite royally from the Powers-that-Be, our commanding officer, down to the roughest old salt in the forecastle. Having a child aboard gave the only real touch of Christmas to our tropical pretence of it. Everything else was lacking—the snow, the tree, the holly and wreaths, the Christmas carol, the dear ones so far away—but the little child was with us, and wherever children are there also will the Christmas spirit come, even though the thermometer registers ninety in the shade, and at the close of that long summer-hot day we all felt more than “richer by one mocking Christmas past.”
Half-a-Woman was also obliging enough to have a birthday on the trip, which we celebrated by a dinner in her honour, a very fine dinner which opened with clear turtle soup and ended with her favourite ice and a birthday cake of gigantic proportions, decorated with ornate chocolate roses and tiny incandescent lamps in place of the conventional age-enumerating candles, cable-ship birthday cakes being eminently scientific and up-to-date. Other people may have had birthdays en route, for we were away from Manila many weeks, but none were acknowledged; modesty doubtless constraining those older than Half-a-Woman from making a too ostentatious display of tell-tale incandescent lights.
It was a very busy trip, everyone on the ship being occupied, with the exception of the women who spent most of their time under the cool blue awning of the quarter-deck, where many a letter was written, and many a book read aloud and discussed, though more often we accomplished little, preferring to lie back in our long steamer chairs and watch the wooded islands with cloud shadows on their shaggy breasts drift slowly by and fade into the purple distance.
Now we would pass close to some luxuriantly overgrown shore where tall cocoanut-palms marched in endless procession along the white beach; now past hills where groups of bamboos swung back and forth in the warm breeze, and feathery palms and plantains, the sunlight flickering through their leaves, showed myriad tints of green and gold and misty gray; these in turn giving place to some volcanic mountain, bare and desolate. Then for hours there would be no land at all, only the wonderful horizonless blue of water and sky, the sunlight on the waves so dazzlingly bright as to hurt the eyes.