ye to the compass ordering, say, two hundred
changes of course in every hour. And one watch-officer of every
destroyer has the extra job of acting as chief engineer of the ship; and
when a watch-officer had to go aboard a torpedoed ship, or to go in the
crow's nest in a critical time, to spend hours, it may be, the time so
spent is in addition to his regular eight hours.

If he is the executive officer he must also act as navigator; and as it
is important to know just where the ship is any moment of the day or
night, the navigator does not figure on sleep in any long stretches.
About twenty waking hours out of twenty-four is his portion. As for the
skipper: Every single waking hour of his is a heavy strain. I went to
sea with the commander of the alert, intense type. Most of them are of
that type, but this one particularly so, with eyes, ears, nerves, and
brain working always at full power. Three hours in twenty-four was a
pretty good lay-off for him.

Lively? Our destroyers are about 11-1/2 times as long as they are wide;
which does not mean that they cannot keep the sea. They can keep the
sea. Put one of them stern-on to a 90-mile breeze and all the sea to go
with it, give her 5 or 6 knots an hour head of steam, and she will stay
there till the ocean is blown dry. But they are engined out of all
proportion to their tonnage, with their great weight of machinery deep
down; which means that they roll. Oh, but they do roll! Whoopo--down and
back like that! Most any of them will make a complete roll inside of six
seconds. Ours was a 5-1/4-second one. When she got to rolling right, she
would snap a careless sailor overboard as quickly as you could snap a
bug off the end of a whalebone cane. There is one over there which
rolled 73 degrees--and came back.

Take one of them when she is hiking along at 20 knots, rolling from 45
to 50 degrees, and just about filling the whale-boat swinging to the
skid deck davits as she rolls! See one dive and take a sea over her
fo'c's'le head and smash in her chart-house bulkhead maybe! Their outer
skin is only 3/16 of an inch thick. See that thin skin give to the sea
like a lace fan to a breeze! Watch the deck crawl till sometimes the
deck-plates buckle up into V-shaped ridges! See them with the seas
sloshing up their low freeboard and over their narrow decks, so that men
have to make use of a sort of trolley line to get about. A man is aft
and has to go forward, say. He hooks onto a rope l