Warrant Officer Crottle didn’t think much of the Navy sports program and rowing in particular. And Hobson was the unofficial coach and manager of the rowing team.
Technically there was an ensign who’d rowed crew for two semesters at Annapolis assigned to run the team, but he was overburdened by official duties, and Hobson was the one who made it work. He cajoled volunteers and figured a practice schedule. He smooth-talked his recruits into regular training which went beyond rowing and included running, speed walking, and work with Indian clubs. Hobson, who had grown up among sampans and schooners, had the most small-boat training of any of the crew, many of whom were from landlocked Western and Midwestern states, except the Oyster Pirate and Tiger.
“Coaling Baltimore at 0830. Make sure Baltimore’s infernal gun sponsons don’t gouge our sides.” Wheelwright announced at the end of reports and the captain nodded.
This was no revelation. Coaling was simply a matter of pain, pain to be endured, and accustomed pain.
He did not mention the pulling-boat competition; he did not need to. Baltimore would bait Pluto and Pluto would take it, for the time being.
“As is our lot in life, we shall be dispersing black diamonds to the needy.”
“Bring back sail, bring back sail,” was the chant that started somewhere on the Baltimore’s foredeck and then died. The skipper of Baltimore holding his stopwatch scowled and looked at his executive officer. Somewhere amidships Baltimore’s massive master-at-arms brushed aside lined-up bodies with a snarl as he made for the miscreants. There would be no counter-productive frivolity, let alone unnecessary time-wasting talk, on Baltimore. The time it took to take on coal was one indication of operational readiness. The skipper of Baltimore, like every other protected cruiser skipper, timed coaling.
“These Baltimores is full o’ beans, ain’t they?” Jackson said to Phipps. Phipps gave the black yeoman a sidelong glance. “Them cruiser sailors are no stranger to arrogance, that’s for sure. A few weeks ago they caught some ’Frisco gunrunner trying to smuggle Gatling guns to the Moros on Mindanao. Admiral loves ’em now, more than ever. Heck, they’ll be totally insufferable for months. Cruiser sailors, hah, no liberty port’s gonna be big enough for their swelled heads.”
Pluto’s, mascot, Admiral Fu, a goat with a coat like obsidian, bleated eagerly from his station on the main deck.
Baltimore and Pluto were rafted up on Baltimore’s anchor in a still cove off Formosa. Enormous hemp fenders had been rigged, as well as a series of “clotheslines” and brows for small carts. Pluto was the larger ship. She was black and forbidding with buff colored decks that would soon be black, too. Alongside her—nearly as big—bristling with six-inch guns lay Baltimore, with buff decks, too, but painted a virginal white. The coal would be in sacks primarily, but any container would do. The coal was wheeled in coaling trucks to the round bunker scuttles and dumped down chutes into the bunkers. There trimmers shifted the coals around evenly and jammed it evenly. This was a timed maneuver, considered a direct measure of a warship’s ability to operate under wartime conditions and was an indirect measure of a warship’s endurance.
The amount of coal shifted during the preceding hour was announced on the hour. A good ship could shift 100 tons of coal in an hour. It was relentless, grimy, backbreaking work.
As the first coal went into Baltimore’s bunkers the cry came up like a wail, “Nip diamonds.” The lament “Nip diamonds” was echoed throughout Baltimore and Baltimore’s crew gave Pluto’s crew a collective look that was not, as Phipps described it, “Christian.” Philadelphia was the City of Brotherly Love; Baltimore as far as anyone could tell was the City that Hated Nip Diamonds. Japanese coal burned sooty and fouled the ship. Japanese coal was the dirtiest coal a ship could burn.
As a rated quartermaster Hobson did not have to pass coal. In fact, Phipps actively discouraged him from doing so; it might set bad precedent. If the ship had been underway, there was no doubt Hobson would not have been allowed to pass coal. His quartermaster skills were too important to the running of Pluto. But they were at anchor and Hobson had submitted a chit to do so. The system couldn’t really stop you from doing extra work without a good reason. That too might set a dangerous precedent.
Warrant Officer Crottle looked on in his sooty coveralls. Coalpassers, a distinct rate, came under the engineering.
“Black Gang don’t need no ‘exercise,’” said Crottle with disdain and flipped the remainder of his coffee over the side. The surly engineer wiped his brush-like walrus mustache, which arched gloriously and seemed to accent his massive shoulders.
He knew why Hobson and the rest of the rowing team had volunteered to pass coal. Only a few of the engineering rates had joined the rowing team and Hobson suspected Crottle had discouraged others from rounding out the team. The Oyster Pirate, an oiler, was one of the few that had risked Crottle’s displeasure.
“Exercise is for skaters, for people who don’t have no real work. Exercise’s fool’s work for people with nothing better to do. You don’t get paid for ‘exercise,’ do ya? So what’s the point? Somebody else’s entertainment?”
“Just taking an even strain, Mr. Crottle,” Hobson returned. There was nothing to be gained getting into an argument with Crottle. Was Crottle looking to start something, or was he making a point?
Hobson crawled down into Pluto’s bunkers with a shovel and began loading 100-pound bags.
He could hear Admiral Fu bleating derisively above him.
Another sailor in the bunker mused about more efficient ways to pass coal. It was said experiments had been conducted where coal could be passed at sea using shear legs, tensioned cables, and trolleys. Some said oil would change things. No one on either ship could truly visualize a Navy that ran on something poured out of a can.
Lunch was on station. Salted beef on crackers that turned black with handling, and water, was passed among the crew. The sailor next to Hobson looked out of the scuttle at Baltimore.
“Hey, look they’ve got soft tack, bread. Fresh bread or biscuits maybe.”
A protected cruiser stood a high likelihood of having a baker and serviceable ovens. Pluto had none of these.
“Criminy, wish-t I was on a cruiser.”
Crottle appeared behind him out of nowhere. His battered form loomed over the edge of the scuttle and with the sun just behind it. His massive shadow covered the scuttle. He spit over the side, a good distance.
“Brass and brightwork and fresh paint and fresh bread don’t make no ship. Either of these magic carpets made of steel can take you some place better ’an you been.
“Who’s to say what ships better ’an another. We’re here to make sure the Navy lays ordnance on a target some place, anyplace, when it wants to. It’s like we’re all links in one long anchor chain. If Baltimore can lob shells into Shanghai or into a limey battleship, who’s to say whether they could do it ’cause we gave ’em the coal to get there, or it’s because some slick gunner’s mate can do math or the stewards served a good enough meal to the officers to give ’em gumption. It all goes into the forgin’ of the chain. Well you jus’ remember ‘…on the strength of one link in the cable, dependeth the might of the chain…’”
“I’d check any new bosses and shipmates afore you get it into your head to jump ship. Don’t jump outta the boiler into the firebox, you scrawny excuse for a sailor. You so sure that you got it so bad here?”
Crottle turned away just as suddenly as he had appeared. The sailor ducked down into the scuttle muttering under his breath, “Tarnation, the Prince of Darkness has spoken and he spoke to me.”
The Prince of Darkness. No one ever said it to his face.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“Secure from coaling.” The boatswain’s whistles trilled.
Coal dust covered everything. It was as if the world had been scorched and covered with black pepper.
“The G
reat Black Fleet,” the sailor next to Hobson mumbled as he poked his head through the bunker scuttle. They looked at each other. They were totally black except for their eyeballs, and little white cracks radiating from their eyes. “The stacks have gone to war with the decks.”
Hobson looked out of the bunker scuttle and recognized Gunnarson on Baltimore lounging on a gunmount just above him. Gunnarson did not recognize him.
Crottle mustered the coalpassers on the fantail and they stripped. They stacked their clothing in bins. Later the clothing would be tied to lines trailed over the side leaving a squid-like line of ink. Pluto fouled both the skies and the seas.
Crottle chuckled mirthlessly. Before him were dozens of men jet black from the neck up, with pale pasty bodies, gritting their teeth and naked as jaybirds. He gave the order to turn on the hoses. The hoses were none too gentle. Black faces and pale white bodies.
“Pluto’s Black Diamonds, best damned minstrel show in the Pacific,” a quartermaster yelled down from Baltimore’s signal bridge as Pluto pulled away and the coaling detail began its wash down. The signalman cooing noises and held his binoculars like a dowager at the opera.
“Stow it, Baltimore” Crottle bellowed. One of the hoses seemed to turn toward Baltimore and the quartermaster sought cover.
Baltimore, conducting a similar washdown, crossed Pluto’s hose stream with its own in warning. Then both hoses turned back to their naked crews.
“Hey turn the hose on Wild Irene,” yelled one coalpasser pointing to a tattoo of a winking Gibson girl on one buttock. “She don’t like no black diamonds, just the white, sparkly kind.”
“With a tattoo, you ain’t never really naked, ya know,” he pronounced to those around him sagely.
Hobson saw Lieutenant Commander Wheelwright bridle.
Wheelwright was proud of Pluto’s minstrel show, one of the best in the fleet. To the coal dust covered crew, the reference had a double meaning. Minstrel shows were standard shipboard entertainment throughout the fleet and had been so for decades. They were a long established ritual of jokes, songs, music, and dancing. The humor was broad; subtlety had never been regarded as a naval virtue. The First Class Yeoman, Pompeii Jackson, was an accomplished buck dancer, and one of the crew’s most respected and well-liked members. His father had been a minstrel on a riverboat. Yet, the comment had been meant as a slur. Perhaps minstrel shows themselves carried the undercurrent of a slur, Hobson thought. It was just easier to draw sailors out and get them to them to take their lot less seriously, if there was an accepted ritual. Like the Crossing the Line ritual, everyone knew the jokes and the parts, but it was still taken as fun where the whitehats were the stars. Everyone had seen or heard of a minstrel show and knew when to laugh or applaud. So if a sailor took part and seemed a little fouled up, well the sailor was just playing a part and who knew if it was he or what the part called for. Everyone participated at some point. Many looked forward to them.
“I think we are going to do away with black face from here on out,” Wheelwright said to no one in particular. “Our shows don’t need it.”
Later someone had said something to Jackson about it and he had rubbed his chin thoughtfully, “Naw, don’t need it. ’Cept if this catches on, I don’t know whose rice bowl is going to get broken back home. Some of us,” he grinned knowingly, “ didn’t have to put much on. Yes, we used to save a lot of money on that black face make-up. Me, I won’t miss it. Just nobody mess with my dancing. Ha, you folk won’t ever learn to dance right.”
Then Jackson laughed that laugh that everyone liked.
No one seemed to mind except the machinist’s mate who had come up with a goop for cleaning the stuff off and charged a whole two bits. “Point out that signalman to me when we get back to Cavite.”
“I’d would kind of like for us to beat Baltimore in that pulling boat race,” Jackson said to himself as he descended the ladder.
A day out of Olongapo, Hobson was on the signal bridge. Quartermasters, in addition to navigational duties, handled flags and signals. Another U.S.N. ship was in the area and he was searching the horizon for it.
Hobson was particularly alert in the first dogwatch as they emerged from a rain squall. Tiger had smuggled a mango out of the officers’ mess for Hobson and he was carving slices out of it on the sly. The trouble was that Admiral Fu one deck below had detected the existence of the stray mango and had begun to bleat.
As the shadows lengthened, they began overtaking a good-sized prau and Hobson gave it the once over. A man and his wife tended its lines.
In the foresheets of the distant prau was a man about average height for a Filipino wearing little more than a loincloth and a scarf around his head. Tucked in the loincloth was a bolo knife. At the tiller was a very young woman wrapped in little more than a towel. He seemed unusually well developed in the shoulders for a Filipino. A long luxuriant moustache arched below his nose like a miniature woman’s boa. It would have made a wonderful handlebar waxed. The man’s hand drifted unconsciously to stroke it.
Hobson remembered their course would take them in the general direction of Mindanao and called down the speaking tube, “Phipps, suggest to the skipper we come closer to that prau.”
“Hobson, we can’t be inspecting barebreasted jail-bait just because you learned how to use a set of binoculars today. You’re gonna haf to learn a-nat-tummy on your own time.”
“No, Phipps, I’m serious. Suggest he change course to get closer to that prau. Something a mite unchristian there. Just a mite, tell ’em Hobson said so. Just a mite.”
A ten degree course alteration brought the prau into fuller view. Thirty minutes later Hobson could make out fishnets in detail and a man who had a badly broken nose and a tattoo on one wrist.
“Phipps? Tell the skipper I think it’s a gunrunner. Guns to the Moros on Mindanao. We better get to her before sunset.”
Tiger sounded the bugle and Pluto came to general quarters.
Pluto raised the code flags for “heave to, boarding” which were ignored. A gun crew prepared to fire across the prau’s bow.
At three hundred yards all hell broke loose. The prau suddenly bristled with Winchesters and two Pluto crewmen readying the steam launch for the boarding party fell dead. At the same time the searchlights were shot out.
“Gutsy bastards.” Phipps said with heat. “Gutsy, dead as a tin of corned beef, bastards.”
“Open up with the Maxims.” Wheelwright commanded. The prau was laced from stem to stern with ball.
All the prau’s lines parted and its sail came crashing to the deck. In the twilight, they could see a half dozen Moros rushing on deck as the prau was holed below the water line. Pluto gave no cease fire command. They dropped into a bloody tangle. Hobson could not see the girl, but assumed she was dead, too. The man with the flowing moustache had found concealment and continued to lay down fire. The Maxims probed for a while and eventually found him.
Hobson was part of the boarding party. The prau was settling. The man with the moustache was indeed the man with the bowler.
“Eagle, globe, and anchor.” Phipps said looking at his tattoo. “Hmmm, didn’t put enough aside for retiry-ment. Should have bought a bar instead. One of Butcher Waller’s boys, I’ll bet. Decided to play both sides. I’d say he was the boss and it looks like the fellow in charge of the project has to know the locals in this operation.”
They found brass cases of Winchesters elaborately encased in oiled leather bags stored in watertight brass boxes.
“Very, very polished.” Wheelwright observed. “That’s not a standard shipping package for ordnance. Someone must know about ships and the sea and how to protect expensive hardware afloat, no matter how crude the delivery.”
“Not just afloat,” Jackson, the yeoman, interrupted. “These packages can be submerged. You could just drop them off the coast, and buoy them for pickup.”
Once stripped of her cargo, the prau was set afire and adrift. They would photograph the bodies of the gunrunners in daylight. The prau burned brilliantly with occasional bursts that proved they had not found all the ammunition.
When the prau had burned to the waterline the gun crew broke apart the remainder of the derelict with 30mm high explosive rounds.
The boatswain’s mate piped “all hands to bury the dead,” the funeral service was read over the two crewmembers, they were consigned to the deep, and their personal effects were auctioned off to the crew.
The gunrunners too were dropped over the side, but with less ceremony.
Tiger was surprised to discover that Admiral Fu had fallen to a stray bullet. There was fresh meat in the crew’s mess that night.
The real Admiral was very pleased with Pluto. The pulling boat race now for Wheelwright—was all risk and beyond any benefit, but the die had been cast. It could not win him favor above what had been earned intercepting a gunrunner to the Moros.
The crew positively swaggered around Manila. The Oyster Pirate for a beer would show shipmates Stewart’s Fabric and Dry Goods if they could endure the thirty-second warm up period it took for him to get started on the story. At a higher level there was even talk of other colliers with all Navy crews.
That week, Calle de Escolta belonged to Pluto.
Hobson found himself in an office in Manila describing his meeting with Atticaris to his commanding officer, Mr. Draper who had been called in from Japan, a local ONI officer and the flag lieutenant. He described the pursuit of Atticaris and the subsequent seizure of the gunrunning prau on its way to Mindanao.
In return, the ONI officer informed them that the man in the battered bowler had been O’Harc, an ex-Marine with many years’ Philippine experience.
“Funny thing,” the ONI officer said. “We have been paying O’Hare for intelligence for months. He provided good information on the Moros. We’ve rounded up several Moro insurgents and we foiled several of their raids based on his tips.”
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