The Other Side of the Night (7 page)

There lurks beneath that somewhat romantic sounding bit of nautical tradition one of the darkest yet best concealed secrets of the British Empire. A realm flung to the four corners of the world, the Empire was maintained by the sinews of Great Britain’s sealanes and the ships which plied them; it was carried on the backs of British merchant seamen. In return they were fed, clothed, quartered, and payed to such a pitiful standard that such conditions would never have been tolerated in the foulest tenement slums of smoky, soot-covered, industrial Sheffield, Manchester, Birmingham, or Glasgow.

Poorly lit, inadequately ventilated, badly heated, the crew’s quarters would consist of cramped rooms where four, six, sometimes eight men would bunk. The prevailing impression was one of almost continuous dampness–-often in rough or stormy weather, despite the best efforts to secure it, the forecastle would be awash, the crewmen donning sodden clothing at the beginning of their watches, and returning to damp bunks at the end, with little chance to ever get completely dry before the ship made port. Their diet was dull and monotonous, a mess of bully beef, porridge, beans, and tea. Lime or lemon juice was mandatory, of course, to prevent scurvy (despite its association with the long-past days of sail, scurvy remains a threat to the health of sailors even in the 21st century), but this was about the only concession the shipping lines made to the men’s health. Alcohol was forbidden below decks, but this was a prohibition honored more in the breach than in the observance, as seeking solace in rum or gin was sometimes the only recourse many of the men had to endure their work and their lot; inevitably, alcoholism was rife among seamen in those decades.

So was tuberculosis, although it would not be recognized for the threat it was in the merchant marine until well into the 1930s. When the 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes described life in the Middle Ages as “nasty, brutish, and short,” he might equally well have been speaking of the lot of British merchant seamen for much of the 19th and 20th centuries. There was little that the men could do to improve their situation, for there were always more unemployed deckhands and men from the “black gang” of the engine rooms than there were berths: once a man had a job, he would tolerate almost anything to assure that he kept it.

The explanation for such a dreadful state of affairs could be summed up in one word: greed. The shipowners, already wealthy, simply accrued more wealth by forcing shipping rates as high as they could while keeping wages as low as possible. When J.P. Morgan was forming International Mercantile Marine, he began cutting shipping fares to the bone to compel his competitors to allow themselves to be absorbed by IMM; he was able to do so in part by reducing seamen’s wages. However, once the cartel was formed, shipping rates rose again, but wages remained the same for the crews.

Wages were what might be expected. While deckhands—the skilled, able-bodied seamen who did the actual work of shiphandling—could make as much as £10 a month, depending on their rating, the men who did the back-breaking work of feeding the ships’ coal-fired boilers typically made less than half that amount. The deck crew at least had some compensation in the knowledge of their hard-won skills in handling lines, taking soundings, hoisting and answering flag signals, reading Morse lamps, working the ship’s machinery and mechanisms, or manning the helm if they were a qualified quartermaster. They were regarded with something approaching professional status by their working-class peers, if still disdained by the majority of their officers. But the men who literally brought power, heat, and electricity—in a word, life—to these ships were the poorest paid and least-regarded of any of the crew.

With the possible exception of the lot of a galley slave, it would be difficult to conceive of a task more demanding and demeaning, more backbreaking and more soul-breaking, than feeding the furnaces of a coal-fired boiler on a steamship. The confines of the hull meant that none of the bulky automated feeding mechanisms that fed boilers ashore could be installed in the ship. Instead the entire chore was accomplished through sheer human muscle power. The task began with the trimmers, who had to carry the coal from the bunkers to the foot of the firebox, using wheelbarrows to deliver great lumps of coal, measuring as much as twenty inches in length and eight inches thick. At the start of the voyage, with full bunkers, it was a relatively easy job, but toward the end of the crossing, as the bunkers began to empty, it was fiercesome work, for by then the coal might be 150 feet or more from the scuttle where it was loaded in the barrows. And for every trimmer carrying a load to the furnaces, there was one
inside
the bunker shifting coal. Despite the fact that the trimmers were at the very bottom of the hierarchy of the engineering department, there was a certain degree of skill required in their job as well. It was their responsibility to see that the coal was used in uniform amounts from each bunker, so that the weight of the remaining coal wouldn’t unbalance the ship, upsetting her trim—hence the name “trimmers.” Their world was an eerie one, even more poorly lit and poorly ventilated than their quarters, while temperatures ranged from the searing heat of the furnace door to the sea-chilled reaches of the farther bunkers. Once the coal was delivered to the firebox, the stokers took over.

Usually working stripped to the waist, like the trimmers their torsos and faces covered in coal dust, the stokers were eerily illuminated by the glow of the flames in the fireboxes and the flare of clinkers and slag as they went through an elaborate and exacting ballet of muscle and sweat. A stoker’s first task was to break up the large lumps of coal brought by the trimmers into something more manageable. Using his shovel and slice bar, he would reduce the larger pieces into fragments roughly the size of a man’s fist. Next, timing his movements to the roll and pitch of the ship, the stoker would swing open the door to a firebox and quickly thrust home his slice bar along the fire-grate, working it back and forth four times, once for each track of the grate, to improve the draft across the burning coals by breaking ashes and clinkers loose. These were quickly raked into a pit below the firebox and the fire-door swung closed again. On double-ended boilers the stokers worked in tandem so that doors at the opposite ends were never open at the same time, preventing back-drafts that could blow the fire out into the stokers’ faces.

The fire-door would be opened again, and the stoker would shovel a layer of coal across the grate—a skilled stoker would usually feed in no more than four shovelfuls of coal, spreading them over the grate at a uniform depth of four inches. At the same time, other crewmen known as water tenders would keep a close eye on the water gauges, careful to keep a level of two inches in the boiler, a combination that maximized the amount of steam each fire-grate could produce.

The whole routine moved to the inexorable ringing of Kilroy’s Patent Stoking Indicator, a mechanical timer that could be set for intervals between eight and thirty minutes. The higher the speed of the ship, the lower the interval between rings on the Indicator; the amount of time for which the Indicator was set was the total allotted to performing the entire cycle of breaking coal, slicing, clinkering, and stoking. The usual settings would be between eight and ten minutes for a complete cycle. At the end of each four-hour watch the stokers would finish by raking the ashes and clinkers out of the pits, hosing them down to cool them, then shoveling them into hoppers that mixed them with seawater and then ejected them out scuttles near the ship’s waterline.

It’s little wonder that, given the endless monotony and the sheer mindlessness of the work, along with the knowledge that they had little if any prospect of advancement from their station in society or aboard the ship, the “black gang” were often a surly, barely subordinate lot. More than one senior engineer had to be as adept at cracking heads as he was at repairing machinery. That such men rarely felt more than the most elementary loyalty to their officers and employers was inevitable. Over the years chilling tales, some of them confirmed to be true, would accumulate in waterfront bars of particularly despised officers who would be knocked senseless with the flat of a coal-shovel, then fed into the maw of a boiler, their ashes and bones emptied into the sea with the clinkers at the end of the watch.

Nor was it surprising that merchant marine officers usually held their crewmen in very low regard. A good captain, careful of how he exercised his authority, might dull the worst edges of the chasm between the wardroom and the fo’c’s’le, but it could never be truly bridged. Even as generally decent a man as Arthur Rostron was not above the prejudice that the wardroom felt for the fo’c’s’le. It was Rostron who said before a Board of Trade Inquiry that “…naturally an Officer is more on the
qui vive
; he is keener on his work than a man would be, and he knows what to look for. He is more intelligent than a sailor.”

These, then, were the men who made up the crews of the British Merchant Marine. They were almost universally invisible men, for ashore they would congregate along the waterfronts, with their gambling dens, taverns, and brothels, while at sea they would rarely if ever be seen by the passengers of the transatlantic liners, their portions of the ship being carefully shut off from the accommodations of their “betters,” the easier to make the liners appear to be showcases.

There was, of course, no need for the new Leyland ship to be a showpiece designed to attract passengers. As she was originally laid down, her owners had no intention that she should carry any passengers at all. It was only during the late stages of her construction that the upper bridge deck was lengthened, when nineteen staterooms were added by the line as an afterthought. These cabins were, of course, never intended to pay the ship’s way like a true passenger liner’s accommodations were designed to do; the additional money they brought to the Leyland Line would be regarded as a sort of corporate bonus.

And, curiously enough, the revenue created by these last-minute additions was not inconsiderable. While no glamour would ever accrue to Hull No. 159, there was a canny logic to the Leyland Line’s decision to add the cabins. Then as now there was a segment of the traveling public which was singularly unimpressed by ornate and opulent public lounges, smoking rooms, dining saloons, and such. Grand staircases, Turkish baths, swimming baths, squash courts, and gymnasiums held little appeal to these folk; what they did enjoy was the experience of being at sea, in comfortable surroundings, traveling at a leisurely pace without any of the attendant fuss and complications which were inseparable from the social life aboard one of the crack transatlantic liners. They included small families, wealthy widows, retired businessmen, a surprising number of Midwestern socialites, young men, and occasionally chaperoned young ladies from middle-class families who were seeking adventure—in short, people who wanted to cross the Atlantic in comfort but were unwilling (or unable) to pay a premium price for passage on one of the big passenger liners.

This meant that the handful of passenger accommodations were devoted to quiet, low-key luxury: by the standards of the North Atlantic trade they were rated as Second Class—which by no means meant that they were second-rate. First, the whole ship was equipped with electric lighting, still something of a novelty on smaller ships on the North Atlantic. The smoking room had paneling in the finest English oak, the furniture was upholstered in embossed leather, and the floor tiling was made out of hard rubber, again something of an innovation in 1901. The dining room was done in Hungarian ash and satinwood, with teak frames about the windows, and the chairs and chaise lounges were upholstered in maquette. All in all, it was a quiet, comfortable way to travel—and surprisingly affordable: passage from London to Boston was £10, and from Boston to London, $50.

Certified to carry a maximum of forty-seven passengers, the nineteen staterooms were located on the port side of the bridge deck, at the top of the superstructure, while the dining saloon, smoking room, and galley, as well as the officers’ and senior engineer’s quarters, were situated on the starboard side. Apart from a small wireless office just below the bridge, quarters for the cooks, and lockers for the galley stowage, the rest of the ship was given over to cargo: the new vessel was destined for the American cotton trade. Her complement of fifty-five included a captain, four officers, one wireless operator, and forty-nine assorted crewmen. The new ship’s name followed a Leyland Line tradition of naming their vessels as belonging to one of the forty-six United States. In this case, nine-inch-high brass letters under the ship’s counter stern and on both sides of the forecastle proclaimed her to be the
Californian
.

The decision to add the passenger accommodations during her construction, made as it was almost at the last minute, was not made by the Leyland Line’s board of directors. Instead it came from the line’s new owner. While the
Californian
was still on the ways, the Leyland Line was bought outright by the American shipping combine known as IMM—International Mercantile Marine—under the leadership of Junius Pierpont Morgan, the American financier. Morgan, the greatest of a generation of trust builders, had conceived of a vast freighting monopoly that would control the shipping rates of goods and the fares of passengers being transported from Europe, from the moment they left the Old World until they arrived at their destination in the New. Since the American rail barons, especially Morgan, had already monopolized the U.S. railroads, all that remained for Morgan’s dream to become reality was to gain control of the North Atlantic shipping lines.

Morgan’s first move in that direction came in 1898, when he acquired the financially troubled Inman Line. Thomas Ismay, who had formed the White Star Line thirty years earlier and turned it into one of the powerhouses of the North Atlantic run, attempted to form a consortium of British shipowners that would keep Inman out of Morgan’s hands, but the attempt fell apart because too few of Ismay’s colleagues believed Morgan was serious. Dismayed at their lack of foresight, Ismay predicted that most of them would fall under Morgan’s sway after the American had crushed them in a fierce rate war.