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Updated: May 31, 2025
The Bowen-Merrill Company, Indianapolis SWEEPERS of the SEA The Story of a Strange Navy By CLAUDE H. WETMORE The recital of the deeds of the "Sweepers of the Sea" is a breathless one. The romance is heightened by the realism of the technique of naval warfare, by the sureness and voluminosity of nautical knowledge.
One hard and fast rule, however, Lumsden made. He would take no low caste men; he would have naught to say to the washermen, sweepers, and fiddlers of the village; he would take only the highest, which in this land is the fighting caste. His argument was one which still holds good.
He interviewed street sweepers, hotel porters, cab drivers newspaper reporters, milk-wagon drivers, barkeepers and laborers along the river docks in fact every follower of an occupation which Bob judged might be sufficiently unremunerative to keep its votaries in poverty as long as they persisted in sticking to it.
Every hundred yards or so one is greeted by the monotonous cry of 'Denk ereis an de baanveger, so that on long trips these sweepers are a great nuisance, for having to get out one's purse and give them cents greatly impedes progress.
The service to which they are put is to clear at the shortest notice, not the travelled avenues where the railroad sweepers run, but the side streets that lead from these to the fire-engine and truck-houses, to break a way for the apparatus for the emergency that is sure to come.
Long before this hour, the greater number of the whole ship's company have dressed themselves and are ready for muster; but the never-ending sweepers, the fussy warrant-officers' yeomen, the exact purser's steward, the slovenly midshipmen's boy, the learned loblolly boy, and the interminable host of officers' servants, who have always fifty extra things to do, are often so sorely pressed for time, that at the first tap of the drum beating to divisions, these idlers, as they are technically much miscalled, may often be seen only then lugging their shirts over their heads, or hitching up their trousers in all the hurry-scurry of a lower-deck toilet.
Pushing this self-analysis further, he reflected that the springs of his conduct were just as obscure. "I may be catching myself any time doing things of which I have no conception," he thought. And as he was passing near the mizzen-mast he perceived a coil of rope left lying on the deck by the oversight of the sweepers.
The imperial magistrates and the chief citizens were compelled, by the force of public opinion, to show themselves there. The porters, sweepers, and dock labourers went without bread and garlic, that they might pay for their places. Poets composed epigrams in her honour.
Late in the afternoon they had a broad hint of how near the end was. The sweepers dropped their brooms and began carrying fire buckets full of water. They placed one or more near every bearing all over the elevator. The men who were quickest to understand explained to the slower ones what the precaution meant, and every man had his eye on the nearest pulley to see when it would begin to turn.
Our doctors are strict, and refuse is burned by the sweepers. It is said there is no physician like fire. He leaves nothing to the flies. It is said that flies produce sicknesses, especially when they are allowed to sit on the nostrils and the corners of the eyes of the children or to fall into their milk-pots.
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