CHAPTER XI
“She walked the waters like a thing of life.”
N.Z.S.S. “KAIKOURA”
(From a painting by Willie Fleming of Cape Town)
I suppose that all seamen have cherished a particular liking for some particular ship they have sailed in; a long association seems to establish a sympathy between the mind that controls and the dull steel that gives effect to the task required of it. Kipling had some such idea in his mind when he wrote “The Ship that found Herself,” and almost insensibly the idea is imbibed that the ship is a sentient thing whose behaviour can be accurately forecasted under any given conditions. I never had that feeling quite for the Mexican—my acquaintance was not long enough to permit it to grow into absolute confidence which it assuredly would have done had time been granted, but for my new ship it was altogether different. I took her twenty-three voyages round the world, and she never disappointed me, or failed to come up to expectation at any time. She could do anything that was reasonably asked of her, and I am vain enough to think she sulked when she lost the hand upon her that she had grown accustomed to, for she never did much afterwards. As it was put to me by a prominent official, “She never seemed to have a day’s luck after you left her.”
On my way to Glasgow I was delighted with the idea that there was to be a really big ship for me. I knew that she was to be forty feet longer than my last one, and at that time a five thousand ton ship was thought to be a pretty fair size. At all events many of us had the idea that with over four hundred feet in length the evil of pitching would be reduced to a minimum. Both Mexican and Ruapehu were 390 feet, and at times they could under provocation really distinguish themselves, but this extra forty feet, it was thought, would put an entirely different aspect on a ship’s behaviour in a heavy head sea. It was a vain hope, for I have known the Kaikoura, when light, pitch and scend through a vertical arc of thirteen degrees, which was both trying to the stomach and the temper, for although I was never actually sea-sick after my second voyage to sea, a heavy bout or spell of pitching always made me feel uncomfortable.