McFee's description of "Merchantmen Engineers" in every expectation of your career down in the bowels of the ship, from your first job as coal-passer to your later jobs as certificated engineer:

It is Sunday, and I have been working. Oh yes, there is plenty of work to do in the world, I find, wherever I go. But I cannot help wondering why Fate so often offers me the dirty end of the stick. Here I am, awaiting my commission as an engineerofficer of the N. R. and I am in the thick of it day after day. I don't mean when I say "work" what you mean by work. I don't mean work such as my friends and shipmates do, the navigating officer or the officers of the deck watch. I mean work, hard, sweating, nasty toil, coupled with responsibility. . . . I am anxious for you, a landsman, to grasp this particular fragment of the sorry scheme of things entire, that in no other profession have the officers responsible for the carrying out of the work to toil as do the engineers in merchantmen, in transports, in fleet auxiliaries. You do not expect the major to clear the waste-pipe of his regimental latrines. You do not expect the surgeon to superintend the purging of his bandages. You do not expect the navigators of a ship to paint her hull. . . . Yet you do, collectively, tolerate a tradition by which the marine engineer has to assist, overlook, and very often perform work corresponding precisely to the irrelevant chores mentioned above, which are in other professions relegated to the humblest and roughest of mankind. . . . The point to distinguish is that the engineer not only has the responsibility but he has in nine cases out of ten to do it. He, the officer, must

befoul his person and derange his hours of rest and recreation that others may enjoy. He must be available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, at sea or in port. Whether chief or the lowest junior, he must be ready to plunge instantly to the succor of the vilest piece of mechanism on board. . . . Yet what alternative can one suggest? . . . The genuine blownin-the-glass engineer must see the thing done himself, must, in most cases, do it himself. If he does not, he is haunted by the nightmare of that particular thing falling down on him while on watch.

Besides having such work to do, he has to have the skill and patience necessary for doing disagreeable jobs with insufficient tools. Mr. McFee, an experienced engineer, also says of this:

There is this to be said and suggested: his tools could be modernized. Think for a moment that of all the ships at sea with electric current on tap, scarce one has an electric drill, a mechanism so common in America that every one is familiar with it. Consider the denseness of intellect which sends ships to sea every day without a single tool especially designed for its work, without an electric torch, or a blow-lamp, or a telephone between bridge and engine-room. I was privileged recently to inspect the stores and workshop placed on a ship for the use of air-mechanics and I was astounded. Here was richness! Here were rows upon rows of neatly made drawers and lockers, lathes, drills, grinders, saws, fans, motors-all the paraphernalia of a modern machine-shop. In the

same vessel the photographic apparatus and dark room were a miracle of modernity. In the sick-bay I found swing cots, fans, porcelain sinks, X-ray apparatus, and every convenience of modern surgery. In the wireless-room was a plant that out-marconied Marconi. And down below in the same vessel the store was a dark and dismal chaos, with a few filthy shelves stocked apparently by an intoxicated tinker. The tools for keeping the propelling mechanism in order were coeval with Watt and Fulton. With a dynamo of 60 kw. there was not a single electric fan or tool available. And the maddening thing about it all is that tradition makes the competent engineer look askance at modern machine tools. He must make good with the silly old things at his disposal. his intellectual shame and his moral glory. does make good, in season and out of it, at sea and in port, fair weather and foul. The engines in his charge get there; and he, involved in grease and sweat and nastiness, retires to his primitive bath-room to divest himself of them and restore his bodily presence to a semblance of civilized decency.

Here is
For he

Those are the trials of the engineer. For the beginner the trials are in the coalbunkers and the fire-room. Oil-burning tur

bines are the words. They take much of the hardship out of life in the engine-room. But they cut out some of the beginner's jobs. And there always will be coal-burning ships, many of them poorly arranged, as long as the life of this generation and the next lasts. You have to take ships as you find them, not

as they ought to be or may be sometime in a happy future.

At this other end of the scale, the breakingin (and breaking) job as coal-passer, at which men headed for the engine-room start, I think of a husky fellow I know who ran away to sea at fourteen. The first voyage his hands swelled to three times their natural size, and when off-watch time came there was no sleep for him because he could not lie in his bunk, his back ached so. That is six years ago and he is a water-tender now, ready to go up for his engineer's license. But fourteen is too young for any lad to go into the fireroom, husky or not. A man needs to be pretty husky to go into it at eighteen.

You will have to get used, too, to an association with foreigners who are more menial than you through their necessities if not through their natures. As long as coal-ships of old type remain on the seasand the life of a well-built ship is twenty-five or thirty years-men used to hardships and discomforts, in both work and quarters, that deserve the term "menial" will have to be upon the seas, for good United States citizens will not hold these jobs. This is especially true of ships that operate in the tropic and And to mix with them on

semi-tropic runs.

even terms may be your fate for months or a year in your breaking-in process. How to handle them as a superior will always be one of the problems at sea for as long as the present generation lasts. A British engineer gives you an idea of what you have to face sometimes:

"Centurion" talks of "handling men"; by men he means British Tommies. What sort of figure would his officer cut if he had to handle a cosmopolitan crowd of firemen, coal-passers, and greasers in the tropics? What would he do with a crowd of forty yelling Chinks surging up the tunnel to beat up a poor silly junior engineer who, in a moment of exasperation, had punched one of them? What would he do with a lot of Japanese firemen, knowing not a word of English, who raced away up out of the stokehold at the moment of collision, and left him with a whirling telegraph and no steam? How would he run his watch and keep full speed if his lot included two Japs who were too small to open the wing-fire doors, an Arab from Perim who ate hashish, and an Armenian and a West-Indian negro who were always trying to knife each other over a Greek woman? Handling men! I tell you, sir, the British officer has a gaudy time of it compared with us in the merchant service this day! To have a white crowd once more, a crowd who could all speak English and do as they were told! It would be like changing from lion-taming to kicking the cat! And we have ten thousand ships at sea!

The problem for the United States merchant marine is not handling Japanese and