Vic Socotra

28 September 2010

The Fires of Hell

(Stokers. Official Navy Picture)

Captain Harry is completely at home in Olympia’s engine room. It is his, after all. If there is a spirit in this magnificent ship, he is the epitome of the life-force.

He has been in her hull, cleaning and polishing, since he was a teenager when he began working on her, after all, and now he is of a certain age. As is Olympia. He gestured at the circles on the white-painted hull where the steel has thinned to as little as an eighth of an inch.

The water wants to come in. The water will come in, in a great flood and submerge the gleaming brass and the rich walnut and the massive members of her mighty steam plant. There are so many ways the implacable brackish flood can penetrate this eggshell and drown her.

The shafts that run directly to the stern, and once spun the great propellers are hollow, capped by oak plugs that will rot away, sooner or later. The weak points in the hull will buckle and collapse under the steady pressure if there is not decisive action, and soon.

Which of course is why I was here.

(Captain Harry in the Starboard Engine Room. Karen’s compartment is forward. Photo Socotra)

“Now,” said Captain Harry, “we can go back to the boiler room and stand where the stokers did in front of the fires.” He gestured forward into the blackness of an unlit compartment. “That is where the black apparition has been observed on multiple occasions. Don’t know if that is the female spirit or not. She touched me once. He turned and faced me, gripping my forearms midway between wrist and elbow. “Just like that.”

A chill that had nothing whatsoever with the coolness of the space ran through me.

Funny to contemplate the contrast of the natural low temperature transferred from the depth of the river outside these bulkheads. When at work, this space was a blur of shining steel and dark cast iron and bright brass and billows of steam and oil and dripping water. Engineering ratings- Snipes- would oil would monitor the whirring bearings, and add oil and crank the brass wheels and answer the annunciator.

“We have identified twelve distinct EVP’s here. They call me The Kid, like I said, so they have some sort of recognition. The one who may be forward is the female, Karen is her name, we think.”

“What would a female spirit be doing on a warship?” I asked, puzzled. I had leapt mentally past the impossibility of the idea that Olympia was haunted. I had processed he notion of the Electronic Voice Phenomenon. Apparently Captain Harry has been at this for a while.

I am a rational man, but as I approach my dotage I have taken a certain wary position on the paranormal. I came to this ambivalent philosophy because I once funded a very special activity conducted by our government that demonstrated, far beyond the odds of random chance, that some people can see things that the rest of us cannot.

Things far away, and things quite real.

Despite the hardest-minded green-eyeshade skeptics, the talent appeared real. We stopped funding it not because it wasn’t real, but because it could not get the visions to come on command. They just happened when they did, and the contents of the remote viewing- that is what they called it- were what they were.

Accordingly, EVP is something I know a bit about, tangentially, part of the ghost-hunter’s tool-kit. It is not something I think about much. Some people just operate at different frequencies than most of us, and there is a lot more to this world than any of use really understand.

Captain Harry looked me straight. “Why would a female be here? Well, we know that Olympia was used to transport Nurses to France in 1918-19, during the great Spanish flu epidemic that killed tens of thousands. Karen could have been a nurse, or she could have been a stow-away. That part is not clear, but she is here. She touched me, real as life, and I have the recordings of her laughing, and saying a full sentence. That makes her a ‘Class A’ EVP.”

“There are different classes of them?”

“Yes, of course. Class ‘B’ and ‘C’ have less clarity. A Class ‘A’ event sometimes has complete sentences, and actually responds to questions. Sometimes they are just grunts, groans, growling and other vocal noises. These are sailors, presumably, so some of it is obscene. I will send you some MP3 files tonight. We have an Italian, too, fellow named Peppi from New York, in a neighborhood called The Buffer, from what he said. It is a real place, the middle-ground between the rich and the poor in Manhattan, circa 1902.”

Captain Harry led the way through a bulkhead into the starboard engine room, which was curiously empty, and showed the height of the frame that once held the might engine. “When the City had the ship back in the ‘50s some bonehead decided to sell most of the fittings for scrap. Go figure.”

(Unknown in forward boiler room of the Olympia, notice how the tail part is lighting up the bulkhead, and interior of the passageway as it entered the room. Photo Captain Harry Burkhardt.)

We walked aft, into the boiler room. He shone his flashlight down a dark passage leading aft. “That leads to the stoking area on the back side of the double boilers. We had an apparition back there, too. Got it on camera. I’ll send you the picture,” said Captain Harry in a matter-of-fact tone. He gestured at the gaping maws of the ovens. “They got 160 psi from these Scotch boilers,” he said. “There are six of them: four double-ended and two singles. We have restored this boiler room, which is where the History Channel filmed a segment a couple months ago.”

There was a pile of raw black coal and a shovel against the forward bulkhead. “They bought the coal. We have to rely on the kindness of strangers on the Oly, like Blanche Dubois.”

(Olympia’s boilers. Here were the fires of hell. Photo Socotra.)

The mouths of the furnaces, cold black iron circles, were open to the air. “How hot was it in here when there was fire in the chambers?”

“The temperatures in this space got up to 130 degrees,” he said, looking up at the overhead. A picture, obviously staged, was on a shelf on the forward bulkhead under a long showed a stoker in whites, an absurd uniform for a member of the Black Gang.
“The boilers had 40 furnaces working under forced draft on a closed-stokehold system. Total machinery weight was 1,239 tons, and the coal consumption rate was awesome. At speed, the stokers had to shovel 800 pounds per minute.”

“Jeeze Louise,” I muttered. “That is hotter than Iraq in the summer. How long did they expect them to stay on watch?”

“Stokers were on for four hours. The Engineers stood eight, three section.”

Captain Harry removed the cover from one of the boilers and hung it on a rack that protruded from the port bulkhead.

“It was an art, and a world apart down here. The stokers fueled the fires of hell down here. They stood streaked with coal dust and sweat. It might have been the worst job in the world. The Black Gang led a life of unremitting, brutal, dirty labor, shoveling the coal into the fire, periodically tending the fires in each of these furnaces to ensure efficient combustion. Think about it. 800 pounds a minute.”

He pointed to a long crooked poker of steel resting on a rack above the picture of the formal stoker. “We found that artifact up in the laundry room. It is what they used to call a “Slice Bar,” used to break up the clinker. That was a red-hot, stone-hard residue left over when the combustible parts of the coal burnt off.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said. “This must have been hell on earth, or at least hell a couple dozen feet below the waterline.”

“It was unbelievable. The heat, the fire. Imagine when they were going into action at Manila Bay and the bell was clanging for full speed ahead. At start of watch, the stokers had to rake out the furnace, extinguish the fire and cool the clinker into a gray watery mass of ash and then load it in 300-pound buckets to be hoisted up the scuttle behind you.”

I leaned in, peering up into the gloom.

“See the ladder welded on the side?” That is how the stokers came and went, too. They were not permitted to use the engine room ladders like the officers or the Snipes. They were a unique bunch, those stokers and trimmers. Richard Givens might have been one of them, don’t know. He told me his name, and added “Port,” like that was his duty section. I’ll send that one along, too.”

“It sounds like the stokers were the modern equivalent of the rowing slaves who powered the Roman galleys,” I said.

“Maybe that is why some of them are still here,” he said. “I asked a question one time down here, like, what could I do to make his life better. When we played it back, we found out he told me to “Get Out” and sounded mad as hell.”