Now, imagine the acreage of several dock-basins crammed,
gunwale to gunwale, with brown and umber and ochre
and rust-red steam-trawlers, tugs, harbour-boats,
and yachts once clean and respectable, now dirty and
happy. Throw in fish-steamers, surprise-packets
of unknown lines and indescribable junks, sampans,
lorchas, catamarans, and General Service stink-pontoons
filled with indescribable apparatus, manned by men
no dozen of whom seem to talk the same dialect or wear
the same clothes. The mustard-coloured jersey
who is cleaning a six-pounder on a Hull boat clips
his words between his teeth and would be happier in
Gaelic. The whitish singlet and grey trousers
held up by what is obviously his soldier brother’s
spare regimental belt is pure Lowestoft. The
complete blue-serge-and-soot suit passing a wire down
a hatch is Glasgow as far as you can hear him, which
is a fair distance, because he wants something done
to the other end of the wire, and the flat-faced boy
who should be attending to it hails from the remoter
Hebrides, and is looking at a girl on the dock-edge.
The bow-legged man in the ulster and green-worsted
comforter is a warm Grimsby skipper, worth several
thousands. He and his crew, who are mostly his
own relations, keep themselves to themselves, and save
their money. The pirate with the red beard, barking
over the rail at a friend with gold earrings, comes
from Skye. The friend is West Country. The
noticeably insignificant man with the soft and deprecating
eye is skipper and part-owner of the big slashing
Iceland trawler on which he droops like a flower.
She is built to almost Western Ocean lines, carries
a little boat-deck aft with tremendous stanchions,
has a nose cocked high against ice and sweeping seas,
and resembles a hawk-moth at rest. The small,
sniffing man is reported to be a “holy terror
at sea.”
HUNTERS AND FISHERS
The child in the Pullman-car uniform just going ashore
is a wireless operator, aged nineteen. He is
attached to a flagship at least 120 feet long, under
an admiral aged twenty-five, who was, till the other
day, third mate of a North Atlantic tramp, but who
now leads a squadron of six trawlers to hunt submarines.
The principle is simple enough. Its application
depends on circumstances and surroundings. One
class of German submarines meant for murder off the
coasts may use a winding and rabbit-like track between
shoals where the choice of water is limited.
Their career is rarely long, but, while it lasts,
moderately exciting. Others, told off for deep-sea
assassinations, are attended to quite quietly and
without any excitement at all. Others, again,
work the inside of the North Sea, making no distinction
between neutrals and Allied ships. These carry
guns, and since their work keeps them a good deal
on the surface, the Trawler Fleet, as we know, engages
Copyrights
Sea Warfare from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
