At K---- it took three full days. We put it in with a teaspoon, as it were. In the first place, they tied us to a buoy out in the very middle of the harbour and the lighters came now and then in a sort of happy-go-lucky fashion. They had gangs on board of the kind that doesn’t get blistered, who stuffed the coal into sacks with shovels and then hove them with a windlass, ten at a time. There were other men in the hold who unhooked the sacks, emptied them by shaking them out, hung them on the hook and sent them out again. While the emptying was going on the windlass kept on running just the same. I understand now why coal costs the Navy so much! That was not all. The port told us that we were to carry coal in briquettes especially for torpedo-boats, so of course I expected briquettes. Not at all! Ten lighters arrived loaded with lump coal. I say lump coal, but I might more correctly call it dust. It must have been there for several years, rotting in the yard. I shouted to the captain of the tug that there had been a mistake and that his dust must be for some other boat. He asks me if I am the _Pamir_. “Looks like it,” I said, “can’t you read the name?” Then he answered that his written instructions were for the _Pamir_. He added that the briquettes would arrive later. The moment there is a written instruction I go ahead: briquettes or coal-dust, they’re all cargo! It took two days for a thousand tons and the foreman of the gang thought that was going fast! What would he catch from the owner, I wonder, if the _Pamir_ had to pay two days’ harbour dues for four shovelfuls of coal? “But,” I asked, “isn’t this coal for the torpedo-boats and isn’t it true that they use nothing but briquettes?” “You’re sure to find cruisers and warships down there. They burn anything. And anyway, these ten lighters were ready and we had to send you a thousand tons, so we took the first thing at hand.” They don’t worry about things at K----, believe me! The briquettes arrived the third day and it was necessary to flatten out the coal-dust, which was piled up like a sugar-loaf, so that they should not tumble to the bottom of the hold. We mustn’t break them, said the foreman, because that spoilt them. But only the tops of the lighters were stowed, shipshape, with whole briquettes. (It was splendid coal, too, Grand-Combe Lens, the very pick of the basket.) But after two or three layers there was nothing but leavings, pieces as big as your fist, and in the bottom--mud--which we had to take just the same because the order was to send the lighters back well scraped out. If everybody scrapes them why should there be any mud? It will be nice in the furnaces of the torpedo-boats! Do you remember the cases of oranges we bought at Carthagena: the top layers A1 Lloyds, the bottom rotten? So it was with their coal.