The Devil and the Deep Sea — The Day's Work

The Devil and the Deep Sea follows the Haliotis, a tramp steamer with a ledger of aliases and a crew that has lived by evasion. Kipling sketches her career in a paragraph of collisions, munition runs, and salvage cases that never quite attach to one name for long. She keeps the same skilled crew, spends lavishly below decks, and treats affidavits as another trade good. Under the name Martin Hunt she has been poaching pearl banks in a strictly preserved sea, smoking the trying-out fires that betray her trade to patrol craft. A faster gunboat overtakes her after a near escape from Pygang-Watai and fires a five-inch practice shell that fractures the forward engine's connecting-rod bolts. The damage cascades: a cracked supporting column, a jammed cross-head, and an engine room that Mr. Wardrop pronounces ruined from end to end while the hull still slides forward shrieking like a wounded animal.

The lieutenant who boards demands pearls and finds seventy thousand pounds of evidence no affidavit can dissolve. The officers arrest the crew, tow the crippled hull to a miserable port with one crazy tug and a Malay boat-builder, and press the men into a colonial back-country regiment while diplomats argue over the firing on a British-flagged ship. Five men die in the jungle; the rest return singing, natural men freed from civilization's embarrassment.

Pearl poaching required patience and careful noise management. The Haliotis kept her trying-out fires low enough to avoid the smoke column that betrayed ships working over pearl banks in restricted waters, but low fires meant slow processing and longer time in a sea where every patrol craft knew which vessels had no business there. Under the name Martin Hunt she had been careful for three seasons; the fourth she ran the banks too long after a profitable find and was still smoking when the faster gunboat came over the horizon at the bearing she had been watching since dawn.

The five-inch practice shell that ended the chase broke more than the connecting-rod bolts. The cracked supporting column transmitted the shock through the engine frame, jamming the cross-head against the guide and bringing the forward engine to a stop audible across the water. Wardrop arrived in the engine room to find a repair that no honest marine surveyor would have quoted on without first taking a very long drink. He declared the engine ruined from end to end, which was accurate, and repeated it to the naval lieutenant who boarded to inventory seventy thousand pounds of pearl, largely non-portable.