The man who throws the "crumbs" into the sack on the rail is less busy than the other dump hands, and he it is who finds leisure to insinuate that you ought to go to some place where they have no coaling to do. You have no time to consider whether he means—the place you would mean if you were in his place; for your honour is at stake now, and, scowling with grim, coldly calculative determination, you stand for the third trial. Neither too coy nor yet too impulsive this time, but by the exercise of such common sense as is still at your command, you press quietly but firmly toward the cluster of sacks and—by lifting your barrow bodily and jerking it sidewise for a few inches—manage to align it fairly evenly in front of a bulging bag of coal dust. It appears to require about as much effort on the part of one of the "load" hands to wriggle it aboard as it does on your part to tip back your barrow to something like a balance. But the fact remains that you do have it stowed, and are ready to get under weigh.
It is the "coldly calculative, set-jaw" spirit which carries you through the next stage with fair success. It is no easy task to do your "right-about" on the slithery deck, but now that you are a "load" instead of an "empty" a tendency to help you on your way is at once in evidence. A couple of "empties" are edged back an inch or two to give you clearance, and a "load" accelerates to avoid giving you a "sideswipe." Where the deck slopes up under the elevated midship guns the petty officer who stands there to wave the traffic down the proper passage gives your sack a friendly kick to keep your barrow from losing weigh and checking the pushers crowding close on your heels.
You debouch to open deck on the port side and are about to push on in the wake of the man just ahead, when the corner of your eye catches the motion of the left-hand of the "traffic officer," and—with the going easy on the down slope—you execute a neat eight-point alteration of course and bring up smartly in front of an open "man-hole" just in time to replace a man who has dumped his sack and ducked out of your way. Unluckily, you have had no chance to study the "technique" of this operation, and it is not surprising that you run too close and dump your sack so that it falls with its mouth a foot beyond the hole and disgorges a part of its contents on the deck. As a consequence, the two men working here have to drag the sack back before emptying it, where (if you had dumped it properly) they would only have had to lift it by its corners and allow the coal to run out down the chute. Of course, they tell you what they think of you, and while you are answering that you are sorry for your mistake and will know how to avoid it next time, a sharp dig from an only half-checked barrow "lip" on your already wounded "Achilles tendon" helps to drive home the rule that—while there is no ban on talking, swearing and singing to your heart's content—the action of the tongue should not be allowed to paralyse the action of the feet.
The man ahead of you has disappeared at a trot, and in your eagerness to overtake him you lift the handles of your barrow too high, with the consequence that the first lump of coal that gets under the wheels brings it up standing, and you "telescope" against it. The lesson this drives home to you, together with the one that sinks in following the jam you create by your slowness in plunging through the procession of "loads" which must be passed in getting back to the dump, just about rounds out the basic essentials of your barrow-pushing education. You have learned how to keep out of the way; the rest is largely a matter of handling your barrow in a fashion to make the work easier, not only for yourself, but for the others whose operations "dovetail" with yours.
The work in the holds of the collier and the bunkers of the battleship, while perhaps a shade less strenuous physically than barrow-pushing, is a deal more dusty and unpleasant. Four holds are worked in the average collier, and in each of these are about thirty men. These work in six groups, each of which fills and stacks one "cluster" of sacks. The men alternate in holding sacks and shovelling. Special instructions are given that the sacks shall be completely filled, and that no pieces of coal too large to go down the chutes to the bunkers should be put in them. A maul is kept handy in each hold for smashing such lumps. A minimum of a dozen sacks are hoisted at one time, and occasionally this number is increased by two or three.
The coal dust is the unpleasant feature of working in the holds of the colliers, but even there it is nothing to the bunkers, where one actually feels it grinding between his teeth from the moment he enters. The coal falls in a steady stream from the chutes, the dust flying from it like the spray from a waterfall. There is no electric wiring, and the lights are open flares, good ventilation making the danger of an explosion from coal "damp" negligible. The men who work here shovelling the coal away from the chutes and passing it on toward the lower bunkers—would make the average chimney-sweep look like a white-winged angel. There is no way to avoid inhaling the settling dust with every breath, and I could well believe a red-eyed imp o' darkness (whom I found blinking like a bat in the sunshine after the collier had cast off) when he told me that he would be tasting the "bloomin' stuff for the next week."
The more one sees of coaling the more he marvels at the extent to which the human element enters into its success. A crew that is not both quick of foot and quick of wit will never have more than a mediocre coaling record. If a man has not both, when he is not getting in the way of his mates, he will be losing a few seconds here, and a few seconds there, until these run into minutes in the course of two or three hours. Multiplied by five or six hundred—the number of the men at work—it may well make the difference in a coaling rate of many score of tons per hour.
A keen interest and pride in the work is also a sine qua non of fast coaling. No ship in which there is not the best of feeling between the men and officers will ever maintain a high coaling average. Under the stimulus of imminent action, or when preparing to weigh anchor for some favourite port, things will move quickly, but the rate will not be maintained when the regular grind resumes. Indeed, slow coaling is, perhaps, the commonest form of "silent protest" on the part of a dissatisfied crew, and a ship which maintains a steadily depressed "curve of coaling" is generally credited with being due for a general shake-up of personnel.