A company selling
passages is a tradesman; though from the way these people talk and behave
you would think they are benefactors of mankind in some mysterious way,
engaged in some lofty and amazing enterprise.
All these boats should have a motor-engine in them. And, of course, the
glorified tradesman, the mummified official, the technicians, and all
these secretly disconcerted hangers-on to the enormous ticket-selling
enterprise, will raise objections to it with every air of superiority.
But don't believe them. Doesn't it strike you as absurd that in this age
of mechanical propulsion, of generated power, the boats of such ultra-
modern ships are fitted with oars and sails, implements more than three
thousand years old? Old as the siege of Troy. Older! . . . And I know
what I am talking about. Only six weeks ago I was on the river in an
ancient, rough, ship's boat, fitted with a two-cylinder motor-engine of
7.5 h.p. Just a common ship's boat, which the man who owns her uses for
taking the workmen and stevedores to and from the ships loading at the
buoys off Greenhithe. She would have carried some thirty people.
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