Surgeon at Sea

_'…for many a time_

I slipped off the bunk, but Hornbeam caught me.

'Death wish to the eyebrows, the lot of you! You withdraw-to sea. To sea! That's what it is!

'You're full of prune-juice, Doc,' someone said.

'I will not have insults,' I cried. 'If you would care to defend yourself like a gentleman, I shall take you up on it. You have the death wish, by God! You've all got it. So had Nelson. I've got it as well.'

I fell over McDougall's feet and no one bothered to pick me up.

The next morning I was suffering from a sharp attack of the death wish. But my performance had raised me surprisingly in the eyes of my shipmates. My earnest years as a medical student, my dignified excursion into practice, my prim approach to seafaring had built a scaffold underneath me: the Third Mate's gin had slipped the bolt.

My companions were relieved to find that I was not only sane but human: for my part, I began to realize that the sea, which washes away terrestrial affectations and inhibitions, had a great deal to recommend it. Sailors are of the few remaining people who make their way in companies across the unsignposted face of the world with the help of the sun and the stars, and spend most of their lives lying at the unhindered fancy of the weather. Their sense of values in human and elemental behaviour is therefore unblunted; they look on their existence as a long uproarious joke relieved by not unentertaining interludes of necessary tragedy. I thought them the last of the Elizabethans.

I believe there is no process so restful as moving at bicycle pace through the sunshine of the South Atlantic. We were steaming at ten knots, which meant we should be about three weeks reaching Santos. The metallic fragment of England in which we all existed-except the Wireless Operator-creaked easily onwards with a faint haze of smoke rolling from the funnel, scattering the nimble flying fish with her bow. Even crossing the Line caused no more disturbance than my having to stand drinks all round. The hot sun welded the days together so that they became indistinguishable. It was impossible to tell whether it was Tuesday or Thursday, and it didn't matter.

Only twice a week were we reminded of the calendar-Friday and Sunday. At four-thirty on Friday afternoons we had boat drill. Captain Hogg stood on the bridge and pulled the cord of the whistle, which sent us scurrying up the ladders in our blue-and-orange lifejackets to the boatdeck. I was in boat number four, in charge of the Third Mate, who ticked our names off with a roll-call. I was alarmed to find that among my companions in an emergency would be the Carpenter with a tendency to D.T.s and a pleasant-faced greaser who, I heard from Easter, had just returned from a ten-year stretch, for armed robbery.

'Swing out!' Captain Hogg shouted through the loud hailer.

The canvas covers were stripped off the boats, and three men set to the handle of each davit to lean it out from the ship's side. When this had been done to Captain Hogg's satisfaction the boats were swung in again and everyone dispersed.

'Board of Trade sports,' Trail said with disgust. 'Waste of time.'

'Why do we do it then?' I asked.

'Oh, it has to go in the log-book. There'd be hell in Liverpool if we didn't. Some skippers cook the log, but not this baby. Anything to give him a chance of bawling through a loud hailer.'

Sunday was recognizable, as it was the only occasion when we flew the flag at sea. From eight to midday the red ensign waved from the gaff on the mainmast, to convince the Almighty that we had not forgotten him-for there was no one else but ourselves to see it. The appearance of the flag that symbolized the Sabbath was greeted warmly by all hands, not through reverence but because, under Ministry of Transport regulations, we all got an extra half-day's pay.

Sunday was also marked by the ceremony of full inspection. This was ordered by Captain Hogg's copy of _Instructions for Masters,_ the manual through which the Fathom Steamship Company directed and advised their commanders, which contained in its yellow pages regulations designed to right such nautical disasters as mutiny, epidemics of smallpox, lost anchor, and imminent shipwreck. At eleven o'clock the four of us fell in behind the Captain, who indicated the exceptional occasion by carrying a torch and a walking-stick. On the poop the ship's company was lined up ready for us-deckhands under the charge of the Bos'n on the port side, firemen and greasers to starboard, and catering staff, in fresh white jackets, standing nervously athwartships. Captain Hogg passed down the ranks scowling into each face like a vengeful but short-sighted victim at an identification parade, then we marched in and out of the little, green-painted crews' cabins that each smelt of feet and hair-oil. They had been cleaned and tidied so that nothing in the slightest degree disturbing could fall into the Captain's visual fields. The decks were scrubbed, the blankets folded ostentatiously, and the owners' possessions-varying from a guitar to a caged canary-were set in unnaturally tidy piles. Captain Hogg shone his torch beneath the bunks, inspected the undersurfaces of tables and chairs, and thrust the crook of his walking-stick into every inviting orifice. Usually his rummaging produced nothing more than a cloud of dust and an empty beer-tin, but occasionally he would drag out a saloon plate, a silver coffee-pot, a mildewed loaf, a pair of underpants, or the crumpled photograph of an inconstant girl friend.

'Mr. Hornbeam!' he would shout, waving the find under the Mate's nose. 'What's the meaning of this? Eh? We'll find the chronometers in here next!'

The last call was my hospital. Sunday was the only occasion when it was inspected, and Easter spent the morning polishing the brass-work and tipping all the small movable objects and surgical debris into a large white bin labelled 'Sterile Dressings.' As we arrived he stood smartly to attention beside the door, hiding a large black patch on the bulkhead.

'All correct, Doctor?' the Captain growled every Sunday.

'Yes, sir. All correct.'

He fixed Easter with his eye.

'Any complaints?'

'I am very happy, Captain,' Easter replied unctuously.

'All right. Pipe down, Bos'n.'

The crew were scattered to their Sunday indolence and we went up to the Captain's cabin, where we stood in a line in front of him, our caps under our arms, and he emphasized the points that had incurred his disapproval. Then we all sat down and had a gin.

There were no religious observances on board the Lotus-an omission that was deplored only by Easter. This surprised me. 'I didn't know you were a churchgoer,' I told him.

'Ho, yes, Doctor. I likes a nice service of a Sunday. Breaks the monotony a bit. Not much good in an old tub like this, but in the big passenger boats I used to sing hymns at the back. I've got a bit of a voice,' he added modestly.

'I'm very pleased to hear it.'

'Used to take the plate round as well. Real nice job that is. Must be the sea air what makes them generous. You see them old skinflints what wouldn't give a tanner to a blind baby at home sticking in quids and suchlike. Made quite a bit out of that in my time.'

'You mean you actually helped yourself from the collection?'

'Sort of commission, as you might say,' he explained amiably. 'Nothing much, mind you. No one knows what there is in the kitty, but you've got to be pretty nifty slipping it out before the Purser spots you. Charity begins at home, don't it, Doctor?'

My clinical practice continued its easy routine, and was centred round preservation of the health of the Captain's stomach. I had never known an organ to produce such widespread clinical effects. If it functioned painlessly life was tolerable, even at mealtimes; but the first twinges of dyspepsia immediately communicated themselves to everyone on board. Fortunately I was able to denature my mixture of its explosive properties, and it combated spiritually with the Captain's diet. My morning visit to him with the sick-list gave me an opportunity to see how the battle was going by judging the state of the old gentleman's temper-a matter of importance on the ship beyond the belief of any landsman. If he was in a good mood he took the chit without question, and sometimes even demonstrated extreme geniality by offering me a gin (he saw nothing unusual in drinking after breakfast). If my mixture was not up to strength, or if he had eaten too many platefuls of Madras curry the night before, he would seize the paper and scowl at it like a Tudor monarch affirming a list of executions.

'What's wrong with that man?' he would demand, stabbing the sheet with his blunt finger. 'McKlusky, J., Ordinary Seaman. Why's he off duty? What's this-P.U.O.?'

Pyrexia of unknown origin, sir,' I explained timidly. 'He had a temperature.'

'Well, why has he?'

'I'm afraid I don't know, sir.'

'Why don't you? You're the Doctor, aren't you? What the devil do you think would happen to us all if I didn't know a lighthouse when I saw one? Eh? What have you got to say to that?'

He slammed the paper down on his desk. I said nothing to it.

Now, look here, Doctor,' he went on. 'I'm not in your line, and I don't pretend to be. But I can tell you what's wrong with this man-he's constipated. I haven't been to sea for forty years for nothing. Give the bastard a double dose of black draught and kick him back on duty. If he still shirks I'll put him in the log-book. That's an order!'

'Yes, sir.'

This put me in a state of professional agitation. But Captain Hogg would have agitated the whole General Medical Council.

The Captain was at his most terrifying when conducting the ceremony of placing an offender's name in the log-book. This was the only disciplinary action left in his hands: flogging at the mainmast, keel-hauling, and hanging from the yardarm at sunset have been abolished by Parliament, and Captain Hogg made it plain that he thought the world all the worse for it.

One night shortly after we reached the Tropics I was pulled from my bunk by Hornbeam to see a couple of firemen who had been fighting in the foc's'le. Both of them were drunk. They were in the hospital, blood-spattered and muttering surly threats at each other, separated by Easter with the heavy pestle from the drug locker.

Now keep quiet for the doctor,' he said cheerfully, 'or I'll bash your ruddy brains in with this. These two have filled each other in something proper,' he added to me as a clinical explanation.

During the two hours needed to sew them up I gathered that the pair of them, Kelly and Crosby, came from the opposite sides of a Liverpool street; and a feud had smouldered between them since they first threw stones at each other from the shelter of their mothers' skirts. Too late they had found themselves both aboard the Lotus, and had been living in grudging amicability since we sailed. But that evening Kelly had been unable to repress any longer his opinion that Crosby's mother was not only a harlot, but the oldest and most ugly in all Liverpool, and Crosby cracked the end of a bottle and went for him.

The next morning at ten I was summoned to the Captain's cabin, which had the ceremonially grim air of a Portsmouth court-martial. Sitting at the desk was Captain Hogg, an expression on his face of uninhibited malevolence. Set before him were his gold-braided cap, _Instructions for Masters,_ the log-book open at the correct page, a sheet of yellow blotting-paper, and a large silver ink-pot with a pen in it, so that everything was at hand for making the damning entry. Hornbeam was in a chair beside the Captain, looking seriously at his own feet. The Bos'n and the Donkeyman were positioned on each side of the door, and I was ordered curtly to the corner. In the middle of the circle were the two delinquents, twisting their caps in their hands and throwing nervous glances round the cabin from the gaps in their bandages.

'Right,' Captain Hogg began briskly. 'Now we are all assembled we can begin. First of all I want to make something perfectly plain to you two. You are going to get a completely fair hearing this morning. Understand? You are quite at liberty to put questions to me or any other of the officers. You may call any witness you like in your defence. As far as I'm concerned a man is innocent until he's proved guilty, whether it's murder or pinching a ha'penny stamp. You'll never find me giving a man a bad character till it's proved. I'm a fair captain, I am. Get me?'

The two firemen nodded hesitantly.

'Very well. Now, tell me your version of the affair.'

He folded his arms judicially.

The feud that had burned so brightly a few hours before was now outshone by the peril that faced the two opponents. They had composed a story during breakfast, which was begun by Kelly in the tone of bitter repentance that had occasionally swayed sympathetic members of a magistrate's bench.

'Well, sir, it was like this 'ere, sir. Me and me mate was 'avin' a cupper tea…'

'You bloody liar!' Captain Hogg shouted. 'You were rotten drunk, both of you bastards! Oh, yes, you were! Don't answer me back or I'll kick you round the deck. You were drunk in the foc's'le and you started fighting like the pair of goddam cut-throats you are. My God, you're a crowd of loafers up forrard! You oughtn't to be at sea, you ought to be in jail, the lot of you! Stand up straight when I'm talking to you, blast you!' He thrust a finger under Kelly's nose. 'You turn my ship into a Liverpool rough-house and you come up here with some cock-and-bull story you think I'm going to swallow. What do you take me for, eh? I was at sea when you were playing marbles in the filth of a Liverpool gutter. Mr. Hornbeam!'

'Sir?'

'You found these men fighting?'

Hornbeam nodded.

'Doctor!'

'Sir?'

'Did you or did you not find these men were drunk?'

'Well, sir, the scientific tests…'

'There you are! The Doctor agrees with me! You were soused, the pair of you!' He banged the desk with his fist, making the pen leap out of the ink-pot. 'Do you know what I'd like to do to you?' he demanded. 'I'd like to give you every holystone on board and make you scrub the boatdeck till the plates showed through. Then I'd put you in irons in the chain-locker and keep you on bread and water till we got back to Liverpool. That's the sort of treatment scum like you need! I'd like to put you in an open boat here and now, and get rid of the pair of you for good. Do you understand, you couple of lazy sons of bitches?'

But fortunately the Captain's justice was obligatorily tempered with mercy. 'Fined five shillings,' he muttered. 'Good morning.'

It was fortunate that Captain Hogg was, through reason of his being a captain, confined most of the day to his own quarters. He passed his time sitting in an armchair reading magazines similar to the one hiding his face on the first occasion I met him. In the corner of his cabin was a pile three feet high of these periodicals, from all parts of the English-speaking world. He consumed them earnestly and steadily, like a man with plenty of time looking up a train in Bradshaw. 'There's one thing I do like,' he announced at dinner one day, a forkful of beef and vegetables at his mouth, 'and that's a good book.'

For the rest of the voyage I bowed to his opinions like a Victorian schoolboy and took the greatest pains possible to avoid him.

The Leader of the Opposition in the Lotus was the Chief Engineer, McDougall. He alone of the engineers had unresented entry into the saloon and our company: the mates looked upon them instinctively as intruders, a relic of the days when thin funnels first poked their way through the proud canvas. The engineers lived away from the rest of us in tiny hot cabins clustered amidships, and ate in a pokey messroom ventilated by the oily breath of the engines. We saw them only when they leant over the rail in their black and sweaty boiler suits, or lay on their backs dissembling one of the pieces of ugly machinery that sprung from the Lotus's deck.

McDougall had a noisy cabin by the engine-room hatchway, in which he received visitors with a half-tumbler of neat whisky (he maintained that gin was a drink fit only for harlots). His surroundings were as untidy as a nursery. Scraps of steel and paint-pots littered the deck, the bunk sagged under pieces of dismantled machinery, and the bulkheads supported charts, graphs, a row of sombre engineering books, and an incongruous nude leaving her bath on a boilermakers' calendar. Scattered everywhere, like thistledown blown by a breeze, were scraps of half-used cotton waste.

'Where would ye all be without my engines?' he demanded. 'Do ye know what you've got to thank us for? Everything from the propeller revolutions to your shaving water and the ice in your gin.'

He thought of his engines, as Boswell did of his lavatories, as living beings possessed of souls.

'Ye'll be no damn good as an engineer till you make friends with your engines,' he told me. 'Talk to 'em, that's what you've got to do. Give 'em hell if they play you up. It pays in the end, lad. Many a times I've had a row with me mates or the wife, and it's been a comfort to know I've got a real pal down below. If ye cut my veins, Doc, ye'll find fuel oil there, not blood.'

McDougall believed that the best engineers came from Scotland, the best Scots from Glasgow, and the only effect of modern innovations like oil furnaces, engine-room ventilation, and refrigerators was a glaring deterioration in the standard of young men coming to sea. When he showed me round his engine-room he exhibited the reverence of an old dean in his cathedral. We stood on the quivering control platform in the centre of the Lotus's clamorous viscera and he waved his arm proudly and shouted, 'This is where we do a man's job, Doc.'

I nodded, looking nervously at the pipes straining with the pressure of superheated steam.

'That's the main steam gauge,' McDougall explained, pointing to a dial on the panel in front of us.

'What's the red line for?' I shouted back.

'That? Och, that's the safety mark.'

'But, I say, isn't the needle well past it?'

'That doesn't matter, lad. We've got to get the old tub moving somehow.'

He took me down greasy ladders, along a narrow cat-walk between pieces of spinning machinery, through the boiler-room where Turnbull, the Geordie Seventh Engineer, sweated eight hours of his twenty-four watching the oil fires. We crouched along the tunnel that carried the propeller shaft to the stern, and stood at the end in a little triangular humid space where the thick revolving metal pierced the plates and disappeared into the sea.

'There ye are, Doc. All us lads and all that machinery to keep this turning. If it wasn't for us that old windbag on the bridge would be out of a job.'

'He doesn't seem to be very appreciative, Chief.'

'Och, we've got better than him conducting the trams in Glasgow,' McDougall said with disgust. 'You watch, Doc, I'll run him off this ship before he's much older. You wait and see.'

McDougall's threat was wholly serious. He had in a locked drawer in his cabin a foolscap book labelled shamelessly HOGG, in which he entered immediately every derogatory fact he discovered about the Captain. When he was particularly annoyed he took the book out and read it, underlining in red ink wherever he thought a passage was not sufficiently condemnatory standing on its own. This book he sent to the Marine Superintendent of the Fathom Line by registered post every time the ship returned to Britain, but its effect was largely cancelled by a similar volume about McDougall put in the Superintendent's hands by the Captain. The two passed their lives in a running fight on oil consumption, engine revolutions, and repair bills, and the daily ceremony by which McDougall handed Captain Hogg a chit on his speed and fuel supplies was always conducted in bitter silence. About once a week the Captain became too much for him, and the Chief Engineer then shut himself in his cabin, took out a fresh bottle of whisky, and determinedly threw the cap through the porthole.

As the ship's company became used to me they paid me the compliment of sharing their troubles with me. I soon discovered all of them were hypochondriacs. In small ships where they had no doctor they worried in case they caught anything; in bigger ships, where there was a doctor living down the alleyway, they brought along their symptoms like bruised children running to their mother. The Second Mate was the severest sufferer from hypochondriasis. The locker in his cabin was a therapeutic bar: he had five different brands of antiseptic, all the popular stomach powders, lotions for rubbing under the arms and between the toes, drops for sticking in his eyes or up his nose, gargles and liniments, hair-food and skin-balm, and a frightening collection of purgatives.

I found him gargling lustily in his cabin one afternoon.

'Hello, Second,' I said. 'What's up? Got a cold?'

He spat guiltily into the basin, as though I had caught him at some wickedness.

'No,' he explained. 'I always gargle three times a day. I was reading an article in _Happy Health_ that said that every cubic inch of air is loaded with millions of microbes.'

'Well, so's every inch of your throat.'

'Listen, Doc,' he went on, sounding worried. 'There's something I've been wanting to ask you for a long time. Where could I get my blood cholesterol measured?'

'Your what!'

'Yes, you see there was an article in-either the _Reader's Digest_ or one of the Sunday papers at home-that said some doctors in California had discovered if your blood cholesterol was above 245 milligrams per cent you were bound to get arteriosclerosis. I've all the symptoms. I…'

'You're far more likely to fall down a hatch and break your neck.'

'Do you think so?' he asked eagerly. 'Still, it's got me worried. I'm sure I've got an inter-vertebral disk as well. There's a pain I get round here in my back every time I sit down.'

'Rubbish! You're healthier than I am.'

He looked dolefully at his medicine chest for a few moments. 'Of course,' he continued, 'what I really need is a woman.'

'I'm inclined to agree with you,' I said.

I sat down reflectively on his bunk. I had become aware in the past few days of feeling-not blatantly sex-starved but unquestionably peckish. I put it down to the sea air. My life ashore had passed undisturbed except for Wendy and occasional vague thoughts that it would be nice to take a girl to the pictures. But now I began to think even the girls in the Third Mate's cabin were delightful. Wendy herself became frighteningly glamourized as my mind's eye behaved like a magazine photographer's lens, and substituted curves for angularity and an inviting expression for the usual one that indicated she thought her nose was running.

'Now, if this was a real passenger ship,' the Second continued, 'everything would be squared up by now. Have you been in one?'

'This is my first ship.'

'I forgot. I was Third in one for a bit. It was like a floating Ball of Kirriemuir. I don't know what it is. As soon as these females get aboard a ship they're all after you. Not a moment's peace. Then there's dances and race meetings and all the fun and games. Not to mention the moonlight and the phosphorescence on the water. I haven't seen any phosphorescence yet. But they fall for it, every time. The places they get to! We found one couple on the steering engine. I used to go under the lifeboats.'

'What about the Captain?'

'He was at it like everyone else. He jacked himself up a nice bit of snicket first day out of Southampton. What a trip that was!'

'I take it you're not married,' I said.

'I've been married. Got hitched during the war when I was a Third. It didn't work out. We've split it up now.' He took a cigarette out of the tin thoughtfully. 'It's no good being married at sea. Oh, yes, every leave's a honeymoon, I know what they say. But long voyages and young wives don't mix. You leave the allotment of your pay and if you don't get a letter at every port you wonder what's up. Anyhow, I reckon you can't ask a girl to sit by the fireside for six months, or a year, or two years maybe. It isn't fair. It isn't human.'

'What about you?' I asked.

'Oh, I always hold you're entitled to count yourself as single at sea,' he said.

Our reflections were interrupted by the engine-room telegraph ringing faintly on the bridge above.

'What's that?' I asked. 'I thought they tested them at noon.'

'I expect she's stopped,' Archer said calmly.

'Stopped! But isn't that important?'

'She often stops. It's the first time she's done it this trip. Something's blown up down below, I suppose. Come on deck. From now on it's usually pretty funny.'

We stepped onto the sunny deck, just below the wing of the bridge. The Lotus had stopped sure enough. She wallowed in the swell like a dead whale.

'Now watch,' the Second said.

Captain Hogg appeared on the bridge. He had been disturbed in his siesta, and was dressed only in a tartan dressing-gown. He looked like Macbeth the day the wood moved.

'Mr. McDougall!' he shouted. 'Mr. McDougall!'

He banged the rail with his fist.

'Quartermaster! Present my compliments to the Chief Engineer and ask him to come to the bridge!'

'Aye aye, sir.'

Captain Hogg clasped his hands behind him and strode fiercely across the deck. After five minutes McDougall appeared. He was in a boiler-suit and held in his hand a scrap of cotton waste, material that appears as indispensable to engineers as stethoscopes to doctors. They glared across the bridge, playing havoc with each other's blood pressure.

'The ship's stopped,' Captain Hogg announced.

'Aye,' said McDougall. 'I know.'

'Well…why the devil has she stopped?'

McDougall lit his pipe.

'You tell me, Cap'n, and then we'll both know.'

'Damn it, Mr. McDougall! Can't you keep the ship going between ports?'

'Not this ship.'

'When I first came to sea engineers took their orders from the bridge. Their job was to raise steam and keep it.'

'When I first came to sea Cap'ns behaved like gentlemen.'

'I will not be spoken to like that!'

'I will speak to ye how I like.'

'I'll have you put in the log-book, Mr. McDougall!'

'I'll report ye to the Company, Cap'n.'

'I will not be obstructed by a pigheaded Scot!'

'An' I will not be told my job by an ignorant Sassenach!'

'Damn you, sir!'

'And damn you, too!'

At that moment the argument was annulled by the telegraph ringing again and the Lotus slowly getting under way.

'It's always like that,' the Second said. 'You know how it is. Oil and water won't mix.'