We are victims of one common superstition—the superstition that we
realise the changes that are daily taking place in the world because we
read about them and know what they are. I should not have supposed that
the modern ship could be a surprise to me, but it is. It seems to be as
much of a surprise to me as it could have been if I had never read
anything about it. I walk about this great vessel, the ‘Havel,’ as she
ploughs her way through the Atlantic, and every detail that comes under
my eye brings up the miniature counterpart of it as it existed in the
little ships I crossed the ocean in, fourteen, seventeen, eighteen, and
twenty years ago.
In the ‘Havel’ one can be in several respects more comfortable than he
can be in the best hotels on the Continent of Europe. For instance, she
has several bath-rooms, and they are as convenient and as nicely
equipped as the bath-rooms in a fine private house in America; whereas
in the hotels of the Continent one bath-room is considered sufficient,
and it is generally shabby and located in some out-of-the-way corner of
the house; moreover, you need to give notice so long beforehand that you
get over wanting a bath by the time you get it. In the hotels there are
a good many different kinds of noises, and they spoil sleep; in my room
in the ship I hear no sounds. In the hotels they usually shut off the
electric light at midnight; in the ship one may burn it in one’s room
all night.
In the steamer ‘Batavia,’ twenty years ago, one candle set in the
bulkhead between two state-rooms was there to light both rooms, but did
not light either of them. It was extinguished at eleven at night, and so
were all the saloon lamps, except one or two, which were left burning to
help the passenger see how to break his neck trying to get around in the
dark. The passengers sat at table on long benches made of the hardest
kind of wood; in the ‘Havel’ one sits on a swivel chair with a cushioned
back to it. In those old times the dinner bill of fare was always the
same: a pint of some simple, homely soup or other, boiled codfish and
potatoes, slab of boiled beef; stewed prunes for dessert—on Sundays ‘dog
in a blanket,’ on Thursdays ‘plum duff.’ In the modern ship the _menu_
is choice and elaborate, and is changed daily. In the old times dinner
was a sad occasion; in our day a concealed orchestra enlivens it with
charming music. In the old days the decks were always wet; in our day
they are usually dry, for the promenade-deck is roofed over, and a sea
seldom comes aboard. In a moderately disturbed sea, in the old days, a
landsman could hardly keep his legs, but in such a sea in our day, the
decks are as level as a table. In the old days the inside of a ship was
the plainest and barrenest thing, and the most dismal and uncomfortable,
that ingenuity could devise; the modern ship is a marvel of rich and
costly decoration and sumptuous appointment, and is equipped with every
comfort and convenience that money can buy. The old ships had no place
of assembly but the dining-room; the new ones have several spacious and
beautiful drawing-rooms. The old ships offered the passenger no chance
to smoke except in the place that was called the ‘fiddle.’ It was a
repulsive den made of rough boards (full of cracks), and its office was
to protect the main hatch. It was grimy and dirty; there were no seats;
the only light was a lamp of the rancid-oil-and-rag kind; the place was
very cold, and never dry, for the seas broke in through the cracks every
little while and drenched the cavern thoroughly. In the modern ship
there are three or four large smoking-rooms, and they have card tables
and cushioned sofas, and are heated by steam and lighted by electricity.
There are few European hotels with such smoking-rooms.
The former ships were built of wood, and had two or three water-tight
compartments in the hold with doors in them, which were often left open,
particularly when the ship was going to hit a rock. The modern leviathan
is built of steel, and the water-tight bulkheads have no doors in them;
they divide the ship into nine or ten water-tight compartments and endow
her with as many lives as a cat. Their complete efficiency was
established by the happy results following the memorable accident to the
‘City of Paris’ a year or two ago.
One curious thing which is at once noticeable in the great modern ship
is the absence of hubbub, clatter, rush of feet, roaring of orders. That
is all gone by. The elaborate manœuvres necessary in working the vessel
into her dock are conducted without sound: one sees nothing of the
processes, hears no commands. A Sabbath stillness and solemnity reign in
place of the turmoil and racket of the earlier days. The modern ship has
a spacious bridge, fenced chin-high with sail-cloth, and floored with
wooden gratings; and this bridge, with its fenced fore-and-aft annexes,
could accommodate a seated audience of a hundred and fifty men. There
are three steering equipments, each competent if the others should
break. From the bridge the ship is steered, and also handled. The
handling is not done by shout or whistle, but by signalling with patent
automatic gongs. There are three tell-tales with plainly lettered
dials—for steering, handling the engines, and for communicating orders
to the invisible mates who are conducting the landing of the ship or
casting off. The officer who is astern is out of sight, and too far away
to hear trumpet calls; but the gongs near him tell him to haul in, pay
out, make fast, let go, and so on; he hears, but the passengers do not,
and so the ship seems to land herself without human help.
This great bridge is thirty or forty feet above the water, but the sea
climbs up there sometimes; so there is another bridge twelve or fifteen
feet higher still, for use in these emergencies. The force of water is a
strange thing. It slips between one’s fingers like air, but upon
occasion it acts like a solid body, and will bend a thin iron rod. In
the ‘Havel’ it has splintered a heavy oaken rail into broom-straws,
instead of merely breaking it in two as would have been the seemingly
natural thing for it to do. At the time of the awful Johnstown disaster,
according to the testimony of several witnesses, rocks were carried some
distance on the surface of the stupendous torrent; and at St. Helena,
many years ago, a vast sea-wave carried a battery of cannon forty feet
up a steep slope, and deposited the guns there in a row. But the water
has done a still stranger thing, and it is one which is credibly vouched
for. A marlinspike is an implement about a foot long which tapers from
its butt to the other extremity, and ends in a sharp point. It is made
of iron, and is heavy. A wave came aboard a ship in a storm and raged
aft, breast high, carrying a marlinspike point-first with it, and with
such lightning-like swiftness and force as to drive it three or four
inches into a sailor’s body and kill him.
In all ways the ocean greyhound of to-day is imposing and impressive to
one who carries in his head no ship-pictures of a recent date. In bulk
she comes near to rivalling the Ark; yet this monstrous mass of steel is
driven five hundred miles through the waves in twenty-four hours. I
remember the brag run of a steamer which I travelled in once on the
Pacific—it was two hundred and nine miles in twenty-four hours; a year
or so later I was a passenger in the excursion-tub ‘Quaker City,’ and on
one occasion, in a level and glassy sea, it was claimed that she reeled
off two hundred and eleven miles between noon and noon, but it was
probably a campaign lie. That little steamer had seventy passengers and
a crew of forty men, and seemed a good deal of a beehive; but in this
present ship we are living in a sort of solitude, these soft summer
days, with sometimes a hundred passengers scattered about the spacious
distances, and sometimes nobody in sight at all; yet, hidden somewhere
in the vessel’s bulk, there are (including crew) near eleven hundred
people.
The stateliest lines in the literature of the sea are these:
Britannia needs no bulwark, no towers along the steep—
Her march is o’er the mountain wave, her home is on the
deep!
There it is. In those old times the little ships climbed over the waves
and wallowed down into the trough on the other side; the giant ship of
our day does not climb over the waves, but crushes her way through them.
Her formidable weight and mass and impetus give her mastery over any but
extraordinary storm-waves.
The ingenuity of man! I mean in this passing generation. To-day I found
in the chart-room a frame of removable wooden slats on the wall, and on
the slats was painted uninforming information like this:
Trim-Tank Empty
Double-Bottom No. 1 Full
Double-Bottom No. 2 Full
Double-Bottom No. 3 Full
Double-Bottom No. 4 Full
While I was trying to think out what kind of a game this might be, and
how a stranger might best go to work to beat it, a sailor came in and
pulled out the ‘Empty’ end of the first slat and put it back with its
reverse side to the front, marked ‘Full.’ He made some other change, I
did not notice what. The slat-frame was soon explained. Its function was
to indicate how the ballast in the ship was distributed. The striking
thing was, that that ballast was water. I did not knew that a ship had
ever been ballasted with water. I had merely read, some time or other,
that such an experiment was to be tried. But that is the modern way;
between the experimental trial of a new thing and its adoption there is
no wasted time, if the trial proves its value.
On the wall, near the slat-frame, there was an outline drawing of the
ship, and this betrayed the fact that this vessel has twenty-two
considerable lakes of water in her. These lakes are in her bottom; they
are imprisoned between her real bottom and a false bottom. They are
separated from each other, thwartships, by water-tight bulkheads, and
separated down the middle by a bulkhead running from the bow four-fifths
of the way to the stern. It is a chain of lakes four hundred feet long
and from five to seven feet deep. Fourteen of the lakes contain fresh
water brought from shore, and the aggregate weight of it is four hundred
tons. The rest of the lakes contain salt water—six hundred and eighteen
tons. Upwards of a thousand tons of water altogether.
Think how handy this ballast is. The ship leaves port with the lakes all
full. As she lightens forward, through consumption of coal, she loses
trim—her head rises, her stern sinks down. Then they spill one of the
sternward lakes into the sea, and the trim is restored. This can be
repeated right along as occasion may require. Also, a lake at one end of
the ship can be moved to the other end by pipes and steam pumps. When
the sailor changed the slat-frame to-day, he was posting a transference
of that kind. The seas had been increasing, and the vessel’s head needed
more weighting, to keep it from rising on the waves instead of ploughing
through them; therefore, twenty-five tons of water had been transferred
to the bow from a lake situated well towards the stern.
A water compartment is kept either full or empty. The body of water must
be compact, so that it cannot slosh around. A shifting ballast would not
do, of course.
The modern ship is full of beautiful ingenuities, but it seems to me
that this one is the king. I would rather be the originator of that idea
than of any of the others. Perhaps the trim of a ship was never
perfectly ordered and preserved until now. A vessel out of trim will not
steer, her speed is maimed, she strains and labours in the seas. Poor
creature! for six thousand years she has had no comfort until these
latest days. For six thousand years she swam through the best and
cheapest ballast in the world, the only perfect ballast, but she
couldn’t tell her master, and he had not the wit to find it out for
himself. It is odd to reflect that there is nearly as much water inside
of this ship as there is outside, and yet there is no danger.