Jo-Jo pumped. The blowlamps roared. The logs tried to climb into the launch. The launch herself rolled broadside to the swell. Tools slid into the bilges. The sun struck the back of one's neck like a hot hammer. The water-bottle, swinging madly from the awning - spar, was empty. Slowly the gauge reached five atmospheres. Pump, Jo-Jo, pump! . . . All right, she's away again.

Such episodes may mark a man, but they do him no permanent damage if he has a sense of humour and a dash of philosophy, and a member of a cannibal tribe to work the pump. There seems to be a rough justice at work on the world, and machines whose imperfections chasten their human associates engage our affections and illumine our memories with comic episodes. Even main engines have this quality. Those in particular which belonged, as we may say, to the Victorian era.

Certainly they partook of the qualities of that era in outward semblance and interior qualities. They had character.

slow. They were durable and dependable. They were built upon principles and specifications which had stood the tests of time and the ruthless sea. They stood up. It was a matter of pride with us that, no matter what happened, so long as a ship floated we could get her home. There was more than a mere scrap of sentiment to us in the tradition that she was part of Britain. She could never be anything else. machinery was as characteristic of her country of origin as were ourselves.

Her

To speak thus of the dead is not to depreciate the living. Other days, other ways. But those old ships with their huge lumbering engines had many virtues. One remembers them with affection as one remembers old cities and old books. The modern fabricated ship has about the same standing as any other article produced by quantity, production. She doesn't last long enough to have any memories. She is like a modern novel-sophisticated, smart, efficient, and soon forgotten.

There was one, and I remember her because on her articles I was for the first time in my life set down as "first engineer." The English Merchant Marine does not recognise legally either "chief engineers " or "captains." I remember her because I joined her after a voyage in a Scotch ship, and was very glad to return to a vessel of the old employ, registered in London. She was a

six thousand tons, very comfortable in an old-fashioned way, and her engines were by Blair of Stockton-on-Tees. What kind of man Blair himself might have been is not known, but his engines were the heaviest and most durable ever built. The flanges of the cylinder covers were three inches thick. The four huge turned columns which supported the cylinders in front were nearly a foot in diameter, and instead of being flanged and fastened with bolts were carried clean through bed-plate and cylinder-block and secured with nuts the size of a snaredrum. The crankshaft was of the same heroic proportions. It was sixteen inches in diameter, and was held in place in its bearings by huge polished steel slabs like grave-stones.

There was a propeller astern resembling a windmill, and that old triple-expansion engine had walked solemnly about the oceans at sixty revolutions per minute for fifteen years when I came to her. Nothing would ever wear out those marvellous engines, and that Lowmoor wrought-iron hull. She was built, like many another thing in England, to last an eternity. She was one of the immortals.

And she had the disposition of one who took a long view and a calm one, and was not to be disturbed by passing trivialities. She was not so much a happy ship as a placid one. She did not roll very much, except in the Bay of Biscay or when rounding Cape

ship, and any water that came into her well-decks soon ran out of great wrought-iron scuppers, which clanged loudly when a wave struck them. She kept her men voyage after voyage. She had a commander who had been mate of her, a hot-tempered Welshman who made it his boast he would never knowingly make money out of the ship's victuals. We lived well and happily. She was, if you have a romantic nature, an ideal ship.

But I remember her most of all for a voyage she made in which everything went wrong: when we put the mate ashore to die in the Naval Hospital at Gibraltar after we had lost twelve hours with a fouled anchor in Oran. We had discharged coal in Alexandria and loaded iron ore in the Grecian Arches, and in both ports we had had trouble. The mate, suddenly and without warning, took to his bunk with a disease which was beyond our commander's diagnosis, and he lay in unassuageable agony. And the commander himself, when we left Gibraltar for home, was in a state of mind bordering on frenzy, what with the delay and the ceaseless fraying of his temper by such untoward happenings. The Fernfield, so long an abode of peace and happiness, tramped out into the winter Atlantic under something very like a cloud. It needed only a word from the chief, to the effect that the Oran coal was burning like chaff, to send the full-bodied

two hundred tons in our bunkers were vanishing. It would never do to face the Bay in wintertime with trash like this. They talked it over as they drank their glasses of Scotch in the Old Man's room, and it was decided to call at Corcubion, which is behind Cape Finisterre, and take fifty tons of real coal for a stand-by. There would be a row, anyway, over the time they were taking. Might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.

We went into that quiet little port of Galicia, and took our fifty tons from a hulk that had been a noble sailing ship before we were born. It was our last glimpse of peace for fifteen days.

The run from Finisterre to Glasgow was about five days for us in a general way. But when we ran out from behind that huge whale-backed promontory and faced the open Atlantic, we found thick weather. It was the sort of weather that the most experienced seafarers regard with uneasy misgiving. The sea came in from the westward in a tremendous unbroken swell.

across which low black streamers hurried eastward to a sinister horizon. The wind whipped the surface of the near-by water into flat sheets of spray. The bows of the ship descended with solemn deliberation, and the windlass was for ever smothered with spray blown athwart the forecastle-head. She came up with even more deliberation. The carpenter, a figure draped in oilskins, sheltered himself against against the bulkhead and chalked his sounding-rod. He was trying the forward wells. The Fernfield had transverse wells across the ship between each double-bottom tank, and into these wells the water from the limbers drained.

Down below the engines were turning their regulation sixty revolutions per minute. They would do this on a hundred and fifty pounds of steam and a vacuum of twenty-four inches. They were able to do this for the next fifteen days of heavy pitching. They raced, of course, when the propeller lifted clear of the sea, but no racing could endanger those enormous cranks and connecting rods. There were times when the captain rather wished the propeller would drop off. We would be nearly two weeks overdue. But he might have saved his sighs. Blair's engines did not lose their propellers. We had no anxiety. And then, the next day, we had to put the ballast on the bilges. She was making water, as we say. Four inches in Number One well.

day into the Bay. It is The Bay par excellence, as the Gulf of Mexico is The Gulf and the English Channel is The Channel. The swell was still there perhaps, but it was not perceptible under the mountainous waves, which came up and lifted the Fernfield bodily and flung her down on her ear, as one might say, and left her to be slugged by the next one because the water in her forehold held her head down. At last the firemen could no longer pass to and from the forecastle. They slept on the engine-room gratings and in the tween-deck bunkers. They climbed up the fire-room ventilators, and going along to the galley, received their grub through the galley skylight. Sometimes a sea would catch them kneeling there, reaching down for the pan, as though they were rifling a secret store of food buried in the earth. It would catch them and inundate them, filling the pan and exploding in steam on the galley range.

We, too, had the same experience. The mess-boy would seize his opportunity and lower the dishes through our skylight in the mess-room. Then he made his way round and served it. The cook, a gentleman with a white beard, was a prisoner in his galley. He slept on the seat by the fire, the water washing to and fro beneath him. When one caught sight of him through his little skylight, his arms upraised offering a tureen of soup or a joint under a shining cover, he

resembled a troll in a cavern, offering the produce of his toil.

Outside it got worse. The ship took a sort of forwardand-starboard list, very uncomfortable in the engine-room, for it threw the weight of the rods on the front guides, and made the thrust-block run hot. We were off Ushant when the carpenter reported eighteen feet of water in the fore-hold. The suctions were choked solid. The captain said it was no use trying to get to Glasgow. We'd be in Dutch before then.

"I'll run her ashore in Milford Haven," he said in the chief's room, staring moodily at a glass of neat whisky he held in his hand. It was his first command, and he wasn't sure what would come of it. But he knew nothing would come of it if he let her go down under him in the Irish Sea. That was no solution.

By this time the ship and her crew were in an unhealthy state. The only ventilation came down the cowls. The white paint of the bulkheads was streaked with black and rust. Seawater poured in through the skylight lifts, and turned to white salt on the once polished cylinder covers. The smell was bad down there. In the forecastle it was worse. We knew that because we were working on a scheme to reach the water in Number One Hold. We went down into the forepeak, which is the interior of a ship's bow, and we began cutting holes through the bulkhead to let the water run into the peak and be drawn out by