NORTH SEA TRAMPS 253 



by the scurrying rats which love nothing so much as to 

 come and eat the engine-tallow and drink the engine-oil. 

 And how could you suppose, if you did not know, that 

 the cheery, friendly engineer was in a steamer, one of 

 five which entered the Bay of Biscay from Gibraltar 

 within twelve hours of each other, and the only survivor 

 of the five ? The four foundered with all hands in a 

 terrific gale in the Bay, and the chiefs big tramp, grain- 

 laden, listing heavily, swept and smashed by seas, pulled 

 through it only by a miracle. 



Every engine-room in every tramp sings its own 

 peculiar story. You can make the story what you like. 

 In one ship the ceaseless song was, " Don't forget the 

 oil-feeders ! " until the brain reeled with the reiteration 

 of it ; in another the clanking, thudding, panting, squeak- 

 ing, straining stood for " Don't care a jigger if I never 

 get home ! " 



And the skipper and his stories! His humour, his 

 mimicry of the foreigner and his ways, and the belief, 

 unexpressed, but none the less clearly indicated, that 

 God made only the Britisher, and that somehow the 

 rest of men were evolved. He tells the wildest stories 

 in the soberest way, as, for instance, that when Nelson 

 fought the Danes and put the telescope to his blind eye 

 he declared 



"Copenhagen shall be tagen 

 Yah, Yah, Yah ! " 



which he interprets for you by explaining that " yah " 

 which he spells is foreign for "yes." He carries his 

 humour even unto those who will not, cannot see it, as, 

 for example, when he points to the metal badge which 



