THE FLEET IN BEING.

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume XXVI, Issue 8409, 7 January 1899, Page 4

THE FLEET IN BEING.

. PLAIN TALES OF THE BRITISH NAVY. LIFE ABOARD A MAN-O'-WAR. (By Rum-Ann Kipling.) Sojie thirty of Her Majesty's men-of-war were involved in this matter, say a dozen battleships of the most recent and seventeeu or eighteen cruisers ; but my concern was limited to one of a new type commanded by an old friend. I had some dim knowledge of the interior of a warship, but none of the new world into which I stepped from a Portsmouth wherry one wonderful evening many months ago. With the exception bf the captain, the chief engineer, and maybe a few petty officers, nobody was more than twentyeight years old. They ranged in the wardroom from this resourceful age to twenty — six or seven clear-cut, cleanshaven young faces, with all manner of varied experience behind them. When one comes to think it is only just that a light twenty-knot cruiser should be handled, under guidance of an older head, by affable young gentlemen prepared, even sinfully delighted, to take chances not set down in books. She was new, they were new, the Admiral was new, and we were all off to tho mancuuvres together, thirty keels next day threading their way in and out between a hundred and twenty moored vessels not so fortunate, \\'e opened the ball for the benefit of two foreign visitors with a piece of rather pretty steering. A consort was coming up a water lane between two lines of shipping just behind us, and we nipped in immediately ahead of her, precisely as a hansom turning out of Bond street nips in in front of a city bus. Distance on water is deceptive, and when I vowed that aM one crisis I could have spat on the wicked ram of our next astern, pointed straight at our naked side, the wardroom laughed. " Oh, that's nothing," said a. gentleman of twenty-two ; " wait till we keep station to-night. It\> my middle watch." " Close water-tight doors then," said a sub-Lieuteuant. "I say" (this to the passenger), "\f you find a second-class cruiser's ram in the small of your back at midnight don't be alarmed, will you ?'' We were then strung out in a six-mile line, thirty ships all heading westward. As soon as we found room, the flagships began to signal, and there followed a most fascinating game of general post. When I came to know our signalmen on the human side, I appreciated it even more. The Admiral wreathed himself with fi:i«s, strings of them : tho signalman on our high little, narrow little bridge, telescope jammed to his eye, read out the letters of that older ; the quartermaster spun ttie infantine wheel, the ollicer of the bridge rumbled requests down the speaking tube to the engine-room, and away we fled to take up station at such and such a distance from our neighbors, ahead and astern, at such and such an angle on the Admiral's bow or beam. The end of it was a miracle to lay eyes. The loni; line bccime four parallel lines of strength and beauty, a mile and a qu.irlei from flank to ll.uik,"and thus we abode (ill evening. A hundred odd yards behind us the ram of our next astein planed through the still water ; an equal distance in ftont of us lay the oily water from the screw of our next ahead. So it was ordered : and so we lay as though glued into position. But our captain took I up the parable and bade me observe how slack we were, by reason of recent festivities, compared to whit we should be in a few days. " Xow we're all over the shup The ships haven't worked together, and station keeping isn't as easy .is it looks." Later on I found this was perfectly true. One thing nioic than all the rest impresses a passenger on a (Queen's ship. She is tekloin tor a single hour at the same

speed. Tlie liner, clear of her dock, strikes her pace and holds it to her journey's end ; but the man-of-war must always lave two or three knots up her sleeve in case the Admiral demands a spurt ; she must also be ready to drop three or four knots at the wave of a Hag, and on occasion she must lie still and ; meditate. This means a varying strain on all the mechanism, and constant strain on the people who control it. I counted seven speeds in one watch, ranging from eight knots to seventeen, winch, with eleven, was her point, of maximum vibration. At eight knots you heard the vicious little twin screws jigitting like restive horses ; at seventeen they pegged away into the sea like a pair of short-giutcd trotting ponies on a hard load. But one felt, even in dreams, that .she was being held back. Those who talk (if a liner's freedom from breakdown should take a 7000 horse-power boat, and hit her and hold her for a fortnight nil across the salt seas. After a while I went to the gallery to get ' light on these and other matters. Once forward of the deck torpedo-tubes you enter another and a fascinating world of seamen-gunners, artiliccrs, cooks, marines (we had twenty and a sergeant), ship's boys, signalmen, and the general democracy. Here the men smoke at the permitted times ; and in clubs and coteries gossip and say what they think of each other and their superiors. Their speech is .soft (if everyone spoke aloud you could not hear yourself think on a cruiser). Their gestures are few (if a man swung his arms about he would interfere with his neighbor), their steps are noiseless as they pop in and out of the forward flats ; they arc at all times immensely interesting, and, as a rule, delightfully amusing. Their slang borrows from the engine-room, the working parts of guns, the drill-hook, and the last, music-hall song. It is delivered in a tight-lipped undertone ; the more excruciatingly funny parts without a shade of expression. The first thing that strikes a casual observer is their superb health, the next their quiet adecjUatcness, and thirdly a grave courtesy. But under the shell of the new navy beats the heart of the old. All Marryat's immortals are there ; better fed ; better tended ; bettor educated, but at heart unchanged. I heard Swinburne laying down the law to his juniors by the ash-shoot ; Chucks were there, too, inquiring in the politest manner in the world what a friend meant by spreading his limbs about the landscape ; and a lineal descendant of Dispart fussed over a fourinch gun that someone had been rude to. They were men of the world, at once curiously simple and curiously rusee (this makes the charm of the naval mau of all ranks), coming and going about their businesses like shadows. The night fell and our fleet blazed " like a lot of chemists' shops adrift," as one truthfully puts it. Six lights to each ship ; astonishing the tramps The younger officers are discussing what they would do in action. " The first thing to do," says authority aged Twenty-one, " is to be knocked silly by concussions in the conning-tower. Then you will revive when all the other chaps are dead, and win a victory off your own bat— a la illustrated papers. Wake up in Haslar a month later with your girl swabbing your forehead, and telling you we wiped out the whole fleet." " Catch me in the conning-tower ! Not much !" says Twenty-three. " Those bow guns of yours will stop every shot that misses it ; an' the upper bridge will come down on you in three minutes." "Don't see that you're any better off in the waist. You"d get the funnels and ventilators and all the upper fanoodleums on top of you, anyhow," is the retort. " We're a lot too full of wood, even with our boats out of the way." " The poop's good enough for me," says Twenty-four (that is his station). " Fine light, airy place, and we can get our ammunition handier than you can forward." "What's the use of that?" says he in charge of the bow guns. "You've got those beastly deck torpedo tubes just under you. Fancy a Whitehead smitten on the nose by one little shell ! You'd go up." "Sod you. She'd blow the middle out of herself. If they took these tubes away, we could have a couple more 4-inchcrs there. There'd be heaps of room for their ammunition in the torpedo magazine." "No-o," says Twenty-four, meditatively. " What we really want, if we ever go into a row, is weather — lots of it. Good old gales — regular smellers. Then we could run in and beak 'em while it's thick. I believe in beakiiig." (That belief, by the way, is curiously general in the navy.) " Do you mean to say you'd ram with a tea tray like ours ? I'm glad your aren't the skipper,"' I interrupt. " Oh, he'd beak like a shot, if he saw his chance. Of course, he wouldn't beak anything our size — it'ud be cheaper to hammer her — but take the — • — (he named a ship that did not fly our flag). If you got in on her almost anywhere, she'd turn turtle. And she cost about a million and a quarter. It is just a question of L.S.D." " Anef what 'ud we do afterwards, please ?" "Ah! that's our strong point. What happened when that collier drifted clown on us at Milford? It only improved our steaming power, didn't it? We're a, regular honeycomb of compartments forward. I believe you could swipe off twenty foot of her forward, and she'd get home somehow," says Twenty-four, enthusiastically. "Bit risky," says Twenty-one. "That ship you talked of is awfully plated up topside, hut all her underpinnings are pretty weak. If you could lob a few shells under some of those forward sponsons of hers, I believe she'd crumple up with the weight of her own guns. But," sorrowfully, "you'd need a nine point two to do that properly." "Beak her! Beak her! Catch her in a gale, coming out of harbor." The speaker named the very port. "It takes their people a week to get their tummies straight.' Next day both fleets were exercised at steam tactics, which is a noble game ; but I was so interested in the life of my own cruiser, unfolding hour by hour, to be intelligently interested in evolutions. All that I remember is that we were eternally taking up positions at fifteen knots an hour, amid a crowd of other cruisers, all precisely alike, all still as death, each with a wedge of white foam under her nose, wheeling, circling, and returning. The battleships danced stately quadrilles by themselves in another part of the deep. We of the light horse did barn dances about the windy floors, and precisely as partners in a ballroom firing a word over their shoulders so we and our friends, whirling past to take up fresh stations, snapped out an unofficial sentence or two by means of our bridge semaphores. Cruisers are wondrous human. In the afternoon the battleships overtook us, their white upper works showing like icebergs as they topped the sea line. Then we sobered our faces, and the engineers had rest, and at a wave of the Admiral's flag at Land's End our fleet was split in twain. One half would go outside Ireland, toying with the weight of the Atlantic en route. to Black Sod Bay, while we turned up the Irish Channel to Lough Swilly. There we would coal and wait for war. After that it would he blind-man's buff within a 350 \ mile ring of the Atlantic.