BANQUET. 335 



ADDRESS BY CAPTAIN EARL P. JESSOP. 



Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen, I have not a megaphone, and I do not know 

 whether I am going to be able to make myself heard. I reached the shores of the United 

 States on Monday last, after having been out of the country for eighteen months, and on 

 board ship I received a radio stating that I was billed to speak before this august assem- 

 blage tonight. They said nothing about the subject, so when I got in I telephoned and was 

 told the subject was to be : — "The Engineer in the Navy." That is sufficiently comprehen- 

 sive, but in order to reduce it to something like talking proportions, I am going to add to it 

 a text. The text of my remarks will be, "And the rabbit climbed a tree," taken from Uncle 

 Remus, 14th Chapter and 5th Verse. You remember that Uncle Remus told a story of the 

 time the fox chased the rabbit and got the rabbit in such a position that he found it impos- 

 sible to save it, and so he said, "That rabbit climbed a tree." The little boy said, "Uncle 

 Remus, rabbits cannot climb trees." Uncle Remus said, "No, honey, I know they cannot 

 climb a tree, but that rabbit sure had to climb the tree," and that has teen the experience of 

 the engineer in the Navy. 



They amalgamated us in 1899 — they said the line must be engineers and the engineers 

 must be the line. Now there are a great many engineers in the United States who believe 

 that that order was a mistake. I wish to say tonight that there never was a better order 

 issued in the United States Navy. The ships prior to that time did not run— that was not 

 due to the personnel, but it was absolutely due to the system. The men on deck knew noth- 

 ing about below decks, and the men below decks knew nothing, and did not care a damn, 

 about what went on up on deck. The thing the engineer found when he got on deck was 

 that he had to spend all his time hiding behind ventilators getting away from the captain's 

 wrath. We had been used to that on deck and it did not bother us ; when we went down be- 

 low we found machines we never dreamed of, and in order to show you how it worked I will 

 tell you of my own experience. I do not know the experience of anybody else so well, and 

 the relation of my own may sound egotistical, because I may use the personal pronoun "I" 

 quite frequently, but it is the only way to let you know how an engineer in the Navy grows 

 up. I am not speaking of the old designers, of the men trained as engineers from the start, 

 of the men who recognized Mr. Thermodynamics when they met him on the street, but I 

 am talking of the operative engineer today in the United States Navy. 



I am not an engineer as you gentlemen recognize the term. I am merely an operating 

 engineer and have got what knowledge I possess by practice rather than theory. My first 

 engineer experience of any magnitude was in 1905, and it was absolutely deliberate. I had 

 spent some nine years outside the Naval Academy, and I decided of my own motion that it 

 was high time that I knew something about what went on down below. I went to the Navy 



