"IN A COFFIN SHIP."

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLV, Issue 13722, 11 April 1908, Page 5 (Supplement)

"IN A COFFIN SHIP."

THE PRICE SAILORS PAY FOR ; ENGLAND'S CHEAP BREAD. One of the most readable and sensational of modern novels with- a purpose is "The Grain Carriers," in which '": Mr; Edward Noble, author of " The Edge of Circumstance," and other vigorous books, exposes with deadly art and evident technical knowledge, the running of cheap wheat from San. Francisco to Liverpool, round the Horn at mid-winter, in cheap ships, with cheap crews, and under the increased loading allowed by Mr. LloydGeorge's accent Bill. There if? not a dull page in the story, and the book is crammed with dramatic incident from cover to cover, attaining its purpose as a fierce politico-economic advocate of'honest pbips, British crews, and fair conditions by a passionate; spirit of indignant sympathy with the victims of the plot that illuminates and emphasises every ".void. The hero of the story is Philip Devine, apprentice promoted to be an officer because he is cheap, and the heroine is his sweetheart, Nita Collins, born and bred at sea. Captain Collins and his wife are cast in the tragic parts, this British skipper having been displaced in his old ship, the Magician, by a cheap and clumsy "Dutchman," and placed in command of the jerry-built Padrone, owned by the same firm of Baker, Filcher, Thug, and Company. The two ships run together to San Francisco, where Collins is informed by the agent that "under Lloyd-George's new Bill the vessels will have to load twelve inches deeper, although the Padrone nearly went to pieces coming out. The " Dutchman" complies, without a murmur, but Collins contemplates resistance, and threatens to demand an inquiry. His old friend, the agent, Denny, reasons thus with him when he talks of fighting the owners : ■'■ -V.:-;/ .. Denny blew a cloud of smoke and withdrew his cigar. '" Wrong. thrre, Collins. It's your nation that put 'em up. It's your nation that is responsible for their darned sloppinessthe nation that has killed its farmers and turned its country into a park; that has forced its farm hands to emigrate or get into the cities a nation that would turn them into hell if it thought it could get grain cheaper by hustling them there. Goin' to fight them 2" Collins marched in silence, a dead cigar two fingers. The wind crooning through the taut wire rigging sang an accompaniment to Denny*3 speech. " Let us face this thing," he went on, sarcastic, biting in tone. " The British nation wants cheap bread. It's nothing to her how it comes. Gutter-tanks from the Black Sea; gutter-tanks round the Horn. She has killed her farmers. She wants grain, and the Germans have got together a lot of ships to carry it. Germany has subsidised her ships; so has France; so, too, will America. We want your trade. There's no harm in that, says your nation we want is cheap bread. Goin' to fight them?" _ ' '* It's a losing game for you men of ] the sea," Denny went on after a pause. " It stands to reason you'll get whipped. The cheap ships you are building won't help you, I reckon. The cheap crews you are carrying won't help you. Increase of load-line won't help you but it's the dying kick of your nation, and you'd better come in out of the rainunless, maybe, you decide to start in and fight them." Thereupon Captain Collins gives in. making up his mind to take the Padrone home and leave the' sea. The Magician, under Captain Fahlim, is delaying, owing to .her crew preferring to go to gaol for »ix weeks rather than take her to sea,, and while she is waiting for another crew, Philip comes over to the Padrone to ask for Nita Collins, who sails on the Padrone wiWi.her. father and mother. Captain Collins refuses to let his daughter become engaged to an English sailor, explaining thus : V " What nationality is the man who commands your ship?"

" Dutchman, sir." - " Steward?" " Mexican." "Cook?" ,- " Nigger, sir." ' "What were your crew coining out?" "Dagos and ' Dutchmen,' generally speaking." ~. " Just so. And why, do you suppose, do we carry so many foreigners in our : " ships?" Philip did not know. It had not come before him in this light, and he said so. "Very well. I will tell you," the other announced, grimly in earnest. "We ship foreigners mainly because the conditions are such that no decent Britisher will accept them, and because the foreigners, are cheaper. - " Steel ships, my lad, are the result of competition. They are lighter, and, therefore, carry more cargo; they are cheaper to build, therefore we build them; but they are more fragile, therefore they break up more quickly and drown their crews more speedily. You are a sailor. I suppose you dream of being in command, and you ask me, who know just what is your chance of command, ;to give you my daughter whom you love. " Well, if I didn't love her also, I should sav, take her, my boy, and be good to her. But as I do, I say to you now, here, in no circumstances will I consent to my daughter marrying a sailor. Sailor- [ ising is done. Captains are no longer Captains. Ships are run from an office to pay, and we are paid a 'Dutchman's' I wage to do what the Dutchman will jump !to do if we refuse." ' ' However, as Mrs. Collins, a charming woman, is sympathetic, and Nita, a delightful girl, desperately in love, Collins finally gives his consent to their tentative engagement on condition that Philip leaves the sea. So the Padrone sails away, there being great rivalry as to who will get home between the British and Dutch "skippers," and, finally,- the Magician leaves 'Frisco with a shanghaieu crew. The crimps bring them aboard thus: A crimp who knows his business has no qualms on this head. A ship requires a crew in order that she may proceed: to sea. That is a problem easily resolvable by the aid of dollars, and the crimp employed by Captain Fahlun was not the man to throw money into the bay. He made his men drunk. Those who objected to making themselves drunk he drugged, and in the maudlin stage of their debauch signed them on and carried them like stuck pigs to the boat. There are several methods of providing a ship with a crew. Some savour more or less of the press-gang; but the formula adopted by the crimp here drawn is generally found useful and expeditious. It is known as Shanghai-ing, which sounds funny, but in practice means sore heads. i. The boats drew alongside. One by one they approached the gangway and whipped their burden over the Magician's rail. There was but little fuss" in the operation. ; It had been so often rehearsed that the runners had become masters in the art of dealing with this branch of their duties. Jack drunk as the fabled forty tops'lsheet blocks, Jack log-like and stupid, Jack retching from the effects of his libations, Jack dead of that hocus which had finished him— and short, young and old, farmer or sailor, it mattered nothing. They came up'the ladders on the «shoulers of the men who had bled them. They were carried up, hauled up by lines and' carted to their home in the forecastle; and Mr. Mate, standing on the prating beside the big, black crimp, checked off each bundle as it appeared. ? Item— :.//-.,- ■ '.',•■ ' ■ •■-'■. 1 "George Cavantos." A hunchback Greek in a shirt like a rainbow, whose name the crimp laboriously pronounced. .Tick. ,;'—■-' ;■-■::>■ : -'v '. ; The mate's pencil acknowledged the fact unquestioned. >:. "Hans -Dcutschmau. Bully man that when he comes sober—you bet!" The crimp expatiated here after the manner of an Eastern slave-dealer appraising bis wares. , , , •Tick..

■ Again the mate's pencil registered the inevitable. '* Constantino." A Greek with a rear from eye to scalp, showing in a blue seam of flesh across the forehead. A man carried between two, his head lolling, inert. Tick. "Nicola." Subject of . His Imperial j Majesty the Emperor of Austriaa lank, heavy-jawed man with a pock-marked face and glazed eves. Tick. "John Johnson.". British in name only —his mouth sticky, trap for flies. Tick. "Jack Somors, Calaboose. Bill, Saltee Dick." Dead men all; men with names which may or may not have been theirs, but without exception men lifted on board—some by the yard whip, some by hand, and passed by the aid of the afterguard to their home in the pit! And the mate's pencil registered their entrance and exit without demur. Then came .an obvious Yank. A big man with shaven cheeks and a goatee beard, whom the whiff of salt air and a dash of spray had partially roused. He arrived on the grating, where stood the mate and his guard with shootingirons on hand, swaying and full of fierce invective. Then a swarthy Creole of the runner fraternity " downed" him scientifically, and he moved onward to the pit in the arms of the men who had no need to brandish force. Walt. B. Sampson," said the crimp. "Yankee?" questioned the mate. "Shua." "I don't like the look of himl can't take him." , " Golly! then you go sea one han' short, Misser Mate." "Can't do that either." The crimp stood back patting the rail with one hand, his teeth gleaming white in the yellow-brown visage. v " I guess that fool-talk," he announced. " I kinder kal'clate Walt. B. Sampson lies shipped in thish-yer gol-dolled packet, an' ef you ask me, I guess he's gwine to sail in her. "Who cashed his note, Misser Mate?" he questioned pertinently; "you or me? Me. Waal he expectorated violently. "Golly! Tink I'm gwine to lose . . . ." Tick. V " Neow yew're talkin'," he commented. He noted the fact that the mate's pencil had acknowledged the receipt of Walt. B. Sampson; that he was passed, as indeed he had passed for his share in the toil necessary to carry this five thousand ton load of grain to the country which is too palsied to grow it, and too fatly smug to question the method by which it arrives. There followed additional human items for the' mate's inspection, and against. the name of each was placed that little sign by which he admitted receipt. Fourteen men and three boys. All of them drunk or hocussed. All of them robbed of three months' advance in order that the British nation might have that cargo of graia cheap; that it might.be transformed into cheap bread and set before it on the cheap platters it has brought from Germany. Naturally, there is trouble withi such a crew, and with such a captain as Fahlim. In the attempt to start the men working the mate, a sterling British sailor, is knifed in the "pit," or forecastle, and when the sailmaker comes on deck with new canvas the captain's ruling passion asserts itself. "Zails," he cried, "gome here." The sailmaker arrived at the head of the ladder. He carried beneath his arm a length of canvas, obviously new. " Vot you going to do vith that?" Fahlim questioned pertinently. "Sew lip the mats, sir. Mr. Finch said ... " But it is new sduff !" lahlun expos tulatcd, eyebrows lifted, head thrust out, "Have ve no second-handt The sailmaker admitted that old canvas was plentiful, and stood silent, staring into the greyness. But he ridded, " It's for the mate", sir. I'm goin' to sew him up." it " Veil, and vill not second-handt sduff do as veil Sails had no words to express his opinion. He was a small man, one of the after-guard, sodden at the moment and very weary. The thing he desired was a week's sleepsomething to remember. The captain hammered in his desire— "Get me some second-handt sduff. New ganvass may gome in some clay for somesings. Ve cannot sbare it. A goodt piece of second-handt 'sduff. He vill not feel it is second-handt," The last phrase he pushed out as though in apology, or to propitiate a sailmaker whose eyes registered a protest. The second mate, now promoted, is a Nova Scotian adventurer, "an ex-island trader, who is a dead shot with a revolver, a believer in knuckle-dusters, and a fearless bullv. He cows the crew, who reluctantly" turn to; and the food is certainly not calculated to attract British youths to the sea. , -."■ . The men Shanghaied into the Magician's forecastle sat round the mess kids, taking breakfast. The kids contained a chunk of cold salt horse in one ; the cook's idea, in concrete form, of cracker-hash in the other. The dishes lay there for all men to appraise, .a sufficiently unappetising meal; the first for individuals who had fought and starved for twenty-four hours by the clock. Weevily biscuits stood near at had in a bread-barge. A pot of rancid butter. And on the bunk-sides were hooked a row of shining pots holding a black draught, which steamed like a funeral pyre about the cockroach carcases still floating in it. Under the cowardly, incapable captain, and the bullying mate, and with its motley crew, the Padrone pushes on, until an exceptionally brutal act of authority induces Philip to head a rising of the "af- ; ter-guard," to depose the captain and mate, and elect Philip captain, and persuade the crew to work home to England, where they will get justice, rather than run into a South American port, where they won't. Decently treated and better fed the men prove themselves human beings, and sterling at the bottom. The Padrone and the Magician join company, the latter being the better ship, and Captain Collins confides his fears to Philip. Then commences a terrible battle with the stormy seas that sweep round Cape Horn, at the end of which the Padrone founders, only one boat being saved by her consort, and Nita is married to' Philip with her father's last breath. • '