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Updated: July 11, 2025
It was a perfect, calm day, and the ships lay, still as paint between a clear blue sky and a deep-blue sea while a boat-load of bluejackets from the big fighting ship rowed across a swell so gentle that it seemed to be only serving to put life into a picture. The lagging steamer had been short a few oilers or firemen or water-tenders. The big ship had them to spare.
We looked out to seaward and noted the black sky and the rising wind. "I guess you 'heroes' will have a chance to show what right you have to be called seamen," said "Stump," mimicking "Cutlets." "Watch on deck, put on your oilers," shouted the boatswain's mates. The order came none too soon, for as the last man ran up the companion-way ladder, the rain began to drop in sheets.
"It's time we took a brace here," he growled, "we're livin' like a lot of Oilers." Oilers: Greasers Mexicans Sang hurried out for a broom. Senor Johnson sat where he was, his heavy, square brows knit. Suddenly he stooped, seized one of the newspapers, drew near the lamp, and began to read. It was a Kansas City paper and, by a strange coincidence, was dated exactly a year before.
It was the Red Un's pleasure to assist unassumingly in the surveillance of that part of the ship where the great god, Steam, ruled an underworld of trimmers and oilers and stokers and assistant engineers and even, with reservations, the Chief.
The fourth engineer and the three oilers, after a warm interview with Wolf Larsen, were furnished with outfits from the slop-chests, assigned places under the hunters in the various boats and watches on the vessel, and bundled forward into the forecastle. They went protestingly, but their voices were not loud.
The navy wants ship-fitters, blacksmiths, plumbers, electricians, wireless operators, carpenters, boiler-makers, painters, printers, store-keepers, bakers, cooks, stewards, drug clerks; even as it wants gunners, boatmen, quartermasters, sailmakers, firemen, oilers, and it will take clarinet, trombone, and cornet players and the like for the ship's band.
But, so far as he could see, the dovetailed masonry stood intact. A voice hailed him. "What a night! What a night!" It was old Pezzack, aloft on the gallery of the light-house in his yellow oilers, already polishing the lantern panes. Taffy's workmen came straggling and gathered about him.
The pistons communicated their motion to the big shaft running aft along the keel to the stern, and the revolutions of the shaft in turn produced the revolutions of the screw propelling the vessel across the Atlantic. Oilers holding oil cans and waste clambered in and out of the rotating masses of iron with astounding sureness and boldness.
The boiler-room was still dry, it seemed, for the incandescent lights burned without a flicker, even after the grimy oilers and stokers had come pouring up on deck. O'Neil climbed to the bridge. "Is this Halibut Bay?" he asked Captain Johnny. "It is. But we're piled up on the reef outside. She may hold fast I hope so, for there's deep water astern, and if she slips off she'll go down."
The smoke was smoking, the pumps were pumping, the works were working, and all the oilers along the quay, like all well-behaved oilers, were oiling.
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