meaning when they are translated for you once, by the Head who orders them and again by the tail who carry them out. When you have been shown lovingly over a torpedo by an artificer skilled in the working of its tricky bowels, torpedoes have a meaning and a reality for you to the end of your days.
‘Men Live There’
Next time you see the ‘blue’ ashore you do not stare unintelligently. You have watched him on his native heath. You know what he eats, and what he says, and where he sleeps, and how. He is no longer a unit; but altogether such an one as yourself—only, as I have said, better. The Naval Officer chance met, rather meek and self-effacing, in tweeds, at a tennis party, is a priest of the mysteries. You have seen him by his altars. With the Navigating Lieutenant ‘on the ’igh an’ lofty bridge persecuting his vocation’ you have studied stars, mast-head angles, range-finders, and such all; the First Lieutenant has enlightened you on his duties as an Upper Housemaid, (see Note Ia.) and the Juniors have guided you through the giddy whirl of gunnery, small-arm drill, getting up an anchor, and taking kinks out of a cable. So it comes that next time you see, even far off, one of Her Majesty’s cruisers, all your heart goes out to her. Men live there.
Chapter IV
It was the Captain’s coxswain (see Note II.)—precise, immaculate, and adequate as ever—who met the returning guest at Devonport a year later—September, 1898. This time my cruiser was not with the Fleet, but on urgent private affairs. A misguided collier had seen fit to sit on her ram for a minute or so in Milford Haven, a few days before, and had twisted it thirteen inches to starboard. The collier was beached as soon as possible, and the Admiral he said to us (this I got from the coxswain as we drove to North Corner, by night, through blue-jacketed Devonport): ‘Can you go round to Plymouth with your nose in that state?’ ‘Lord love you, yes,’ said we, or words to that effect. ‘Very good,’ said the Admiral, ‘then you go.’ This we did at an average speed of sixteen knots, through a head-sea, with a collision-mat over our nose (‘Same mat we used when we tied up the Thrasher, sir’), and we ran her up to eighteen point two for a few hours to see how the bulkhead would stand it. The carpenter and the carpenter’s mate (‘Yes, they’re the same as last year, sir’) sat up to watch, but nothing happened.
‘An’ now we’re under orders to go back and join the Fleet at Bantry. We’ve been cruising all round England since August.’
The Record of a Year
Once aboard the lugger the past twelve months rolled up like a chart that one needs no longer. The ‘commodious coffee-grinder’ welcomed me as a brother, for by good luck no one had been changed; the same faces greeted me in the little ward-room, and we fell to chattering like children. Had I seen the new fore and aft bridge that we had managed to screw out of the Dockyard? A great contraption—a superior contraption. We had worked in a little extra deck under the forebridge, so that now the signalman had a place to stand in, which I would remember was not the case last year. Had I heard of our new coaling record? Nearly fifty tons per hour, which for a third-class cruiser represented four times that amount for a battleship. Had I heard of the zephyr that blew at Funchal; of unrecorded evolutions in Minorca Bay; of the First Lieutenant’s great haul of paint; of a recent target-practice when nothing was left of the target; of the influenza that overtook the steam-whistle; and a hundred other vital matters?
The record of a year with the Channel Fleet is not to be told in two hours, but I gathered a good deal ere I dropped into my well-remembered berth that joyous night. We departed at noon the next day, unhampered by signals. A liner leaves Plymouth in one style; a cruiser snakes out from Devonport in quite another, which was explained to me on the ‘’igh an’ lofty bridge’ as we skated round buoy after buoy, courteously pulled out a little not to interfere with a yacht race, and ran through the brown-sailed Plymouth fishing fleet. It was divine weather—still, cloudless, and blue—and the bridge was of opinion that he who had a farm should sell it and forthwith go to sea.
Our Noble Selves
The Cornwall coast slid past us in great grey-blue shadows, laid out beyond the little strip of sail-dotted blue; but my eyes were all inboard considering our noble selves. We had accumulated all sorts of small improvements since last year. She had shaken into shape, as a new house does when one has decided where to put the furniture. The First Lieutenant, as usual, explained that we were in no sense clean; that twenty ton at least of the four hundred we had just taken in lay about the deck in dust, and that it would cost a fortnight to put any appearance on her.
‘We’re supposed to be burning No. 2 Welsh. It’s road sweepings and soot really. That’s on account of the Welsh Coal Strike. Isn’t it filthy? We smoked out the whole of the Fleet and the Rock of Gibraltar the other day. But wait till you see some of the others. They’re worse. Isn’t she a pukka pigsty?’
From the landsman’s point of view she seemed offensively clean, but it is hard to please a First Lieutenant. Ours utilised the delay at Devonport to touch her up outside; and the perfect weather at Bantry to paint her thoroughly inside. The only time he left her was to pull round her in a boat and see how she looked from various points of view. Then I think he was satisfied—for nearly half a day.
Rash Interest in Gun Practice
Over against Falmouth we found the sea sufficiently empty for gun practice, and went to work at two thousand six hundred yards on the little, triangular, canvas target, all splintered and bepatched from past trials. This year the three-pounders were using up some black powder ammunition, and with the wind behind us we were villainously wrapped in smoke. But for all that the shots were very efficiently placed on and about the tiny mark. One shrapnel burst immediately above the thing, and the deep was peppered with iron from above. It looked like the cloud-wristed hand of a god (as they draw it in the Dutch picture-books) dropping pebbles into a pond. The more one sees of big gun practice the less one likes it; but a big yacht of the R.Y.S. thought otherwise, streaming down on us of a sudden with all the rash interest of a boy in next-door’s fireworks.
‘She thinks the target is a derelict,’ said the bridge. ‘She’s coming for salvage. She’ll be right in the middle of it in a minute.’
‘No, she won’t. Starboard bow Maxim there—thirteen hundred yards.’
The little demon set up the ‘irritating stammer’ that the nine point two gun found so objectionable, and spattered up the blue all about the canvas, as a swizzle-stick works up a cocktail.
Our friend turned on her heel with immense promptitude and scuttled to windward.
Later on I heard some interesting tales of craft—excursion steamers for choice—anchoring between a man-of-war and her target because their captains had heard that there would be gun practice, and the passengers, at a shilling a head, wished to see the fun.
‘But they didn’t think,’ said my informant, ‘that I was the man who’d have been hung, drawn, and quartered if a life was lost. They anchored slap behind the Island I was firing at—experimental firing at a dummy gun, if you please, with six-inchers, twelve-pounders, and Maxims all turned loose together. They were angry when we told ’em to go away!’
* * *
Out of the strong-shouldered Atlantic swell—bluer than sapphires—rose the double-fanged rock of the Fastnet. We were close enough to see its steps and derricks and each wave as it shot thirty feet up the rocks—the Fastnet in fair weather. It was like meeting a policeman in evening dress. One does not think of the Fastnet save as a blessed welcoming wink of light through storm and thick weather.
Big Atlantic Rollers
The Irish coast is a never-failing surprise to the big Atlantic rollers. They trip and ground—you can see them check—on the shallows; fling up a scornful eyebrow and then lose their temper and shape in great lashings of creamy foam.