Rudyard Kipling: The ship that found herself

“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 didn’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 isn’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-northwesterly 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 hands for the present,” said the Steam, slipping into the condenser. “You’re left to your own devices till the weather betters.”

“I wouldn’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 Pará 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 woods 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, grey 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 organised 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 organised conspiracy on your part,” the capstan gurgled, taking his cue from the mast.

“Organised 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.