have believed it," I declared. "No," he said. "You would not have

thought she would have cracked an egg--eh?"
I certainly wouldn't have thought that. He shook his head, and

added: "Ah! These great, big things, they want some handling."
Some months afterwards I was back in Sydney. The same pilot

brought me in from sea. And I found the same steamship, or else
another as like her as two peas, lying at anchor not far from us.

The pilot told me she had arrived the day before, and that he was
to take her alongside to-morrow. I reminded him jocularly of the

damage to the quay. "Oh!" he said, "we are not allowed now to
bring them in under their own steam. We are using tugs."

A very wise regulation. And this is my point--that size is to a
certain extent an element of weakness. The bigger the ship, the

more delicately she must be handled. Here is a contact which, in
the pilot's own words, you wouldn't think could have cracked an

egg; with the astonishing result of something like eighty feet of
good strong wooden quay shaken loose, iron bolts snapped, a baulk

of stout timber splintered. Now, suppose that quay had been of
granite (as surely it is now)--or, instead of the quay, if there

had been, say, a North Atlantic fog there, with a full-grown
iceberg in it awaiting the gentle contact of a ship groping its way

along blindfold? Something would have been hurt, but it would not
have been the iceberg.

Apparently, there is a point in development when it ceases to be a
true progress--in trade, in games, in the marvellous handiwork of

men, and even in their demands and desires and aspirations of the
moral and mental kind. There is a point when progress, to remain a

real advance, must change slightly the direction of its line. But
this is a wide question. What I wanted to point out here is--that

the old Arizona, the marvel of her day, was proportionately
stronger, handier, better equipped, than this triumph of modern

naval architecture, the loss of which, in common parlance, will
remain the sensation of this year. The clatter of the presses has

been worthy of the tonnage, of the preliminary paeans of triumph
round that vanished hull, of the reckless statements, and elaborate

descriptions of its ornate splendour. A great babble of news (and
what sort of news too, good heavens!) and eager comment has arisen

around this catastrophe, though it seems to me that a less strident
note would have been more becoming in the presence of so many

victims left struggling on the sea, of lives miserably thrown away
for nothing, or worse than nothing: for false standards of

achievement, to satisfy a vulgar demand of a few moneyed people for
a banal hotel luxury--the only one they can understand--and because

the big ship pays, in one way or another: in money or in
advertising value.

It is in more ways than one a very ugly business, and a mere scrape
along the ship's side, so slight that, if reports are to be

believed, it did not interrupt a card party in the gorgeously
fitted (but in chaste style) smoking-room--or was it in the

delightful French cafe?--is enough to bring on the exposure. All
the people on board existed under a sense of false security. How

false, it has been sufficiently demonstrated. And the fact which
seems undoubted, that some of them actually were reluctant to enter

the boats when told to do so, shows the strength of that falsehood.
Incidentally, it shows also the sort of discipline on board these

ships, the sort of hold kept on the passengers in the face of the
unforgiving sea. These people seemed to imagine it an optional

matter: whereas the order to leave the ship should be an order of
the sternest character, to be obeyed unquestioningly and promptly

by every one on board, with men to enforce it at once, and to carry
it out methodically and swiftly. And it is no use to say it cannot

be done, for it can. It has been done. The only requisite is
manageableness of the ship herself and of the numbers she carries

on board. That is the great thing which makes for safety. A
commander should be able to hold his ship and everything on board

of her in the hollow of his hand, as it were. But with the modern
foolish trust in material, and with those floating hotels, this has

become impossible. A man may do his best, but he cannot succeed in
a task which from greed, or more likely from sheer stupidity, has

been made too great for anybody's strength.
The readers of THE ENGLISH REVIEW, who cast a friendly eye nearly

six years ago on my Reminiscences, and know how much the merchant
service, ships and men, has been to me, will understand my

indignation that those men of whom (speaking in no sentimental
phrase, but in the very truth of feeling) I can't even now think

otherwise than as brothers, have been put by their commercial
employers in the impossibility to perform efficiently their plain

duty; and this from motives which I shall not enumerate here, but
whose intrinsic unworthiness is plainly revealed by the greatness,

the miserablegreatness, of that disaster. Some of them have
perished. To die for commerce is hard enough, but to go under that

sea we have been trained to combat, with a sense of failure in the
supreme duty of one's calling is indeed a bitter fate. Thus they

are gone, and the responsibility remains with the living who will
have no difficulty in replacing them by others, just as good, at

the same wages. It was their bitter fate. But I, who can look at
some arduous years when their duty was my duty too, and their

feelings were my feelings, can remember some of us who once upon a
time were more fortunate.

It is of them that I would talk a little, for my own comfort
partly, and also because I am sticking all the time to my subject

to illustrate my point, the point of manageableness which I have
raised just now. Since the memory of the lucky Arizona has been

evoked by others than myself, and made use of by me for my own
purpose, let me call up the ghost of another ship of that distant

day whose less lucky destiny inculcates another lesson making for
my argument. The Douro, a ship belonging to the Royal Mail Steam

Packet Company, was rather less than one-tenth the measurement of
the Titanic. Yet, strange as it may appear to the ineffable hotel

exquisites who form the bulk of the first-class Cross-Atlantic
Passengers, people of position and wealth and refinement did not

consider it an intolerablehardship to travel in her, even all the
way from South America; this being the service she was engaged

upon. Of her speed I know nothing, but it must have been the
average of the period, and the decorations of her saloons were, I

dare say, quite up to the mark; but I doubt if her birth had been
boastfully paragraphed all round the Press, because that was not

the fashion of the time. She was not a mass of material gorgeously
furnished and upholstered. She was a ship. And she was not, in

the apt words of an article by Commander C. Crutchley, R.N.R.,
which I have just read, "run by a sort of hotel syndicate composed

of the Chief Engineer, the Purser, and the Captain," as these
monstrous Atlantic ferries are. She was really commanded, manned,

and equipped as a ship meant to keep the sea: a ship first and
last in the fullest meaning of the term, as the fact I am going to

relate will show.
She was off the Spanish coast, homeward bound, and fairly full,

just like the Titanic; and further, the proportion of her crew to
her passengers, I remember quite well, was very much the same. The

exact number of souls on board I have forgotten. It might have
been nearly three hundred, certainly not more. The night was

moonlit, but hazy, the weather fine with a heavy swell running from
the westward, which means that she must have been rolling a great

deal, and in that respect the conditions for her were worse than in
the case of the Titanic. Some time either just before or just

after midnight, to the best of my recollection, she was run into
amidships and at right angles by a large steamer which after the

blow backed out, and, herself apparently damaged, remained
motionless at some distance.

My recollection is that the Douro remained afloat after the
collision for fifteen minutes or thereabouts. It might have been

twenty, but certainly something under the half-hour. In that time
the boats were lowered, all the passengers put into them, and the

lot shoved off. There was no time to do anything more. All the
crew of the Douro went down with her, literally without a murmur.

When she went she plunged bodily down like a stone. The only
members of the ship's company who survived were the third officer,

who was from the first ordered to take charge of the boats, and the