August 9, 1917 
LAND & WATER 
The Commodore 
By William McFee 
17 
HE was one of those Scotsmen who had come 
down into England about the time Blair began to 
build those immensely heavy and solid triple 
engines of his at Stockton-on-Tees, engines still 
thumping and wheezing their way about the oceans, old-fash- 
ioned, deliberate, and very dependable. He was, in fact, one of 
Blair's guarantee-chiefs at one time. A guarantee-chief , be it 
known, is a chief put aboard a new tramp steamer by the 
engine builders for the first six months, to guarantee an 
efficient consummation of the contract. There used to be 
money in it. But the Commodore of whom I speak, while 
putting the brand-new Bcnvenuto ■ through h«r paces decided 
that he would remain in the employ. He did. 
When I knew the Benvenuto a dozen years ago she was 
so old I could scarcely believe the brass plate on the bulk- 
head. She was nearly as old as I was. But the Commodore 
was still in the employ. He had been away at intervals, 
trj'ing various schemes for getting rich ; but he had always 
come back. At the time 1 was in the company they had 
about a score of vessels, from decaying old crocks like the com- 
fortable Benvenuto to smart, new hurry-up freighters like 
the Aretino and the Petncchio, and Mr. Gowrie, the Com- 
modore as we call him, had been at various times chief of 
them all. And I used to wonder why he had not been 
appointed superintendent, until I learned that the Super- 
intendent himself had been second with the Commodore. 
Yes ! And it wasn't that the latter was so old. He was 
then an active, alert, and extremely competent man of 
fifty-five, and whenever a new ship was launched, he was 
kept ashore to take her over at the end of the six-months 
guarantee. The fact was, he was too valuable afloat. More- 
over, at sea the Commodore's ineradicable vice of uttering 
forcible truths spiced with sardonic humour did no harm. 
Indeed it did good, for part of the time I was third with him, 
and I had to sit under the rich stream of acrid wisdom that 
poured from his lips. • 
For he knew the world. He had knocked about. He had 
had shore billets in China and Nicaragua. He had put his 
money into a repair-shop in Rotherhithe and gone into 
bankruptcy in some style. He had won a lottery prize in 
Havana and lost it all in a bank failure. He had read deeply 
in many directions, and he could talk. He was a good 
mathematician, one of those men to whom algebraic formulae 
are merely semi-transparent screens behind which a shy 
truth is vainly trying to hide. And I remember one joyous 
New Year's Eve, when the Curio, Pdnechio, Aretino, Mario 
and Malvolio were all in Genoa together, and we had marched 
back to the harbour seventeen abreast singing " Auld Lang 
Syne," I caught sight of old Gowrie taking a turn up and 
down the deck, his big pilot-coat with its collar up against 
the keen night air. 1 stepped aboard and made a light 
remark excusing the hilarity that was now audible further on 
along the quay. The chief nodded, and I heard a distinct 
mutter of haec olitn meminisse jtivabit." And he told 
me afterwards that his father had been dominie in Perth- 
shire and had often waled him for his poor success in the 
classics. And then the railway came up to Perth and the 
dominie discovered that there were other things in the world 
not near so dead as Latinity. 
But the dominie had built well, for his son had a keen eye 
and a long nose for the meretricious. " Heh, Hinny ! " he 
would say to a new fourth " W hat'd ye call that ? " and the 
" hinny " would have to do it again. And part of his lack 
of success on shore was due. I believe, to his sardonic contempt 
for the rewards meted out to the cunning and the subservient 
and the knavish. He would jerk out tales as he walked to and 
fro in a half-gale in the Irish Sea, we sheltering in the lee of 
the engineers' quarters. He had a habit of walking rapidly 
away from you, head down, as though he had taken leave of 
you for e\'er, and then, stopping abruptly^ begin to talk over 
his shoulder, moving his hand in a passionate way as though 
he were taking the words and throwing them down the wind at 
you. He would jerk out tales, as 1 said, and the burden 
was the bizarre disparity between merit and reward. 
He told me once that a pwlitician or civil servant whose 
work involved as much responsibility, skill, tact and knowledge 
as a ship-master's or engineer's, would be getting £2,000 a 
year. And I daresay that was a very moderate estimate 
of the case. He was getting £200 himself. Not that he 
coveted wealth for its own sake. He was, if anything, 
an idealist, for h^ had a vehement conviction that neither 
wealth nor birth nor cunning was any adequate substitute 
for achievement. Sometimes he would pose as a disappointed 
man, and I remember one evening in Liverpool, sitting in the 
engineer's mess after supper (for it was my night on duty) 
and hearing him tell his wife how once he had been full up to 
the eyebrows with ambition. He would jeer at me for 
studying, and then incontinently express regret at having 
abandoned it himself. His wife would soothe him by 
sajdng softly, " Oh, nonsense, Jack," and he would turn on 
her with a flash of his sardonic humour: "You don't care so long 
as the half-pay's safe," he would say, and she would look at 
me as though to ask, " Did you ever see such a man ? " I 
never had, and he made a very profound impression on me, 
so that when I heard the tale of his latest exploit, his caustic 
individuality illuminated the whole thing and made it real. 
For he is still at sea, though he must be sixty- five. I once 
expressed astonishment to his wife that he did not retire, 
but she said he was so restless they were glad to see hirii out of 
the house. 
A year or more ago he was chief of the Malvolio,, eight 
thousand tons dead weight, bound westward after dis- 
charging oats at a Mediterranean base. She was flying fight, 
of course, doing eleven knots and unarmed. At seven 
o'clock on a Sunday morning a submarine emerged about 
two thousand yards abeam and fired a shot warning her 
to stop. The commander immediately put the helm over to 
bring the enemy astern and sent word of what was happening 
to the engine-room urging full speed. Pa Gowrie was already 
below in his pyjamas, opening the expansions to their 
utmost limit and ordering the spare bunker doors to be 
raised, for he had about fifty tons of Norfolk Virginia steam 
coal (the famous Pocahontas brand) which he was saying to 
catch a tide. And then he went up on deck, where things 
were happening, for the enemy had found the range. The 
mizzen mast had been struck just below where the wooden 
top telescopes into the hollow steel part, and had collapsed ; 
but as she carried no wireless this was nothing. The mate, 
standing on the high poop, had been nearly blown over 
board by a shell which buried itself in the ice box and exploded, 
flinging timber, sheet-lead, sawdust and beef in all directions. 
On the bridge the man at the wheel and the carpenter, who 
was taking orders from the " old man," had been kiUed out- 
right. The commander had taken the wheel for the time, 
and he informed the commodore that he was going on for the 
present. The latter went back to his room and put on his 
working serges. 
Down below he found the other engineers clustered about 
the starting platform discussing the situation. His orders 
were that they should carry on in the engine room while 
he took charge of the fires. When he reached the stokehold he 
discovered nobody to take charge of. The firemen had all 
gone up on deck. Pa Gowrie in his young days ha4 been an 
expert fireman. He knew coal. He used to tell me the curse 
of the modern engineer was he didn't know cocd. In this 
case he was in hfs element. He grasped a shovel and flung 
door after door open. There were nine fires in all and three 
fires to a man is a good allowance. Pa Gowrie worked through 
the lot. Now and again a shell would strike some part of the 
ship and e.xplode, but he went on with the job. Then he took 
the slice, a long bar of inch and three-quarters steel flattened 
at the end, and proceeded to loosen the clinker from his bars. 
The sweat ran in streams from his lined, obstinate yet dignified 
features. Suddenly with a terrific bang, a shell tore through the 
'tween deck bunkers which were empty, ricochetted against 
the beams and ventilators in the fiddlfey and fell thump on 
the plates a couple of yards away from him. Pa Gowrie 
regarded it over his shoulder as he worked. When he had 
slammed the fire door to, he took a shovel and scooped the 
sinister pointed twelve-pound visitor into a bucket of 
sea-water standing under the ash-cock. Then he went on. 
He could hear, above the hum of the furnaces, the steady 
seventy-eight a minute beat of his engines. The third 
engineer dashed in to give the news — shell in the after hold 
just above the water line. The enemy were nearer too. Pa 
Gowrie had nothing to say to that. He relighted his pipe 
with a live coal and nodded. Watch the bilges, he advised. 
The third said "Aye," and sprinted back to the engine-room! 
It was very exciting. 
High up above him. Pa Gowrie could see a black weather- 
cloth which he knew to be the back of the bridge. Suddenly 
a bearded face looked oVer the black cloth, a big bearded 
mouth opened and let out a far away yell " There, Chief ? " 
" Yes, what's the matter ? " asked the Chief in a sort of 
surly defensive tone. He was always defensive in talking 
to skippers. "Game's up. Come on -out of it. Rudder's 
jammed." 
It appeared that they were going to take to the boats 
