Paul Keith Morse

I worked in there as an oiler later, after I worked in the boiler room. In the boiler room, I was in there; and obviously, we had to fire the boilers, get the steam. But in those days, communication was by voice pipe only and modern ships today, technology being the way it is, it’s much different. But there would be one on each, we had two boilers and there was a bulkhead, or a large wall between the two boiler rooms, and there was like a watertight door between the two that if something happened, that you could dog the door down [lock the door] and close it, and isolate one boiler room if something hit the ship or anything that would stop it, in case it was flooded. In the boiler room, it was a case cleaning the burners. We burned oil. You had to bring it up to a certain heat to get good combustion with the air that’s introduced by air pumps and that’s regulated according to what speed they were going at, if they were going to upgrade the speed, I think our maximum speed was around 16 knot. But you would have to be there to operate the boiler. to keep the fires [going]. So there would be several burners and they were each supplied with air. And so you had to keep regulating the air and mix with the oil that you’re using and the speed that we were going. There were a lot of variables there. You had to keep your eye on the water that was inside the boilers, so that you kept that at the proper level, that that would change, like if you had a quick stop. We’d go out of the glass and if you had to pull away quick from whatever action might have taken place, you would have to add more water or decrease it, depending on the demand of the power to drive the engine faster. It was quite interesting, I thought. The engineering, before you go aboard, when you first go in, you take short courses. But I had been working with steam when I was on this merchant ship, an Irish gentleman who was engineer and he was a wonderful man on this other ship. He would teach me different things about engineering because he had learned his apprenticeship and he worked, of course, in the Belfast shipyards in northern Ireland, I can’t remember the name of it quite offhand, but he was on this merchant ship that I was on. I don’t mean to deviate away from the engine room, but he had a problem that some people have ̶ too much of certain beverages. [laughs] But, anyway, he became the second engineer. They took him onboard. I’m talking about the merchant ship now. The chief engineer came from England, but the Irishman, MacDonald, he was a wonderful person because I was just a jerk of a kid and he was like a schoolteacher. He taught me so many things that, probably I can’t remember them all now, but taught me different things and how to do different things. The chief, I shouldn’t say this, but the chief engineer said, don’t bring any liquids onboard for MacDonald, the Irishman. Every once in a while (I wouldn’t be arrested now), [laughs] I used to get him a bottle of Jameson’s Irish Whiskey. He would still be able to function. He never got ossified [completely] drunk or anything onboard the ship. But he liked a little tot once in a while, the same as everybody else. But he was one of the many men in my life that helped me in learning some of the things about engineering.