Andersen came to me. "I tank I sign de order book for sou'west half sou'—here we bane running eastb'no'th. How I tell de truth wid sech a t'ing—hey?" said he.
"If you always tell the truth in this line of packets you'll soon get a job hoeing potatoes in Essex! What's the matter with you? Do you want the company to get wise that we fought a fire set in with oiled rags by a fool of a bos'n and had to run the ship fifty miles off her course? Who'll pay for the coal? Who'll square the old man? Who'll tell the passengers that we don't always have a bonehead bos'n to wreck us, and that if they'll promise to come again we'll see that it don't happen often—no, not often?"
Andersen went on duty with a queer look in his eyes. He had seen something and it amazed him—just why I never could tell, for he had been in steamers before and ought to have known something of a ship's officers' duties before coming into the Prince Line.
The truth in many lines is sacred. Absolutely sacred. Too sacred entirely to shift about the deck like a bag of dunnage and leave lying around for some fools to play with. No, never play with the truth in some lines of shipping. Do your duty. That's all you've got to do, and if it's so logged, why, then you're all right. If it isn't, why, then you better get to driving a truck or peddling peanuts.
Well, Boldwin was a pretty good sort, as I have said. He mostly saw that all of us did our duty—in the log book, in the order book, and with the company officers. We went along slowly on our course after that, and were in the latitude of Watlings when bad weather came on. It was nothing much, just a cyclone of the usual order, coming as it did in the hurricane season; but we were a full-powered ship of six thousand tons, and it wouldn't have delayed us to any extent—except that we didn't count on the donkey man from Donegal.
You see, the Albert had one of those underwater ash-chutes. The pipe came down through the bilge, about fifteen feet below the water line. It was a foot in diameter, and was supposedly bolted to the skin and as solid as the keel or garboards.
The metal of the pipe was half an inch in thickness, and was braced and bolted so that the top which showed above the water line could be hove on and shut off in a seaway. The top had a sliding cover working with a lever, and when the ashes were to be fired out the cover was thrown back, the bucket dumped, and a jet of steam blew the mass out through the ship's bottom, making no dirt or dust at all, and doing away with the everlasting firing over the side.
It was a good invention. It saved the company many dollars in paint, and it kept the ship, which was always short-handed, looking better than most vessels that used the old way over the side.
It would have lasted forever if the man from Donegal hadn't been of an inquisitive turn of mind, and started exploring it with a monkey wrench the week before the storm. As it happened he broke several of the bolts which had rusted in the bottom, and the metal, having been much worn and corroded, the first thing Mac knew was a torrent of sea water pouring into the after compartment, coming as it did through a pipe hole about a foot in diameter and fifteen feet below the sea level.
It caught the firemen unawares. The donkey man was with them and let out a yip that brought every coal passer, oiler, and fireman to the chute. A wild burst of water tore through that hole, and the compartment was flooded in less time than it takes to tell about it—and that compartment ran the whole length of the engine room and aft of it until it brought up in the wake of the machinery, where the bulkhead of the tail-shaft room shut off the stern.