Able Seaman Billings heard his remark and smiled. 'Garn!' he jeered good-naturedly; 'this 'ere coalin' ain't bin nothin', only six 'undred ton. You wait till we joins up wi' the fleet, me lad, w'en we coals once a fortnight reg'lar.'
It was quite true, as Martin afterwards discovered.
That afternoon, armed with the hose, scrubbers, and soap, they set about cleaning the ship, themselves, and their clothes. Coal-dust seemed to be everywhere; it had lodged in every nook and cranny, but by dark most of it was removed and the battleship was looking more or less like her old self. So ended Martin's first experience of 'coaling ship,' an evolution which subsequently was carried out with such frequency that it became a mere incident.
The next day they took in ammunition and explosives enough to send a whole squadron of Dreadnoughts to the bottom. Innocent-looking lighters and barges, crammed to the hatches with shell for the twelve-inch, six-inch, and smaller guns; cases of cordite-cartridges; boxes containing the copper war-heads for the torpedoes, filled with gun-cotton; small-arm ammunition; gun-cotton charges in cylindrical red-painted cases, and detonators, came alongside in the early morning while it was yet dark.
Soon after eight o'clock the work began. It was preferable to coaling, as it was cleaner; but the labour was very strenuous. There were three lighters on each side, and each had its own party of men employed in hooking on the projectiles and metal cordite-cases, which were then hoisted on board by the battleship's winches. Other men on deck with barrows transported the shell and cases as they arrived to square hatches in different parts of the deck, through which they were lowered to the magazines and shell-rooms in the bowels of the ship, to be stowed in their proper racks, bays, and compartments.
The great eight hundred and fifty pound projectiles for the twelve-inch guns dwarfed all the others, and they were slung inboard singly on account of their weight. The hundred-pound shell for the six-inch guns came in in canvas bags a couple at a time, while the lighter projectiles for the smaller weapons were hoisted in consignments.
Such a variety of shell there was! Some had bright-yellow bodies with red bands round their middles, and sundry stencil-marks on their sides denoting the date and place of manufacture, date of filling with explosive, and other purely personal details. These were the lyddite high-explosive shell Martin had often heard about; and he was informed, by an A.B. who was lowering them below as if they had been mere sacks of potatoes, that they burst into thousands of minute fragments on impact, and that they were designed primarily for use as man-killing projectiles against the unarmoured portions of an enemy's ship. Then there were the common shell with black-painted bodies and red-and-white bands round their noses. They, too, were deadly in their way, but not quite so deadly as the lyddite, since they were filled only with black powder, and did not burst so violently on striking. The armour-piercers were also black, and had white-red-white bands round their heads. They, Martin was told, had very thick walls and specially toughened points, and were designed to bore their way through an enemy's armoured sides and to burst inside. Then came the shrapnel shell for the lighter guns, with their red tips and red bands; they were provided with a small bursting charge, were filled with bullets, and had time-fuses, so that they could be burst in the air at any moment, to send their leaden bullets flying on over a cone-shaped region of destruction. The practice projectiles were black, with yellow bands round their middles and white tips. They were quite harmless, being made of cast-iron, with small quantities of salt inside to bring them up to the exact weight.
It was quite six o'clock in the evening by the time the ammunition had all been taken in, and even then there were many hours' work in stowing the shell, cordite, and explosives in their several shellrooms and magazines.
The next morning, at cock-crow, they started another very similar job, taking in slops and stores of provisions from the victualling yard. This time the deck was littered with bundles of clothing done up in sacking, bags of flour, boxes and cases containing boots, shoes, straw hats, caps, biscuits, condensed milk, tea, coffee, chocolate, jam, preserved meat, tinned salmon and rabbit, mustard, pepper, salt, raisins, rice, dried beans and peas, pickles, suet, compressed vegetables, oatmeal, split peas, celery-seed for flavouring pea-soup, soap, and tobacco. There were also casks or drums of rum, vinegar, and sugar. The total consignment ran into well over a hundred tons dead weight, and all the hundred and one different articles had to be hoisted on board, sorted out, transported, and stowed in their proper storerooms.
The ship's steward and his assistant 'dusty boys' had a very busy day. Quite early in the proceedings a flour-bag burst like a shell and deluged the steward with its contents. He was powdered from head to foot, and remained so for the rest of the day; and the little runnels of perspiration running down his whitened face made a strange criss-cross pattern which transformed his ordinarily rubicund countenance into a very fair representation of a map of the planet Mars, with all the canals clearly marked. His appearance caused titters of amusement and howls of derisive merriment when his back was turned, as, armed with an enormous note-book and a sheaf of coloured pencils, he flitted in and out of the piles of boxes and packing-cases like a lost soul. He was endeavouring to trace odd cases of raisins, or errant boxes of jam or pickles, and looked very worried, poor man! At any rate, it was hardly safe to talk to him, for finding the mislaid things among the heaps of barrels, drums, cases, and boxes, which covered the deck in places to a height of fully five feet, was for the time being rather like searching for a pebble on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.