252 NORTH SEA FISHERS AND FIGHTERS 



Your shipmates are the men who have done things 

 and bring you into touch with the whole world. Their 

 eyes have seen most that the earth can offer in the shape 

 of good and evil. Take one of them at random. He is 

 a quiet man, young and slight of build, but every inch of 

 him bone and muscle. Look at his face, the brownness 

 of it, the clearness of the skin, the squareness of the 

 jaw, the firmness of the mouth, the eyes that do not 

 falter. 



There is a wondrous humour in the smile, and a 

 joyous ring in his careless laughter as you jest. Then 

 the face hardens as the keen eyes peer over the weather- 

 cloth of the narrow bucking bridge hardens because 

 there may be passing through the mind the picture of a 

 sailing-ship in which he was more than six months getting 

 from China to America, never touching, seldom seeing, 

 land ; twice rescued from starvation by passing vessels, 

 and once from death from thirst by catching rain in sail- 

 troughs ; or a vision of a cholera-stricken steamer in 

 which he ran down the Indian coast, with midnight 

 stoppages of engines for the moment needed to cast the 

 corpses overboard ; or the bullfight he has recently be- 

 held in Spain, or he may be wondering whether, when 

 he gets ashore, he will remain in the old packet or be 

 drafted to another tramp. So young, and yet he has 

 seen and done so much ! 



You leave the bridge and go below with the chief 

 engineer, overlook the engines, enter the stokehold, 

 where the solitary fireman feeds the furnaces, then away 

 through the shaft-tunnel, blaze-lamp in hand, crouching 

 in the slush and water and whirr and groans and 

 complaints of it all, groping towards the stern, preceded 



