Ducking under hammocks in which restive would-be sleepers were stirring, we filed up the ladder and came out into the frosty air of the quarterdeck to speed the parting guests. Good-nights were spoken softly in deference to the Captain, whose sleeping cabin was just beneath our feet, and the four cloaked officers tip-toed gently down the gangway and aboard their waiting launch. Then the Commander passed a quietly spoken order down the line along the rail. "Ready now; altogether. One--two--three!"
With the sudden roar of a full gun salvo, the Navy yell boomed out on the still air and went rolling forth across the still waters to set strange echoes chattering in the distant hills. A sudden surge of quickly suppressed laughter floated back to us from the receding launch, but the visiting officers were on their good behaviour once they were "out in the open" again, and the challenge was not taken up.
The Commander was chuckling as he bade me good night in the half-darkness of the wardroom flat. "There can't have been such another yell as that heard by these quiet waters since they were first ploughed by the galleys of the old Norse Vikings," he said with a laugh. "I'd really like to know just how many of the fifty or sixty thousand men of the Grand Fleet awakened by it knew to what Navy that 'Nav-eee!' they heard referred to. Not that it makes much matter, though, now that we're all one."
II. WHAT THE BRITISH BLUEJACKET THINKS OF THE AMERICAN
The British naval officer, sapient of many ports and peoples, had a pretty clear idea that in the American Naval Officer he was going to find an ally who, in spite of a number of superficial differences from himself, would still be a deal easier to act in intimate co-operation with than any of those with whom he had been fighting up to the time of the entry of the United States into the war. With the British sailor it was different. Only a few of him had ever met any American bluejackets, and these meetings--for the most part confined to the bars and bunds of Shanghai, Hongkong, Singapore, and the other ports of the Far East--had not always been of a nature calculated to be promotive of international amity. The American Jackie was chiefly remembered by the British for the softness of a speech that belied the hardness of a fist, and an astonishing and unaccountable penchant for scattering Mexican dollars from rickshaws for coolies to scramble for.