The Devil And The Deep Sea

The Devil And The Deep Sea

All supplies very bad and dear, and there are no facilities for
even the smallest repairs. - Sailing Directions.

Her nationality was British, but you will not find her house-flag
in the list of our mercantile marine. She was a nine-hundred-ton,
iron, schooner-rigged, screw cargo-boat, differing externally in
no way from any other tramp of the sea. But it is with steamers
as it is with men. There are those who will for a consideration
sail extremely close to the wind; and, in the present state of a
fallen world, such people and such steamers have their use. From
the hour that the Aglaia first entered the Clyde - new, shiny, and
innocent, with a quart of cheap champagne trickling down her
cut-water - Fate and her owner, who was also her captain, decreed
that she should deal with embarrassed crowned heads, fleeing
Presidents, financiers of over-extended ability, women to whom
change of air was imperative, and the lesser law-breaking Powers.
Her career led her sometimes into the Admiralty Courts, where the
sworn statements of her skipper filled his brethren with envy. The
mariner cannot tell or act a lie in the face of the sea, or
mis-lead a tempest; but, as lawyers have discovered, he makes up
for chances withheld when he returns to shore, an affidavit in
either hand.

The Aglaia figured with distinction in the great Mackinaw
salvage-case. It was her first slip from virtue, and she learned
how to change her name, but not her heart, and to run across the
sea. As the Guiding Light she was very badly wanted in a South
American port for the little matter of entering harbour at full
speed, colliding with a coal-hulk and the State's only man-of-war,
just as that man-of-war was going to coal. She put to sea without
explanations, though three forts fired at her for half an hour.
As the Julia M'Gregor she had been concerned in picking up from a
raft certain gentlemen who should have stayed in Noumea, but who
preferred making themselves vastly unpleasant to authority in
quite another quarter of the world; and as the Shah-in-Shah she
had been overtaken on the high seas, indecently full of munitions
of war, by the cruiser of an agitated Power at issue with its
neighbour. That time she was very nearly sunk, and her riddled
hull gave eminent lawyers of two countries great profit. After a
season she reappeared as the Martin Hunt painted a dull slate-colour,
with pure saffron funnel, and boats of robin's-egg blue, engaging
in the Odessa trade till she was invited (and the invitation could
not well be disregarded) to keep away from Black Sea ports
altogether.

She had ridden through many waves of depression. Freights might
drop out of sight, Seamen's Unions throw spanners and nuts at
certificated masters, or stevedores combine till cargo perished
on the dock-head; but the boat of many names came and went, busy,
alert, and inconspicuous always. Her skipper made no complaint of
hard times, and port officers observed that her crew signed and
signed again with the regularity of Atlantic liner boatswains. Her
name she changed as occasion called; her well-paid crew never; and
a large percentage of the profits of her voyages was spent with an
open hand on her engine-room. She never troubled the underwriters,
and very seldom stopped to talk with a signal-station, for her
business was urgent and private.

But an end came to her tradings, and she perished in this manner.
Deep peace brooded over Europe, Asia, Africa, America, Australasia,
and Polynesia. The Powers dealt together more or less honestly;
banks paid their depositors to the hour; diamonds of price came
safely to the hands of their owners; Republics rested content with
their Dictators; diplomats found no one whose presence in the least
incommoded them; monarchs lived openly with their lawfully wedded
wives. It was as though the whole earth had put on its best Sunday
bib and tucker; and business was very bad for the Martin Hunt. The
great, virtuous calm engulfed her, slate sides, yellow funnel, and
all, but cast up in another hemisphere the steam whaler Haliotis,
black and rusty, with a manure-coloured funnel, a litter of dingy
white boats, and an enormous stove, or furnace, for boiling blubber
on her forward well-deck. There could be no doubt that her trip
was successful, for she lay at several ports not too well known,
and the smoke of her trying-out insulted the beaches.

Anon she departed, at the speed of the average London four-wheeler,
and entered a semi-inland sea, warm, still, and blue, which is,
perhaps, the most strictly preserved water in the world. There she
stayed for a certain time, and the great stars of those mild skies
beheld her playing puss-in-the-corner among islands where whales
are never found. All that while she smelt abominably, and the
smell, though fishy, was not whalesome. One evening calamity
descended upon her from the island of Pygang-Watai, and she fled,
while her crew jeered at a fat black-and-brown gunboat puffing far
behind. They knew to the last revolution the capacity of every
boat, on those seas, that they were anxious to avoid. A British
ship with a good conscience does not, as a rule, flee from the
man-of-war of a foreign Power, and it is also considered a breach
of etiquette to stop and search British ships at sea. These things
the skipper of the Haliotis did not pause to prove, but held on at
an inspiriting eleven knots an hour till nightfall. One thing only
he overlooked.

The Power that kept an expensive steam-patrol moving up and down
those waters (they had dodged the two regular ships of the station
with an ease that bred contempt) had newly brought up a third and
a fourteen-knot boat with a clean bottom to help the work; and that
was why the Haliotis, driving hard from the east to the west, found
herself at daylight in such a position that she could not help
seeing an arrangement of four flags, a mile and a half behind, which
read: "Heave to, or take the consequences!"

She had her choice, and she took it. The end came when, presuming
on her lighter draught, she tried to draw away northward over a
friendly shoal. The shell that arrived by way of the Chief
Engineer's cabin was some five inches in diameter, with a practice,
not a bursting, charge. It had been intended to cross her bows,
and that was why it knocked the framed portrait of the Chief
Engineer's wife - and she was a very pretty girl - on to the floor,
splintered his wash-hand stand, crossed the alleyway into the
engine-room, and striking on a grating, dropped directly in front
of the forward engine, where it burst, neatly fracturing both the
bolts that held the connecting-rod to the forward crank.

What follows is worth consideration. The forward engine had no more
work to do. Its released piston-rod, therefore, drove up fiercely,
with nothing to check it, and started most of the nuts of the
cylinder-cover. It came down again, the full weight of the steam
behind it, and the foot of the disconnected connecting-rod, useless
as the leg of a man with a sprained ankle, flung out to the right
and struck the starboard, or right-hand, cast-iron supporting-column
of the forward engine, cracking it clean through about six inches
above the base, and wedging the upper portion outwards three inches
towards the ship's side. There the connecting-rod jammed. Meantime,
the after-engine, being as yet unembarrassed, went on with its work,
and in so doing brought round at its next revolution the crank of
the forward engine, which smote the already jammed connecting-rod,
bending it and therewith the piston-rod cross-head - the big
cross-piece that slides up and down so smoothly.

The cross-head jammed sideways in the guides, and, in addition to
putting further pressure on the already broken starboard
supporting-column, cracked the port, or left-hand, supporting-column
in two or three places. There being nothing more that could be
made to move, the engines brought up, all standing, with a hiccup
that seemed to lift the Haliotis a foot out of the water; and the
engine-room staff, opening every steam outlet that they could find
in the confusion, arrived on deck somewhat scalded, but calm. There
was a sound below of things happening - a rushing, clicking, purring,
grunting, rattling noise that did not last for more than a minute.
It was the machinery adjusting itself, on the spur of the moment,
to a hundred altered conditions. Mr. Wardrop, one foot on the
upper grating, inclined his ear sideways, and groaned. You cannot
stop engines working at twelve knots an hour in three seconds
without disorganising them. The Haliotis slid forward in a cloud
of steam, shrieking like a wounded horse. There was nothing more
to do. The five-inch shell with a reduced charge had settled the
situation. And when you are full, all three holds, of strictly
preserved pearls; when you have cleaned out the Tanna Bank, the
Sea-Horse Bank, and four other banks from one end to the other
of the Amanala Sea - when you have ripped out the very heart of
a rich Government monopoly so that five years will not repair your
wrong-doings - you must smile and take what is in store. But the
skipper reflected, as a launch put out from the man-of-war, that
he had been bombarded on the high seas, with the British flag -
several of them - picturesquely disposed above him, and tried to
find comfort from the thought.

Where," said the stolid naval lieutenant hoisting himself aboard,
"where are those dam' pearls?"

They were there beyond evasion. No affidavit could do away with
the fearful smell of decayed oysters, the diving-dresses, and the
shell-littered hatches. They were there to the value of seventy
thousand pounds, more or less; and every pound poached.

The man-of-war was annoyed; for she had used up many tons of coal,
she had strained her tubes, and, worse than all, her officers and
crew had been hurried. Every one on the Haliotis was arrested and
rearrested several times, as each officer came aboard; then they
were told by what they esteemed to be the equivalent of a
midshipman that they were to consider themselves prisoners, and
finally were put under arrest.

It's not the least good," said the skipper, suavely. "You'd much
better send us a tow - "

"Be still - you are arrest!" was the reply.

"Where the devil do you expect we are going to escape to?" We're
helpless. You've got to tow us into somewhere, and explain why
you fired on us. Mr. Wardrop, we're helpless, aren't we?"

"Ruined from end to end," said the man of machinery. "If she rolls,
the forward cylinder will come down and go through her bottom. Both
columns are clean cut through. There's nothing to hold anything up."

The council of war clanked off to see if Mr. Wardrop's words were
true. He warned them that it was as much as a man's life was worth
to enter the engine-room, and they contented themselves with a
distant inspection through the thinning steam. The Haliotis lifted
to the long, easy swell, and the starboard supporting-column ground
a trifle, as a man grits his teeth under the knife. The forward
cylinder was depending on that unknown force men call the pertinacity
of materials, which now and then balances that other heartbreaking
power, the perversity of inanimate things.

"You see!" said Mr. Wardrop, hurrying them away. "The engines
aren't worth their price as old iron."

"We tow," was the answer. "Afterwards we shall confiscate."

The man-of-war was short-handed, and did not see the necessity
for putting a prize-crew aboard the Haliotis. So she sent one
sublieutenant, whom the skipper kept very drunk, for he did not
wish to make the tow too easy, and, moreover, he had an
inconspicuous little rope hanging from the stem of his ship.

Then they began to tow at an average speed of four knots an hour.
The Haliotis was very hard to move, and the gunnery-lieutenant,
who had fired the five-inch shell, had leisure to think upon
consequences. Mr. Wardrop was the busy man. He borrowed all the
crew to shore up the cylinders with spars and blocks from the
bottom and sides of the ship. It was a day's risky work; but
anything was better than drowning at the end of a tow-rope; and
if the forward cylinder had fallen, it would have made its way to
the sea-bed, and taken the Haliotis after.

"Where are we going to, and how long will they tow us?" he asked
of the skipper.

"God knows! and this prize-lieutenant's drunk. What do you think
you can do?"

"There's just the bare chance," Mr. Wardrop whispered, though no
one was within hearing -"there's just the bare chance o' repairin'
her, if a man knew how. They've twisted the very guts out of her,
bringing her up with that jerk; but I'm saying that, with time
and patience, there's just the chance o' making steam yet. We
could do it."

The skipper's eye brightened. "Do you mean," he began, "that she
is any good?"

"Oh, no," said Mr. Wardrop. "She'll need three thousand pounds in
repairs, at the lowest, if she's to take the sea again, an' that
apart from any injury to her structure. She's like a man fallen
down five pair o' stairs. We can't tell for months what has
happened; but we know she'll never be good again without a new
inside. Ye should see the condenser-tubes an' the steam connections
to the donkey, for two things only. I'm not afraid of them repairin'
her. I'm afraid of them stealin' things."

"They've fired on us. They'll have to explain that."

"Our reputation's not good enough to ask for explanations. Let's
take what we have and be thankful. Ye would not have consuls
remembern' the Guidin' Light, an' the Shah-in-Shah, an' the Aglaia,
at this most alarmin' crisis. We've been no better than pirates
these ten years. Under Providence we're no worse than thieves now.
We've much to be thankful for - if we e'er get back to her."

"Make it your own way, then," said the skipper. "If there's the
least chance - "

"I'll leave none," said Mr. Wardrop - "none that they'll dare to
take. Keep her heavy on the tow, for we need time."

The skipper never interfered with the affairs of the engine-room,
and Mr. Wardrop - an artist in his profession - turned to and
composed a work terrible and forbidding. His background was the
dark-grained sides of the engine-room; his material the metals
of power and strength, helped out with spars, baulks, and ropes.
The man-of-war towed sullenly and viciously. The Haliotis behind
her hummed like a hive before swarming. With extra and totally
unneeded spars her crew blocked up the space round the forward
engine till it resembled a statue in its scaffolding, and the
butts of the shores interfered with every view that a dispassionate
eye might wish to take. And that the dispassionate mind might be
swiftly shaken out of its calm, the well-sunk bolts of the shores
were wrapped round untidily with loose ends of ropes, giving a
studied effect of most dangerous insecurity. Next, Mr. Wardrop
took up a collection from the after-engine, which, as you will
remember, had not been affected in the general wreck. The cylinder
escape-valve he abolished with a flogging-hammer. It is difficult
in far-off ports to come by such valves, unless, like Mr. Wardrop,
you keep duplicates in store. At the same time men took off the
nuts of two of the great holding-down bolts that serve to keep the
engines in place on their solid bed. An engine violently arrested
in mid-career may easily jerk off the nut of a holding-down bolt,
and this accident looked very natural.

Passing along the tunnel, he removed several shaft coupling-bolts
and -nuts, scattering other and ancient pieces of iron underfoot.
Cylinder-bolts he cut off to the number of six from the after-engine
cylinder, so that it might match its neighbour, and stuffed the
bilge - and feed-pumps with cotton-waste. Then he made up a neat
bundle of the various odds and ends that he had gathered from the
engines - little things like nuts and valve-spindles, all carefully
tallowed - and retired with them under the floor of the engine-room,
where he sighed, being fat, as he passed from manhole to manhole of
the double bottom, and in a fairly dry submarine compartment hid
them. Any engineer, particularly in an unfriendly port, has a
right to keep his spare stores where he chooses; and the foot of
one of the cylinder shores blocked all entrance into the regular
store-room, even if that had not been already closed with steel
wedges. In conclusion, he disconnected the after-engine, laid
piston and connecting-rod, carefully tallowed, where it would be
most inconvenient to the casual visitor, took out three of the
eight collars of the thrust-block, hid them where only he could find
them again, filled the boilers by hand, wedged the sliding doors
of the coal-bunkers, and rested from his labours. The engine-room
was a cemetery, and it did not need the contents of the ash-lift
through the skylight to make it any worse.

He invited the skipper to look at the completed work.

Saw ye ever such a forsaken wreck as that?" said he, proudly.
"It almost frights me to go under those shores. Now, what d' you
think they'll do to us?"

"Wait till we see," said the skipper. "It'll be bad enough when
it comes."

He was not wrong. The pleasant days of towing ended all too soon,
though the Haliotis trailed behind her a heavily weighted jib
stayed out into the shape of a pocket; and Mr. Wardrop was no
longer an artist of imagination, but one of seven-and-twenty
prisoners in a prison full of insects. The man-of-war had towed
them to the nearest port, not to the headquarters of the colony,
and when Mr. Wardrop saw the dismal little harbour, with its
ragged line of Chinese junks, its one crazy tug, and the
boat-building shed that, under the charge of a philosophical
Malay, represented a dockyard, he sighed and shook his head.

"I did well," he said. "This is the habitation o' wreckers an'
thieves. We're at the uttermost ends of the earth. Think you
they'll ever know in England?"

"Doesn't look like it," said the skipper.

They were marched ashore with what they stood up in, under a
generous escort, and were judged according to the customs of the
country, which, though excellent, are a little out of date.
There were the pearls; there were the poachers; and there sat a
small but hot Governor. He consulted for a while, and then
things began to move with speed, for he did not wish to keep a
hungry crew at large on the beach, and the man-of-war had gone
up the coast. With a wave of his hand - a stroke of the pen was
not necessary - he consigned them to the black gang-tana, the
back-country, and the hand of the Law removed them from his sight
and the knowledge of men. They were marched into the palms, and
the back-country swallowed them up - all the crew of the Haliotis.

Deep peace continued to brood over Europe, Asia, Africa, America,
Australasia, and Polynesia.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

It was the firing that did it. They should have kept their
counsel; but when a few thousand foreigners are bursting with joy
over the fact that a ship under the British flag has been fired at
on the high seas, news travels quickly; and when it came out that
the pearl-stealing crew had not been allowed access to their consul
(there was no consul within a few hundred miles of that lonely port)
even the friendliest of Powers has a right to ask questions. The
great heart of the British public was beating furiously on account
of the performance of a notorious race-horse, and had not a throb
to waste on distant accidents; but somewhere deep in the hull of
the ship of State there is machinery which more or less accurately
takes charge of foreign affairs. That machinery began to revolve,
and who so shocked and surprised as the Power that had captured the
Haliotis? It explained that colonial governors and far-away
men-of-war were difficult to control, and promised that it would
most certainly make an example both of the Governor and the vessel.
As for the crew reported to be pressed into military service in
tropical climes, it would produce them as soon as possible, and it
would apologise, if necessary. Now, no apologies were needed.
When one nation apologises to another, millions of amateurs who
have no earthly concern with the difficulty hurl themselves into
the strife and embarrass the trained specialist. It was requested
that the crew be found, if they were still alive - they had been
eight months beyond knowledge - and it was promised that all
would be forgotten.

The little Governor of the little port was pleased with himself.
Seven-and-twenty white men made a very compact force to throw
away on a war that had neither beginning nor end - a jungle and
stockade fight that flickered and smouldered through the wet hot
years in the hills a hundred miles away, and was the heritage of
every wearied official. He had, he thought, deserved well of his
country; and if only some one would buy the unhappy Haliotis,
moored in the harbour below his verandah, his cup would be full.
He looked at the neatly silvered lamps that he had taken from her
cabins, and thought of much that might be turned to account. But
his countrymen in that moist climate had no spirit. They would
peep into the silent engine-room, and shake their heads. Even
the men-of-war would not tow her further up the coast, where the
Governor believed that she could be repaired. She was a bad
bargain; but her cabin carpets were undeniably beautiful, and his
wife approved of her mirrors.

Three hours later cables were bursting round him like shells, for,
though he knew it not, he was being offered as a sacrifice by the
nether to the upper millstone, and his superiors had no regard for
his feelings. He had, said the cables, grossly exceeded his power,
and failed to report on events. He would, therefore - at this he
cast himself back in his hammock - produce the crew of the Haliotis.
He would send for them, and, if that failed, he would put his
dignity on a pony and fetch them himself. He had no conceivable
right to make pearl-poachers serve in any war. He would be held
responsible.

Next morning the cables wished to know whether he had found the
crew of the Haliotis. They were to be found, freed and fed - he
was to feed them - till such time as they could be sent to the
nearest English port in a man-of-war. If you abuse a man long
enough in great words flashed over the sea-beds, things happen.
The Governor sent inland swiftly for his prisoners, who were also
soldiers; and never was a militia regiment more anxious to reduce
its strength. No power short of death could make these mad men
wear the uniform of their service. They would not fight, except
with their fellows, and it was for that reason the regiment had
not gone to war, but stayed in a stockade, reasoning with the new
troops. The autumn campaign had been a fiasco, but here were the
Englishmen. All the regiment marched back to guard them, and the
hairy enemy, armed with blow-pipes, rejoiced in the forest. Five
of the crew had died, but there lined up on the Governor's verandah
two-and-twenty men marked about the legs with the scars of
leech-bites. A few of them wore fringes that had once been trousers;
the others used loin-cloths of gay patterns; and they existed
beautifully but simply in the Governor's verandah, and when he came
out they sang at him. When you have lost seventy thousand pounds'
worth of pearls, your pay, your ship, and all your clothes, and have
lived in bondage for five months beyond the faintest pretences of
civilisation, you know what true independence means, for you become
the happiest of created things - natural man.

The Governor told the crew that they were evil, and they asked for
food. When he saw how they ate, and when he remembered that none of
the pearl patrol-boats were expected for two months, he sighed. But
the crew of the Haliotis lay down in the verandah, and said that
they were pensioners of the Governor's bounty. A grey-bearded man,
fat and bald-headed, his one garment a green-and-yellow loin-cloth,
saw the Haliotis in the harbour, and bellowed for joy. The men
crowded to the verandah-rail, kicking aside the long cane chairs.
They pointed, gesticulated, and argued freely, without shame. The
militia regiment sat down in the Governor's garden. The Governor
retired to his hammock - it was as easy to be killed lying as
standing - and his women squeaked from the shuttered rooms.

"She sold?" said the grey-bearded man, pointing to the Haliotis.
He was Mr. Wardrop.

"No good," said the Governor, shaking his head. "No one come buy."

"He's taken my lamps, though," said the skipper. He wore one leg
of a pair of trousers, and his eye wandered along the verandah.
The Governor quailed. There were cuddy camp-stools and the skipper's
writing-table in plain sight.

"They've cleaned her out, o' course," said Mr. Wardrop. "They
would. We'll go aboard and take an inventory. See!" He waved his
hands over the harbour. "We - live - there - now. Sorry?"

The Governor smiled a smile of relief.

"He's glad of that," said one of the crew, reflectively. "I
shouldn't wonder."

They flocked down to the harbour-front, the militia regiment
clattering behind, and embarked themselves in what they found -
it happened to be the Governor's boat. Then they disappeared over
the bulwarks of the Haliotis, and the Governor prayed that they
might find occupation inside.

Mr. Wardrop's first bound took him to the engine-room; and when
the others were patting the well-remembered decks, they heard him
giving God thanks that things were as he had left them. The
wrecked engines stood over his head untouched; no inexpert hand
had meddled with his shores; the steel wedges of the store-room
were rusted home; and, best of all, the hundred and sixty tons of
good Australian coal in the bunkers had not diminished.

"I don't understand it," said Mr. Wardrop. "Any Malay knows the
use o' copper. They ought to have cut away the pipes. And with
Chinese junks coming here, too. It's a special interposition o'
Providence."

"You think so," said the skipper, from above. "There's only been
one thief here, and he's cleaned her out of all my things, anyhow."

Here the skipper spoke less than the truth, for under the planking
of his cabin, only to be reached by a chisel, lay a little money
which never drew any interest - his sheet-anchor to windward. It
was all in clean sovereigns that pass current the world over, and
might have amounted to more than a hundred pounds.

"He's left me alone. Let's thank God," repeated Mr. Wardrop.

"He's taken everything else; look!"

The Haliotis, except as to her engine-room, had been systematically
and scientifically gutted from one end to the other, and there was
strong evidence that an unclean guard had camped in the skipper's
cabin to regulate that plunder. She lacked glass, plate, crockery,
cutlery, mattresses, cuddy carpets and chairs, all boats, and her
copper ventilators. These things had been removed, with her sails
and as much of the wire rigging as would not imperil the safety of
the masts.

"He must have sold those," said the skipper. "The other things are
in his house, I suppose."

Every fitting that could be pried or screwed out was gone. Port,
starboard, and masthead lights; teak gratings; sliding sashes of
the deckhouse; the captain's chest of drawers, with charts and
chart-table; photographs, brackets, and looking-glasses; cabin
doors; rubber cuddy mats; hatch-irons; half the funnel-stays;
cork fenders; carpenter's grindstone and tool-chest; holystones,
swabs, squeegees; all cabin and pantry lamps; galley-fittings en
bloc; flags and flag-locker; clocks, chronometers; the forward
compass and the ship's bell and belfry, were among the missing.

There were great scarred marks on the deck-planking over which
the cargo-derricks had been hauled. One must have fallen by the
way, for the bulwark-rails were smashed and bent and the
side-plates bruised.

"It's the Governor," said the skipper "He's been selling her on
the instalment plan."

"Let's go up with spanners and shovels, and kill 'em all," shouted
the crew. "Let's drown him, and keep the woman!"

"Then we'll be shot by that black-and-tan regiment - our regiment.
What's the trouble ashore? They've camped our regiment on the beach."

"We're cut off; that's all. Go and see what they want," said Mr.
Wardrop. "You've the trousers."

In his simple way the Governor was a strategist. He did not desire
that the crew of the Haliotis should come ashore again, either
singly or in detachments, and he proposed to turn their steamer into
a convict-hulk. They would wait - he explained this from the quay
to the skipper in the barge - and they would continue to wait till
the man-of-war came along, exactly where they were. If one of them
set foot ashore, the entire regiment would open fire, and he would
not scruple to use the two cannon of the town. Meantime food would
be sent daily in a boat under an armed escort. The skipper, bare
to the waist, and rowing, could only grind his teeth; and the
Governor improved the occasion, and revenged himself for the bitter
words in the cables, by saying what he thought of the morals and
manners of the crew. The barge returned to the Haliotis in silence,
and the skipper climbed aboard, white on the cheek-bones and blue
about the nostrils.

"I knew it," said Mr. Wardrop; "and they won't give us good food,
either. We shall have bananas morning, noon, and night, an' a man
can't work on fruit. We know that."

Then the skipper cursed Mr. Wardrop for importing frivolous
side-issues into the conversation; and the crew cursed one another,
and the Haliotis, the voyage, and all that they knew or could bring
to mind. They sat down in silence on the empty decks, and their
eyes burned in their heads. The green harbour water chuckled at
them overside. They looked at the palm-fringed hills inland, at
the white houses above the harbour road, at the single tier of
native craft by the quay, at the stolid soldiery sitting round the
two cannon, and, last of all, at the blue bar of the horizon. Mr.
Wardrop was buried in thought, and scratched imaginary lines with
his untrimmed finger-nails on the planking.

"I make no promise," he said, at last, "for I can't say what may
or may not have happened to them. But here's the ship, and here's
us."

There was a little scornful laughter at this, and Mr. Wardrop
knitted his brows. He recalled that in the days when be wore
trousers he had been Chief Engineer of the Haliotis.

"Harland, Mackesy, Noble, Hay, Naughton, Fink, O'Hara, Trumbull."

"Here, sir!" The instinct of obedience waked to answer the
roll-call of the engine-room.

"Below!"

They rose and went.

"Captain, I'll trouble you for the rest of the men as I want them.
We'll get my stores out, and clear away the shores we don't need,
and then we'll patch her up. My men will remember that they're in
the Haliotis, - under me."

He went into the engine-room, and the others stared. They were
used to the accidents of the sea, but this was beyond their
experience. None who had seen the engine-room believed that
anything short of new engines from end to end could stir the
Haliotis from her moorings.

The engine-room stores were unearthed, and Mr. Wardrop's face, red
with the filth of the bilges and the exertion of travelling on his
stomach, lit with joy. The spare gear of the Haliotis had been
unusually complete, and two-and-twenty men, armed with screw-jacks,
differential blocks, tackle, vices, and a forge or so, can look
Kismet between the eyes without winking. The crew were ordered to
replace the holding-down and shaft-bearing bolts, and return the
collars of the thrust-block. When they had finished, Mr. Wardrop
delivered a lecture on repairing compound engines without the aid
of the shops, and the men sat about on the cold machinery. The
cross-head jammed in the guides leered at them drunkenly, but
offered no help. They ran their fingers hopelessly into the cracks
of the starboard supporting-column, and picked at the ends of the
ropes round the shores, while Mr. Wardrop's voice rose and fell
echoing, till the quick tropic night closed down over the
engine-room skylight.

Next morning the work of reconstruction began. It has been
explained that the foot of the connecting-rod was forced against
the foot of the starboard supporting-column, which it had cracked
through and driven outward towards the ship's skin. To all
appearance the job was more than hopeless, for rod and column
seemed to have been welded into one. But herein Providence
smiled on them for one moment to hearten them through the weary
weeks ahead. The second engineer - more reckless than resourceful
- struck at random with a cold chisel into the cast-iron of the
column, and a greasy, grey flake of metal flew from under the
imprisoned foot of the connecting-rod, while the rod itself fell
away slowly, and brought up with a thunderous clang somewhere in
the dark of the crank-pit. The guides-plates above were still
jammed fast in the guides, but the first blow had been struck.
They spent the rest of the day grooming the donkey-engine, which
stood immediately forward of the engine-room hatch. Its tarpaulin,
of course, had been stolen, and eight warm months had not improved
the working parts. Further, the last dying hiccup of the Haliotis
seemed - or it might have been the Malay from the boat-house - to
have lifted the thing bodily on its bolts, and set it down
inaccurately as regarded its steam connections.

"If we only had one single cargo-derrick!" Mr. Wardrop sighed. "We
can take the cylinder-cover off by hand, if we sweat; but to get
the rod out o' the piston's not possible unless we use steam. Well,
there'll be steam the morn, if there's nothing else. She'll fizzle!"

Next morning men from the shore saw the Haliotis through a cloud,
for it was as though the deck smoked. Her crew were chasing steam
through the shaken and leaky pipes to its work in the forward
donkey-engine; and where oakum failed to plug a crack, they stripped
off their loin-cloths for lapping, and swore, half-boiled and
mother-naked. The donkey-engine worked - at a price - the price of
constant attention and furious stoking - worked long enough to allow
a wire-rope (it was made up of a funnel and a foremast-stay) to be
led into the engine-room and made fast on the cylinder-cover of the
forward engine. That rose easily enough, and was hauled through the
skylight and on to the deck, many hands assisting the doubtful steam.
Then came the tug of war, for it was necessary to get to the piston
and the jammed piston-rod. They removed two of the piston junk-ring
studs, screwed in two strong iron eye-bolts by way of handles,
doubled the wire-rope, and set half a dozen men to smite with an
extemporised battering-ram at the end of the piston-rod, where it
peered through the piston, while the donkey-engine hauled upwards
on the piston itself. After four hours of this furious work, the
piston-rod suddenly slipped, and the piston rose with a jerk,
knocking one or two men over into the engine-room. But when Mr.
Wardrop declared that the piston had not split, they cheered, and
thought nothing of their wounds; and the donkey-engine was hastily
stopped; its boiler was nothing to tamper with.

And day by day their supplies reached them by boat. The skipper
humbled himself once more before the Governor, and as a concession
had leave to get drinking-water from the Malay boat-builder on the
quay. It was not good drinking-water, but the Malay was anxious
to supply anything in his power, if he were paid for it.

Now when the jaws of the forward engine stood, as it were, stripped
and empty, they began to wedge up the shores of the cylinder itself.
That work alone filled the better part of three days - warm and
sticky days, when the hands slipped and sweat ran into the eyes.
When the last wedge was hammered home there was no longer an ounce
of weight on the supporting-columns; and Mr. Wardrop rummaged the
ship for boiler-plate three-quarters of an inch thick, where he
could find it. There was not much available, but what there was
was more than beaten gold to him. In one desperate forenoon the
entire crew, naked and lean, haled back, more or less into place,
the starboard supporting-column, which, as you remember, was cracked
clean through. Mr. Wardrop found them asleep where they had
finished the work, and gave them a day's rest, smiling upon them
as a father while he drew chalk-marks about the cracks. They woke
to new and more trying labour; for over each one of those cracks a
plate of three-quarter-inch boiler-iron was to be worked hot, the
rivet-holes being drilled by hand. All that time they were fed on
fruits, chiefly bananas, with some sago.

Those were the days when men swooned over the ratchet-drill and the
hand-forge, and where they fell they had leave to lie unless their
bodies were in the way of their fellows' feet. And so, patch upon
patch, and a patch over all, the starboard supporting-column was
clouted; but when they thought all was secure, Mr. Wardrop decreed
that the noble patchwork would never support working engines; at
the best, it could only hold the guide-bars approximately true.
he deadweight of the cylinders must be borne by vertical struts;
and, therefore, a gang would repair to the bows, and take out, with
files, the big bow-anchor davits, each of which was some three
inches in diameter. They threw hot coals at Wardrop, and threatened
to kill him, those who did not weep (they were ready to weep on the
least provocation); but he hit them with iron bars heated at the
end, and they limped forward, and the davits came with them when
they returned. They slept sixteen hours on the strength of it, and
in three days two struts were in place, bolted from the foot of
the starboard supporting-column to the under side of the cylinder.
There remained now the port, or condenser-column, which, though not
so badly cracked as its fellow, had also been strengthened in four
places with boiler-plate patches, but needed struts. They took
away the main stanchions of the bridge for that work, and, crazy
with toil, did not see till all was in place that the rounded
bars of iron must be flattened from top to bottom to allow the
air-pump levers to clear them. It was Wardrop's oversight, and he
wept bitterly before the men as he gave the order to unbolt the
struts and flatten them with hammer and the flame. Now the broken
engine was underpinned firmly, and they took away the wooden
shores from under the cylinders, and gave them to the robbed
bridge, thanking God for even half a day's work on gentle, kindly
wood instead of the iron that had entered into their souls. Eight
months in the back-country among the leeches, at a temperature of
84 degrees moist, is very bad for the nerves.

They had kept the hardest work to the last, as boys save Latin
prose, and, worn though they were, Mr. Wardrop did not dare to
give them rest. The piston-rod and connecting-rod were to be
straightened, and this was a job for a regular dockyard with every
appliance. They fell to it, cheered by a little chalk showing of
work done and time consumed which Mr. Wardrop wrote up on the
engine-room bulkhead. Fifteen days had gone - fifteen days of
killing labour - and there was hope before them.

It is curious that no man knows how the rods were straightened.
The crew of the Haliotis remember that week very dimly, as a
fever patient remembers the delirium of a long night. There were
fires everywhere, they say; the whole ship was one consuming
furnace, and the hammers were never still. Now, there could not
have been more than one fire at the most, for Mr. Wardrop
distinctly recalls that no straightening was done except under
his own eye. They remember, too, that for many years voices gave
orders which they obeyed with their bodies, but their minds were
abroad on all the seas. It seems to them that they stood through
days and nights slowly sliding a bar backwards and forwards
through a white glow that was part of the ship. They remember an
intolerable noise in their burning heads from the walls of the
stoke-hole, and they remember being savagely beaten by men whose
eyes seemed asleep. When their shift was over they would draw
straight lines in the air, anxiously and repeatedly, and would
question one another in their sleep, crying, "Is she straight?"

At last - they do not remember whether this was by day or by
night - Mr. Wardrop began to dance clumsily, and wept the while;
and they too danced and wept, and went to sleep twitching all
over; and when they woke, men said that the rods were straightened,
and no one did any work for two days, but lay on the decks and ate
fruit. Mr. Wardrop would go below from time to time, and pat the
two rods where they lay, and they heard him singing hymns.

Then his trouble of mind went from him, and at the end of the third
day's idleness he made a drawing in chalk upon the deck, with
letters of the alphabet at the angles. He pointed out that, though
the piston-rod was more or less straight, the piston-rod cross-head
- the thing that had been jammed sideways in the guides - had been
badly strained, and had cracked the lower end of the piston-rod.
He was going to forge and shrink a wrought-iron collar on the neck
of the piston-rod where it joined the cross-head, and from the
collar he would bolt a Y-shaped piece of iron whose lower arms
should be bolted into the cross-head. If anything more were needed,
they could use up the last of the boiler-plate.

So the forges were lit again, and men burned their bodies, but
hardly felt the pain. The finished connection was not beautiful,
but it seemed strong enough - at least, as strong as the rest of
the machinery; and with that job their labours came to an end.
All that remained was to connect up the engines, and to get food
and water. The skipper and four men dealt with the Malay
boat-builder by night chiefly; it was no time to haggle over the
price of sago and dried fish. The others stayed aboard and
replaced piston, piston-rod, cylinder-cover, cross-head, and bolts,
with the aid of the faithful donkey-engine. The cylinder-cover
was hardly steam-proof, and the eye of science might have seen in
the connecting-rod a flexure something like that of a
Christmas-tree candle which has melted and been straightened by
hand over a stove, but, as Mr. Wardrop said, "She didn't hit
anything."

As soon as the last bolt was in place, men tumbled over one
another in their anxiety to get to the hand starting-gear, the
wheel and worm, by which some engines can be moved when there is
no steam aboard. They nearly wrenched off the wheel, but it was
evident to the blindest eye that the engines stirred. They did
not revolve in their orbits with any enthusiasm, as good machines
should; indeed, they groaned not a little; but they moved over
and came to rest in a way which proved that they still recognised
man's hand. Then Mr. Wardrop sent his slaves into the darker
bowels of the engine-room and the stoke-hole, and followed them
with a flare-lamp. The boilers were sound, but would take no harm
from a little scaling and cleaning. Mr. Wardrop would not have
any one over-zealous, for he feared what the next stroke of the
tool might show. "The less we know about her now," said he, "the
better for us all, I'm thinkin'. Ye'll understand me when I say
that this is in no sense regular engineerin'."

As his raiment, when he spoke, was his grey beard and uncut hair,
they believed him. They did not ask too much of what they met,
but polished and tallowed and scraped it to a false brilliancy.

"A lick of paint would make me easier in my mind," said Mr.
Wardrop, plaintively. "I know half the condenser-tubes are
started; and the propeller-shaftin''s God knows how far out of
the true, and we'll need a new air-pump, an' the main-steam
leaks like a sieve, and there's worse each way I look; but -
paint's like clothes to a man, 'an ours is near all gone."

The skipper unearthed some stale ropy paint of the loathsome
green that they used for the galleys of sailing-ships, and Mr.
Wardrop spread it abroad lavishly to give the engines
self-respect.

His own was returning day by day, for he wore his loin-cloth
continuously; but the crew, having worked under orders, did not
feel as he did. The completed work satisfied Mr. Wardrop. He
would at the last have made shift to run to Singapore, and gone
home without vengeance taken to show his engines to his brethren
in the craft; but the others and the captain forbade him. They
had not yet recovered their self-respect.

"It would be safer to make what ye might call a trial trip, but
beggars mustn't be choosers; an if the engines will go over to the
hand-gear, the probability - I'm only saying it's a probability -
the chance is that they'll hold up when we put steam on her."

"How long will you take to get steam?" said the skipper.

"God knows! Four hours - a day - half a week. If I can raise
sixty pound I'll not complain."

"Be sure of her first; we can't afford to go out half a mile, and
break down."

"My soul and body, man, we're one continuous breakdown, fore an'
aft! We might fetch Singapore, though."

"We'll break down at Pygang-Watai, where we can do good," was the
answer, in a voice that did not allow argument. "She's my boat,
and - I've had eight months to think in."

No man saw the Haliotis depart, though many heard her. She left
at two in the morning, having cut her moorings, and it was none
of her crew's pleasure that the engines should strike up a
thundering half-seas-over chanty that echoed among the hills.
Mr. Wardrop wiped away a tear as he listened to the new song.

"She's gibberin' - she's just gibberin'," he whimpered. "Yon's
the voice of a maniac.

And if engines have any soul, as their masters believe, he was
quite right. There were outcries and clamours, sobs and bursts of
chattering laughter, silences where the trained ear yearned for the
clear note, and torturing reduplications where there should have
been one deep voice. Down the screw-shaft ran murmurs and warnings,
while a heart-diseased flutter without told that the propeller
needed re-keying.

"How does she make it?" said the skipper.

"She moves, but - but she's breakin' my heart. The sooner we're
at Pygang-Watai, the better. She's mad, and we're waking the town."

"Is she at all near safe?"

"What do I care how safe she is? She's mad. Hear that, now! To
be sure, nothing's hittin' anything, and the bearin's are fairly
cool, but - can ye not hear?"

"If she goes," said the skipper, "I don't care a curse. And she's
my boat, too."

She went, trailing a fathom of weed behind her. From a slow two
knots an hour she crawled up to a triumphant four. Anything
beyond that made the struts quiver dangerously, and filled the
engine-room with steam. Morning showed her out of sight of land,
and there was a visible ripple under her bows; but she complained
bitterly in her bowels, and, as though the noise had called it,
there shot along across the purple sea a swift, dark proa,
hawk-like and curious, which presently ranged alongside and wished
to know if the Haliotis were helpless. Ships, even the steamers
of the white men, had been known to break down in those waters,
and the honest Malay and Javanese traders would sometimes aid them
in their own peculiar way. But this ship was not full of lady
passengers and well-dressed officers. Men, white, naked and savage,
swarmed down her sides - some with red-hot iron bars, and others
with large hammers - threw themselves upon those innocent inquiring
strangers, and, before any man could say what had happened, were
in full possession of the proa, while the lawful owners bobbed in
the water overside. Half an hour later the proa's cargo of sago
and trepang, as well as a doubtful-minded compass, was in the
Haliotis. The two huge triangular mat sails, with their
seventy-foot yards and booms, had followed the cargo, and were
being fitted to the stripped masts of the steamer.

They rose, they swelled, they filled, and the empty steamer visibly
laid over as the wind took them. They gave her nearly three knots
an hour, and what better could men ask? But if she had been forlorn
before, this new purchase made her horrible to see. Imagine a
respectable charwoman in the tights of a ballet-dancer rolling drunk
along the streets, and you will come to some faint notion of the
appearance of that nine-hundred-ton, well-decked, once schooner-rigged
cargo-boat as she staggered under her new help, shouting and raving
across the deep. With steam and sail that marvellous voyage
continued; and the bright-eyed crew looked over the rail, desolate,
unkempt, unshorn, shamelessly clothed beyond the decencies.

At the end of the third week she sighted the island of Pygang-Watai,
whose harbour is the turning-point of a pearl sea-patrol. Here the
gun-boats stay for a week ere they retrace their line. There is no
village at Pygang-Watai; only a stream of water, some palms, and a
harbour safe to rest in till the first violence of the southeast
monsoon has blown itself out.

They opened up the low coral beach, with its mound of whitewashed
coal ready for supply, the deserted huts for the sailors, and the
flagless flagstaff.

Next day there was no Haliotis - only a little proa rocking in
the warm rain at the mouth of the harbour, whose crew watched
with hungry eyes the smoke of a gunboat on the horizon.

Months afterwards there were a few lines in an English newspaper
to the effect that some gunboat of some foreign Power had broken
her back at the mouth of some far-away harbour by running at full
speed into a sunken wreck.

-THE END-
Rudyard Kipling's short story: The Devil And The Deep Sea

GO TO TOP OF SCREEN