Part 9

The keel is laid down on blocks, four or five feet apart, which form a slope toward the water, so that the hull may glide down easily when the time for launching comes. It is not a keel at all, in the sense in which the word was formerly used: a modern ship has a smooth bottom, without any projecting ridge or break to the curve of her sides; it is simply the central series of plates, from which an inner keel is built up like an enormous backbone, and to this the ribs are attached. The metal is delivered at the yard in the shape of angle iron or angle steel, the latter being the material which would be used in a ship of the class we have in mind. Heated to a white heat, the angle-bars are drawn out of the furnace into a perfectly level iron floor, upon which they are bent to the needed curve, and that which has been a line of ink in the original drawing, a chalk mark on the floor of the mould loft, and a groove in the surface of the “scrive board,” is now embodied in the heavy rib of the ship. The bending is done thus: the metal floor is perforated with thousands of holes, into which iron pegs are inserted until they form the curvature required, and the long, pliable bar of steel is pressed against them until it corresponds exactly with the line exhibited in the “scrive board,” which is always in sight of the workmen for guidance and comparison. In handling the metal the men use pitchforks, and with the prongs inserted in the holes they get purchase enough to make the bar yield; if it bends upward a hammer is used upon it. Each rib has, of course, to be duplicated with the utmost precision, in order that it shall be the same on both sides of the ship, and each, after it has cooled, is laid upon the “scrive board” and compared with the lines thereon, every variation being corrected before it is passed. Having already been punched for rivets, it is then marked with a chisel to show where rib-bands, stringers, and deck-beams are to fit into it.

Two or three months or less after the completion of the “fairing,” the ship is probably “in frame,” and looks like the skeleton of some Brobdignagian monster that has stranded on the bank of the river. The ribs have been hoisted into position at right angles with the keel, and strung together by “rib-bands,” and already there are signs of the coming subdivision by decks and bulkheads of the hollow space within. You can still see through her, however; she is like, to make yet another comparison, a great oblong wicker-basket, the supple willows being represented by the net-work of steel.

The next step is the clothing of the ribs with plates. As they reach the yard the plates are square and flat, but they are passed through rollers of various kinds, from which they issue in any shape desired—hollowed like a spoon, curved lengthwise or breadthwise or diagonally, as the contour of the ship may call for. A steam or hydraulic plane smooths them down as though they were the softest of whitewood; another machine trims the edges as easily as a woman cuts silk with a pair of scissors. Then, suspended by iron chains, they are thrust between the jaws of a punching machine, which has a resemblance to a sinister human face with a flat nose, a long upper lip, and a small chin. The jaws close upon them and bite out, ten at a time, the holes for the rivets by which they are to be fastened to the frame.

As they are hoisted up to the workmen, each fits the exact place designed for it and takes its part in the softly swelling lines of the ship. They are put on in rows, or, as rows are technically called in this connection, “strakes,” which are lettered alphabetically, A being the row riveted to the keel. The upper edge of A overlaps the lower edge of B, and the lower edge of C overlaps the upper edge of B, and thus while one row of plates like B has both edges hidden, the row above it has both edges exposed, which minimizes resistance to the progress of the ship. We all know what caulking a wooden vessel is—the wedging of all seams between the planks with oakum and tar. An iron or steel ship is also caulked, but in her case the word has a different meaning. The sharp edges of the plates are merely turned in with a chisel, and they meet so closely that no insertion is necessary to exclude the water.

First held in place by bolts and nuts, the plates are finally secured by the rivets, the holes for which have previously been countersunk by machinery, so that there are no protuberances. The rivets go right through, and have double heads: millions of them are used, and every one of them is examined and checked before the work is passed as satisfactory.

At last the hull is closed in, and hundreds of artisans toil upon it, inside and out. At the end of a year, perhaps, the ship is ready for launching, by which time, if she is of the same dimensions as the City of New York or the City of Paris, seven thousand tons of material have been placed in position, one casting alone—the sternpost—weighing twenty-six tons. She is a steel ship, but in addition to the metal, one hundred and twenty thousand cubic feet of timber, brought from all parts of the world, have been used in her. From the cradle in which she lies to the promenade deck she rises to a height of fifty feet or more, and she looks as immovable as a fortress.

Nothing is more wonderful than the launching of such a vessel. Imminent peril seems to attend the operation; she must topple over, thinks the uninitiated observer, or if she succeeds in reaching the water, she must plunge against the opposite bank of the narrow river. But at the appointed time she glides into the water as smoothly as an eel, and once afloat she is held in check by cables attached to the shore. Her engines have got to be put on board, and fully six months more elapse before she is ready for sea. If she is complete within two years of the day the contract for her was awarded, her builders have done well.

Let us now look at the “plant” which is necessary for building such a ship, and to see this in perfection we will visit Fairfield, which divides honors with the great ship-yard of Messrs. James & George Thomson, at Clydebank.

IV.

A wonderful place is Fairfield. When a ship is taken in hand for construction the design for each and every part is proceeded with simultaneously. It is not the keel first, then the frames, then the reverse frames, then the flooring, and so on, as it is in smaller ship-yards. Keel, frames, flooring are put in hand together, and the hull plates are ready before the keel is in position. Simultaneously, too, the sawmill is preparing the planks which are to cover the steel decks: the joiners are at work on the saloon and cabins; the upholsterers are cutting and stitching the brocades, plushes, and silks which are so freely used in modern ocean steamers; the chain-maker is forging the cables, and each department is busying itself with its own share, conscious that what it produces will presently be sought to take its place in the rapidly progressing whole.

How rapid the progress is may be judged from the fact that on August 14, 1885, the steel intended for a North German Lloyd steamer began to enter the yard, and exactly one month later the ship was in frame with keelsons and beams in position, and the plating for the hull, rolled to waterline shape, lying alongside.

The works cover nearly seventy-four acres, and lie on the south side of the Clyde, about three miles from Glasgow, with which city they are connected by a continuous chain of docks, warehouses, and other ship-yards. Not very long ago this great inclosure was arable land attached to a comfortable mansion which still retains a few vestiges of its former dignity. But now the verdure has been trampled down and the face of the earth is hidden by paving-stones and iron rails. The river is inky, and the smoke lying in a brown fog over-head is ever being replenished from the high chimneys of the neighborhood.

The scene within the high brick walls which keep out idlers is exhilarating but scarcely picturesque. All the materials which enter into the construction of a modern ship are visible in profusion. A bird’s-eye view reveals great stacks of timber, iron, and steel; a net-work of rails which connect the works with all the principal lines converging at Glasgow; long brick sheds, and edging the water-front the launching-slips, where as many as fifteen vessels have been in course of construction at the same time. There the great hulls of many of the most famous Atlantic liners have been put together; this was the birthplace of all the new ships of the North German Lloyd line; of the Arizona, the Alaska, the Oregon, the Umbria, and the Etruria.

Running at right angles from the river, a dock has been excavated, large enough to accommodate a vessel of twelve thousand tons, and after launching, the steamers are hauled in here to receive their engines and boilers. Immediately in the rear of the launching-slips there is an enormous shed, with a roof of glass and iron, where all the iron-work for the hulls of fifteen ships has been handled at one time. Within it gangs of workmen, each skilled in a specialty, carry on that part of the work which belongs to them. Some are carriers of angle steel or iron, others receivers of angle iron, which they place in the furnaces until the metal is at such a heat that it can be shaped to suit the water-lines of the vessel for which it is intended. Others still are busy with reverse frames and with the bending of plates; others with funnels, ventilators, and skylights.

There is a special department for the casting of manganese bronze, which is used for the blades of propellers. Standing against a wall not far off is a blade saved from the propeller of the wrecked steamer Mosel. She ran ashore on a rocky coast, and her propeller played upon the reef like a flail upon a threshing-floor without break or fracture; so great is the strength of the bronze that the only effect upon it was a feathering of the edges as revealed by the blade in question.

Then we see the engineering, forge, and pattern shops. Forgings of steel are made which weigh as much as thirty tons, as in the case of the crank-shafts of the new North German Lloyd steamers. A shafting of that weight is lifted as easily, and with as little commotion, as a bar of angle iron, and placed on a table to be finished. All the tools are of enormous size, and nearly all of them are adaptations of the well-known turning-lathe. Either the tool turns or the work turns. A steamer’s cylinders are bored out with a bar, the bar moving. In turning a thrust-shaft the shaft moves, not the tool. In facing a condenser the tool moves, not the condenser. Cutting, planing, and turning are all accomplished by modifications of the lathe. There are in all nearly forty lathes, vertical, horizontal, and oblique, each gnawing at some vital part of a ship, and there—there is the “devil.” This is the name given by the workmen to an immense metallic disk, over sixteen feet in diameter, which bores through solid steel at the rate of two and a quarter inches in four minutes. The workmen fill what standing room there is between propeller blades, cylinder liners, piston-valves, and sole-plates; they swarm like ants, each gang carrying on its specified work with diligence and singleness of purpose.

Let the reader figure to himself the gleaming tools, the whirring machinery for the distribution of power, the begrimed toilers, the ponderous masses of iron and steel—now swinging in mid-air, then clutched to the breast of an excoriating monster like the “devil;” let his eye rest on those forty lathes all busy at once, eating with unwearying jaws into the metal fed them, and on the plane which shaves an armor-plate as if it were a deal board; then let him fill his ears with the groaning, creaking, hissing, grinding, shrieking of all this activity, and add to it the battle-like din of the boiler-makers. Thus he may know what Fairfield is like.

Ranging up and down these work-shops, and pausing before this or that lathe, we see in undistinguishable fragments the engines that are designed to propel the seven or eight thousand-ton ship; then the pieces are gathered together and united in a pit; power is applied from an auxiliary engine, and the work of final adjustment is proceeded with. That completed, the engines are again taken apart and transferred to the vessel for which they have been built.

Has the reader ever stood in the engine-room of an ocean steamer when she was plunging through an Atlantic gale at the rate of seventeen or more knots an hour? Even if he has done so, and been awed by the experience, it is not likely that he has been able to fully realize the immensity of the power exerted. He needs some standard of comparison, and for that purpose we may offer him the ancient galley, and repeat a passage from the address made by Sir Frederick Bramwell at the meeting of the British Association last September: “Compare a galley, a vessel propelled by oars, with the modern Atlantic liner.... Take her length as some 600 feet, and assume that place be found for as many as 400 oars on each side, each oar worked by three men, or 2,400 men; and allow that six men under these conditions could develop work equal to one horse-power; we should have 400 horse-power. Double the number of men, and we should have 800 horse-power, with 4,800 men at work, and at least the same number in reserve, if the journey is to be carried on continuously. Contrast the puny result thus obtained with the 19,500 horse-power given forth by a large prime-mover of the present day, such a power requiring on the above mode of calculation 117,000 men at work and 117,000 men in reserve; and these to be carried in a vessel less than 600 feet in length. Even if it was possible to carry this number of men in such a vessel, by no conceivable means could their power be utilized so as to impart to it a speed of twenty knots an hour.”

Huge as the several parts are, their adjustment is a matter of extreme delicacy, and yet so carefully is it accomplished that a steamer may leave the builder’s hand at Fairfield and proceed on a voyage of twenty days or more without once having to slacken speed on account of her engines.

It is a fair sight to see the men come to work when the bell rings in the morning. When the yard is fully occupied there are between six and seven thousand of them, and the wages paid have amounted in one year to one million eight hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars.

The head and front of all this industry—Sir William Pearce—was himself in early life a workman in the yard. I met him soon after his elevation by the Queen to the baronetage. He was then, apparently, in the best of health, and was full of plans for building still faster steamers for the Atlantic. That he would have soon put afloat a vessel of greater speed than his own Etruria, there is no doubt in the minds of those who knew his genius as a naval architect, and the indomitable and imperious will with which he carried out all his plans. But he died suddenly in 1888, and though his work was incomplete, he had already done wonders in minimizing the discomfort and duration of the now familiar passage of the Atlantic.

OCEAN PASSENGER TRAVEL.

BY JOHN H. GOULD.

THE FIRST OCEAN RACE—PASSENGER TRAFFIC IN THE OLD CLIPPER DAYS—STATE-ROOMS AND TABLE FARE IN EARLY DAYS—THE FIRST OCEAN MAIL CONTRACT—DISCOMFORTS FIFTY YEARS AGO—AMERICAN TRANSATLANTIC LINES—GOVERNMENT SUBSIDIES—NOVELTIES ON THE COLLINS LINE—WHEN STEERAGE PASSENGERS WERE ALLOWED ON OCEAN STEAMSHIPS—IMPORTANT CHANGES IN THE COMFORT OF PASSENGERS WROUGHT BY THE OCEANIC IN 1870—THE PRESENT ERA OF TWIN-SCREW SHIPS—THEIR ADVANTAGES—THE FASTEST VOYAGES EAST AND WEST—RECORDS OF THE GREAT RACERS—MODERN CONVENIENCES AND LUXURIES—THE INCREASE IN THE NUMBER OF CABIN PASSENGERS FROM 1881 TO 1890—HOW THE LARDER IS SUPPLIED—ELECTRIC LIGHTS, LIBRARIES, AND MUSIC-ROOMS—CUSTOMS PECULIAR TO THE FRENCH, GERMAN, AND BRITISH LINES—LIFE IN THE STEERAGE—IMMIGRATION STATISTICS—GOVERNMENT REGULATIONS.

There are, undoubtedly, many men and women in New York to-day who went down to the Battery and cheered and waved their hands in greeting to the first steamship that entered this port from Europe. This important event took place on April 23, 1838, and it was doubly interesting and significant because not only the first transatlantic steamship came to anchor in the harbor on that day, but the second also; steam travel across the sea thus beginning with a race that was earnestly contested and brilliantly won. Furthermore, it was a race that attracted infinitely more attention than any of the contests that have succeeded it. Two steam-vessels had crossed the Atlantic in years previous, both having started from this side; the Savannah, from Savannah, in 1819;[16] and the Royal William from Quebec, in 1831; but neither of these voyages had demonstrated the feasibility of abandoning the fine sailing packets and clippers for steamers when it came to a long voyage. The Savannah used both steam and sail during eighteen of the twenty-five days required for a passage to Liverpool, and more than one clipper overtook and passed her during the voyage. The Royal William had to utilize all her hold for coal in order to carry sufficient fuel to insure a completion of the voyage. The reasons for the commercial failure of such craft are, therefore, apparent; but they proved to be available and profitable for coastwise traffic, and meantime inventive genius was at work on plans and models and theories, all intended for the construction of a steamship capable of carrying goods and passengers between Europe and America, and of outrunning the packets. Public interest, accordingly, was deeply stirred on both sides of the ocean when, in 1837, it was learned that two steam-vessels were on the stocks, building for the American service. These were the Sirius, at London, and the Great Western, at Bristol. It was these vessels that made the first race; the Sirius making the trip, measured from Queenstown, in eighteen and a half days, and the Great Western in fourteen and a half days. The Sirius, having had nearly four days’ start, came in a few hours ahead of the winner. She brought seven passengers, and whether the Great Western had others than her crew on board cannot now be ascertained.

At this time there were several lines of sailing vessels in operation between America and Europe, among the most important of which were Williams & Guion’s Old Black Star line, afterward merged into the Guion line of Steamships; Grimshaw & Co.’s Black Star line; C. H. Marshall & Co.’s Black Ball line; and Tapscott’s line. All these concerns conducted a profitable business in carrying passengers, and the ships were provided with accommodations for the three classes into which travellers have been divided from early times. It is impossible at this day to determine with exactness the volume of passenger traffic in clippers, for no complete records were kept; but that it was comparatively light may be inferred from the fact that provision was made in the large ships for from ten to thirty first-cabin and twenty second-cabin passengers.

The steerage capacity varied from eight hundred to one thousand, and it was a long time after steamship lines had been established before immigrants ceased to come over in clippers. In fact, for ten years after the inauguration of the first steam line the immigrants had no choice—the steamships carrying none but cabin passengers. The rates were, £30 for first cabin; £8 for second cabin; and £5 to £8 for steerage. The appointments of cabins and state-rooms were meagre as compared with the great steamships of to-day, but the table fare was substantially the same that is provided now. The first-cabin passengers fared as they might in a good hotel; those in the second cabin, or “intermediates,” as they were called, had a plentiful supply of plain well-prepared food, and the needs of the steerage passengers were looked after by the British Government, which instituted an official bill of fare. These matters will be described in greater detail farther on.

In the _Marine News_ of April 4, 1838, published in New York, the agents of the Sirius advertise her as a “New and Powerful Steamship, 700 tons burden, 320 horse-power.” The advertisement continues:

This vessel has superior accommodations, and is fitted with separate cabins for the accommodation of families, to whom every possible attention will be given.

Cabin, $140.00, including provisions, wines, etc.

Second cabin, $80.00, including provisions.

Commenting upon the arrival of the Sirius and Great Western, the New York _Courier and Enquirer_ of April 24, 1838, said:

What may be the ultimate fate of this excitement—whether or not the expenses of equipment and fuel will admit of the employment of these vessels in the ordinary packet service—we cannot pretend to form an opinion; but of the entire feasibility of the passage of the Atlantic by steam, as far as regards safety, comfort, and despatch, even in the roughest and most boisterous weather, the most sceptical must now cease to doubt.

The “fate of the experiment,” as far as the Sirius was concerned, was decided by the initial voyage. She had taken on four hundred and fifty tons of coal at Queenstown, all of which had been consumed before passing Sandy Hook, and had it not been for the sacrifice of spare spars and forty-three barrels of rosin to the demands of the furnace, she would not have entered the upper bay under steam. Nevertheless there were people who trusted her capability to get back to Queenstown with the same quantity of coal, and among these confident, not to say venturesome, travellers, were the Chevalier Wyckoff and James Gordon Bennett, Sr. The Sirius made better time on the eastward trip, but she never again crossed the ocean. For many years she plied between Cork and Dublin.

As a business venture the Great Western was more successful, and she made in all thirty-seven round voyages between Bristol, or Liverpool, and New York. Sixty-six passengers sailed in her on her first voyage from New York. Enthusiastic reporters of that day record that at least one hundred thousand persons crowded the Battery and other points of view to see her off. She had been advertised as follows:

BRITISH STEAM-PACKET SHIP GREAT WESTERN,

JAMES HOSKEN, R.N., _Commander_:

Having arrived yesterday from Bristol, which place she left on the 8th inst., at noon, will sail from New York for Bristol on Monday, May 7th, at 2 o’clock P.M.

She takes no Steerage Passengers. Rates in the Cabin, including Wines and Provisions of every kind, 30 guineas; a whole State-room for one person, 50 guineas. Steward’s fee for each passenger, £1 10s. sterling. Children under 13 years of age, half price. No charge for Letters or Papers. The Captain and Owners will not be liable for any Package, unless a Bill of Lading has been given for it. One to two hundred tons can be taken at the lowest current rates.

Passage or freight can be engaged, a plan of cabin may be seen, and further particulars learned, by applying to

RICHARD IRVIN, 98 Front St.