Truthfully, it was a sickening sight. We could have been seen thirty miles off, a curtain of cloud, spangled and speckled with bits of burning rubbish and lumps of muck. The First Lieutenant looked at the beach of clinkers piling up on his hammock-nettings and blessed the Principality of Wales. The Chief Engineer merely said, ‘You never know your luck in the Navy,’ put on his most ancient kit, and was no more seen in the likeness of a Christian man. Fate had hit him hard, for, just as his fires were at their pink of perfection, a battleship chose to get up her anchor by hand, delaying us an hour, and blackening the well-cherished furnaces. ‘No. 2 Welsh’ (this must have been an Admiralty jest) needs a lot of coaxing. CHIMNEY-SWEEPS ON THE HIGH SEAS But we were not quite such an exhibition as the _Arrogant_. She showed like chemical works in full blast as we swept out of Bantry and headed south for the Scillies. Then up came the _Blake_ (_see_ Note VI.), a beautiful boat, giving easily to the swell that was lifting us already, and she dodged about left and right till we asked: ‘What are you trying to do?’ ‘Trying to get out of your smoke,’ said she, vomiting cascades of her own the while. Meantime the Fleet-rams were doing their best to blind and poison us, and the battleships sagged away to leeward looking like wet ricks ablaze. It was not the ignominy of the thing—the mere dirt and filth—that annoyed one so much as the thought that there was no power in the State which owes its existence to the Navy whereby a decent supply of State-owned, State-dug coal could be assured to us. There had been a strike, and while masters and men were argle-bargling ashore Her Majesty’s ships were masquerading in the guise of chimney-sweeps on the high seas. The delay, the disorder, the cruel extra work on stokers, not to mention the engineers, who at all times are worked pitilessly, is in Peace no more than merely brutal. In war it would be dangerous. FOUR HOURS AT FULL SPEED