hybrid engine in her. Each piston is driven downward by Diesel oil, and is driven on the up-stroke by steam generated from the heat of the exhaust acting upon the hot circulating water from the Diesel end. Henry Ford has a gigantic mill-engine running in a glass house at Highland Park on this principle. designed an engine of long One astonishing ship is now stroke and enormous compres- on the ocean with a strange sion, which would use almost anything containing carbon, from crude oil to leather scraps, charcoal or pulverised coke. The compression he got by admitting, not atmospheric air to a volatile gas like a modern motor-car, but air from a compressor worked by the engine. The result was that instead of exploding suddenly and generating intense heat and pressure in the cylinder-head like a gasoline engine, Diesel's machine burned its fuel along the stroke, giving a steady even thrust, and burning it all. Its efficiency with fuels hitherto unavailable was so surprising that it was hardly credible. Diesel was derided as a visionary. He was a visionary. He seemed to understand, better than any man since Watt, the true nature of a heat engine. But the practical difficulties in the way of applying this new idea to ships were almost fabulous. The pistons had to be cooled as well as the cylinders. Telescopic pipes had to be designed to slide up and down to keep up a circulation of fresh cold water to each moving piston. Pistons had to be designed which would not crack and warp under the double torment of fire and water. Lubrication seemed an almost insoluble problem. Starting several thousand horse-power by compressed air was not as easy as it looked. But once the principle was grasped nothing could stay the advance. VOL. CCXXIII.-NO. MCCCXLVII. Out of this invention was developed for small plants the semi-Diesel. Low pressure air is drawn into the crank-chamber through a thing like an agitated sauce pan lid, and darts up a passage into the cylinder at the right moment. Oil is squirted in at the same time through a jet, and the mixture is compressed into a hot bulb in the cylinder-head. The result, if all goes well, is an explosion, and the engine continues to function. If all goes well. The launch referred to in these memoirs, however, was something of a museum piece. She was Number One. The company had several hundred ships, and they had purchased this particular auxiliary as an experiment. For many years it had hauled mahogany logs from Gold Coast forests to the ships in the roadsteads. The valve gear of the engine was one of those complex aggregations of knife-edges, cams, springs, and swinging bobweights called, with sinister humour, "hit-and-miss gears." When new it doubtless hit В a with the cleanest and most The next operation was the honourable intentions. In my crucial one. With Jo-Jo whirltime it functioned like an elderly ing like a demon, with both spinster's memory-irregularly blow - lamps roaring on the and with a genius for the in- cylinder-heads and heating the opportune. bulbs to redness, with the launch rearing and bucketing against the ship's side in the swell of the Gold Coast combers, it was necessary to give the fuel valve a quick twist and open the air valve at the same. time. If successful-and silent prayer often ascended— the engine would give a vast snort and thump, and begin to revolve. If otherwise-and the silent prayer then became a Vocal imprecation - she uttered a long hiss and stalled. If the fuel valve was not shut with the utmost expedition, she would inhale SO much crude oil that not a quart of gasoline injected through petcocks would tempt her to start again for a week. But the dreadful defect which aroused and still arouses resentment in an otherwise philosophic bosom was its compressed-air starter. It was a huge engine as launch-engines go. No human power could spin the five-hundred-pound flywheel over a compression-stroke. Beside it, bolted to the hot little engine-room wall, was a man - power air compressor. Here stood Jo-Jo, an almost naked East African negro, whirling the handle of a three-feet flywheel and trying to send the needle of the pressure gauge up to eight atmospheres, which Mr Bolinder or one of his satraps had decided was sufficient to start. It was old like the engine. The plungers were leaky, and the valves stuck. The sweat spurted from the coloured gentleman's forehead, which was marked deeply with tribal signs in blue tatooings, and his back, decorated with spear scars like clumsy tyre-patches, writhed in a manner which conveyed a disturb ing impression that he was being tortured. Perhaps he was. He probably had his own mythological explanation of this weird and apparently futile task. The gauge never rose above five atmospheres, and he had to keep at it with every ounce in his system while I got the engine to the starting position. If Jo-Jo suffered, what of his colleague with the white man's burden? The equatorial sun beat down through the scuttle, the sweat poured from his soiled and weary body, and the first mate, in khaki uniform and a huge pith-helmet, hailed from the deck of the ship, and wanted to know when the launch would be ready. Human nature is weak. There were times when I disliked that engine. On one occasion, when she coughed and died half-way to the ship, so that she lost her momentum and six huge mahogany logs came leaping through the sea and tangled their tow-ropes about the propeller, I even hated her. The logs, like insane They were big and they were leviathans, crowded about me. Jo-Jo, who had doubtless attended cannibalistic barbecues in his time, appeared to meditate diving off and swimming back to barbarism when ordered to pump for his life. The red bluffs of Accra were very alluring, the ship seemed an immense distance. Pump, Jo-Jo, pump! or no more palm-oil chop! Jo-Jo pumped. The blowlamps roared. The logs tried to climb into the launch. The launch herself rolled broadside to the swell. Tools slid into the bilges. The sun struck the back of one's neck like a hot hammer. The water-bottle, swinging madly madly from the awning - spar, was empty. Slowly the gauge reached five atmospheres. Pump, Jo-Jo, pump! . . . All right, she's away again. Such episodes may mark a man, but they do him no permanent damage if he has a sense of humour and a dash of philosophy, and a member of a cannibal tribe to work the pump. There seems to be a rough justice at work on the world, and machines whose imperfections chasten their human associates engage our affections and illumine our memories with comic episodes. Even main engines have this quality. Those in particular which belonged, as we may say, to the Victorian era. Certainly they partook of the qualities of that era in outward semblance and interior qualities. They had character. slow. They were durable and dependable. They were built upon principles and specifications which had stood the tests of time and the ruthless sea. They stood up. It was a matter of pride with us that, no matter what happened, so long as a ship floated we could get her home. There was more than a mere scrap of sentiment to us in the tradition that she was part of Britain. She could never be anything else. machinery was as characteristic of her country of origin as were ourselves. Her To speak thus of the dead is not to depreciate the living. Other days, other ways. But those old ships with their huge lumbering engines had many virtues. One remembers them with affection as one remembers old cities and old books. The modern fabricated ship has about the same standing as any other article produced by quantity production. She doesn't last long enough to have any memories. She is like a modern novel-sophisticated, smart, efficient, and soon forgotten. respectable old party of about six thousand tons, very comfortable in an old-fashioned way, and her engines were by Blair of Stockton-on-Tees. What kind of man Blair himself might have been is not known, but his engines were the heaviest and most durable ever built. The flanges of the cylinder - covers were three inches thick. The four huge turned columns which supported the cylinders in front were nearly a foot in diameter, and instead of being flanged and fastened with bolts were carried clean through bed-plate and cylinder-block and secured with nuts the size of a snaredrum. The crankshaft was of the same heroic proportions. It was sixteen inches in diameter, and was held in place in its bearings by huge polished steel slabs like grave-stones. There was a propeller astern resembling a windmill, and that old triple-expansion engine had walked solemnly about the oceans at sixty revolutions per minute for fifteen years when I came to her. Nothing would ever wear out those marvellous engines, and that Lowmoor wrought-iron hull. She was built, like many another thing in England, to last an eternity. She was one of the immortals. And she had the disposition of one who took a long view and a calm one, and was not to be disturbed by passing trivialities. She was not so much a happy ship as a placid one. She did not roll very much, except in the Bay of Biscay or when rounding Cape St Vincent. She was a dry ship, and any water that came into her well-decks soon ran out of great wrought-iron scuppers, which clanged loudly when a wave struck them. She kept her men voyage after voyage. She had a commander who had been mate of her, a hot-tempered Welshman who made it his boast he would never knowingly make money out of the ship's victuals. We lived well and happily. She was, if you have a romantic nature, an ideal ship. But I remember her most of all for a voyage she made in which everything went wrong: when we put the mate ashore to die in the Naval Hospital at Gibraltar after we had lost twelve hours with a fouled anchor in Oran. We had discharged coal in Alexandria and loaded iron ore in the Grecian Arches, and in both ports we had had trouble. The mate, suddenly and without warning, took to his bunk with a disease which was beyond our commander's diagnosis, and he lay in unassuageable agony. And the commander himself, when we left Gibraltar for home, was in a state of mind bordering on frenzy, what with the delay and the ceaseless fraying of his temper by such untoward happenings. The Fernfield, so long an abode of peace and happiness, tramped out into the winter Atlantic under something very like a cloud. It needed only a word from the chief, to the effect that the Oran coal was burning like chaff, to send the full-bodied black-eyed Welsh commander The sky was a grey vault, up in the air. We It was true, however. had always bunkered at Algiers before, where they knew us, and gave us coal that would burn clean and evenly on our ponderous and thick fire-bars. This Oran was a new port, one day nearer home, full of greedy ships taking advantage of a cut-rate tariff. Our men were shovelling all the time. The two hundred tons in our bunkers were vanishing. It would never do to face the Bay in wintertime with trash like this. They talked it over as they drank their glasses of Scotch in the Old Man's room, and it was decided to call at Corcubion, which is behind Cape Finisterre, and take fifty tons of real coal for a stand-by. There would be a row, anyway, over the time they were taking. Might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. We went into that quiet little port of Galicia, and took our fifty tons from a hulk that had been a noble sailing ship before we were born. It was our last glimpse of peace for fifteen days. The run from Finisterre to Glasgow was about five days for us in a general way. But when we ran out from behind that huge whale-backed promontory and faced the open Atlantic, we found thick weather. It was the sort of weather that the most experienced seafarers regard with uneasy misgiving. The sea came in from the westward in a tremendous unbroken swell. across which low black streamers hurried eastward to a sinister horizon. The wind whipped the surface of the near-by water into flat sheets of spray. The bows of the ship descended with solemn deliberation, and the windlass was for ever smothered with spray blown athwart the forecastle-head. She came up with even more deliberation. The carpenter, a figure draped in oilskins, sheltered himself against the bulkhead and chalked his sounding-rod. He was trying the forward wells. The Fernfield had transverse wells across the ship between each double-bottom tank, and into these wells the water from the limbers drained. Down below the engines were turning their regulation sixty revolutions per minute. They would do this on a hundred and fifty pounds of steam and a vacuum of twenty-four inches. They were able to do this for the next fifteen days of heavy pitching. They raced, of course, when the propeller lifted clear of the sea, but no racing could endanger those enormous cranks and connecting rods. There were times when the captain rather wished the propeller would drop off. We would be nearly two weeks overdue. But he might have saved his sighs. Blair's engines did not lose their propellers. We had no anxiety. And then, the next day, we had to put the ballast on the bilges. She was making water, as we say. Four inches in Number One well. |