Part 2

On modern ships, a machine called a windlass raises and lowers the anchors. In the old days, when sailors had to raise anchors by turning the capstan by hand, they had a phrase for officers who worked their way up from being deckhands. They said these officers came up “through the hawse pipe.” Officers who got their knowledge from going to school and studying books were said to “come in through the cabin window.”

After the cement is out of the hawse pipe, Jim takes the devil’s claws off the anchor chains and releases the riding pawls. These are two brakes on the anchor chain which you can see in the picture. Now only the brake on the windlass holds the anchor chain in position over the wildcat, which is the wheel on the windlass.

The captain signals from the bridge to let go. Chips releases the windlass brake. The big chain rushes up out of the locker, over the wildcat and down the hawse pipe with a terrific roar. Soon the ship is safely anchored. The skipper can wait now until there is a vacant pier where he can tie up.

After the ship ties up, the captain orders watches broken. The men no longer work four hours and rest eight. Now most of them work eight hours during the day and have the remaining time off, just the way shoreside people do. There is no need for the routine of the sea. Egyptian longshoremen will unload the cargo.

Jim puts on a suit he has kept hanging pressed in his locker. Then he and Juan go down the gangplank. They are off to see the sights in the fascinating Egyptian city--and to buy souvenirs.

But before they have gone very far from the waterfront where a tangle of masts and booms and stacks marks the skyline, they meet Lars, an old shipmate of theirs. That’s not so strange as you might think. A sailor often changes ships, and he gets to have many friends who travel just as much as he does. While they eat an Egyptian meal in an Egyptian restaurant, Lars says he’s on a tanker now. She’s in Alexandria getting her rudder repaired. It broke in a storm, but the men fixed up something to take its place. They called it a jury rudder.

Lars’s tanker looks very different from a freighter. She is long and low and has two houses. One is midships, and the officers’ quarters and wheelhouse are there. The crew lives in the other house at the stern.

Between the two houses the deck is so low that waves often wash over it, and so there has to be a high bridge called a walkaway or a catwalk.

Lars says his particular tanker carries “clean” oil. By that he means oil that has been refined into different grades of gasoline. “Dirty” oil is crude oil just the way it comes out of the wells. Lars is a tankerman and a seaman. He has taken a special examination for his job. He knows all the ways to pump different kinds of oil in and out of the tanks on a ship. He knows how to keep gasoline from exploding. He has learned to use special equipment. For instance, he never goes down to clean a tank on his ship without an oxygen mask and a lifeline. The lifeline is tied around him so that a seaman on deck can haul him up if fumes in the tank knock him out.

Like most seamen, Lars has travelled all over the world. In China he has seen junks and sampans. He has seen fishing boats in Portugal with big eyes painted on the bows because sailors thought that helped the boats to see their way. Eyes of the same kind have been painted on ships for hundreds of years in many other places, even in Chesapeake Bay.

OUTRIGGER. Long ago South Sea Islanders sailed great distances, guiding themselves by the stars. The outrigger at the side gives their small vessel balance in rough water.

JUNK. The sails of this Chinese ship are made of bamboo slats braced by bamboo rods. The rudder is so big that often a dozen men have to work on it. Many junks have colored sails.

NORWEGIAN SHIPS. Old Viking ships that sailed from Norway had both oars and brightly decorated sails. Vikings were such good seamen they crossed the Atlantic in their open ships. Norwegians are still seafarers. Boys who want to be sailors get training on a sailing ship.

Lars used to work on a tanker that brought oil from the Persian Gulf. When he went ashore there, he saw boats just like the earliest ones that men invented thousands of years ago. He saw boats that were really big, round clay pots, built by people in places where there was plenty of clay but very little wood. He saw huge basket boats woven from a kind of grass and waterproofed with a covering of tar. Some of the basket boats were big enough to carry twenty passengers--or several men and three horses!

Smaller basket boats were used as lighters. (A lighter is any craft that helps to unload freight from another.) Here on the Tigris River, the freight was carried on a large raft supported by animal skins blown up like balloons. A little raft floating downstream sometimes carried its owner, his donkey and the grain he had to sell. After selling the grain, the boatman took the skins from under the raft, let the air out, piled them on the donkey’s back and walked back home upriver.

Out at sea, whenever Lars sees a life raft on the top deck, he realizes it is just like the skin-float rafts he saw on the Tigris River. Instead of blown-up skins, water-tight metal containers filled with air hold the life raft up. When Lars puts on his life jacket for lifeboat drill, he is getting ready to use a float, just the way people long ago used bundles of reeds. Even though men have learned so much about ships in all the years since they first started to travel on water, they still use some of the first knowledge they ever acquired.

All of these things interest Lars. He grew up by the sea in Norway, and his people have been seamen since the days of the Vikings. But best of all he likes the clean, modern, comfortable tankers. He is not only going somewhere himself when he is on a tanker. He is also helping to carry a cargo that helps other people to go places.

SEATRAINS

Lars’s tanker was built to do a very special kind of job. So were many other kinds of ships. Look at the Seatrain, which carries fully loaded freight cars--a hundred of them at a time.

To load a Seatrain, the railroad locomotive pushes a string of cars out onto a long pier. A derrick lifts the cars up one by one, swings them over an open hatch, and lowers them neatly onto tracks in the ship’s hold. After the holds are filled, there’s still room for more cars on the main deck outside.

It seems queer for trains to travel by ship, but sometimes that’s the best way to send cargo. Freight cars can be filled with sugar on the island of Cuba and brought across the water to the United States, without any extra loading and unloading. It’s often cheaper for freight cars to go by ship than by rail from New York to Savannah or New Orleans or Texas City.

BANANA BOATS

Banana boats do their own particular kind of work, too. Actually, they aren’t boats, although they do carry bananas. They are refrigerator ships. Seamen call them reefers--just as railroad men call a refrigerator car a reefer. Everything about a banana boat is arranged to keep her cargo cool. She is even painted white, because white things reflect some of the sun’s rays into the air instead of absorbing their heat. Inside the ship, blowers send cool air circulating around the bananas all the time. It isn’t enough just to chill them once and leave them there. Bananas actually make heat themselves. So a constant cool breeze is needed to carry their heat away. The ships that bring bananas from Central America do keep them in the refrigerator.

A banana boat is fast, for she must rush the green fruit from the farm to market as quickly as possible. There are even very quick ways of loading and unloading. Machines called gantries stand on the pier where the ship ties up. The gantries carry the big bunches of bananas in soft canvas pockets arranged in an endless chain. Men on the dock lay the bunches, one after another into the pockets. Men inside the ship take them out and stow them away.

A banana boat sailor does just about the same things that sailors on other cargo vessels do. He steers and stands lookout and works on deck. And like all sailors he has lifeboat drills. Every ship that sails the seas must have lifeboats. Look for them on some high deck, where they are easy to get at in emergencies. Canvas covers on the boats keep out rain and snow and protect the things stowed inside.

A lifeboat is equipped with everything that you may need if you have to float around on the open sea after your ship has gone down. There are water-tight containers full of food, drinking water and matches. There are oars and sails and life jackets, first-aid equipment and ropes. There are flares to light, so that rescuers can locate the boat, and pistols that shoot signal flares like Roman candles high into the air. There are scoops called bailers for dipping water out of the boat. And each lifeboat carries a supply of storm oil. When this oil is spread out on the water, it keeps stormy waves from breaking near the boat. If a wave breaks too close, it may fill the boat with water and sink it.

The can of storm oil fits inside a cone-shaped canvas bag called a sea anchor. The sea anchor floats ahead of the boat and keeps it pointed toward the wind, while the oil drips slowly out and calms the waves. It’s important to be pointed into the wind, because a boat that bobs around sidewise can easily be tipped over by a wave. Long ago sailors discovered what a wonderful help oil can be in stormy weather, and that’s where the expression “oil on troubled waters” came from. It means to calm things down.

A blast from the ship’s whistle tells seamen when it’s time for lifeboat drill. Every man knows which boat he’s supposed to use. He runs first for his life jacket, then up the ladders by the shortest route to his boat. All the knots and fastenings on the boat are made so that they can be loosened with one jerk. Quickly the men work machines called davits that are always in perfect order, ready to swing the lifeboat out over the water. In a real emergency, the boats would be lowered into the sea, and the men would scramble down rope ladders which are kept ready on deck. But in a drill, seamen just test the davits and lines.

Most lifeboats are double-enders. This means that the bow and stern are rounded and look just alike. The rounded shape helps keep waves from tumbling in at either end. Lifeboats are modeled after the old-time boats in which sailors rowed away from sailing vessels when they went out to harpoon whales.

“THAR SHE BLOWS”

Nowadays, a group of very modern vessels go out together on whaling expeditions. A big ship called the factory ship waits in one place while a half-dozen or more killer boats cruise around hunting whales. The killer boats are power driven, and they are almost as big as an old-time sailing ship.

In June or July, one of these little fleets sets out for the South Pacific. At the whaling grounds, each killer boat begins its search. Suddenly--“Thar she blows!” A whale rises to the surface and spouts. The killer boat dashes after it. The harpooner in the bow aims a gun that’s fastened to the deck. The harpoon in the gun is as tall as a man and heavy, with an explosive charge in its pointed head, and a line attached to the shaft. When the head strikes the whale, the charge goes off inside, killing the great animal. The harpoon barbs spread out. Now the whale is held tight at the end of the line. The killer boat tows it back to the factory ship.

The stern of the factory ship is open. A ramp leads up from the water to the ship’s after deck. Machinery pulls the whale up the ramp and onto the deck. There men with knives that look like big hockey sticks cut up the blubber and throw it into vats where the whale oil is boiled out.

Hour after hour the killer boats bring in whales, sometimes forty or fifty a day--or even more! Everybody works day and night, with very little time to eat and sleep. The oil tanks in the factory ship begin to fill up. Now an ordinary tanker comes alongside. The whale oil is pumped from the factory ship to the tanker which delivers it at some big port thousands of miles away.

When at last the factory ship again has all the oil she can hold, she steams off toward home. For seven or eight months her crew has not been ashore.

Now, as well as in the old days, men on whaling vessels proudly bring home scrimshaw. That is carving they have done on the teeth or jawbones of whales. It is often very delicate and beautiful.

On the return trip the factory ship’s speed is much less than when she started out--and not just because her tanks are full. In June her hull was smooth and freshly painted, and it slipped easily through the water. Now in February she has barnacles all over the hull under water--such a rough coat of barnacles that she’s held back a great deal.

Barnacles are tiny sea creatures that grow by the millions. They attach themselves to anything under water and form hard little shells. They hold so tightly to the ship that they must be chipped off. That’s a job to be done in a place called drydock.

DRYDOCK

All ships go to drydock for regular cleaning and repairing and painting. This is what happens: The ship noses into a place surrounded by three concrete walls. Huge water-tight gates swing shut behind her, penning her in. Mooring lines hold her steady in the exact center of the dock, and pumps go to work taking out all the water in which she floats. Slowly the ship settles into a sort of cradle that has been prepared on the floor of the dock to fit her hull just right. When the water is all out, there she stands, balanced and braced. Now men can work under her and all over her--and inside. They scrape off the barnacles, paint the hull, and repair any parts that have begun to wear out. To reach some parts of the hull painters use long-handled brushes--really long. They’re often three times as tall as a man!

Experts go over the ship as carefully as doctors examine people. But many men work at top speed in shifts around the clock, and a ship often spends only twenty-four hours in drydock. Then the gates open. Water flows back into the dock. The ship floats again, ready to go to sea.

Sometimes a ship can’t get to drydock. Then a floating drydock comes to the ship. It works the same way as a regular one. Floating drydocks have traveled to distant parts of the world, pulled by seagoing tugs.

TUGS

A tug is a vessel that looks small but has an enormously powerful engine--an engine almost as big as one that moves a cargo ship. In fact, the tugboat’s job is to push and pull cargo and passenger ships around.

Big ships need help getting in and out of the narrow spaces between piers in a harbor. If they used only their own power, they might either smash themselves up or crush the piers. Tugs, working together, can push a little here, pull a little there, and ease a huge vessel gently into place.

A tugboat captain must have a great deal of knowledge about the harbor in which he works. In order to pass his captain’s examination, he has to draw a map of the harbor from memory, showing every pier and marker and even the rocks, hills and valleys underwater. Most important, he must have a feel for what a ship is going to do when he nudges her at a certain point or when he reverses his propeller and pulls.

For all his skill and responsibility, the captain wouldn’t think of wearing a uniform at work. He prefers old work clothes, and he sits down with the crew when the cook serves up jumbo-sized meals.

The cook goes on duty in the galley at any time from one o’clock in the morning on, depending on what time the tug must start work. Breakfast may be at three or four, but the usual time is six. And often the cook’s job isn’t over at four in the afternoon when he serves supper. If the tug is working overtime, he fixes a meal called a “midnight snack” which the men eat perhaps around seven o’clock. There’s enough food in the snack to feed a shoreside person for a whole day.

Besides the captain and the cook, a tug needs a chief engineer, an oiler, a fireman and a deckhand. The deckhand works with the hawsers that are often used when a tug has to pull a big ship.

This is what happens: An AB aboard the ship holds a coil of light line, called a heaving line. At the end of the line is a ball-shaped knot called a monkey fist. The AB gives a big swing and sends the monkey fist and line flying down to the tug. The deckhand on the tug grabs for the line. He’s not an outfielder trying to catch the ball. The monkey fist is there only to make the line uncoil and go straight.

The deckhand pulls on the heaving line, which is attached to a hawser on the ship. (Sailors don’t say the line is attached or tied. They say it’s “bent” to the hawser.) The hawser is so big that it can’t be thrown, but it can be hauled onto the tug by the heaving line. The deckhand makes the hawser fast to a bitt on the tug’s deck, and now she can pull.

For pushing jobs the tug has a thick pad called a bow fender made of heavy rope hung over the bow. After the fender has been used a while, it gets worn and shaggy and is often called a “beard.” It protects any ship the tug is pushing. There are fenders along each side of a tug, too. Sometimes they are made of rope. Sometimes they are old automobile tires or just logs hung loosely over the side. The logs get so much banging around that they may have to be replaced every few days.

Very often a tug has something on its bridge that looks like a gun. It’s not. It’s a water nozzle attached to a pump, and it’s there to help fight fires on ships.

The kind of tug that you can see on the Mississippi River is called a towboat. She doesn’t tug, and she

doesn’t tow. She just pushes. A Mississippi towboat gets behind a whole string of flat-bottomed barges and shoves them up and down rivers. She often pushes ten barges at a time, loaded with twice as much cargo as an ordinary seagoing freighter can carry.

Many towboats have all of the latest inventions for quick and safe travelling in water that is often more tricky than the open sea. There’s a lot of traffic to watch out for on the Mississippi, and the river sweeps around in many bends. Mud collects on the river bottom, so the captain can’t always know how deep the water is going to be. Uprooted trees and other big things that could damage vessels often come floating downstream. And when it’s pitch dark, or when a thick fog hangs over the water, all these problems get much worse.

Radar is one of the inventions that help towboats avoid danger. Radar sends out radio waves which bounce back to the towboat from anything they hit. In the towboat’s pilothouse is a radarscope, which is a little like a television screen. The returning radio waves show up as spots of light called pips on the radarscope. By looking at the pips, the pilot can locate the shores of the river, other vessels, floating trees and anything else that’s dangerous.

Another wonderful invention, called a depth recorder, tells the pilot how deep the water is under the head barge in his tow. If the river seems to be getting shallow, he can steer the whole tow into safer water. The depth recorder works by sending out sound waves and making a record of them when they bounce back from the river bottom.

In the old days, river craft had a leadman who measured depth with a line tied to a lead weight. Knots and pieces of leather marked the line. Even at night the leadman could tell by feel how deep the water was. For instance, if his fingers felt that the line was wet up to a place where there were two strips of leather, he would know that two fathoms (twelve feet) of water lay underneath. Two markers at two fathoms. “By the mark twain,” the leadman would call out to the captain.

There was once a Mississippi River pilot named Samuel Clemens who, like all pilots, loved to hear that call. It meant that there was enough water to keep his vessel afloat. Later, when he began to write books, he signed them with the name Mark Twain.

In Mark Twain’s time, the Mississippi River boats were driven by huge paddle wheels. As the wood-burning steam engine turned the wheels, the paddles pushed against the water and shoved the boat forward.

Steam engines began working in rivers very quickly after the first successful paddle boat, the Clermont, proved that she could push upstream. River boatmen needed engines more than seafaring men did, because winds seldom blow upstream as they do on the Nile.

Before there were paddleboats, men took cargo down the Mississippi in keelboats. Then they had to get the boats up-river again almost entirely by muscle-power. Pushing against the bottom with poles, or pulling with ropes from the shore, river boatmen worked the whole way up from New Orleans to Pittsburgh.

A river boatman still works hard, but in a very different way. In his time off, he may listen to radio or even watch television on board the towboat. In the old days, he would have caught fish and fried them over a fire built in a pile of sand on the keelboat deck. Today the cook takes food from a freezer, prepares it on an electric range, and stows the dirty dishes in an automatic dishwasher.

In the old days, the river was the quickest way for passengers to travel, and for freight, too. People now go faster by bus or train or plane. But there’s more and more cargo for the barges to carry on the Mississippi and the other rivers that flow into it. Oil, coal, grain, steel, ore, sulfur are some of the things that move along ahead of the powerful streamlined towboats.

GREAT LAKES SHIPS

Grain, coal, ore and limestone for making steel travel on Great Lakes ships, too. So do many other kinds of cargo. Long ago, explorers believed that the enormous sea-like lakes would lead them all the way around the world to China. One man even wore Chinese clothes as he paddled westward in an Indian canoe, so he would be properly dressed when he arrived!

For nearly three hundred years since then, vessels have used these great inland waterways to carry goods and the most precious cargo of all--people. Settlers by the thousand from Germany, Sweden, Scotland and other countries filled the decks of sailing vessels and paddle steamboats that took them right up to the frontier. Today almost five hundred modern cargo vessels shuttle back and forth on the Lakes, carrying the wealth that the descendants of those pioneers have created.

A Great Lakes ship doesn’t look like any other. She is broad and low and very long--so long, in fact that she is less rigid than most ships. Seamen say she feels “willowy” if she steams along in heavy weather after her cargo is unloaded. The wheelhouse of a Lakes ship is forward in the bow, along with quarters for the officers and a few passengers. The engine and the crew’s quarters are away at the stern. In between, are holds--a great many more of them than on any ocean-going ship. Marvellous loading machines dump ore or any other loose cargo into the holds. Other wonderful unloading machines quickly scoop the cargo out.