The Other Side of the Night by Daniel Allen Butler Page A

for the threat it was in the merchant marine until well into the 1930s. When the 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes described life in the Middle Ages as “nasty, brutish, and short,” he might equally well have been speaking of the lot of British merchant seamen for much of the 19th and 20th centuries. There was little that the men could do to improve their situation, for there were always more unemployed deckhands and men from the “black gang” of the engine rooms than there were berths: once a man had a job, he would tolerate almost anything to assure that he kept it.
    The explanation for such a dreadful state of affairs could be summed up in one word: greed. The shipowners, already wealthy, simply accrued more wealth by forcing shipping rates as high as they could while keeping wages as low as possible. When J.P. Morgan was forming International Mercantile Marine, he began cutting shipping fares to the bone to compel his competitors to allow themselves to be absorbed by IMM; he was able to do so in part by reducing seamen’s wages. However, once the cartel was formed, shipping rates rose again, but wages remained the same for the crews.
    Wages were what might be expected. While deckhands—the skilled, able-bodied seamen who did the actual work of shiphandling—could make as much as £10 a month, depending on their rating, the men who did the back-breaking work of feeding the ships’ coal-fired boilers typically made less than half that amount. The deck crew at least had some compensation in the knowledge of their hard-won skills in handling lines, taking soundings, hoisting and answering flag signals, reading Morse lamps, working the ship’s machinery and mechanisms, or manning the helm if they were a qualified quartermaster. They were regarded with something approaching professional status by their working-class peers, if still disdained by the majority of their officers. But the men who literally brought power, heat, and electricity—in a word, life—to these ships were the poorest paid and least-regarded of any of the crew.
    With the possible exception of the lot of a galley slave, it would be difficult to conceive of a task more demanding and demeaning, more backbreaking and more soul-breaking, than feeding the furnaces of a coal-fired boiler on a steamship. The confines of the hull meant that none of the bulky automated feeding mechanisms that fed boilers ashore could be installed in the ship. Instead the entire chore was accomplished through sheer human muscle power. The task began with the trimmers, who had to carry the coal from the bunkers to the foot of the firebox, using wheelbarrows to deliver great lumps of coal, measuring as much as twenty inches in length and eight inches thick. At the start of the voyage, with full bunkers, it was a relatively easy job, but toward the end of the crossing, as the bunkers began to empty, it was fiercesome work, for by then the coal might be 150 feet or more from the scuttle where it was loaded in the barrows. And for every trimmer carrying a load to the furnaces, there was one inside the bunker shifting coal. Despite the fact that the trimmers were at the very bottom of the hierarchy of the engineering department, there was a certain degree of skill required in their job as well. It was their responsibility to see that the coal was used in uniform amounts from each bunker, so that the weight of the remaining coal wouldn’t unbalance the ship, upsetting her trim—hence the name “trimmers.” Their world was an eerie one, even more poorly lit and poorly ventilated than their quarters, while temperatures ranged from the searing heat of the furnace door to the sea-chilled reaches of the farther bunkers. Once the coal was delivered to the firebox, the stokers took over.
    Usually working stripped to the waist, like the trimmers their torsos and faces covered in coal dust, the stokers were eerily illuminated by the glow of the flames in the fireboxes and the flare