THE

Whale Island.

HERE could hardly be a greater contrast than that afforded by the place where I am beginning this chapter and the subject of which it treats. From my window at Mürren I look out on the snow-clad Eiger, Mönch, and Jungfrau mountains: my subject is an island laboriously manufactured out of a mud-flat in Portsmouth Harbour! Yet these have one point in common, for they are alike the scene and witness of the energy of man ; in the one case providing for the health and amusement of his fellows by means of funicular and rack-and-pinion railways and big hotels far up the mountain-sides; in the other building up on an unlovely mud-flat the finest naval gunnery establishment in the world.

A year or two ago I paid a visit to Whale Island, and was astonished at what I saw. In my old troopship days I was accustomed to see bands of convicts engaged in excavating the sites of the big docks which were to be constructed at Portsmouth Yard, and knew that the soil thus removed was being used to make Whale Island. But I had never seen the island, and

now it was before me, covered with all sorts of buildings, and with its drill grounds and cricket and football fields all properly laid out. To preserve the insular idea of the establishment, it is approached at high-tide by a swing-bridge to the mainland, but at low-tide one can get across by a causeway.

Here, then, the Navy has, in the most literal sense of the words, made its home so far as the gunnery school is concerned. The mud-flat has become a sort of naval university, where teachers and learners have everything they require to make life comfortable and work pleasant and profitable. Officers have their mess-room, billiard-room, racquet-court, library, and private apartments; petty officers their special quarters ; and men their convenient barracks. In the instructionrooms are to be found classes being initiated into the latest mysteries of gunnery, or having their previous acquaintance with that science and art renewed and amplified; in the school the necessary mathematics are being drilled into willing heads; on the parade ground Handy-men are practising that handiness with their pets the guns, of all sorts and sizes, which always excites the admiration of spectators at the "'Cultural ’All,” and has lately proved so very useful in South Africa. I am not a gunnery man myself, and cannot expatiate learnedly on six-pounders, Gatling or Gardner, 4'7, six-inch, or 9′2 guns. But if you will visit Whale Island in company with an enthusiastic gunnery officer (and they are all enthusiastic that I have ever come across) he will show you wonderful things enough in the way of guns and models and parts of

guns to make you feel that if a bluejacket has to learn about all these things and handle them aright, he can't be the "lazy chap" that our friend thought him to be when he saw one of them asleep on the mess-stool one afternoon, as I mentioned in a former chapter. Here, too, is to be seen some very pretty practice in the way of marching and countermarching, and similar evolutions, which will go far to explain why it is that at a "big parade" on Southsea Common the bluejackets do their part of the show so well.

Canteen, gymnasium, reading-, billiard-,and smokingrooms, concert-hall, bowling-alley, cycle-track, pigeontraining house, gardens, horses and stables-everything you can think of, and a good deal more, is there. It is not to be wondered at that officers and men alike are fond and proud of Whale Island, for they themselves have made it what it is and seen it grow under their hands, so to speak. The main lines of the establishment were laid out by Captain Percy Scott -of whose brilliant work in South Africa who has not heard ?—and are a standing tribute to his genius. Mr. Harold Begbie tells us that the Handy-man is—

"Handy afloat, handy ashore,
Handier still in a hole."

And in the designer of Whale Island and of the guncarriage that did so much towards the relief of Ladysmith we have a brilliant example of the correctness of this description. He may well be proud as he looks upon the splendid buildings and lawns and gardens