Doctor at Sea

engine-room hatchway, in which he received visitors with a halftumbler of neat whisky (he maintained that gin was a drink fit only for harlots). His surroundings were as untidy as a nursery. Scraps of steel and paint-pots littered the deck, the bunk sagged under pieces of dismantled machinery, and the bulkheads supported charts, graphs, a row of sombre engineering books, and an incongruous nude leaving her bath on a boilermakers’ calendar. Scattered everywhere, like thistledown blown by a breeze, were scraps of half-used cotton waste.
    ‘Where would ye all be without my engines?’ he demanded.’ Do ye know what you’ve got to thank us for? Everything from the propeller revolutions to your shaving water and the ice in your gin.’
    He thought of his engines, as Boswell did of his lavatories, as living beings possessed of souls.
    ‘Ye’ll be no damn good as an engineer till you make friends with your engines,’ he told me.’ Talk to ‘em, that’s what you’ve got to do. Give ‘em hell if they play you up. It pays in the end, lad. Many a time I’ve had a row with me mates or the wife, and it’s been a comfort to know I’ve got a real pal down below. If ye cut my veins, Doc, ye’ll find fuel oil there, not blood.’
    McDougall believed that the best engineers came from Scotland, the best Scots from Glasgow, and the only effect of modern innovations like oil furnaces, engine-room ventilation, and refrigerators was a glaring deterioration in the standard of young men coming to sea. When he showed me round his engine-room he exhibited the reverence of an old dean in his cathedral. We stood on the quivering control platform in the centre of the Lotus’s clamorous viscera and he waved his arm proudly and shouted.’ This is where we do a man’s job, Doc.’
    I nodded, looking nervously at the pipes straining with the pressure of superheated steam.
    ‘That’s the main steam gauge,’ McDougall explained, pointing to a dial on the panel in front of us.
    ‘What’s the red line for?’ I shouted back.
    ‘That? Och, that’s the safety mark.’
    ‘But, I say, isn’t the needle well past it?’
    ‘That doesn’t matter, lad. We’ve got to get the old tub moving somehow.’
    He took me down greasy ladders, along a narrow catwalk between pieces of spinning machinery, through the boiler-room where Turnbull, the Geordie Seventh Engineer, sweated eight hours of his twenty-four watching the oil fires. We crouched along the tunnel that carried the propeller shaft to the stern, and stood at the end in a little triangular humid space where the thick revolving metal pierced the plates and disappeared into the sea.
    ‘There ye are, Doc. All us lads and all that machinery to keep this turning. If it wasn’t for us that old windbag on the bridge would be out of a job.’
    ‘He doesn’t seem to be very appreciative, Chief.’
    ‘Och, we’ve got better than him conducting the trams in Glasgow,’ McDougall said with disgust.’ You watch, Doc. I’ll run him off this ship before he’s much older. You wait and see.’
    McDougall’s threat was wholly serious. He had in a locked drawer in his cabin a foolscap book labelled shamelessly hogg , in which he entered immediately every derogatory fact he discovered about the Captain. When he was particularly annoyed he took the book out and read it, underlining in red ink wherever he thought a passage was not sufficiently condemnatory standing on its own. This book he sent to the Marine Superintendent of the Fathom Line by registered post every time the ship returned to Britain, but its effect was largely cancelled by a similar volume about McDougall put in the Superintendent’s hands by the Captain. The two passed their lives in a running fight on oil consumption, engine revolutions, and repair bills, and the daily ceremony by which McDougall handed Captain Hogg a chit on his speed and fuel supplies was always conducted in bitter silence. About once a week the Captain became too much for him, and the Chief Engineer then shut himself in his cabin, took out a fresh bottle of whisky, and determinedly threw the cap through the porthole.
    As the ship’s company became used to me they paid me the compliment of sharing their troubles with me. I soon discovered all of them were hypochondriacs. In small ships where they had no doctor they worried in case they caught anything; in bigger ships, where there was a doctor living down the alleyway, they brought along their symptoms