Complete Works

become manifest enough without any signal, and the rush of water into the stokehold could be cut off directly the doorplate came into its place.  Say a minute at the very outside.  Naturally, if the blow of a right-angled collision, for instance, were heavy enough to smash through the inner bulkhead of the bunker, why, there would be then nothing to do but for the stokers and trimmers and everybody in there to clear out of the stoke-room.  But that does not mean that the precaution of having water-tight doors to the bunkers is useless, superfluous, or impossible. {7}
    And talking of stokeholds, firemen, and trimmers, men whose heavy labour has not a single redeeming feature; which is unhealthy, uninspiring, arduous, without the reward of personal pride in it; sheer, hard, brutalising toil, belonging neither to earth nor sea, I greet with joy the advent for marine purposes of the internal combustion engine.  The disappearance of the marine boiler will be a real progress, which anybody in sympathy with his kind must welcome.  Instead of the unthrifty, unruly, nondescript crowd the boilers require, a crowd of men in the ship but not of her, we shall have comparatively small crews of disciplined, intelligent workers, able to steer the ship, handle anchors, man boats, and at the same time competent to take their place at a bench as fitters and repairers; the resourceful and skilled seamen — mechanics of the future, the legitimate successors of these seamen — sailors of the past, who had their own kind of skill, hardihood, and tradition, and whose last days it has been my lot to share.
    One lives and learns and hears very surprising things — things that one hardly knows how to take, whether seriously or jocularly, how to meet — with indignation or with contempt?  Things said by solemn experts, by exalted directors, by glorified ticket-sellers, by officials of all sorts.  I suppose that one of the uses of such an inquiry is to give such people enough rope to hang themselves with.  And I hope that some of them won’t neglect to do so.  One of them declared two days ago that there was “nothing to learn from the catastrophe of the Titanic .”  That he had been “giving his best consideration” to certain rules for ten years, and had come to the conclusion that nothing ever happened at sea, and that rules and regulations, boats and sailors, were unnecessary; that what was really wrong with the Titanic was that she carried too many boats.
    No; I am not joking.  If you don’t believe me, pray look back through the reports and you will find it all there.  I don’t recollect the official’s name, but it ought to have been Pooh-Bah.  Well, Pooh-Bah said all these things, and when asked whether he really meant it, intimated his readiness to give the subject more of “his best consideration” — for another ten years or so apparently — but he believed, oh yes! he was certain, that had there been fewer boats there would have been more people saved.  Really, when reading the report of this admirably conducted inquiry one isn’t certain at times whether it is an Admirable Inquiry or a felicitous opéra-bouffe of the Gilbertian type — with a rather grim subject, to be sure.
    Yes, rather grim — but the comic treatment never fails.  My readers will remember that in the number of The English Review for May, 1912, I quoted the old case of the Arizona , and went on from that to prophesy the coming of a new seamanship (in a spirit of irony far removed from fun) at the call of the sublime builders of unsinkable ships.  I thought that, as a small boy of my acquaintance says, I was “doing a sarcasm,” and regarded it as a rather wild sort of sarcasm at that.  Well, I am blessed (excuse the vulgarism) if a witness has not turned up who seems to have been inspired by the same thought, and evidently longs in his heart for the advent of the new seamanship.  He is an expert, of course, and I rather believe he’s the same gentleman who did not see his way to fit water-tight doors to bunkers.  With ludicrous earnestness he assured the Commission of his intense belief that had only the Titanic struck end-on she would have come into port all right.  And in the whole tone of his insistent statement there was suggested the regret that the officer in charge (who is dead now, and mercifully outside the comic scope of this inquiry) was so ill-advised as to try to pass clear of the ice.  Thus my sarcastic