The answer to such a question should have been, “Certainly,” for it is obvious to the simplest intelligence that the more water-tight spaces you provide in a ship (consistently with having her workable) the nearer you approach safety.  But instead of admitting the expediency of the suggestion, this witness at once raised an objection as to the possibility of closing tightly the door of a bunker on account of the slope of coal.  This with the true expert’s attitude of “My dear man, you don’t know what you are talking about.”

Now would you believe that the objection put forward was absolutely futile?  I don’t know whether the distinguished President of the Court perceived this.  Very likely he did, though I don’t suppose he was ever on terms of familiarity with a ship’s bunker.  But I have.  I have been inside; and you may take it that what I say of them is correct.  I don’t wish to be wearisome to the benevolent reader, but I want to put his finger, so to speak, on the inanity of the objection raised by the expert.  A bunker is an enclosed space for holding coals, generally located against the ship’s side, and having an opening, a doorway in fact, into the stokehold.  Men called trimmers go in there, and by means of implements called slices make the coal run through that opening on to the floor of the stokehold, where it is within reach of the stokers’ (firemen’s) shovels.  This being so, you will easily understand that there is constantly a more or less thick layer of coal generally shaped in a slope lying in that doorway.  And the objection of the expert was:  that because of this obstruction it would be impossible to close the water-tight door, and therefore that the thing could not be done.  And that objection was inane.  A water-tight door in a bulkhead may be defined as a metal plate which is made to close a given opening by some mechanical means.  And if there were a law of Medes and Persians that a water-tight door should always slide downwards and never otherwise, the objection would be to a great extent valid.  But what is there to prevent those doors to be fitted so as to move upwards, or horizontally, or slantwise?  In which case they would go through the obstructing layer of coal as easily as a knife goes through butter.  Anyone may convince himself of it by experimenting with a light piece of board and a heap of stones anywhere along our roads.  Probably the joint of such a door would weep a little—­and there is no necessity for its being hermetically tight—­but the object of converting bunkers into spaces of safety would be attained.  You may take my word for it that this could be done without any great effort of ingenuity.  And that is why I have qualified the expert’s objection as inane.