At seven o’clock I am aroused by the mess-room steward leaning over me, closing my ports. They are flooding the decks with sea-water to cool them, and if my ports are open I am also flooded.
Still no relief. There is a deathly quiet in the mess-room as we assembled to our Christmas breakfast of bacon and eggs, coffee, cocoa, and marmalade. Imagine such a menu in the tropics! The butter is liquid, and from each of us, clad in singlets and white ducks, the sweat streams. The day begins unpropitiously. John Thomas, the mess-room steward, balancing himself on the top step of our companion-way with three cups of boiling cocoa in his hands, slips and thunders to the bottom. There is a chaotic mixture of scalded boy, broken cups, and steam on the floor, and we giggle nervously in our Turkish bath.
George the Fourth goes on watch, and we lie listlessly under our awning, praying for a breeze. On the face of the blazing vault there is not a single cloud, on the face of the waters not a ripple. The sea is a vast pond of paraffin. The hot gases from the funnel rise vertically, and the sun quivers behind them. The flaps of the windsail hang dead, the sides of the canvas tube have fallen in like the neck of a skinny old man. Slowly the sun mounts over our heads and the air grows hotter and hotter. From the galley come sounds of quacking, and a few feathers roll slowly past us. Now and then an agonized trimmer will stagger out of a bunker hatch into the open air, his half-naked body black with coal-dust and gleaming with sweat. The Mate, in a big straw hat, paces the bridge slowly. The cook emerges from the galley and hastens aft for provisions—they are preparing our Christmas dinner. Roast duck, green peas, new potatoes, plum pudding—and the temperature is 105° Fah. on deck.
One bell. I rise, and go below to change for my watch—12 to 4.
“Will you take any dinner, sir?” John Thomas rubs the sweat from his forehead and sets the soup on the table. I ponder on the madness of eating Christmas fare in that oven-like mess-room, but sentiment wins, and I sit down with the others.
“Hoondred an’ twenty oonder t’ win’s’le,” whispers George to me huskily.
“What’s the sea-water?” asks the Chief.
“Eighty-nine, sir.”
We push the soup aside, and John Thomas brings in the roast ducks. How appetizing they would be at home! The Chief wrenches them apart in perspiring silence, and we fall to. We peck at the food; the sweat drops from our faces into the plates, the utensils slide from our hands, and so we make the best of it. But when the pudding arrives our courage fails us. We cannot face plum pudding, sentiment or no sentiment. We gulp down some lime-juice and stagger away like dying men—I to four hours’ purgatory below.
Slowly (oh, so slowly!) the time drags on. The greaser draws his tattooed arm across his eyes and whispers, with the triumph of a lost soul bragging of the Circle of Fire, that he has known it “’otter’n this in the Red Sea, sir.” He is an entertaining man. Often I hear tales from the wide world of waters from his lips. This is his last voyage, he tells me. He is going “shore donkeyman” in future—what you call longshoreman. His wife has a nice little business in Neath now, and “she wants ’im ’ome.” Have I noticed how that high-press guide is leaking? Should he tighten up the tap-bolts in the bottom plate? I dissent, because one cannot reach them safely while she is running. It is only a trifle; better let it go. He acquiesces doubtfully, and resumes greasing. And the hours drift by.