Stories of the Ships

by Lewis R. Freeman

If there is one thing in the world that delights the secret heart of the average landsman more than the sad spectacle of a parson in the divorce court, it is the sight of a sea-sick sailor. Since, however, the average landsman reads his paper far oftener than he sails the stormy seas, the former delectation is probably granted him rather more frequently than the latter. At any rate, the one landsman in No. X Mess of H.M.S. Zeus that morning saw enough sea-sick sailors to keep the balance on the parsons' side for the duration of the war, and perhaps even longer.

I made the acquaintance of one of the "prostrates" marooned on the beach of my hammock island through rescuing him from the assaults of a tidal-wave-driven rum tub. He was nursing a crushed package of gumdrop-like lozenges, one of which he offered me, murmuring faintly that they had been sent him by his sister, who had found them useful while boating at Clacton-on-Sea last summer. Endeavouring to start a conversation, I asked him—knowing the Zeus had been present at that mighty struggle—if they had had weather like this at the Battle of Jutland. A sad twinkle flickered for a moment in the corner of the eye he rolled up to me, and, with a queer pucker of the mouth which indicated that he must have had a sense of humour in happier times, he replied that he had only joined the ship the week before: "'Tis my first time at sea, sir, and I've come out to—to—this."

I gave him the best advice I could by telling him to pull himself together and get out on deck to the fresh air; but neither spirit nor flesh was equal to the initiatory effort. Looking back while I waited near the foot of a ladder for a Niagara to exhaust itself, the last I saw of him he was pushing mechanically aside with an unresentful gesture a lump of salt pork which one of the table-roosting sailors dangled before his nose on a piece of string.

Three flights up I clambered my erratic way before, on the boat deck in the lee of a launch, I found a vantage sufficiently high and sheltered to stand in comfort. The sight was rich reward for the effort. Save for an ominous bank of nimbus to westward, the wind had swept the coldly blue vault of the heavens clear of cloud, and the low-hanging winter sun to south'ard was shooting slanting rays of crystalline brightness across a sea that was one wild welter of cotton wool. I have seen—especially in the open spaces of the mid-Pacific, where the waves have half a world's width to get going in—heavier seas and higher seas than were running that morning, but rarely—not even in a West Indian hurricane—more vicious ones—seas more palpably bent on going over, or through a ship that got in their way, rather than under, as proper waves should do. And in this obliquity they were a good deal more than passively abetted by a no less viciously inclined wind, which I saw repeatedly lift off the top of what it appeared to think was a lagging wave, and drive it on ahead to lace the heaving water with a film of foam or dust the deck of a battleship with snowy brine.

But it was the ships themselves that furnished the real show. Of all craft that ply the wet seaways, the battleship is the least buoyant, the most "unliftable," the most set on bashing its arrogant way through a wave rather than riding over it, and—with the increasing armour and armaments, and the crowding aboard of various weighty contrivances hitherto unthought of—this characteristic wilfulness has tended to increase rather than decrease since the war. As a consequence, a modern battleship bucking its way into a fully developed mid-winter gale is one of the nearest approaches to the meeting of two irresistible bodies ever to be seen.

The conditions for the contest were ideal that morning. Never were seas more determined to ride over battleships, never were battleships more determined to drive straight through seas. Both of them had something of their way in the end, and neither entirely balked the other; but, drawn as it was, that battle royal of Titans was a sight for the gods.

The battleships were in line abreast as I came up on deck, and holding a course which brought the wind and seas abeam. We were all rolling heavily, but with the rolls not sufficiently "synchronised" with the waves—which were charging down without much order or rhythm—to keep from dipping them up by the ton. If the port rail was low—as happened when the ship was sliding down off the back of the last wave—the next wave rolled in-board, and (save where the mast, funnels, and higher works amidships blocked the way) drove right on across and off the other side. If the port side had rolled high as an impetuous sea struck, the latter expended its full force against the ship, communicating a jar from foretop to stokeholds as shivering as the shock of a collision with another vessel.

Our own quarter-deck was constantly swept with solid green water, and even the higher fo'c'sle deck caught enough of the splash-up to make traversing it a precarious operation. But it was only by watching one of the other ships that it was possible to see how the thing really happened. If it was the wallowing monster abeam to port, the striking of a sea was signalised by sudden spurts of spray shooting into the air all the way along her windward side, the clouds of flying water often going over the funnels and bridge, and not far short of the foretop. She would give a sort of shuddering stumble as the weight of the impact made itself felt, and then—running from bow to stern and broken only by the upper works, and occasionally, but not always, by the turrets—a ragged line of foam appeared, quickly resolving itself into three or four hundred feet of streaking cascades which came pouring down over the starboard side into the sea. Watching the vessel abeam to starboard, the phenomenon was repeated in reverse order. Save for the swaying foretop against the sky, either ship at the moment of being swept by a wave was suggestive of nothing so much as a great isolated black rock on a storm-bound coast.

But the most remarkable thing about it all was the astonishingly small effect this really heavy weather had upon the handling of the ships. Evidently they had been built to withstand weather as well as to fight, for they manœuvred and changed formation with almost the same meticulous exactitude as in protected waters. A gunnery officer assured me that—except for momentary interference in training some of the lighter guns—the fighting efficiency of the ship would hardly be effected by all their plungings and the clouds of flying spray. Their speed was, naturally, somewhat diminished in bucking into a head sea, yet no lack of seaworthiness would prevent (should the need arise) their being driven into that same head sea at the full power of their mighty engines. The reason we were proceeding at somewhat reduced speed was to ease things off a bit for the destroyers.

Ah! And what of the destroyers? There they all were, the faithful sheep-dogs, when I came up, and at first blush I got the impression that they were making rather better weather of it than the battleships. That this was only an optical illusion (caused by the fact that they were farther away and more or less obscured by the waves) I discovered as soon as I climbed to the vantage of the after super-structure, and put my glass upon the nearest of the bobbing silhouettes of mast and funnel. Then I saw at once, though not, indeed, any such spray clouds or cascades of solid water as marked the course of the battleships, that she was plainly a labouring ship. A destroyer is not made to pulverise a wave in the bull-at-a-gate fashion of a battleship, and any exigency that compels her to adopt that method of progression is likely to be attended by serious consequences. If one of the modern type she will ride out almost any storm that blows if left to her own devices; but force her into it at anything above half-speed, and it is asking for trouble. Even before the destroyer I was watching began disappearing—hull, funnels, and all but the mastheads—between crest and crest of the onrushing waves, it was plain that both she and her sisters were having all they wanted; and I was not surprised when word was flashed to us that one of our brave little watch-dogs was suffering from a wave-smashed steering geer, and had asked permission to make for port if necessary. The permission was, I believe, granted, but—carrying on with some sort of a makeshift or other—her plucky skipper managed to stick it out and see the game through to the end.