March 7, igi8 
Land & Water 
able side-rail, and was rocked to sleep to the even throb of 
the turbines and the splish-splash of the spray against the 
screwed-down port. 
"We aren't having 'B.J.i' this morning," some one 
explained facetiously when I reported for "duty" at seven 
o'clock, "because wc already have 'B.B.8.'" This last 
rneant "Boreas Blowing Eight," he said, and I was just 
"nautical" enough to know that a wnd of "8" in the 
Beaufort scale indicated something like fiftv or sixty miles 
■ an hour. 
"No U-boat will want to be getting within ' periscopic ' 
distance of the surface of the sea that's running this morning," 
said a young engineer-lieutenant who had been "in the sub- 
marine ser\-ice, "and even if one was able to get a sight, its 
torpedo would have to have some kind of a ' kangaroo ' 
attachment to jump the humps and hollows with. Fact is, 
it's rather more than our destroyers are entirely happy with, 
and we've just slowed down by several knots to keep 'em 
from dipping up the brine with their funnels. Hope nothing 
turns up that they have to get a jump on for. A destroyer's 
all right. on the surface, but no good as a submarine; yet 
an under-sea diver is just what she is if you drive her more'n 
twelve into a sea like the one that's kicking up now. Baro- 
meter's down sixty points since last night, and still going." 
Breakfast that morning had little in common with the 
similar festal occasion in port where, fresh bathed and shaven, 
each immaculate member of the mess comes down and sits 
over his coffee and paper much (save for the fact that the 
journal is two days old) as at home. Several places besides 
those of the officers actually on watch were empty, and by 
no means a few of those who chd appear had that intro- 
spective look which is so unmistakable a sign of all not 
being well within the citadel. Even the Poldu— the daily 
wireless bulletin of the Nav\'— had a "shot-to-pieces" look 
where "static" or some other esoteric difficulty was respon- 
sible for gaps in several items of the laconic summary. The 
last word in super-dreadnoughts does not have table-racks 
and screwed-down chairs. She isn't supposed to lose her 
dignity to the extent of needing anvthing in the way of such 
vulgar makeshifts. The fact remains that if the mighty 
"Zeus" had chanced to have these things, she would have saved 
herself some china and several officers from "nine-pinning" 
down one side of a table and piling up in a heap at the other. 
With the staid ward-room doing things Hke this, it was 
only to be e.xpected that the mess decks would be displaying 
a certain amount of shiftiness. I was, however, hardly 
prepared for the gay seascape which unrolled before me 
when I had worried my way through the intricate barricade 
of a watertight bulkhead door in trying to skirmish forward 
to the ladders leading to the upper decks. For several 
reasons— ventilation and guns have something to do with 
it— it is not practicable to close up certain parts of a battle- 
ship against heavy seas to anything like the same extent as 
with the passenger quarters on a modern finer. It is only 
m very rough weather that this may give rise to much 
trouble, but— well, we were having rough weather that 
, morning, and that little bit of the Roaring Forties I had 
stumbled into was a consequence of it. 
Oilskinned. "sou'-westered," sea-booted men, sitting and 
Ijang on benches and tables, was the first strange thing that 
came to my attention ; and then, with a swish and a gurgle, 
the foot-deep wave of dirty water which had driven them 
there caught me about the knees, and sat me down upon a 
pile of hammocks, or, rather, across the inert bodies of two 
men (boys I found them to be presently) who had been cast 
away there in advance of me. Clambering over their unpro- 
testing anatomies, I gained dry land at a higher level, and at 
a tactically defensible point, where a half-Nelson round a 
stanchion steadfastly refused to give way under the double 
back-action shuffle with which the next roll tried to break it. 
With two good toe-holds making me safe from practically 
anything but a roll to her beams' ends, I was free to survey 
the shambles at my leisure. Then I saw how havoc was 
being wrought. 
With a shuddering crash, the thousand-ton bludgeon of a 
wave struck along the port side, immediately followed by 
the muffled but unmistakable sound of water rushing in 
upon the deck above. To the accompaniment of a wild 
slap-banging, this sound came nearer, and then, as she heeled 
far to starboard under the impulse of the blow that had been 
dealt her, a solid spout of green water came tumbling down a 
hatchway — the fount from which the mobile tidal wave 
swaggering about the deck took replenishment. Two men, 
worrying a side of frozen Argentine bullock along to the 
galley from the cold-storage hold, timing (or, rather, mis- 
timing) their descent to coincide with that of the young 
Niagara, reached the mess-deck in the form of a beef sand- 
wich. Depositing that delectable morsel in an inert mass 
at th« foot of the ladder, the briny cascade, with a joyov^s 
whoof, rushed down to reinforce the tidal wave and do 
the rounds of the mess. 
I was now able to observe that the saUors, marooned on the 
benches, tables, and other islands of refuge, were roughly 
dividable into three classes— the prostrate ones, who heaved 
drunkenly to the roll and took no notice of the primal chaos 
about them ; the semi-prostrate ones, who were still able 
to exhibit mild resentment when the tidal wave engulfed or 
threatened to engulf them ; and the others— some lounging 
easily, but the most perched or roosted on some dry but 
precarious pinnacle— who quaffed great mugs of hot tea and 
bit hungrily into hunks of bread and smoked fish. These 
latter— hard-bit tars they were, with faces pickled ruddy by 
the blown brine of many windy watches — ^took great joy of 
the plight of their mates, guffawing mightily at the dumb 
misery in the hollow eyes of the "semi-prostrates" and the 
dead-to-the-worid roll of "prostrates" with the reelings 
of the ship. 
Sea-sick Sailors 
If there is one thing in the world that delights the secret 
heart of the average landsman more than the sad spectacle 
df a parson in a divorce court, it is the sight of a seasick 
sailor. Since, however, the average landsman reads his 
paper far oftener than he sails the stormy seas, the former 
delectation is probably granted him rather more frequently 
than the latter. At any rate, the one landsman in Number X 
Mess of H.M.S. "'Zeus" that morning saw enough seasick sailors 
to keep the balance on the parsons' side for the duration of 
the war, and perhaps even longer. 
I made the acquaintance of one of the "prostrates" 
marooned on the beach of my hammock island through 
rescuing him from the assaults of a tidal-wave-driven rum 
tub. He was nursing a crushed package of gumdrop-like 
lozenges, one of which he offered me, murmuring faintly 
that they had been sent him by his sister, who had found 
them useful while boating at Clacton-on-Sea last summer. 
Endeavouring to start a conversation, I asked him — knowing 
the " Zeus " had been present at that mighty Struggle — if they 
had had weather like this at the battle of Jutland. A sad 
twinkle flickered for a moment in the comer of the eye he 
rolled up to me, and, with a queer pucker of the mouth 
which indicated that he must have had a sense of humour in 
happier times, he replied that he had only joined the ship 
the week before :." 'Tis my first time' at sea, sir, and I've 
come out to — to — this." 
I gave him the best advice I could by telling him to pull 
himself together and get out on deck to the fresh air ; but 
neither spirit nor flesh was equal to the initiatory effort. 
Looking back while I waited near the foot of a ladder for a 
Niagara to exhaust itself, the last I saw of h m_ he was 
pushing mechanically aside with an unresentful gesture a 
lump of salt pork which one of the table-roosting sailors 
dangled before his nose on a piece of string. 
Three flights up I clambered my erratic way before, on the 
boat deck in the lee of a launch. I found a vantage sufficiently 
high and sheltered to stand in comfort. The sight was rich 
reward for the effort. Save for an ominous bank of nimbus 
to westward, the wind had swept the coldly blue vault of the 
heavens clear of cloud, and the low-hanging winter sun to 
south'ard was shooting slanting rays of crystaUine bright- 
ness across a sea that was one wild welter of cotton wool. 
I have seen — especially in the open spaces of the mid-Pacific, 
where the waves have half a world's width to get going in — 
heavier seas and higher seas than were running that morning, 
but rarely — not even in a West Indian hurricane — more 
vicious ones — seas more palpably bent on going over, or 
through a ship that got in their way, rather than under, as 
proper waves should do. And in this obliquity they were a 
good deal more than passively abetted by a no less viciously 
incHned wind, which I saw repeatedly lift off the top of 
what it appeared to think was a lagging wave and drive it 
on ahead to lace the heaving water with a film of foam or 
dust the deck of a battleship with snowy brine. 
But it was the ships themselves that furnished the real 
show. Of all craft that ply the wet seaways, the battleship 
is the least buoyant, the most "unliftable," the most set on 
bashing its arrogant way through^a wave rather than riding 
over it, and — with increasing armour and armaments, and 
the crowding aboard of various weighty contrivances hitherto 
unthought of — this characteristic wilfulness has tended to 
increase rather than decrease since the war. As a conse- 
quence, a modern battleship bucking its way into a fully 
developed mid-winter gale is one of the neare.st approaches 
to the meeting of two irresistible bodies ever to be seen. 
The^ conditions.»for the contest were ideal that morning. 
Never were seas more determined to ride over battleshins. 
