Towards the close of my voyaging I became involved in the after-effects of the various seamen’s strikes, and the dangerous spirit of unrest and insubordination generated by them. The power of the master of a merchant ship, be she a collier or be she an Olympic, is a very uncertain quantity, inasmuch as it is limited only by the necessity of the case that is being dealt with. In other words, you can act as you consider the occasion rightly demands you should do, but you stand to be called upon to defend your action when you get on shore.
It will thus be seen that the discipline clauses of the Merchant Shipping Act leave a great deal to the discretion of the judicial authority that may be dealing with any particular case, and it can well be realised that some magistrates would view offences against discipline with a more lenient spirit than others. Again, and I am well aware of the gravity of the words I am using, it is not the Board of Trade that has whittled down the master’s authority voluntarily, but it is the deliberate action of shipowners, who, curiously enough, have done more than any other agency to destroy authority on board ship. So long as a master was certain of support from the owner, so long would he act unflinchingly if necessity arose. But in many cases a master will hesitate to involve himself in law when he knows that in doing so he will get no support from his owners. Quite recently the master of a great mail steamer told me that it would not do to have any trouble with his crew, “for the Company would not like it,” a policy, I submit, which is simply asking for trouble, for the men of to-day fully realise that a clever lawyer can make a plausible case from very slight grounds. Hence arises the crying need of one uniform administration of the Merchant Shipping Act, for as it is dealt with at present there is no uniformity of practice.
I had occasion to take part in a police court case in Wellington where a fireman was being prosecuted for assaulting my second officer and knocking some of his teeth out. It was a particularly bad case, and deserved the extreme penalty that could be awarded for that offence, but the magistrate took an entirely different view and only inflicted half the maximum penalty. I was rather put out at this and am afraid that I showed it, for I told the stipendiary that I should advise my officers in future to carry something for their own defence, as they got little protection from the police. This was rather unfortunate, for some little time afterwards, I think it was the next voyage, there was a shooting case which caused a good deal of comment and which nearly got me into serious trouble. The facts were as follows. Two mates of sailing vessels had got themselves disliked by certain seamen belonging to their own and other vessels. They had been threatened, and consequently kept together for mutual protection, one of them, as they went on shore one Sunday morning, putting a revolver in his pocket. They were met by men in search of them with hostile intent, and the mate in possession of the revolver was knocked down. Fearing worse treatment he fired at his assailant from his pocket, and the aggressor fell shot through the heart. It is to be noticed that although this feud had been in existence some little time there was no sign of any police supervision or watching until the mischief was complete. The two men were put on trial for wilful murder together, but the judge ruled that they were to be tried separately. Consequently the man who fired the shot was first tried, and sentenced to a long term of penal servitude. This was on a Saturday. The next day I sat down and wrote a long letter to the New Zealand Times, which was published on the Monday; in it I pointed out former complaints of my own as to police inefficiency, and concluded with an appeal for mitigation of sentence. I did not mention the other man, who had to stand his trial on the Monday. This man was acquitted, but the public prosecutor was furious at my interference in the case. He and I were on very friendly terms as far as whist players went, but meeting me in the Club on Monday afternoon he told me that I had been guilty of contempt of court, and would have to take the consequences. I think, however, that it was just one of those touch-and-go cases where it would have been difficult to convict, for I heard no more of the matter. The man who was acquitted came down to my ship on the Tuesday morning, and meeting East in the gangway told him that he had come to thank me for getting him off, to which my chief replied, “Clear out at once! The old man don’t want to see you, I know!” and really he was quite right. So ended that episode; but I did not make many friends over what was really a fight for principle, and to this day I cherish animosity against a Christchurch newspaper that, taking this case as a handle, attacked me falsely and bitterly in my absence, when I had no opportunity of replying.
By this time I had become tired to some extent of spending so much time at sea; I wanted for one thing to do some training in the Excellent, and for another my wife had been so pulled down by repeated attacks of influenza that it was necessary I should look more closely after my family affairs. I accordingly thought I would stay at home for a voyage, and one fine summer’s afternoon I took my leave of the old ship that had served me so well, and as I stood by Manor Way Station seeing the blue ensign replaced by a red one I felt as though I was taking farewell of a much-loved friend. I never saw the Kaikoura again, but grieved to hear that she had met her fate at the shipbreaker’s hands. She deserved a better ending.
It is one thing to be a Naval Reserve officer in command of a fine ship in peace time, but it is quite another matter to give up separate command, inferior to the Navy as it is, and take your place as one of the eighteen hundred or so units that carry on the principal duties of H.M. Navy. This fact had long been dimly recognised by me, although in all my periods of drill service I had always been shown a great deal of consideration.
As soon as one had reported at Whale Island one’s identity was lost in the particular class in which one was merged, and I thanked goodness that drill had always been rather a hobby of mine, and that I could hold my own respectably with other lieutenants of the senior class to which I was attached. Indeed, I discovered that so far as actual drill was concerned the teaching of the drill ships had been very thorough. It was only that here one was faced with the handling of the latest and newest weapons. In other respects the lieutenants of the regular service had not been better instructed than we were.
The senior staff officer was a lieutenant named Waymouth, now captain of a battleship, and he it was who put us through our gunnery tests, and lectured on those matters requiring explanation and blackboard diagrams, such as hydraulics and kindred matters. He was a wonderfully gifted man, and had the rather rare faculty of being able to impart his knowledge to others. He had, I think, made gunnery his particular study, for there was no possible question concerning any gun in the service the answer to which was not immediately forthcoming. Indeed, so far as I could judge, the whole staff of the Excellent had reached a standard of efficiency and excellence it would have been difficult to find fault with. The first lieutenant, Adair—now admiral—was a man of great personal character.
The torpedo school, H.M.S. Vernon, was another thing altogether, and here I suffered considerably from my inability to chase “X.” Highly interesting though the lectures were, they required a knowledge of algebra, which, though learned in my school-days, I had entirely forgotten. As it happened I had to leave the course before the examination, so my shortcomings were not discovered. I had been through all the practical work connected with mining, etc., but as the Whitehead came last of all I did not then make its acquaintance. The following year I was appointed to H.M.S. Devastation for the naval manœuvres, at which I was highly pleased, and duly proceeded to join her when she was lying in historic Mutton Cove. She was commanded by Captain Oxley, who gave me a very cordial welcome, and her first lieutenant was none other than my old acquaintance of Zanzibar, P. G. Vanderbyl. The other lieutenants were all men who have since done well in the service, and one with whom I was on specially good terms, named Hall, I found acting as inspecting captain of submarines when I was down at a review at the invitation of the Admiralty just a year or two ago. With that peculiarity men in the service have, Captain Hall hardly looked a day older.
Service in the Devastation was a novelty. She was one of the earlier types of ironclads, and at the time she was built was of considerable utility, but as a sea-going craft she was not a thing of joy. Even in that capacity, though, she had her good points, one of which was her extreme steadiness in a sea-way, but on the other hand, the ventilation below left much to be desired, and in anything like bad weather, when the ship was closed down, a considerable amount of potted air was consumed by every one.
We left Plymouth the morning after I joined her to join the fleet at Portland. We were making our best possible speed, but she was a ship that resented being driven beyond a certain pace, for when doing anything over ten or eleven knots her steering was erratic to the last degree. A yaw of three points on either side was of constant occurrence, and my sympathies went out to the chief engineer, who stood looking at her wake in grim calculation of an enormous amount of wasted energy. In due course we joined up at Portland with the Red Fleet under the command of Admiral Fitzroy. Compared with our fleets of to-day it was a motley gathering. The best vessels in the manœuvres were four ships of the Royal Sovereign class, all allotted to the Red Fleet, while first-class cruisers were put into the line of battle to make up sufficient numbers to carry out the scheme of operations. But if the Red Fleet was one of all sorts, the Blue Fleet was still worse, for with the exception of some armoured and other cruisers, there were not in it any two homogeneous ships. This, be it remembered, was in 1894. It would be interesting to hear the comments of an admiral to-day if he were given the command of a fleet of battleships consisting of six different types, such as Alexandra, Barfleur, Benbow, Inflexible, Colossus, and Edinburgh. It speaks well for the capacity of the officers in charge that they were able to obtain satisfactory results from so strange a mixture, but that really was the transition time of the Navy, for since that date ships have been built with a view to homogeneity.