Chapter XXXIV: The Fireman and Trimmer

It is a standing mystery to me however men can be found who are willing to become the firemen of marine boilers. Use dulls the edge of apprehension, of course, and in time the mind refuses to be impressed by the sense of imminent danger. Whether on the battle-field or in the stokehold this is so; but apart altogether from that, the nature of the work is such that I always wonder what the state of a man's mind can be who is willing to undertake it, or who, having undertaken it, remains in such a business. The engine-room of a large steamship is a terrible place, with its infinite suggestions of incalculable forces exerting themselves in orderly ways under the steady control and guidance of man; but there is a sense of exultation, of high satisfaction, in the realization of their own powers that goes a long way towards compensating the engineers for the dangers they confront, the discomforts they undergo; and where, as in the Mercantile Marine, their high abilities and undaunted courage are fully recognized, their treatment in pay and provisioning and accommodation as good as can be got, they have also something which atones for a great deal of physical suffering. Yes; I can understand a man choosing to become a marine engineer. But a fireman! The very thought of such a life is terrifying. The sailor in his watch on deck at night is seldom called upon to do anything but stand quietly at the helm or on the look-out. If he be a man of any observation, he may hold sweet communion with Nature, may meditate in the sweetest solitude in the world, gazing out upon the ever-beautiful face of the deep. In any case he may smoke, or doze undisturbed by any call to duty, except some shift of wind calling for trimming or setting sail. It is a pleasant mellow time for the sailor, the night watch at sea.

The fireman is called with the sailor at eight bells. Hastily putting on his shirt, trousers, and boots, he descends by many iron ladders past grim walls of iron that glow with fervent heat, and give out a vibrant hum, telling of the pent-up power within. Down, down he goes, until at last he stands upon an iron floor slightly raised above the very bottom of the vessel. Over his head there is a circular opening, down which comes a steady draught of cool air--that is, if the ship be in regions where the temperature will allow of the air being cool. At any rate, this air is fresh. It is conducted below by the intervention of those huge bell-mouthed ventilators, which are so prominent a feature of every steamship's deck equipment. In front of him towers the face of the boiler, that now claims him as its slave for four hours. It is ornamented by divers strange-looking taps and gauges and tubes, with the use of which he must be familiar. And it has a voice, an utterance that, while not loud, is so penetrating that soon it seems to a novice as if it were reverberating within his skull. It is the speech of imprisoned steam that finds no outlet by any channel except the one provided for it, the complaint of the awful giant who is rending at every square inch of his prison walls in the one supreme, never-ceasing effort to escape. It is utterly disregarded by the fireman: doubtful, indeed, whether he even hears it, or is in any way conscious of it, for it is more to be felt by the whole of the nerve centres than merely through the ears. His concern is with the three vast throats that occupy the lower third of the boiler. And there is no time to be lost. Seizing a shovel, he lifts with it the latch of one of the doors, and flings it wide open with a clang. The ship may be rolling furiously, tumbling to and fro with that peculiarly disconcerting motion that seems to a landsman the subversion of all principles of uprightness, but he must balance himself somehow. With legs spread wide apart, he stands upon that slippery iron floor, stoops, and peers within at the roaring cavern of almost white-hot coals. His trained eye can see just how they are burning; where clinkers are forming, whether perfect combustion is going on, or certain expert manipulation is necessary in order to make it do so. If all is satisfactory he shifts his position slightly sideways, so that he can swing his shovel on one side to the bunker door, at the sill of which a heap of coal is lying, fill it, and then, with a peculiar stroke, send its contents broadcast over the lambent surface of the furnace bed. The mere shovelling of coals into a fire has no relation to the careful, intelligent stoking of a steamship's furnaces, as engineers are never weary of saying. There is as much difference between a good fireman and an incompetent one--although the latter may work far harder than the former--as there is between a good and bad carpenter, or any other skilled worker.

When I was lamp-trimmer in the A.S.N. Company's employ on the Australian coast I was shipmate with an old Scotch fireman whose invariable practice it was to get most methodically drunk every time we left port. So drunk did he always become, that he could not stand, much less walk. But, crawling to the fidley, sometimes on hands and knees, he would somehow get down into the stokehold when his turn came, and there, balancing himself in some mysterious fashion, he would feed his fires. No sooner had he slammed to the furnace door than he would collapse, his legs bending every which way, as if they had been made of india-rubber. Yet the chief engineer used to declare that Andra could keep steam better drunk than any other fireman in the ship could sober. I have known him after a watch of firing to be still so drunk that he could not climb on deck, but lay huddled up in one corner of the stokehold like a heap of rags, utterly oblivious of the work going on around him.

It must, however, be remembered that pitching coal into the furnace, though it is the principal work of a fireman, does not by any means complete his work. After he has been "firing" for a certain length of time he perceives the necessity for "cleaning fires." He has been carefully raking and poking his fires at intervals so that no clogging of the bars shall hinder the free upward draught, and this operation, performed with long tools called a slice, a rake, and a devil, is very severe. The operator must stand very close to the furnace mouth and peer within at the fervent glow, while he searches the vitals of his fire as quickly and deftly as may be, lest the tell-tale gauge shall reveal to the watchful engineer that the pressure of steam is lessening, bringing him into the stokehold on the run to know what the all-sorts-of-unprintable-words that particular fireman is doing. But this is only the merest child'splay to cleaning fires. When that time comes the other furnace or furnaces (each fireman has two or three under his charge) must be at the top of their blast, doing their very utmost. Then the fireman flings wide the door of the furnace to be cleaned, plunges his tools into the heart of the fire, and thrusts, rakes, and slices, until he presently, half roasted, drags out on to the stokehold floor a mass of clinker. This sends out such a fierce upward heat that it must needs be damped down, the process being accompanied by clouds of suffocating steam-smoke. But there is no time to be lost. Again and again he dives into the heart of the furnace, each time purging it of some of the deadening clinker, until, at last, with smarting eyeballs, half choked, half roasted, and wholly exhausted for the time, he flings a shovelful or so of coal upon the now comparatively feeble fire, and retires to call up his reserve of strength.

And this work, of course, must go on continuously, no matter how the vessel is behaving, even if, as often happens, there descends occasionally from on high a flood of sea-water as waves break right over the labouring ship. The fireman must, to be efficient, nurse his fires, keep them clean, and hand them over to his successor in first-class going order, with the steam up to its ordered pressure; and failure to do this is provocative of bad language and much ill-feeling. Surely it hardly needs pressing upon the reader that such an occupation involves a truly awful strain upon the human animal, especially in tropical climates. The amount of strain has been officially recognized in the arrangement of firemen's watches. Instead of getting four hours on and four hours off, as do the sailors, they have four hours on and eight hours off, so that the exhausted frame may be able in some measure to recuperate. And in addition, wherever it is possible to do so, they get somewhat better food. I do not know certainly whether the institution is general, but I have been in several steamers where, at supper time, the firemen received a mess from the galley called the "black pot." It consisted of the remains of the saloon passengers' fare, sometimes made into a savoury stew, sometimes simply of itself, according to its component parts. But it was looked upon as the firemen's right, and no sailor ever participated in its contents.

It has probably occurred to the reader before this to ask the question, "How, if the fireman is so hard-worked in the stokehold and the space there be so limited, does he manage to get at the truly enormous quantity of coal that must be required to feed those devouring furnaces?" The explanation of this brings us to the lowest deep of all on board-ship life to-day. The providing of the coal for the use of the firemen is the duty of the "trimmer," the nature of whose work is so terrible that he should receive the sympathy of every kindly man and woman whom he serves. The coal is kept in vast magazines called bunkers, giving on to the stokeholds by means of watertight doors. In merchant ships these bunkers are placed so as to be most convenient for the transmission of coal to the stokeholds, and are as little subdivided as possible. What their capacity is may be imagined from the fact that some ships require three thousand tons of coal for a single passage, it being consumed at the rate of between twenty and thirty tons per hour! At the commencement of the passage the trimmer's work is comparatively easy. The coal lies near the outlet, and by a little skilful manipulation it is made to run out upon the stokehold floor handy for the fireman's shovelling. But as the consumption goes on, and the "face" of the coal recedes from the bulkhead, the trimmer's work grows rapidly more heavy. His labour knows no respite as he struggles to keep the fireman's needs supplied. And there is no ventilator pouring down fresh air into the bunker. In darkness, only punctuated by the dim light of a safety-lamp, in an atmosphere composed of the exhalations from the coal and a modicum of dust-laden air, liable at any moment to be overwhelmed by the down-rushing masses of coal as the ship's motion displaces it, the grimy, sweat-soaked man works on. By comparison with him the coal-hewer in the mine has a gentleman's life. Darkness and danger and want of breath are his inevitable environment. What wonder is it that he becomes a hard citizen? The fact is that no man with longings for decent life would or could remain in such employment. Only those who by carelessness and disregard of all that for the majority of us makes life worth living stay in it, and enable the ocean traffic of to-day to go on.

It is absolutely impossible to exaggerate the miseries of such a mode of life, made necessary by the imperious demand for swift travel. Yet, severe as is the lot of the coal-trimmer in an ocean liner, it again is comparatively easy when compared with the lot of the second-class stoker in her Majesty's Navy. For him another set of conditions comes into play. The necessity for using the coal as a means of protection from shot and shell leads to the bunkers being subdivided into a host of "pockets" holding but a few tons and communicating with each other deviously. The work of getting the coal passed from one to the other of these is far worse than anything of the kind in the Merchant Service, as much worse as is the firing under forced draught for a Belleville boiler than the steady supply of fuel to a well-equipped, natural-draught stokehold of any of our great merchant steamships, where Belleville boilers, thank God, will never be used. And, coming deeper still, there is the firing and trimming of a "destroyer." That occupation defies any attempt to describe it. No words could give an adequately forceful idea of what the firemen, trimmers, and E.R.A.'s must endure in order that a vessel no larger than an above-bridge steamer shall be driven by engines of five thousand horse-power at the rate of thirty miles per hour. We do not seem to have reached finality yet in this direction; but I should think that since human endurance has its limits, there must of necessity be a halt soon from the utter impossibility of finding human beings able to live and work under such awful conditions. When you find the long quivering hull of a destroyer, only a plate of steel not much thicker than a crown piece keeping out the sea, packed full of boilers, whizzing machinery, and coal, the tiny air space left containing something, of which one inhalation would make you or me, reader, feel as if we had been suddenly strangled, and the heat greater than one would find in the hottest room of a Turkish bath, it seems time to consider whether there can be any justification in compelling our fellow creatures, whom the need for bread has driven to accept such employment, to endure imprisonment like that, let alone _work_ in it.

It is somewhat comforting to know that the exigencies of peaceful travel, severe as they are undoubtedly, do not require such suffering as that from their servants. Of course there are times, such as upon the outbreak of fire or the sudden springing of a leak, when the toilers below are literally between the devil and the deep sea. Also in the case of a boiler explosion or a sudden breakdown of machinery in full career, when the danger and attendant suffering are very great. But then, we all have to face dangers at times in burning houses, railway accidents, and so on, which come so seldom that we do not lose any sleep in anticipating them. Therefore we do not reckon the possibilities of calamity among the drawbacks to a fireman's or trimmer's business. It is the steady stress of such conditions of labour which is to be deplored.

Before the black watch below can be relieved there is always a duty to be performed that makes no unfitting climax to the preceding tale of toil. It is "ashes up." Some steamers have been fitted with a contrivance for obviating this piece of hard work--the fitting of a sort of valve in the ship's side or bottom through which the ashes and _débris_ of the fire can be blown into the sea. These, however, are few. The usual way is for the ashes to be filled into long iron buckets, just as much as a strong man can lift when full, down in the stokehold. Some of the trimmers go on deck (how sweet the sea air is after their long sojourn below!), and sliding open a door in the tube of one of the ventilators, discover there a winch. The chain of this winch runs down into the stokehold, where it is hooked on to the ash-bucket. The trimmers on deck heave away with all their might (for when their task is ended they may go below), and when the bucket reaches them, they snatch it and carry it to the ash-shoot, where they dump its contents overboard. In some very well-found ships there is a small steam-winch for doing this work, but usually it is performed as described, and a heavy piece of business it is, involving the raising of several tons of ashes from the bottom of the ship.

Here I must leave the fireman and trimmer. I hope that engineers and their crews will forgive me, being a sailor, for having had the hardihood to say anything about them at all. They know very well the prejudice that even now exists against them in the minds of most sailors, and they will probably look closely into what I have written for some sign of sneering depreciation. But they will not find it. My sympathies are most fully with them. My admiration for them is great. And I think that as regards the firemen and trimmers, that their work in tropical seas is so utterly unfit for white men to do that, in spite of the hardship attendant upon loss of employment at first, it would be a good thing if stokeholds were entirely manned by negroes, who, from their constitutional experience of heat, must be far better fitted to endure the conditions of the stokehold. Many southern-going ships carry them now. I should not be sorry to see them the rule, and my countrymen doing something better.