"Perhaps the men would try to make you believe something to that effect," he laughed, "but so also would those of the '——,' and the '——,' and the '——' regarding each other, the rest of the squadron and the whole of the Grand Fleet. As a matter of fact, if you had been on any one of them during the last twenty-four hours, you would probably have seen and heard and experienced just about what you have seen and heard and experienced here. You will not go far wrong if you say we are all 'Happy Ships' up here. The 'Happy Ship' is a tradition of the British Navy, and it's the one type of craft which does not become out of date with the march of science and the passage of the years."
[IN A BALLOON SHIP]
I had crossed in the old Xerxes in those ancient days when, as the latest launched greyhound of the Cunarder fleet, she held for a few precarious months the constantly shifting blue-ribbon for the swiftest transatlantic passage; but in that angular "cubistic" lump of lead-grey looming over the bow of my spray-smothered launch to blot out the undulant skyline of the nearest Orkney, there was not one familiar feature. Her forward funnel had been "kippered" down the middle to somewhere about on the level of the lower deck, and carried up in two smaller stacks which rose abreast to port and starboard. This had been done (as I learned later) to make room for a platform leading forward from the waist over which seaplanes could be wheeled to the launching-stage, which ran out over the bow from beneath the bridge. The break in the forecastle had been closed in connexion with a sweeping alteration which had converted the whole forward end of the main deck into a roomy seaplane "repository" and repair shop.
The changes aft were no less startling. The old poop seemed to have been razed to extend the last two hundred feet of the main deck, and over the ten or fifteen-feet-high railing, which surrounded this, the top of a partly inflated observation balloon showed like the back of a half-submerged turtle. The whole effect was weird and "impossible" in the extreme, and I felt like exclaiming with the yokel who saw a giraffe for the first time: "Aw, there ain't no such animal."
I had been asked aboard the Xerxes for an afternoon of seaplane and balloon practice. I had already seen a good deal of the former at various points in the Mediterranean and Adriatic, but the towed observation balloon—the "kite," as they call it—was an entirely new thing. I "put in" at once for an ascent in a kite, for I was anxious not only to get some sort of a firsthand idea of how it was being employed against submarines—of which I had already heard not a little—and also to compare the work with that of handling the ordinary observation balloons, of which I had seen so much in France, Italy, and the Balkans. The captain—whom I found just getting the ship under weigh from the bridge—after some hesitation, promised to "see what he could do," if there was not too much wind, when he was ready for "balloon work."
To one who has had experience only of hangars on land, perhaps the most impressive thing about an "aeroship" is the amount of gear and equipment which can be stowed and handled in restricted spaces. Wings and rudders which fold and refold upon each other until they form compact bundles that can be trundled about by a man or two, collapsible fuselages and pontoons, wheels which detach at a touch of a lever, "knock-down" transmissions—these things were everywhere the rule. One "baby" scout I saw almost completely assembled on the launching-stage, and the "tail," which a couple of men wired to the main body in a little more than a minute, I would have sworn I could have knocked off with a single well-placed kick. Yet, five minutes later, I saw that same machine "loop," "side-flop," "double-bank," and (quite at the will of its young pilot, who is rated the most expert seaplane man in the British Naval Air Service) recover at the end of a five-hundred-feet rolling fall, all without apparently starting a strut or rivet. "Collapsibility" and portability are evidently secured without sacrificing any essential strength.
The science of working the seaplane from the deck of a ship is still in process of development. Even up to quite recently it was the practice to put a machine overboard on a sling, and allow it to start from the water. The use of detachable wheels—which fall off into the sea after they have served their purpose in giving the preliminary run—has made launching from the deck practicable and comparatively safe, but the problem of landing even a wheeled machine on deck has not yet been satisfactorily solved. On account of lack of room, most of the experiments in this direction have ended disastrously, even tragically.
When a seaplane is about to be launched, after the usual preliminary "tuning" up on the launching-stage, the ship is swung dead into the teeth of the wind and put at full speed. This matter of wind direction is very important, for its variation by a fraction of a point from "head-on" may easily make a crooked run and a fluky launching. As the latter would almost inevitably mean that both plane and pilot must be churned under the swiftly advancing fore-foot of the ship, no precautions calculated to avoid it are omitted. Besides a wind-pennant at one end of the bridge, assurance is made doubly sure by the turning on of a jet of steam in the mathematical centre of the extreme tip of the launching-stage. When the back-blown steam streams straight along the middle plank of the stage, the wind is "right."