Classic Poem

It was her first voyage, and though she was but a cargo-steamer of
twenty-five hundred tons, she was the very best of her kind, the
outcome of forty years of experiments and improvements in framework
and machinery; and her designers and owner thought as much of her as
though she had been the Lucania. Anyone can make a floating hotel
that will pay expenses, if he puts enough money into the saloon, and
charges for private baths, suites of rooms, and such like; but in
these days of competition and low freights every square inch of a
cargo-boat must be built for cheapness, great hold-capacity, and a
certain steady speed. This boat was, perhaps, two hundred and forty
feet long and thirty-two feet wide, with arrangements that enabled her
to carry cattle on her main and sheep on her upper deck if she wanted
to; but her great glory was the amount of cargo that she could store
away in her holds. Her owners--they were a very well-known Scotch
firm--came round with her from the north, where she had been launched
and christened and fitted, to Liverpool, where she was to take cargo
for New York; and the owner's daughter, Miss Frazier, went to and fro
on the clean decks, admiring the new paint and the brass work, and the
patent winches, and particularly the strong, straight bow, over which
she had cracked a bottle of champagne when she named the steamer the
Dimbula. It was a beautiful September afternoon, and the boat in all
her newness--she was painted lead-colour with a red funnel--looked
very fine indeed. Her house-flag was flying, and her whistle from time
to time acknowledged the salutes of friendly boats, who saw that she
was new to the High and Narrow Seas and wished to make her welcome.

"And now," said Miss Frazier, delightedly, to the captain, "she's a
real ship, is n't she? It seems only the other day father gave the
order for her, and now--and now--is n't she a beauty!" The girl was
proud of the firm, and talked as though she were the controlling
partner.

"Oh, she's no so bad," the skipper replied cautiously. "But I'm sayin'
that it takes more than christenin' to mak' a ship. In the nature o'
things, Miss Frazier, if ye follow me, she's just irons and rivets and
plates put into the form of a ship. She has to find herself yet."

"I thought father said she was exceptionally well found."

"So she is," said the skipper, with a laugh. "But it's this way wi'
ships, Miss Frazier. She's all here, but the parrts of her have not
learned to work together yet. They've had no chance."

"The engines are working beautifully. I can hear them."

"Yes, indeed. But there's more than engines to a ship. Every inch of
her, ye'll understand, has to be livened up and made to work wi' its
neighbour--sweetenin' her, we call it, technically."

"And how will you do it?" the girl asked.

"We can no more than drive and steer her, and so forth; but if we have
rough weather this trip--it's likely--she'll learn the rest by heart!
For a ship, ye'll obsairve, Miss Frazier, is in no sense a reegid body
closed at both ends. She's a highly complex structure o' various an'
conflictin' strains, wi' tissues that must give an' tak' accordin' to
her personal modulus of elasteecity." Mr. Buchanan, the chief
engineer, was coming toward them. "I'm sayin' to Miss Frazier, here,
that our little Dimbula has to be sweetened yet, and nothin' but a
gale will do it. How's all wi' your engines, Buck?"

"Well enough--true by plumb an' rule, o' course; but there's no
spontaneeity yet." He turned to the girl. "Take my word, Miss Frazier,
and maybe ye'll comprehend later; even after a pretty girl's
christened a ship it does not follow that there's such a thing as a
ship under the men that work her."

"I was sayin' the very same, Mr. Buchanan," the skipper interrupted.

"That's more metaphysical than I can follow," said Miss Frazier,
laughing.

"Why so? Ye're good Scotch, an'--I knew your mother's father, he was
fra' Dumfries--ye've a vested right in metapheesics, Miss Frazier,
just as ye have in the Dimbula," the engineer said.

"Eh, well, we must go down to the deep watters, an' earn Miss Frazier
her deevidends. Will you not come to my cabin for tea?" said the
skipper. "We'll be in dock the night, and when you're goin' back to
Glasgie ye can think of us loadin' her down an' drivin' her forth--all
for your sake."

In the next few days they stowed some four thousand tons' dead weight
into the Dimbula, and took her out from Liverpool. As soon as she
met the lift of the open water, she naturally began to talk. If you
lay your ear to the side of the cabin next time you are in a steamer,
you will hear hundreds of little voices in every direction, thrilling
and buzzing, and whispering and popping, and gurgling and sobbing and
squeaking exactly like a telephone in a thunder-storm. Wooden ships
shriek and growl and grunt, but iron vessels throb and quiver through
all their hundreds of ribs and thousands of rivets. The Dimbula was
very strongly built, and every piece of her had a letter or number, or
both, to describe it; and every piece had been hammered, or forged,
or rolled, or punched by man, and had lived in the roar and rattle of
the shipyard for months. Therefore, every piece had its own separate
voice in exact proportion to the amount of trouble spent upon it.
Cast-iron as a rule, says very little; but mild steel plates and
wrought-iron, and ribs and beams that have been much bent and welded
and riveted, talk continuously. Their conversation, of course, is not
half as wise as our human talk, because they are all, though they do
not know it, bound down one to the other in a black darkness, where
they cannot tell what is happening near them, nor what will overtake
them next.

As soon as she had cleared the Irish coast a sullen gray-headed old
wave of the Atlantic climbed leisurely over her straight bows, and sat
down on her steam-capstan used for hauling up the anchor. Now the
capstan and the engine that drove it had been newly painted red and
green; besides which, nobody likes being ducked.

"Don't you do that again," the capstan sputtered through the teeth of
his cogs. "Hi! Where's the fellow gone?"

The wave had slouched overside with a plop and a chuckle; but "Plenty
more where he came from," said a brother-wave, and went through and
over the capstan, who was bolted firmly to an iron plate on the iron
deck-beams below.

"Can't you keep still up there?" said the deck-beams. "What's the
matter with you? One minute you weigh twice as much as you ought to,
and the next you don't!"

"It is n't my fault," said the capstan. "There's a green brute outside
that comes and hits me on the head."

"Tell that to the shipwrights. You've been in position for months and
you've never wriggled like this before. If you are n't careful you'll
strain us."

"Talking of strain," said a low, rasping, unpleasant voice, "are any
of you fellows--you deck-beams, we mean--aware that those exceedingly
ugly knees of yours happen to be riveted into our structure--ours?"

"Who might you be?" the deck-beams inquired.

"Oh, nobody in particular," was the answer. "We're only the port and
starboard upper-deck stringers; and if you persist in heaving and
hiking like this, we shall be reluctantly compelled to take steps."

Now the stringers of the ship are long iron girders, so to speak, that
run lengthways from stern to bow. They keep the iron frames (what are
called ribs in a wooden ship) in place, and also help to hold the ends
of the deck-beams, which go from side to side of the ship. Stringers
always consider themselves most important, because they are so long.

"You will take steps--will you?" This was a long echoing rumble. It
came from the frames--scores and scores of them, each one about
eighteen inches distant from the next, and each riveted to the
stringers in four places. "We think you will have a certain amount of
trouble in that;" and thousands and thousands of the little rivets
that held everything together whispered: "You will. You will! Stop
quivering and be quiet. Hold on, brethren! Hold on! Hot Punches!
What's that?"

Rivets have no teeth, so they cannot chatter with fright; but they did
their best as a fluttering jar swept along the ship from stern to bow,
and she shook like a rat in a terrier's mouth.

An unusually severe pitch, for the sea was rising, had lifted the big
throbbing screw nearly to the surface, and it was spinning round in a
kind of soda-water--half sea and half air--going much faster than was
proper, because there was no deep water for it to work in. As it sank
again, the engines--and they were triple expansion, three cylinders in
a row--snorted through all their three pistons, "Was that a joke, you
fellow outside? It's an uncommonly poor one. How are we to do our work
if you fly off the handle that way?"

"I did n't fly off the handle," said the screw, twirling huskily at
the end of the screw-shaft. "If I had, you'd have been scrap-iron by
this time. The sea dropped away from under me, and I had nothing to
catch on to. That's all."

"That's all, d'you call it?" said the thrust-block whose business it
is to take the push of the screw; for if a screw had nothing to hold
it back it would crawl right into the engine-room. (It is the holding
back of the screwing action that gives the drive to a ship.) "I know I
do my work deep down and out of sight, but I warn you I expect
justice. All I ask for is bare justice. Why can't you push steadily
and evenly instead of whizzing like a whirligig, and making me hot
under all my collars." The thrust-block had six collars, each faced
with brass, and he did not wish to get them heated.

All the bearings that supported the fifty feet of screw-shaft as it
ran to the stern whispered: "Justice--give us justice."

"I can only give you what I can get," the screw answered. "Look out!
It's coming again!"

He rose with a roar as the Dimbula plunged, and
"whack--flack--whack--whack" went the engines, furiously, for they had
little to check them.

"I'm the noblest outcome of human ingenuity--Mr. Buchanan says so,"
squealed the high-pressure cylinder. "This is simply ridiculous!" The
piston went up savagely, and choked, for half the steam behind it was
mixed with dirty water. "Help! Oiler! Fitter! Stoker! Help! I'm
choking," it gasped. "Never in the history of maritime invention has
such a calamity overtaken one so young and strong. And if I go, who's
to drive the ship?"

"Hush! oh, hush!" whispered the Steam, who, of course, had been to sea
many times before. He used to spend his leisure ashore in a cloud, or
a gutter, or a flower-pot, or a thunder-storm, or anywhere else where
water was needed. "That's only a little priming, a little
carrying-over, as they call it. It'll happen all night, on and off. I
don't say it's nice, but it's the best we can do under the
circumstances."

"What difference can circumstances make? I'm here to do my work--on
clean, dry steam. Blow circumstances!" the cylinder roared.

"The circumstances will attend to the blowing. I've worked on the
North Atlantic run a good many times--it's going to be rough before
morning."

"It is n't distressingly calm now," said the extra-strong frames--they
were called web-frames--in the engine-room. "There's an upward thrust
that we don't understand, and there's a twist that is very bad for our
brackets and diamond-plates, and there's a sort of west-north-westerly
pull that follows the twist, which seriously annoys us. We mention
this because we happened to cost a good deal of money, and we feel
sure that the owner would not approve of our being treated in this
frivolous way."

"I'm afraid the matter is out of owner's hand, for the present," said
the Steam, slipping into the condenser. "You're left to your own
devices till the weather betters."

"I would n't mind the weather," said a flat bass voice below; "it's
this confounded cargo that's breaking my heart. I'm the
garboard-strake, and I'm twice as thick as most of the others, and I
ought to know something."

The garboard-strake is the lowest plate in the bottom of a ship, and
the Dimbula's garboard-strake was nearly three-quarters of an inch
mild steel.

"The sea pushes me up in a way I should never have expected," the
strake grunted, "and the cargo pushes me down, and, between the two, I
don't know what I'm supposed to do."

"When in doubt, hold on," rumbled the Steam, making head in the
boilers.

"Yes; but there's only dark, and cold, and hurry, down here; and how
do I know whether the other plates are doing their duty? Those
bulwark-plates up above, I've heard, ain't more than five-sixteenths
of an inch thick--scandalous, I call it."

"I agree with you," said a huge web-frame by the main cargo-hatch. He
was deeper and thicker than all the others, and curved half-way across
the ship in the shape of half an arch, to support the deck where deck
beams would have been in the way of cargo coming up and down. "I work
entirely unsupported, and I observe that I am the sole strength of
this vessel, so far as my vision extends. The responsibility, I assure
you, is enormous. I believe the money-value of the cargo is over one
hundred and fifty thousand pounds. Think of that!"

"And every pound of it is dependent on my personal exertions." Here
spoke a sea-valve that communicated directly with the water outside,
and was seated not very far from the garboard-strake. "I rejoice to
think that I am a Prince-Hyde Valve, with best Para rubber facings.
Five patents cover me--I mention this without pride--five separate and
several patents, each one finer than the other. At present I am
screwed fast. Should I open, you would immediately be swamped. This is
incontrovertible!"

Patent things always use the longest words they can. It is a trick
that they pick up from their inventors.

"That's news," said a big centrifugal bilge-pump. "I had an idea that
you were employed to clean decks and things with. At least, I've used
you for that more than once. I forget the precise number, in
thousands, of gallons which I am guaranteed to throw per hour; but I
assure you, my complaining friends, that there is not the least
danger. I alone am capable of clearing any water that may find its way
here. By my Biggest Deliveries, we pitched then!"

The sea was getting up in workmanlike style. It was a dead westerly
gale, blown from under a ragged opening of green sky, narrowed on all
sides by fat, gray clouds; and the wind bit like pincers as it fretted
the spray into lacework on the flanks of the waves.

"I tell you what it is," the foremast telephoned down its wire-stays.
"I'm up here, and I can take a dispassionate view of things. There's
an organized conspiracy against us. I'm sure of it, because every
single one of these waves is heading directly for our bows. The whole
sea is concerned in it--and so's the wind. It's awful!"

"What's awful?" said a wave, drowning the capstan for the hundredth
time.

"This organized conspiracy on your part," the capstan gurgled, taking
his cue from the mast.

"Organized bubbles and spindrift! There has been a depression in the
Gulf of Mexico. Excuse me!" He leaped overside; but his friends took
up the tale one after another.

"Which has advanced----" That wave hove green water over the funnel.

"As far as Cape Hatteras----" He drenched the bridge.

"And is now going out to sea--to sea--to sea!" The third went free in
three surges, making a clean sweep of a boat, which turned bottom up
and sank in the darkening troughs alongside, while the broken falls
whipped the davits.

"That's all there is to it," seethed the white water roaring through
the scuppers. "There's no animus in our proceedings. We're only
meteorological corollaries."

"Is it going to get any worse?" said the bow-anchor, chained down to
the deck, where he could only breathe once in five minutes.

"Not knowing, can't say. Wind may blow a bit by midnight. Thanks
awfully. Good-bye."

The wave that spoke so politely had travelled some distance aft, and
found itself all mixed up on the deck amidships,