Stories of the Ships

by Lewis R. Freeman

With the coal "skip" doing a dervish dance from one end to the other of the narrow space, and with even lumps of the coal itself indulging in punitive expeditions on their own account, the waiting stoker needed all the quick-wittedness and shifty-footedness of a bull-fighter combined with the nicety of balance of a tight-rope walker to carry on at all. Yet carry on he did, and with only less clocklike a regularity than the imperturbable "Kilroy" itself.

A heavy slam-banging from the opposite end of the boiler-room indicated that things were not going quite so smoothly there, and edging cautiously along I was presently able to get some hint of the cause from the words of a volubly cursing stoker who limped out to tell me that the "blinkin' skip 'as took charge." Rubbing a bruised shin and glowering balefully from a blackened eye which appeared to have bumped against a boiler, he explained, in language more forceful than elegant, that some unpractical theorist had encouraged them to experiment with wheels on the side of the skip with the idea of making it easier to push about over the coal-cluttered deck. This had turned out a very satisfactory "safe-in-harbour" expedient, but the increased mobility which had been so useful in fair weather had proved its undoing in foul.

In the picturesque language of the sea, it had "taken charge," and so effectually that one swift, straight rush to starboard, followed by a "googly" progress back to port, put every man who, either by chance or intent, barred its way more or less hors de combat. When I peeped gingerly round a corner the sight I saw was vividly suggestive of those good old days of mass play American football when a burly half-back was bucking the line of his demoralised opponents.

The heavy three-quarters-full skip had slammed down against the port bunkers when the ship rolled to that side, and in the second or two she hung there before swinging back again half a dozen men had thrown themselves upon it in an effort to "clip its wings" by removing the wheels. Either the time was too short, or else they had got in each other's way.

At any rate, the wheels were still in position to go round when the battleship, sliding down the reverse of the big wave that had thrown her over, tilted her decks back the other way. Straight down the one-in-three incline from the port to the starboard bunkers lolloped the Juggernaut, dashing the protesting anatomies of the stokers to left and right as it went. Spitting blood and oaths indiscriminately, one man clung to it all the way, however, and he it was who, taking advantage of the tilt, finally rendered it harmless by pushing it over on its side, where it was left wriggling impotently like an overturned turtle.

Meanwhile the "Kilroy" had been ringing up its numbers in vain, and it took several minutes of fast shovelling by all hands to bring the fires up to where they would have been had the interruption not occurred.

It was about this time that the bridge called on the engine-room for an increase of speed, and it was that, with a change of course, that sent the mounting seas crashing over the starboard bow, which brought my visit to the stokeholds to a sudden and unceremonious end. There came a shivering crash, followed by a momentary halt like that which throws one against his neighbour in a jerkily-braked tramcar.

The great ship staggered groggily for a second or two as a weight of solid water equal to her own was launched against her. Then the relentless urge of her spinning screws drove her forward, with the dish of her rigid hull skimming a few thousand tons off the top of the uprearing wave that had assailed her. The most of the mighty cataclysm surged to lee and back into the sea again, but wherever there was an opening—by gun-port, by ventilator, by unbattened hatch—it poured below in thunderous torrents. Deck by deck, where we had descended so laboriously by tilting ladders, we heard it bounding lower and lower, and then (just how and by where I never exactly understood) the flood was all about us.

"If we ship two or three more like that it'll be getting to the fires," shouted the warrant officer who had taken me over from the Senior Engineer; "we'll only be in the way here; we'd best get up while we can. I've stood all the watches I care to in flooded stokeholds in the years I was a stoker myself."

Over steel plates that were rocking with the wash of the water that had penetrated beneath them, he led me to a little electric lift into which the two of us were just able to crowd and slide the door. "Never thought much of this thing," he said as the car began to ascend after two or three propitiatory prods at the button; "there's too much chance of getting stalled halfway and spending the night like a tinned herring. But even that would be better than getting caught by another waterfall on one of the ladders. Besides, she seems to be going all right anyway."