THE war to end war has one achievement to its credit rarely mentioned. It disposed of the enormous number of obsolete tramp steamers which rising freights had kept from the breaking-up yards year after year. The sea-going engineer of these later days can neither imagine nor believe the nature of the toil involved in a voyage to the Cape or to India in one of those vessels. They were not, in the vernacular of the craft, "kept up." They were given the irreducible minimum of repairs, and the engineer with a name to make was disposed to run his engines on the irreducible minimum of stores with a maximum of back-breaking manual labour. Britain is rightly proud of her long maritime supremacy. Blood, however, is the price of admiralty, and when "the white wings of commerce" were folded and the unkempt tramp began to smear the blue heavens with her smoke-trails, it would be tactless to say whose blood and sweat was spent to keep ten thousand ships at sea.

It must not be supposed that grim tales of rascally owners and grafting characters are about to be unfolded. The Plimsoll Mark and the Board of Trade, the underwriters and the general rise in commercial probity, made lurid criminality unlikely and infrequent.

But

the British ship which carried a load - line had to compete with foreign vessels which were loaded to the master's discretion. I have seen a Danish vessel of less tonnage register than my own ship leave port with her coal ports awash, with two hundred tons more cargo aboard than we under British registry could allow. And the rate for that particular cargo was a pound a ton for a twelve-day voyage. To keep in commission and show a profit the British tramp had to run on nothing at all. There was no money for paint or for tools. And the auxiliary machinery was only induced to function by the never-ending toil of short-handed crowds working and watch - keeping eleven hours a day. It was "glorious and obscure toil." It was poorly paid and poorly victualled by modern standards. The perplexing feature of the period in retrospect is that it evokes neither resentment nor bitterness in the survivor's breast.

Indeed, it is very much the other way. The idealist, no doubt, is an exception. His starry vision shows him a perfect world whose smooth rondure enables it to roll sweetly through the years-a world on whose ever-placid oceans enchanted ships steam towards Paradise Port, their captains

song and story and with potations of fabulous rum, where no trouble or folly ever mars the beauty of the day. But to those of us who have accepted the austere conditions of life on earth and sea, who have abandoned the theory that men and materials are ever perfect, and who have got used to facing a day's work without flinching, the memory of those old ships is mellowed by time to true proportions.

Leaving for a moment the inevitable miseries of machinery too old or too neglected to run as it should, let us contemplate the Inventor of Gadgets. Inventors of the calibre of Stevenson, Watt, and Rudolf Diesel are in a different category. The person alluded to now is usually a draughtsman by profession and a theorist at heart. He invents pumps which, on paper, are miracles of simplicity and paragons of reliability. Gadgets are his dish. He does not comprehend why existing pumps, reducing valves, escapes, evaporator coils, and generator-engines are so complicated and costly. He sees where he can design them more simply and economically. objects, when brooding over the lay-out of an engine-room, to vacant corners. Has he been to sea? It is safe to assume that he made a voyage to the Mediterranean and back. He knows all about it. You will hear about that voyage the moment the faintest doubt of his experience creeps into your voice. His opinion of

He

are an ignorant, shiftless, drunken, and inefficient crowd of impostors. They cannot do the simplest problem involving the calculus, and they have no other term in their vocabulary more scathing than to call a man a draughtsman.

Now such a person-tall, spare, and wearing rimless glasses-is not allowed to monkey with the general design of engines and ships. He gets his work in on the gadgets, the auxiliary contraptions which make or mar a man's life on board of a ship. Patents, in a general way, are the curse of the sea-going engineer. Anyone who is interested in the little known psychology of invention will find food for thought in the great museum of arts and sciences in London, where models of all the amazing mechanisms of the past fifty or sixty years are gathered in chambers of horrors for the instruction and warning of modern youth. There he will behold engines animated by all the prime movers, including some that have solved (for a minute or two) the problem of perpetual motion. He will see the engine devised by the man who wanted quick compression in his internal combustion motor, and substituted for the cylinder head another piston advancing stealthily upon the unwitting gas from behind. Whereupon the explosion drove the pistons apart, and power, oodles of power, was transmitted by huge clonking bell-crank levers to the

The steamship, it may be easily imagined, however, has been the particular mark of the ruthless inventor. I report with joy that ninety-nine out of every hundred of these infernal affairs do not work. The simpler they are the less likely their chances of survival. Valveless pumps and engines are mentioned here. The duplex pump, whereby the piston rod of the left cylinder operates the valve-stem of the right, and vice versa, is a true couple, and as reliable as it is simple to adjust. It produces an even flow from its discharge, and it will start from any position at which it may have stopped. It can be hung upside down in a well-shaft, and it will work as well as in the manufacturer's show-room. Even an oiler, sent in an emergency to start such a homely adequate dingus, can do no more than forget to open a drain cock, in which case the pump, nonplussed by a cylinder full of water, stops.

Came a day, however, when a knight of the drawing-board had a vision of a pump with only one cylinder and one bucket, operating with a valve whose impetus was derived from a thimbleful of steam pocketed at the end of a thing like a dumb-bel noving endwise, and with a rotary twist of perhaps thirty degrees.

was supposed to open a port into the cylinder, and presto! the pump made a stroke. On paper the contrivance had a deceptive simplicity. In practice it was expensive, but it was not competent.

The one desideratum in auxiliary machinery is an ability to function without more than reasonable supervision. You have a pump; in this case it is a patent. The name is probably some variant of the word Simple. It is a Simplicitas, let us say, cheap and nasty. nasty. It goes into a corner where a hot steam-pipe prevents you getting at it. You give it steam, warm it through, and drain it. You open suction and delivery valves, run a swabbing-brush over the rod, and open up the stop-valve. And nothing happens.

The aforesaid thimbleful of steam, so exquisitely adjusted to the duty of thrusting the dumbbell distributing valve into the new position, is trapped behind globules of condensation. It is, by a very efficient natural law, becoming condensed itself. This forms a vacuum, and all the moisture which has been indolently draining from that end of the steamchest changes direction and rushes back to fill that vacuum. This the gentleman in the draughting - room has overlooked. But it is no longer any use blaming the inventor. The thing has been bought and delivered and installed in the ship upon the strength of trial performances carried out under

ideal conditions. part of the ship's gear, and by some obscure process of evolution it has gotten itself a disposition, a personality, a galaxy of moods, almost a soul of its

own.

So it seemed to me in the night watches of the first ship in which I sailed, and the erratic temperaments of auxiliaries blended with the sombre animosity of the main engines. The boilers of that ship were as old as the ship-twenty years. To enter the casings beneath them with a slushlamp, for she had no dynamo, was like entering an iron cave whose sagging vault blotched and blistered with vast yellowish globes and inverted pinnacles of salt. Every seam and rivet-head bore its quota of harsh saline crystals stained with corrosion and dripping bitter brine into the ascending stalagmites on the floor of the cellular double-bottom.

was

This told three things. The boilers were leaking, the evaporator was out of commission, and the condenser was letting sea-water seep into the steam spaces. The boilers, far from needing what is called "makeup," which is the additional water to compensate for legitimate losses, were gaining a few inches in the gauge every day. The amount of salt in the water, as shown to me by the salinometer every morning at three o'clock, was ominous. It was nearly eight ounces to the gallon. Therefore it became my lugubrious duty to fill the boilers as full as was

Here lay the sinister significance of the patent. Each engineer of the ship would delegate the operating of that pump to the one lower down. The chief, as a matter of politics, announced that the pump was all right, but we didn't know how to work it. As the most junior of all, it was impossible for me to abdicate in anybody's favour. I therefore was forced into the society of the slim green-painted jezebel in the forward port corner of our engine-room, and many a desperate tryst I kept with that iron maiden. The second engineer had another name for her.

She was like a light woman with three lovers, none of whom really understood the workings of her secret heart. There were times when she seemed to stand there smiling derisively in the shadows behind the high-pressure columns, a sort of demoniac Rima haunting an iron forest. She would start sometimes to pump, making strange sounds as though developing cardiac syncope. Softly, softly the plunger would rise and fall and rise and fall, exactly as the inventor, now safely asleep in his bed ashore, had intended.

And then, just as I would turn away to attend to the other ten thousand duties in that terrible old engine-room, she would choke with rage, stamp her foot, and stop dead. I would tickle her under the chin with a wrench, and she would give a terrific up and down stroke, ending with a heartbreaking bang. "Once for all I wont," she seemed to say. I would administer cylinder oil through a lubricator fastened to her ear, and she would send out a geyser of unsuspected vapour to scald my arms.

Sometimes in despair, and turning to other work, I would be hurrying past her, and find her moving up and down as sweetly as could be. She seemed to be dancing solitarily in the shadow, a shy nereid of the seas, an elfin elfin gypsy whom none would ever bend to his will. And again, she would pause and put her foot down hard, so that the feed pipes shivered with the shock, and my heart, very much in my mouth all the time, jumped through my teeth.

It would be idle to pretend that such a union could ever be a happy one. The most devoted of lovers expects a little consideration from his mistress. She had none for us. She held before us, supposing the big main pumps failed, the promise of disaster. On her forehead was a plate bearing the word SIMPLICITAS. It gleamed. The donkeyman polished the flanges of her cylindercovers and her bulbous lubricator. She led us into decep

tive courses. We strove, like knights of a degenerate grail, to believe in her. We gave her the benefit of work done secretly by the great main pumps crashing up and down for ever behind the low pressure casing. The second engineer, gulping hot coffee at four o'clock, would say, 'Did she work?" I would nod. 'Aye," I would say easily, "she worked pretty well." But I avoided his eye, and he never sought mine. He knew. He knew she had one of those fatal personalities which engender neither faith nor hope in a man's breast.

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There were other machines whose vagaries evoke no remembered emotions nobler than a savage exasperation and a dogged desire to conquer. Consider, for example, that aged Bolinder semi-Diesel engine in a launch which was used by me to tow mahogany logs and lighters of palm-oil barrels from the jetty at Cape Coast Castle to the ship lying off in deep water. It was also used by less conscientious persons to go ashore in Duala, which is the port of the Cameroons, and three degrees from the Equator. Consider also that a semiDiesel had in those days about the same standing as a parson's son. Nobody expected her to behave herself.