{"id":29641,"date":"2010-09-28T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-09-28T03:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/WP-IMPORT\/2010\/09\/28\/the-fires-of-hell\/"},"modified":"2010-09-28T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2010-09-28T03:00:00","slug":"the-fires-of-hell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/the-fires-of-hell\/","title":{"rendered":"The Fires of Hell"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
\n


(Stokers. Official Navy Picture)
\u00a0
Captain Harry is completely at home in Olympia\u2019s engine room. It is his, after all. If there is a spirit in this magnificent ship, he is the epitome of the life-force.
\u00a0
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.
\u00a0
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.
\u00a0
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.
\u00a0
Which of course is why I was here. <\/p>\n


(Captain Harry in the Starboard Engine Room. Karen\u2019s compartment is forward. Photo Socotra)
\u00a0
\u201cNow,\u201d said Captain Harry, \u201cwe can go back to the boiler room and stand where the stokers did in front of the fires.\u201d \u00a0He gestured forward into the blackness of an unlit compartment. \u201cThat is where the black apparition has been observed on multiple occasions. Don\u2019t 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. \u201cJust like that.\u201d
\u00a0
A chill that had nothing whatsoever with the coolness of the space ran through me.
\u00a0
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.
\u00a0
\u201cWe have identified twelve distinct EVP\u2019s 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.\u201d
\u00a0
\u201cWhat would a female spirit be doing on a warship?\u201d 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.
\u00a0
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.
\u00a0
Things far away, and things quite real.
\u00a0
Despite the hardest-minded green-eyeshade skeptics, the talent appeared real. We stopped funding it not because it wasn\u2019t 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.
\u00a0
Accordingly, EVP is something I know a bit about, tangentially, part of the ghost-hunter\u2019s 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.
\u00a0
Captain Harry looked me straight. \u201cWhy 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 \u2018Class A\u2019 EVP.\u201d
\u00a0
\u201cThere are different classes of them?\u201d
\u00a0
\u201cYes, of course. Class \u2018B\u2019 and \u2018C\u2019 have less clarity. A Class \u2018A\u2019 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.\u201d
\u00a0
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. \u201cWhen the City had the ship back in the \u201850s some bonehead decided to sell most of the fittings for scrap. Go figure.\u201d <\/p>\n


(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.)
\u00a0
We walked aft, into the boiler room. He shone his flashlight down a dark passage leading aft. \u201cThat 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\u2019ll send you the picture,\u201d said Captain Harry in a matter-of-fact tone. He gestured at the gaping maws of the ovens. \u201cThey got 160 psi from these Scotch boilers,\u201d he said. \u201cThere 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.\u201d
\u00a0
There was a pile of raw black coal and a shovel against the forward bulkhead. \u201cThey bought the coal. We have to rely on the kindness of strangers on the Oly, like Blanche Dubois.\u201d <\/p>\n


(Olympia\u2019s boilers. Here were the fires of hell. Photo Socotra.)
\u00a0
The mouths of the furnaces, cold black iron circles, were open to the air. \u00a0\u201cHow hot was it in here when there was fire in the chambers?\u201d
\u00a0
\u201cThe temperatures in this space got up to 130 degrees,\u201d 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.
\u201cThe 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.\u201d
\u00a0
\u201cJeeze Louise,\u201d I muttered. \u201cThat is hotter than Iraq in the summer. How long did they expect them to stay on watch?\u201d
\u00a0
\u201cStokers were on for four hours. The Engineers stood eight, three section.\u201d
\u00a0
Captain Harry removed the cover from one of the boilers and hung it on a rack that protruded from the port bulkhead.
\u00a0
\u201cIt 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.\u201d
\u00a0
He pointed to a long crooked poker of steel resting on a rack above the picture of the formal stoker. \u201cWe found that artifact up in the laundry room. It is what they used to call a \u201cSlice Bar,\u201d 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.\u201d
\u00a0
\u201cJesus Christ,\u201d I said. \u201cThis must have been hell on earth, or at least hell a couple dozen feet below the waterline.\u201d
\u00a0
\u201cIt 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.\u201d
\u00a0
I leaned in, peering up into the gloom.
\u00a0
\u201cSee the ladder welded on the side?\u201d 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\u2019t know. He told me his name, and added \u201cPort,\u201d like that was his duty section. I\u2019ll send that one along, too.\u201d
\u00a0
\u201cIt sounds like the stokers were the modern equivalent of the rowing slaves who powered the Roman galleys,\u201d I said.
\u00a0
\u201cMaybe that is why some of them are still here,\u201d he said. \u201cI asked a question one time down here, like, what could I do to make his life better. When we played it back, \u00a0we found out he told me to \u201cGet Out\u201d and sounded mad as hell.\u201d <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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(Stokers. Official Navy Picture) \u00a0 Captain Harry is completely at home in Olympia\u2019s engine room. It is his, after all. If there is a spirit in this magnificent ship, he is the epitome of the life-force. \u00a0 He has been in her hull, cleaning and polishing, since he was a teenager when he began working […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daily-socotra"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29641"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29641\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}