Part 1

Produced by Al Haines.

*[Frontispiece: "I HAULED IT UP HAND OVER HAND" (missing from book)]*

On Foreign Service

Or, The Santa Cruz Revolution

BY

STAFF SURGEON T. T. JEANS, R.N.

Author of "Mr. Midshipman Glover, R.N." "Ford of H.M.S. Vigilant"

_ILLUSTRATED BY WILLIAM RAINEY, R.I._

BLACKIE AND SON LIMITED LONDON GLASGOW AND BOMBAY 1911

*Preface*

This story is based on experiences, of my own, in various parts of the world, and describes a Revolution in a South American Republic, and the part played by two armoured cruisers whilst protecting British interests.

It describes life aboard a modern man-of-war, and attempts to show how the command of the sea exercises a controlling influence on the issue of land operations.

As the proof sheets have been read by several officers of the Royal Navy and Royal Marines, and many suggestions and corrections made, the naval portion of the story may be taken to give an accurate description of the incidents narrated.

T. T. JEANS, Staff Surgeon, Royal Navy.

ROYAL NAVAL HOSPITAL, CHATHAM.

*Contents*

CHAP.

I. Ordered to Santa Cruz II. A Revolution imminent III. The Revolution breaks out IV. The Rescue of the Sub V. Gerald Wilson Captures San Fernando VI. The *Hector* goes to San Fernando VII. General Zorilla falls back VIII. Zorilla loses his Guns IX. Zorilla attacks X. The Fight round the Casino XI. San Fernando attacked from the Sea XII. How we fought the Four Point Sevens XIII. Bad News for Gerald Wilson XIV. *La Buena Presidente* Fights XV. The Santa Cruz Fleet again XVI. The Attack on Santa Cruz XVII. The Ex-policeman XVIII. The *Hector* goes Home

*Illustrations*

"I hauled it up hand over hand" . . . _Frontispiece_ (missing from book)

"His eyes simply spat fire"

"Is that Gerald Wilson aboard?"

"I gave the first a blow on the point of his jaw"

"I dodged to the rear of the first wagon"

Mr. Bostock takes Command

The effect of the Shell

Scrambling down the Mountain Side

*CHAPTER I*

*Ordered to Santa Cruz*

_Written by Sub-Lieutenant William Wilson, R.N._

Only eight months ago Ginger Hood and I had been midshipmen aboard the old _Vengeance_, and of course had spent most of our time, in her, trying to get to windward of her sub, pull his leg, and dodge any job of work which came along. Now the boot was on the other leg, for we were sub-lieutenants ourselves--he in the _Hercules_, I in the _Hector_, with gun-rooms of our own to boss, and as we'd only been at the job for a month, you can guess that we hadn't quite settled down yet, and felt jolly much like fish out of water.

The _Hector_ and _Hercules_ were two big armoured cruisers, as like as two peas, and they had come straight out from England to Gibraltar to work up for their first gunnery practices. For the last ten days they had been lying inside the New Mole waiting for a strong south-easter to blow itself out, and we had taken the opportunity of trying to make our two gun-rooms friendly; for, as a matter of fact, they hated each other like poison, his mids. taking every opportunity of being rude to mine, and mine to his. These rows were always reported to us, and if we hadn't been such chums, I do believe that we, too, should have fallen out. If a _Hercules_ mid. came aboard the _Hector_ on duty, my chaps would let him wear his legs out on the quarterdeck for hours sooner than ask him down below, and you can guess that they were just as kind aboard the _Hercules_ if any of my mids. had to go aboard her. I had sixteen of the beauties in my gun-room to look after, and Ginger had fifteen; if his were more bother to him than mine were to me, I don't wonder he thought that his hair was turning grey. Never did they meet ashore without a free fight or some trouble or another cropping up. The row had started on board the _Cornwall_, where they had all been together as cadets, over some wretched boat-race. The winning crew had used racing oars, which the second boat's crew either hadn't had the savvy to get, or didn't find out till too late that they might have used. However it was, there had been a glorious row at the time, and as some of my mids. had pulled in the losing boat and some of Ginger's in the winning one, both gun-rooms still kept the feud going.

Ginger and I thought that the best way to patch up their quarrel was to make them play matches against each other, and this we had done--'soccer,' hockey, and cricket on the dockyard ground, and a 'rugger' game on the North Front.

There wasn't the slightest improvement. I had jawed my chaps till I was tired, and Ginger had jawed his, without the least effect; and now they'd just spoilt what might have been a grand game of hockey by squabbling all the time, claiming fouls, and 'sticks,' and nonsense like that, every other minute.

The game had been so unpleasant that Ginger and I were thankful when it was finished, slipped on our coats and watched our two teams quarrelling and taunting each other as they left the ground in two separate groups.

'Look at the young fools, Billums!' Ginger said angrily. 'Did you ever see anything so perfectly idiotic?'

'Come along up to the Club,' I said savagely. 'We'll have some tea. It makes one feel perfectly hopeless. I'd like to cane the whole crowd of them.'

Up we went together, and found the Captains and a number of the ward-room fellows from the two ships lying back in the wicker chairs on the verandah, basking in the sun and waiting for afternoon tea. As we came up the steps, they sang out to know which gun-room had won.

'_Hercules_ won, sir,' I told our Skipper, Captain Grattan. 'Won by four to two.'

'Tut, tut, boy! What's that now? Still one game ahead, ain't you?'

'No, sir, we're all square.'

'Well, beat 'em next time, lad.'

A jolly chap our Skipper was--short and plump and untidy, with a merry twinkle spreading over his funny old face, all wrinkled up with the strain of keeping his eyeglass in place. Everybody knew him as 'Old Tin Eye,' and he was so jolly unaffected that nobody could help liking him.

As we leant our hockey sticks up against the railings and sat down in the corner, we could hear him chaffing Captain Roger Hill, the tall, thin, beautifully dressed Skipper of the _Hercules_, and could jolly well see by the way he fidgeted in his chair that he didn't like it a little bit. Old Tin Eye would call him 'Spats,' and he didn't like it in public, and squirmed lest we inferior mortals should hear of it. I don't suppose he knew that nobody ever did call him anything but 'Spats.' You see, he never went ashore without white canvas spats over his boots, and they were very conspicuous.

Our Fleet Surgeon, Watson--a morose kind of chap--and Molineux, the Fleet Surgeon of the _Hercules_, stopped talking 'shop' to ask Ginger how many goals he'd scored (Ginger was the terror of his team); and Montague, our Gunnery Lieutenant, and Barton, their gunnery-man, left off talking about the coming gun-layers' 'test' to ask us if the gun-rooms had made up their row.

'No such luck, sir,' we said. 'They're worse, if anything.'

Whilst we were having our tea, one of the Club 'boys' brought along the little Gib. paper, and of course our Skipper had first turn.

'Cheer up, Spats, old boy!' he sang out loudly enough for every one to hear--he loved tormenting Captain Roger Hill; 'there's trouble in Santa Cruz again. Old Canilla, the President, has collared half-a-dozen Englishmen belonging to the Yucan Rubber Company, and won't give 'em up. If you've got any shares in it you'd better sell them.'

'Hello,' I sang out to Ginger. 'I've got a brother out there. He's supposed to be rubber-planting, but I'll bet he spends most of his time teaching his natives to bowl leg breaks at him. Hope they haven't collared him--I'm sorry for them if they have.'

We saw the telegrams ourselves later on, but there wasn't any more information. Old Gerald, my brother, didn't belong to the Yucan Company, and we forgot all about it because there was a much more exciting telegram above this one. The United Services had beaten Blackheath by fifteen points to five--a jolly sight more exciting that was, especially as I had played for the U.S. this season before we left England, and knew all the chaps playing on our side.

Well, that night I had the middle watch, and whilst the Angel and Cousin Bob (you don't know who they are yet, but you precious soon will) were making my cocoa, the light at the Europa Signal Station began flashing our number. I telephoned to the fore-bridge to smarten up the signalman, and ask what the dickens he meant by being asleep; and then, just for practice, and for something to do, leant up against the quarterdeck rails and took in the signal. 'Admiral Superintendent to Captain Grattan. Coal lighters will come alongside at daybreak. (Full stop.) Both _Hector_ and _Hercules_ will fill up with coal and water as soon as possible, and will complete with ten days' fresh provisions. (Full stop.)'

A second or two later the signalman came running up with his signal-pad, and, not having the faintest idea what was in the wind, I took it down to the Skipper. I had to shake him before he would wake; and when he sat up in his bunk, found his eyeglass, tucked it into his eye, and read the signal, he chuckled, 'Tut, tut, boy; we're off somewhere--finish gunnery. Won't old Montague be sick of life? Show it to the Commander, and repeat it to old "Spats"--I mean Captain Roger Hill.'

As I was tapping at the Commander's door, Cousin Bob and the Angel came along, and I knew they were up to some dodge, for I could see them grinning in the light of the gangway lantern.

'Couldn't you let us off watch, as we've got to coal early to-morrow? Your cocoa's just inside the battery door,' they asked me as I went in.

The Commander was out of bed like a redshank, read the signal, and gave me his orders for the morning. 'Can I let Temple and Sparks turn in, sir, as we're coaling early?'

'Confound them! I suppose they'd better, the young rascals. Turn the light off as you go out, and for heaven's sake make that lumbering ox of a sentry outside my cabin take his boots off.'

I looked round to find the two mids., but they'd taken the leave for granted and gone below, so I drank my cocoa and finished my watch by myself.

I may as well tell you about the two young beauties. Bob Temple was, unfortunately for me, my cousin--a scraggy, freckled, untidy midshipman, who hadn't the brains to get into mischief, or to get out of it again, but for his pal the Angel. What had made them chum together I don't know, for the Angel (Tommy Sparks) was the exact opposite of Bob--as spruce and ladylike a chap as you ever saw, always beautifully neat and clean, with a face like a girl's, light hair, and blue eyes. He looked as though butter couldn't possibly melt in his mouth, and devoted every moment when he wasn't asleep or eating to getting himself and my _dear_ young cousin into a scrape. It was one of his latest efforts which had cost them watch and watch for three days, and that was why they were keeping the 'middle' with me that night; so you can guess why they were so keen on the coaling signal, and had streaked down below. It didn't matter to me a tinker's curse how many watches the Angel kept, but with Cousin Bob it mattered a good deal. His people looked on me as his bear-leader, and every time he got into a row sooner or later I heard about it from them, or from his sister Daisy. I'm hanged if you are going to hear any more about her, except that she used to think me a brute whenever his leave was stopped, or he had 'watch and watch,' and put it all down to me. I hadn't had to cane him yet, but I knew that would have to happen sooner or later, and I guessed that when it did happen, she'd write me a pretty good 'snorter.'

Don't think that Bob would peach--not he, intentionally--but I knew exactly what he'd write home--something like this:

'The Angel sends his love--he and I cheeked the Padre at school yesterday--we had awful fun--old Billums (that was I) caned the two of us after evening quarters. This morning we both pretended we couldn't sit down, and groaned when we tried to, till the Padre went for old Billums for laying it on so hard. We've got our leave stopped for trying to catch rats on the booms with a new trap which the Angel has invented. The Commander caught his foot in it. You should have heard him curse.'

That was the kind of thing that used to go home, and his father and mother, and my mother too, to say nothing of Daisy, put it all down to me.

I had to turn the hands 'out' at seven bells, to rig coaling screens, the whips, and all the other gear for coaling, turned over my watch to the fat marine subaltern who relieved me, and got a couple of hours' sleep before the coal lighters bumped alongside.

It was a case of being as nippy as fleas after that, because we _had_ to beat the _Hercules_. You should have seen the Angel and Cousin Bob in blue overalls, with white cap covers pulled down over their heads, digging out for daylight down in my coal lighter among the foretopmen, all of them as black as niggers, shovelling coal into baskets, passing them up the side, dodging the lumps of coal which fell out of them and the empty baskets thrown back from the ship. There wasn't much of the Angel left about either of them then.

At the end of the first hour we'd got in 215 tons, and as the little numeral pendants 2-0-7 ran up to the _Hercules_ foreyard-arm to show how many tons she had taken in, our chaps cheered. We'd beaten her by eight tons.

'I bet she cheated even then,' I heard Bob tell his chum.

We were still a ton or two to the good after the second hour, and then the 'still' was sounded in both ships, and every one went to breakfast.

You should have been there to have seen us in our coaling rigs--simply a mass of coal dust and looking like a lot of Christy Minstrels--squatting on the deck outside the gun-room, and stuffing down sardines with our dirty hands, every one talking and shouting and as merry as pigs in a sty. Even young Marchant, the new clerk, had got into a coaling rig of sorts and worked like a horse--he was so keen to beat the hated _Hercules_.

I gave them all a quarter of an hour to stuff themselves, and then down we clambered into the lighters again and began filling baskets--nobody, not even the Angel, shirking a job like this, when there was the chance of getting even with the _Hercules_.

The men came struggling down after us, long before the breakfast half-hour was finished, and we could see the _Hercules'_ people swarming down into her lighters as well.

In all the lighters we must have had sixty tons or more in baskets before the bugler sounded the commence, the ship's band upon the booms banged out 'I'm afraid to go home in the dark,' the drum doing most of it; the men began cheering and singing the chorus, and the baskets began streaming on board again.

By the end of the fourth hour we were as hard at it as ever, but then Commander Robinson--we didn't care for him much, as he was such a bully--began bellowing at us, because the _Hercules_ was fifteen tons ahead. We could hear her chaps cheering. The band banged out again 'Yip-i-addy,' and the Skipper, with his eyeglass tucked in his eye and his long hair straggling over his neck, walked round the upper deck singing down to the lighters, 'Go it, lads, we must beat 'em.'

Down in my lighter the men were working like demons. They looked like demons too, got up in all sorts of queer rigs, and only stopping to take a drink from the mess tins of oatmeal water which the 'Scorp'[#] lighterman ladled out for them.

[#] Natives of Gibraltar are often called 'Scorps' (Rock Scorpions).

'Look out how you're trimming your lighter, Wilson,' the Commander had bellowed.

'Aye, aye, sir,' I shouted back, but never thought what he really meant--thought he meant we weren't working hard enough.

'We can't do no more 'ardly,' Pat O'Leary, the captain of the foretop, panted. 'The foretop men be pulling their pound--anyway, sir,' and he seized basket after basket and hove them on the platform rigged half-way up the ship's side, doing the work of three men.

'Keep it up, foretop,' I shouted, shovelling for all I was worth, Bob and the Angel keeping me busy with empty baskets. Then there was a warning shout from up above, a lot of chaps cried, 'Look out, sir!' and, before I knew what had happened, I was in the water, all my chaps were in the water, the lighter had turned turtle, and twenty or more tons of good coal was sinking to the bottom of the harbour.

The first thing I thought was, 'We can't beat them now,' knew it was my fault, and felt a fool. The Commander was bellowing for me to come aboard, and Bob and the Angel, with their faces rather cleaner and bursting with laughter, were bobbing alongside me. Then O'Leary spluttered out that the 'Scorp' lighterman was missing, and we both up with our feet and dived down to find him.

The water was so thick with coal dust that we couldn't see a foot away from us, but O'Leary touched him as he was coming up for breath and brought him to the surface, pretty well full of water and frightened out of his wits, though otherwise none the worse.

I did feel a fool if you like. What had happened was that we had dug away all the coal on one side, and I had never noticed--I was so excited--that the lighter was gradually heeling over, till over she went--upside down. The band had stopped, the whole of the coaling had stopped, the men looking over the side to see if any of us had been drowned, till the Commander, hoarse with shouting, shrieked for them to carry on again, whilst we clambered up the ship's side like drowned rats, O'Leary helping the lighterman. Well, there wasn't the faintest chance of our beating the _Hercules_ now. Every one knew it, everyone slacked off, and there was no more cheering and shouting of choruses.

It was my stupidity that had spoilt everything.

The only thing that I could give as an excuse was that I'd never been in charge of a coal lighter before, but I jolly well knew that the Commander would say, 'And I'll take care you never have charge again,' so I kept quiet whilst he stormed at me, shouting that he'd make me pay for the twenty tons. When he was out of breath, he took me, dripping with coal water, to the Captain, who was very angry and very disappointed about the _Hercules_ part of it, but he hated the Commander bellowing at people, so wasn't as severe as he might have been. He sent me away to right the lighter, and it took us--me and the foretop men--a couple of hours to do it, fixing ropes round her under water. We shouldn't have done it even then hadn't Stevens--one of the Engineer Lieutenants and a chum of mine--switched on the current to the electric fore capstan, and we hauled her round with this.

Another loaded lighter had been brought off from the shore to make up for the coal I'd tipped into the harbour, and then we were sent to empty her, whilst the rest of the ship's company sat with their feet dangling over the side, jeering at us.

By the time we had finished we were all in a pretty bad temper, all except O'Leary, who kept up his 'pecker' till the last basket had been filled and hauled up the side. 'I ought to have told you--anyway, sir; I've coaled from lighters time enough to have known better,' he said, trying to buck me up.

I reported myself to the Commander, had another burst of angry bellowing from him, and then every one had to clean ship.

Bob and the Angel were shivering close to me, so I sent them down below to get out of their wet things, but they were up again in a couple of seconds, and could hardly speak for excitement.

'We're off to Santa Cruz. They've collared a steamer as well as those Englishmen, and we're off to give 'em beans. Isn't that ripping?'

It jolly well was, but the youngsters had had just about enough of working in their wet clothes, and were shaking with cold, so I sent them down again and went on with my job--it didn't make any difference whether hoses were turned on me or not, I was so wet. Presently, old Bill Perkins, our First Lieutenant, came limping along, his jolly old red face beaming all over. 'Never mind, Wilson, we'll beat 'em another time; lucky none of you were hurt or drowned.' He saw that I too was about blue with cold, and took my job whilst I changed into dry things.

Old Ginger came over after dinner from the _Hercules_. 'They're having a sing-song in the gun-room, but I thought I'd give you a look up,' he told me--'awfully sorry about the lighter business.' Of course he'd come across to cheer me, and he did too, both of us talking twenty to the dozen about Santa Cruz and the chances of our having a 'scrap.'

My chaps presently started a bit of a jamberee, old Ginger singing a couple of songs and joining in the choruses. We were just beginning to forget all about the coaling, when a signalman came down and handed Barton, the senior mid., a signal. 'Senior Midshipman, _Hercules_, to Ditto, _Hector_.--Hope none of you are any the worse for your nice little swim.'

The mids. were too angry to speak for a minute, and then the storm burst, and they called the _Hercules_ gun-room all the names they could lay hold of, old Ginger looking very uncomfortable, and very angry too.

'Never mind, Billums,' he said. 'We've done our best to make 'em friends, and they won't be,' and then sang out, 'Gentlemen, I apologise for that signal--don't answer it--its beastly rude, and I'll cane the senior midshipman to-morrow morning.'

There was no more sing-song after that, old Ginger went back to his ship as angry as we were, and I turned in, knowing jolly well that my chaps would hate Ginger's all the more, and that Ginger beating the senior mid. would only make things worse.

'Let's hope we get mixed up in a 'scrap' or two out in Santa Cruz,' Ginger had said as he went away, and I knew that that was about the only thing that would do the trick and make them friends.

That was a bad day's work for me. I'd shown myself a fool, the Commander wouldn't forget my carelessness for months, and the Skipper would feel he couldn't trust me. That made me want to kick myself.

*CHAPTER II*

*A Revolution Imminent*

_Written by Sub-Lieutenant William Wilson, R.N._

Early next morning, just as the sun was lighting up the signal station at the top of the Rock, we and the _Hercules_ slipped from our buoys and shoved off into the Atlantic, the _Hercules_ two cables astern of us.