Chapter 8

When I was lamp-trimmer in the A.S.N. Company's employ on the Australian coast I was shipmate with an old Scotch fireman whose invariable practice it was to get most methodically drunk every time we left port. So drunk did he always become, that he could not stand, much less walk. But, crawling to the fidley, sometimes on hands and knees, he would somehow get down into the stokehold when his turn came, and there, balancing himself in some mysterious fashion, he would feed his fires. No sooner had he slammed to the furnace door than he would collapse, his legs bending every which way, as if they had been made of india-rubber. Yet the chief engineer used to declare that Andra could keep steam better drunk than any other fireman in the ship could sober. I have known him after a watch of firing to be still so drunk that he could not climb on deck, but lay huddled up in one corner of the stokehold like a heap of rags, utterly oblivious of the work going on around him.

It must, however, be remembered that pitching coal into the furnace, though it is the principal work of a fireman, does not by any means complete his work. After he has been "firing" for a certain length of time he perceives the necessity for "cleaning fires." Hehas been carefully raking and poking his fires at intervals so that no clogging of the bars shall hinder the free upward draught, and this operation, performed with long tools called a slice, a rake, and a devil, is very severe. The operator must stand very close to the furnace mouth and peer within at the fervent glow, while he searches the vitals of his fire as quickly and deftly as may be, lest the tell-tale gauge shall reveal to the watchful engineer that the pressure of steam is lessening, bringing him into the stokehold on the run to know what the all-sorts-of-unprintable-words that particular fireman is doing. But this is only the merest child'splay to cleaning fires. When that time comes the other furnace or furnaces (each fireman has two or three under his charge) must be at the top of their blast, doing their very utmost. Then the fireman flings wide the door of the furnace to be cleaned, plunges his tools into the heart of the fire, and thrusts, rakes, and slices, until he presently, half roasted, drags out on to the stokehold floor a mass of clinker. This sends out such a fierce upward heat that it must needs be damped down, the process being accompanied by clouds of suffocating steam-smoke. But there is no time to be lost. Again and again he dives into the heart of the furnace, each time purging it of some of the deadening clinker, until, at last, with smarting eyeballs, half choked, half roasted, and wholly exhausted for the time, he flings a shovelful or so of coal upon the now comparatively feeble fire, and retires to call up his reserve of strength.

And this work, of course, must go on continuously,no matter how the vessel is behaving, even if, as often happens, there descends occasionally from on high a flood of sea-water as waves break right over the labouring ship. The fireman must, to be efficient, nurse his fires, keep them clean, and hand them over to his successor in first-class going order, with the steam up to its ordered pressure; and failure to do this is provocative of bad language and much ill-feeling. Surely it hardly needs pressing upon the reader that such an occupation involves a truly awful strain upon the human animal, especially in tropical climates. The amount of strain has been officially recognized in the arrangement of firemen's watches. Instead of getting four hours on and four hours off, as do the sailors, they have four hours on and eight hours off, so that the exhausted frame may be able in some measure to recuperate. And in addition, wherever it is possible to do so, they get somewhat better food. I do not know certainly whether the institution is general, but I have been in several steamers where, at supper time, the firemen received a mess from the galley called the "black pot." It consisted of the remains of the saloon passengers' fare, sometimes made into a savoury stew, sometimes simply of itself, according to its component parts. But it was looked upon as the firemen's right, and no sailor ever participated in its contents.

It has probably occurred to the reader before this to ask the question, "How, if the fireman is so hard-worked in the stokehold and the space there be so limited, does he manage to get at the truly enormousquantity of coal that must be required to feed those devouring furnaces?" The explanation of this brings us to the lowest deep of all on board-ship life to-day. The providing of the coal for the use of the firemen is the duty of the "trimmer," the nature of whose work is so terrible that he should receive the sympathy of every kindly man and woman whom he serves. The coal is kept in vast magazines called bunkers, giving on to the stokeholds by means of watertight doors. In merchant ships these bunkers are placed so as to be most convenient for the transmission of coal to the stokeholds, and are as little subdivided as possible. What their capacity is may be imagined from the fact that some ships require three thousand tons of coal for a single passage, it being consumed at the rate of between twenty and thirty tons per hour! At the commencement of the passage the trimmer's work is comparatively easy. The coal lies near the outlet, and by a little skilful manipulation it is made to run out upon the stokehold floor handy for the fireman's shovelling. But as the consumption goes on, and the "face" of the coal recedes from the bulkhead, the trimmer's work grows rapidly more heavy. His labour knows no respite as he struggles to keep the fireman's needs supplied. And there is no ventilator pouring down fresh air into the bunker. In darkness, only punctuated by the dim light of a safety-lamp, in an atmosphere composed of the exhalations from the coal and a modicum of dust-laden air, liable at any moment to be overwhelmed by the down-rushing masses of coal as the ship's motion displaces it, thegrimy, sweat-soaked man works on. By comparison with him the coal-hewer in the mine has a gentleman's life. Darkness and danger and want of breath are his inevitable environment. What wonder is it that he becomes a hard citizen? The fact is that no man with longings for decent life would or could remain in such employment. Only those who by carelessness and disregard of all that for the majority of us makes life worth living stay in it, and enable the ocean traffic of to-day to go on.

It is absolutely impossible to exaggerate the miseries of such a mode of life, made necessary by the imperious demand for swift travel. Yet, severe as is the lot of the coal-trimmer in an ocean liner, it again is comparatively easy when compared with the lot of the second-class stoker in her Majesty's Navy. For him another set of conditions comes into play. The necessity for using the coal as a means of protection from shot and shell leads to the bunkers being subdivided into a host of "pockets" holding but a few tons and communicating with each other deviously. The work of getting the coal passed from one to the other of these is far worse than anything of the kind in the Merchant Service, as much worse as is the firing under forced draught for a Belleville boiler than the steady supply of fuel to a well-equipped, natural-draught stokehold of any of our great merchant steamships, where Belleville boilers, thank God, will never be used. And, coming deeper still, there is the firing and trimming of a "destroyer." That occupation defies any attempt to describe it. No words could give an adequately forcefulidea of what the firemen, trimmers, and E.R.A.'s must endure in order that a vessel no larger than an above-bridge steamer shall be driven by engines of five thousand horse-power at the rate of thirty miles per hour. We do not seem to have reached finality yet in this direction; but I should think that since human endurance has its limits, there must of necessity be a halt soon from the utter impossibility of finding human beings able to live and work under such awful conditions. When you find the long quivering hull of a destroyer, only a plate of steel not much thicker than a crown piece keeping out the sea, packed full of boilers, whizzing machinery, and coal, the tiny air space left containing something, of which one inhalation would make you or me, reader, feel as if we had been suddenly strangled, and the heat greater than one would find in the hottest room of a Turkish bath, it seems time to consider whether there can be any justification in compelling our fellow creatures, whom the need for bread has driven to accept such employment, to endure imprisonment like that, let aloneworkin it.

It is somewhat comforting to know that the exigencies of peaceful travel, severe as they are undoubtedly, do not require such suffering as that from their servants. Of course there are times, such as upon the outbreak of fire or the sudden springing of a leak, when the toilers below are literally between the devil and the deep sea. Also in the case of a boiler explosion or a sudden breakdown of machinery in full career, when the danger and attendant sufferingare very great. But then, we all have to face dangers at times in burning houses, railway accidents, and so on, which come so seldom that we do not lose any sleep in anticipating them. Therefore we do not reckon the possibilities of calamity among the drawbacks to a fireman's or trimmer's business. It is the steady stress of such conditions of labour which is to be deplored.

Before the black watch below can be relieved there is always a duty to be performed that makes no unfitting climax to the preceding tale of toil. It is "ashes up." Some steamers have been fitted with a contrivance for obviating this piece of hard work—the fitting of a sort of valve in the ship's side or bottom through which the ashes anddébrisof the fire can be blown into the sea. These, however, are few. The usual way is for the ashes to be filled into long iron buckets, just as much as a strong man can lift when full, down in the stokehold. Some of the trimmers go on deck (how sweet the sea air is after their long sojourn below!), and sliding open a door in the tube of one of the ventilators, discover there a winch. The chain of this winch runs down into the stokehold, where it is hooked on to the ash-bucket. The trimmers on deck heave away with all their might (for when their task is ended they may go below), and when the bucket reaches them, they snatch it and carry it to the ash-shoot, where they dump its contents overboard. In some very well-found ships there is a small steam-winch for doing this work, but usually it is performed as described, and a heavy piece of businessit is, involving the raising of several tons of ashes from the bottom of the ship.

Here I must leave the fireman and trimmer. I hope that engineers and their crews will forgive me, being a sailor, for having had the hardihood to say anything about them at all. They know very well the prejudice that even now exists against them in the minds of most sailors, and they will probably look closely into what I have written for some sign of sneering depreciation. But they will not find it. My sympathies are most fully with them. My admiration for them is great. And I think that as regards the firemen and trimmers, that their work in tropical seas is so utterly unfit for white men to do that, in spite of the hardship attendant upon loss of employment at first, it would be a good thing if stokeholds were entirely manned by negroes, who, from their constitutional experience of heat, must be far better fitted to endure the conditions of the stokehold. Many southern-going ships carry them now. I should not be sorry to see them the rule, and my countrymen doing something better.

CHAPTER XXXV.

CONCLUSION.

Andnow, approaching the conclusion of the whole matter, the end of what I feel to have been an important task, while the way in which it has been performed is an open question, I ask myself, "What is likely to be the effect of this book upon the minds of those for whom it has been written? Will they think that the British Mercantile Marine is a profession which they should exert all their influence to keep their young friends and relatives out of, or will they feel, as I do, that, in spite of all its obvious drawbacks, it should be by no means neglected as an opening for enterprising adventurous youngsters, the right stuff of which British sailors are made?"

I have been compelled, in truth, to say many hard things of the Merchant Service, but there is such a thing as speaking the truth in love. And as I love the Merchant Service with all my heart, and desire most earnestly to see it flourish and prosper more and more, I am the more anxious that nothing I have said will be taken as spoken in a carping or pessimistic spirit. I want to see the Mercantile Marine purged of theforeigner, not because I hate the foreigner of any nation, but because this peculiarly and particularly maritime nation of ours cannot afford, in the face of the undoubted hatred manifested towards it by practically every continental people, to allow the life of its citizens to be dependent upon the good-will of aliens. In spite of what not only continental writers, but many of our own scribes, may and do say about our unctuous hypocrisy, there can be no doubt that the chief characteristic of the British nation to-day is its careless magnanimity. Warned by innumerable writers of the risks we wilfully expose ourselves to, we go on with a good-natured shrug of the shoulders in the same reckless fashion. We welcome, as if we were in a new colony with millions of acres undeveloped, with all our resources at their spring-tide, a continuous flood of aliens to our shores and in our ships. We not only give them all the advantages we ourselves possess, but actually strain a point, wherever possible, in their favour. Finding no reciprocity anywhere, no feeling of kindliness for all our generous treatment of aliens, we are unmoved, nor is our policy, or want of policy, altered. And this grand air of indifference, which is not assumed, but real, is to the last degree galling to our continental neighbours. Their attitude becomes daily more difficult to understand. Rejoicing to see how we are, as they firmly believe, exposing all our most vital, most vulnerable points to their attack, both in matters of war and peace, they are yet almost frantic with rage at what they are pleased to call our abominable insular insolence, our refusal to be frightenedof them. I do not pretend to justify our insouciant attitude, I only note its universal presence.

In the matter of our Mercantile Marine, I feel sure that we are heaping up for ourselves a most awful mountain of disaster in the way in which we are allowing it to become really a foreign service. One thing we could do, and should do at once—apply the same rule to the Merchant Service that is in force in the Royal Navy. There no alien, unless he has become naturalized, can hold any post whatever. It sounds a small reform; but it would have, I am sure, the most far-reaching effects. At present it is quite possible—indeed, it will be found actually the case in some instances—for a British ship to be wholly manned by foreigners, from the master to the boy—sailing ships, that is. Foreigners in steam are mostly confined to the crew; and, as I have said before, I know of no instance where foreign engineers are employed in our ships at all. Because, in the first place, they, our home-bred engineers, are the best in the world; and, secondly, because they have behind them the support of a great Trade Union, that—although I do not suppose many sea-going engineers are active members of it—would speedily make its voice heard and its influence felt, if any attempt was made to bring in foreign engineers.

For reasons which I hope I have made abundantly clear in the preceding pages, such support cannot be found for the seaman—that is, for the foremast hand. But the officers might do much more than they are doing. There are several societies for the mutual help and defence of Mercantile Marine officers, some doingexcellent work, others doing scarcely anything at all. I will not particularize, for that would do no good. I will merely say that if all these societies would amalgamate, would all pull together and enlist the sympathy and active support of shipmasters and officers, retired as well, they would be a body extremely powerful in their influence on behalf of the best interests of their profession. Such a body, composed of serious-thinking, well-informed, and trustworthy men in full touch with the subject, could do more in one year for the upraising and nationalizing of the Merchant Service than will ever be done by isolated efforts, however earnest. For their own sakes they would not neglect the foremast hand; in the best interests of the service they could not. Even by the present local efforts of some of these societies much good has been done, enough to show what might be done were they all united.

As to the ships themselves, perhaps enough has been said already to indicate the transition stage through which we are passing. For while it is undoubtedly true that the sailing ship is doomed to extinction in the near future, at the present day there is still an enormous amount of sailing tonnage afloat. Thousands of good seaworthy sailing ships still come and go between distant shores, doing good work, not only in earning profits for their owners, but in rearing sailors for the British Mercantile Marine. But we are not building any more to replace them. We have come to the conclusion that the future of sea-traffic is to the steamer. Doubtless many ship-owners, in the present abnormally inflated state of the coal market, are sighingover the fact that they are so dependent upon the black dirty stuff for the due working of their ships, and vainly wishing for the days to return when the clean free winds furnished all the motive power needed. But we cannot go back again to sail. Even the Norwegian timber droghers are taking to steam, and that is a portent indeed. It is the beginning of the end. The end will come, for all sailing ships still making long voyages, with the opening of the Panama Canal. Then, at one fell swoop, the 'Frisco trade in grain, the South American trade in nitrate, will pass into the hands or holds of the steamships. Huge cargo carriers, able to stow eight or ten thousand tons away with ease, will go lumbering steadily down the gulf and through the canal. They will range the western sea-board of the Americas, sweeping into their capacious maws every ounce of cargo, and stimulating production in an amazing way.

Presently also will come the petroleum-propelled ship, the electrically-engined ship, as the carriage of coal becomes more and more of a burden, while its price steadily rises. Meanwhile, the inventive genius of America will surely find some way of re-creating for herself a splendid Mercantile Marine. I cannot think that she will always be content to see all her vast carrying trade over-sea practically in the hands of Britain and foreigners. At present it seems to be evident to all, except the average Americans, that such efforts as have recently been made with that object in view are foredoomed to failure. Only one thing is required for the rehabilitation of the AmericanMercantile Marine, and that is, that owing to the rapid filling up of all uninhabited land on the American continent, the teeming millions along her sea-board shall turn their earnest attention to the possibilities of money-getting that there are in ship-owning and sailing. Then they will insist upon some reasonable laws being passed that shall help, not hinder, the expansion of American sea-traffic, and the thing will be as good as done.

That, however, will require some considerable time yet. Meanwhile, the sailing ships, wooden ships too, will probably linger longest in our North American colonies. But they too must disappear. Already they are feeling the pinch very sorely, with economically run tramp-steamers cutting them out everywhere. This is obvious now when the thrifty Norwegians are running tramp-steamers in lieu of the ramshackle old craft with which they have so long monopolized the lumber and ice trade. To a seaman the spectacle of steamers in the home ports discharging ice comes as something of a shock, for he remembers what class of vessels have always been used for this, perhaps the roughest of all the carrying trades known.

But the great work to be done is the dissemination of popular information with regard to maritime matters. To burn into the minds of our people at home what the merchant ship means to them; to make the villager understand that the cheap and abundant food, which may be purchased even in remotest inland hamlets, has been brought thus to his door from the other side of the world by the unceasing strenuous labours ofseamen and the sleepless enterprise of ship-owners. I look earnestly for the day when every newspaper in the kingdom will be considered incomplete without its column of readable shipping matter—true tales of latter-day daring, of courage as high as any manifested in the attempt to destroy life in battle; when the British seaman shall no longer feel that he is as completely isolated from the thoughts and sympathies of his countrymen as if he were an inhabitant of another planet; when the British man-o'-war's man, whether he be blue-jacket or stoker, shall know of a truth that his friends at home realize what he is doing during his long absence from home: how he, for their sakes, in order that the steady stream of food-bearing ships from prolific lands far away shall never cease by day or by night through the years, keeps sleepless watch all round the world.

Let no one think that this is a small matter. The acquisition of knowledge like this is not only of the highest importance in itself, but it will bring with it a vast amount of cognate information that now is much neglected. Geography will become what it should be, a popular science, because the immense value of it will be recognized. Economical science will also assume an interest which it has long lacked for all but the minutest percentage of fairly well-educated people. Politically, such an education of the people will be of the highest value, preventing them from being led away by clap-trap and jargon, and enabling them to understand why our country has risen to its present enviable height of prosperity, and how essential it is to thewell-being of every man, woman, and child in the community that the peaceful flow of over-sea traffic shall never be interrupted.

Beyond and above all this there is the liquidation of the debt due to the sailor; the recognition of the fact in practical ways that without him we should not merely be without at least half of what he has taught us to look upon as the necessities of life, necessities which less than a century ago were looked upon as the highest luxuries, but that we should be a feeble population of slaves groaning under the iron rule of some military continental despot, who would rob us of our very blood and marrow, and give us in return leave to live that we might toil for him and his satraps until, early worn out, we were flung aside to die and obtain that liberty in death that we were denied in life. We want to atone as far as we may for our long neglect, through ignorance, and by our united intelligent efforts to show that at last we have awakened to the fact that in our Mercantile Marine we possess the most magnificent heritage ever built up for a free people by the courage and endurance of its sons.

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An Introduction and Notes to Mrs. Gaskell's 'Life of Charlotte Brontë' by Mr. CLEMENT K. SHORTER, the eminent Brontë authority.

CONTENTS OF THE VOLUMES:

1. JANE EYRE. ByCharlotte Brontë. With a Photogravure Portrait of Charlotte Brontë, from a Drawing byG. Richmond, a Photogravure of Rochester and Jane Eyre, from a Water-colour Drawing byFrederick Walker, A.R.A.; a Facsimile of the Title-page of the first edition, and 8 Full-page Illustrations.2. SHIRLEY. ByCharlotte Brontë. With a Facsimile of the Title-page of the first edition, and 10 Full-page Illustrations.3. VILLETTE. ByCharlotte Brontë. With a Photogravure Portrait of M. Heger, Facsimiles of the Title-page of the original edition and of a page of the original MS., and 8 Full-page Illustrations.4. THE PROFESSOR, byCharlotte Brontë, and POEMS, byCharlotte,Emily, andAnne Brontë, and the Rev.Patrick Brontë, &c. With Facsimiles of the Title-pages of the first editions, and 8 Full-page Illustrations.5. WUTHERING HEIGHTS. ByEmily Brontë. AGNES GREY. ByAnne Brontë. With a Preface and Biographical Notice of both Authors byCharlotte Brontë. With a Portrait of Emily Brontë, Facsimiles of the Title-pages of the first edition, and 8 full-page Illustrations.6. THE TENANT OF WILDFELL HALL. ByAnne Brontë. With a Portrait of Anne Brontë, a Facsimile of the Title-page of the first edition, and 6 Full-page Illustrations.7. THE LIFE OF CHARLOTTE BRONTË. By Mrs.Gaskell. With an Introduction and Notes byClement K. Shorter. With Photogravure Portraits of Mrs. Gaskell and of the Rev. A.B. Nicholls, a Portrait of the Rev. Patrick Brontë, 11 New Illustrations, Facsimiles of a letter by Charlotte Brontë, and of a page from Charlotte Brontë's MS. of 'The Secret,' &c., &c.The LIFE AND WORKS OF THE SISTERS BRONTË are also to be had in 7 vols. large crown 8vo. handsomely bound in cloth, price 5s. each; in small post 8vo. limp green cloth, or, cloth boards, gilt top, price 2s. 6d. each: and in small fcp. 8vo. bound in cloth, with gilt top, with Frontispiece to each volume, price 1s. 6d. each; or the Set, in gold-lettered cloth case, 12s. 6d.

2. SHIRLEY. ByCharlotte Brontë. With a Facsimile of the Title-page of the first edition, and 10 Full-page Illustrations.

3. VILLETTE. ByCharlotte Brontë. With a Photogravure Portrait of M. Heger, Facsimiles of the Title-page of the original edition and of a page of the original MS., and 8 Full-page Illustrations.

4. THE PROFESSOR, byCharlotte Brontë, and POEMS, byCharlotte,Emily, andAnne Brontë, and the Rev.Patrick Brontë, &c. With Facsimiles of the Title-pages of the first editions, and 8 Full-page Illustrations.

5. WUTHERING HEIGHTS. ByEmily Brontë. AGNES GREY. ByAnne Brontë. With a Preface and Biographical Notice of both Authors byCharlotte Brontë. With a Portrait of Emily Brontë, Facsimiles of the Title-pages of the first edition, and 8 full-page Illustrations.

6. THE TENANT OF WILDFELL HALL. ByAnne Brontë. With a Portrait of Anne Brontë, a Facsimile of the Title-page of the first edition, and 6 Full-page Illustrations.

7. THE LIFE OF CHARLOTTE BRONTË. By Mrs.Gaskell. With an Introduction and Notes byClement K. Shorter. With Photogravure Portraits of Mrs. Gaskell and of the Rev. A.B. Nicholls, a Portrait of the Rev. Patrick Brontë, 11 New Illustrations, Facsimiles of a letter by Charlotte Brontë, and of a page from Charlotte Brontë's MS. of 'The Secret,' &c., &c.

The LIFE AND WORKS OF THE SISTERS BRONTË are also to be had in 7 vols. large crown 8vo. handsomely bound in cloth, price 5s. each; in small post 8vo. limp green cloth, or, cloth boards, gilt top, price 2s. 6d. each: and in small fcp. 8vo. bound in cloth, with gilt top, with Frontispiece to each volume, price 1s. 6d. each; or the Set, in gold-lettered cloth case, 12s. 6d.

London: SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15, Waterloo Place, S.W.

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