MARCH 1, 1919. When the car got to the Board of Trade Office, which is opposite the old chapel of ease where the crews of John Company’s ships “used to worship,” as a local history tells us, I saw Uncle Dave by the kerb, with time apparently on his hands. I got down. He told me old Jackson is dead. Jackson was a mast and block maker, but his fame was the excellence of his figure-heads. It is many years since old Jackson made one, but if it is doubted that he was an artist, there is a shop near where he once lived which still displays three of his images, the size of life, reputed to have been conjured from baulks of timber with an ax. I remember Jackson. He rarely answered you when you questioned him about those ships to which he had given personality and eyes that looked sleeplessly overseas from their prows. He regarded you, and only his whiskers moved in Here we were joined by some young men who knew Uncle Dave. They were looking for a ship. But Uncle continued to tell me of the merits of his friend the maker of figure-heads. A stoker became a trifle irritated. “Well, what’s the good of ’em, anyway?” he interjected. “Lumber, I call ’em. They can’t be carried on straight stems, and clipper-bows aren’t wanted these days, wasting good metal. Why, even Thompson’s White Star liners have chucked that sort of truck. They’re not built like it now. What’s the good of figger-’eds?” This youth’s casual blasphemy in the presence An older hand interposed. “Ah, come away now! I’ve heard chaps make game of figger-’eds, an’ call ’em superstition. But I say let such things alone. I know things that’s happened to funny fellows through making game of figger-’eds. There was the Barbadian Lass. She was a brigantine. “Yes, I know,” broke in one of us. “But you can’t say it was along of that tar-brush...” “You young chaps ain’t got no sense,” here interrupted Uncle, his voice evidently under control, but shaky. “I’d like to know where you were brought up. You learn it all wrong at them schools of yours, and you never get it right afterwards. You learn about the guts of engines and ’lectricity, and you mix it up with the tales your grandmothers told you, and you get nothing straight. What you’ve got is all science and superstition. And then you wonder why you make a mess of it. Listen! It don’t matter what you do to a figger-’ed, if you’re fool enough He turned on the stoker. There was astonishment and pity in his glance. “Look at you. In and out of a ship, and you forget her name when you’ve signed off. You don’t care the leavings in a Dago’s mess-kit for any ship you work in, if you can get a bit out of her and skip early.” “That’s me, Uncle,” muttered the stoker. “Can you remember names, like some of us remember the Mermus, the Blackadder, and the Titania? Not you. Your ships haven’t got names, properly speaking. They’re just a run out and home again for you, and a row about the money and the grub.” “Sure to be a row about the grub,” murmured the stoker. “What are ships nowadays?” he went on, raising a shaking index finger. “Are they ships at all? They’re run by companies on the make, and worked by factory hands who curse their own house-flags. It’s a dirty game, I call it. Things are all wrong. I can’t make them out. You fellers take no pride in your work, and you’ve got no work to take pride in. You don’t know |