It is somewhat comforting to know that the exigencies of peaceful travel, severe as they are undoubtedly, do not require such suffering as that from their servants. Of course there are times, such as upon the outbreak of fire or the sudden springing of a leak, when the toilers below are literally between the devil and the deep sea. Also in the case of a boiler explosion or a sudden breakdown of machinery in full career, when the danger and attendant suffering are very great. But then, we all have to face dangers at times in burning houses, railway accidents, and so on, which come so seldom that we do not lose any sleep in anticipating them. Therefore we do not reckon the possibilities of calamity among the drawbacks to a fireman's or trimmer's business. It is the steady stress of such conditions of labour which is to be deplored.
Before the black watch below can be relieved there is always a duty to be performed that makes no unfitting climax to the preceding tale of toil. It is "ashes up." Some steamers have been fitted with a contrivance for obviating this piece of hard work--the fitting of a sort of valve in the ship's side or bottom through which the ashes and _débris_ of the fire can be blown into the sea. These, however, are few. The usual way is for the ashes to be filled into long iron buckets, just as much as a strong man can lift when full, down in the stokehold. Some of the trimmers go on deck (how sweet the sea air is after their long sojourn below!), and sliding open a door in the tube of one of the ventilators, discover there a winch. The chain of this winch runs down into the stokehold, where it is hooked on to the ash-bucket. The trimmers on deck heave away with all their might (for when their task is ended they may go below), and when the bucket reaches them, they snatch it and carry it to the ash-shoot, where they dump its contents overboard. In some very well-found ships there is a small steam-winch for doing this work, but usually it is performed as described, and a heavy piece of business it is, involving the raising of several tons of ashes from the bottom of the ship.
Here I must leave the fireman and trimmer. I hope that engineers and their crews will forgive me, being a sailor, for having had the hardihood to say anything about them at all. They know very well the prejudice that even now exists against them in the minds of most sailors, and they will probably look closely into what I have written for some sign of sneering depreciation. But they will not find it. My sympathies are most fully with them. My admiration for them is great. And I think that as regards the firemen and trimmers, that their work in tropical seas is so utterly unfit for white men to do that, in spite of the hardship attendant upon loss of employment at first, it would be a good thing if stokeholds were entirely manned by negroes, who, from their constitutional experience of heat, must be far better fitted to endure the conditions of the stokehold. Many southern-going ships carry them now. I should not be sorry to see them the rule, and my countrymen doing something better.