SAILING CRAFT: THE BUILDING OF THE SHIP
Shipbuilding was and is a very complex industry. But only the actual
construction can be noticed here, and that only in the briefest general
way. The elaborate methods of European naval yards were not in vogue
anywhere in Canada, not even in Quebec, much less in Nova Scotia. It
was not uncommon for a Bluenose crew to make everything themselves,
especially in the smaller kinds of vessels. They would cut the trees,
draft the plan, build the ship and sail her: being thus lumbermen,
architects, builders, and seamen all in one. The first step in
building is to lay the blocks on which the keel itself is laid. These
blocks are short, thick timbers, arranged in graduated piles, so that
they form an inclined plane of over one in twenty, from which the
completed hull can slide slowly into the water, stern first. Then
comes the laying of the keel, that part which is to the whole vessel
what {83} the backbone is to a man. A false keel is added to the
bottom of this in order to increase its depth and consequent grip.
This prevents the side drift which is called making leeway. The false
keel is only fastened to the keel itself from underneath, because such
a fastening is strong enough to resist water pressure and weak enough
to allow of detachment in case of grounding. The slight projection of
the keel itself then gives too little purchase for a dangerous amount
of leverage on the frame. A long keel is made up of several pieces of
square timber, with their ends shaped into scarfs, an overlapping and
interlocking arrangement of great strength. The foremost keel piece is
scarfed into the stem, which is the fore-end of the vessel's bow. The
aftermost keel piece joins the stern-post, on which the rudder hangs.
Elm makes a good keel, especially with oak for stem and stern-post.
The frame, to pursue our simile, is to the ship what ribs are to our
bodies. In the same way the planking is the skin. The frame, or ribs,
determines the vessel's form. There were, and still are, many
varieties of frame. In a very small vessel there are very few timbers.
The keel is probably all in one piece, and the planks may possibly run
from stem {84} to stern without a break. In this case the unity of
each piece supplies enough longitudinal resistance to strains. But
when a vessel is large, and more especially when she is long, the
strains known as hogging and sagging are apt to rack her timbers apart.
A ship is not built for mere passive resistance, like a house, or even
for resistance only to pressures and vibrations, like a bridge. She is
built to resist every imaginable strain of pitching and rolling, and so
requires architectural skill of a far higher kind than is required (in
the constructional, not the aesthetic, sense) for any structure on the
land. When a ship is on the top of a single wave she tends to hog,
because there is much less support for her ends than for her centre,
and so her ends dip down, racking her upper and compressing her lower
parts amidships. When the seas are shorter she often has her ends much
more waterborne than her centre, and this in spite of the fact that the
extreme ends are not naturally waterborne themselves. Then she sags,
and the strains of racking and compressing are reversed, because her
centre tends to sink and her ends to rise. Now, a series of hogging
and sagging strains alternately compresses and opens every resisting
join in every {85} timber, with the inevitable result of loosening the
whole. To meet these strains longitudinal strength must be supplied.
The keel supplies much of it, so does the planking (or skin) to a
lesser degree; but not enough; and the ribs, by themselves, are for
transverse stiffening only. Four means are therefore employed to hold
the parts together lengthwise--keelsons, shelf-pieces, fillings, and
some form of truss.
The keelson is an inverted keel inside the vessel. The floors, which
are the timbers uniting the two sides of the frame (or ribs), are given
a middle seating on the keel. The keelson is then placed over them,
exactly in line with the keel, when bolts as long as the thickness of
all three are used to unite the whole in one solid backbone, and this
backbone with the ribs. Side or 'sister' keelsons were used in the
Navy on either side of the mainmast for a distance equal to about a
third of the length of the keelson. But they were little used in
merchant vessels, and their longitudinal resistance was only partial
and incidental. Shelf-pieces and waterways were adapted from French
models by Sir Robert Seppings, who became chief constructor to the Navy
some years after Trafalgar. They are thick timbers running
continuously under and {86} over the junctions of the deck beams with
the ship's sides, to both of which they are securely fastened.
The keelson was an old invention and shelf-pieces and waterways were
soon in vogue. But fillings and trusses, both expensive improvements,
were not much favoured in any mercantile marine. The truss is even
older than the keelson, having been used by the ancient Egyptians at
least thirty-five centuries ago, and probably earlier. Four to eight
pillars rose in crutches from the bottom amidships to about six feet
above the gunwale. The Egyptians ran a rope over the crutches and
round the mast, and then used its ends to brace up the stem and stern.
The moderns discarded the rope, took the strains on connecting timbers,
and modified the truss, sometimes out of recognition. But many
Canadian and American river steamers of the twentieth century A.D.
employ the same principle for the same object as the Egyptians of the
seventeenth century B.C. Fillings came from the French, like
shelf-pieces and waterways. Seppings put them between the ribs, in the
form of thick timbers. The whole frame thus became almost solid
against any tendency of the ribs to close together, and quite strong
{87} enough against their other tendency to draw apart.
All means that strengthen a well-built hull longitudinally have also
been made to add their quota to its transverse strength. The ribs
spring from the solid mass of their own floors bolted in between the
keelson and the keel; and the planking, or skin, is let into the
rabbets, or side grooves, of the keel and firmly fastened to the ribs
throughout by hardwood pegs called treenails. The decks are, in
themselves, a source of weakness. The beams supporting them are like
the rafters of a house, which, of course, work the walls apart under
pressure from the floors--and here, as in every other detail, the
stability required for a house is nothing to what is required for a
ship. The way to overcome this difficulty is to make the decks and
beams so many bridges holding the sides together. At the point of
junction of every beam-end with a shelf-piece, waterway, and rib there
is an arrangement of bolts and dowellings (or dovetailings) which makes
the whole as solid as possible. An extra bolt through the waterway,
rib, and outside planking adds to the strength; and a knee, or angular
piece of wood or iron connecting the shelf with the under side of the
beam, almost completes the {88} beam-end connection. The final touches
are the clamps below the shelves and the spirketing above the
waterways, with short-stuff between the clamps of one deck and the
spirketing of the next below.
All this is only the merest suggestion of what is done for the main
part of the vessel's hull. The ends require many modifications,
because the shape there approaches a V, and so the floors cannot cross
the keel as holding bodies. But the breast-hooks forward and crutches
aft, the deck transom, which is the foundation for the deck abaft as
well as the assemblage of timbers uniting the stern to the body of the
vessel, with all the other parts that make up the ends, cannot be more
than mentioned here. Then come the decks, which are quite complex in
themselves, and still more complex by reason of the mast-holes and
hatchways cut out of them all, and the windlass, bitts, and capstan
built into the one that is exposed to the storm. To make sure that
whatever strength is taken out by cutting is restored in some other
way, and that the exposed deck which has to resist the strains put upon
the structures built into it is specially reinforced, the most careful
provision must be made for the mast-holes; for the hatchways {89} with
their coamings fore and aft on carlings that reach from beam to beam;
for the riding bitts, which are posts to hold the cable when the vessel
is at anchor, and which must therefore be immensely strong; for the
windlass, which in the merchant service often did the double duty of
the bitts and capstan; and for a multiplicity of other parts.
A landsman could hardly believe what a marvellous adjustment of
co-operating parts is required for a ship unless he actually watches
its construction. He will then understand why it is by far the most
wonderful structure man has ever built throughout all the ages of his
evolution. It represents his first success in mastering an element not
his own; and, whatever the future may see in the way of aviation, the
priority of seamanship will always remain secure by thousands and
thousands of known and unknown years.
But we are still no farther than a few parts of the hull. There is the
stepping of the masts, with their heels set firm and square above the
keel, and their rake 'right plim' throughout. Then there is the whole
of the rigging--a perfect maze to look at, though an equally perfect
device to use; the sails, which require the most highly expert
workmanship to make; {90} the rudder, and many other essentials.
Finally, there is all that is needed in every well-found vessel which
is 'fit to go foreign.' No vessel would go far unless its under-water
parts were either sheathed, tarred, or tallowed; for sea-worms burrow
alarmingly, and 'whiskers' grow like the obnoxious weeds they are.
These particulars, of course, leave many important gaps in the process.
Then the hull has to be transferred from the inclined plane of block
piles, on which it was built, to a cradle, on which it moves down the
sliding-ways into the water.
When everything is ready, the christening of the ship takes place. A
bottle of wine is broken against her bows and her name is pronounced by
some distinguished person in a formula which varies more or less, but
which is generally some version of the good old English benediction:
'God bless the Dreadnought and all who sail in her.' No matter what
the name may be, the ship herself is always 'she.' Many ingenious and
mistaken explanations have been given of this supposedly female 'she.'
The schoolboy 'howler' on the subject is well known: 'All ships are
"she" except mail boats and men-of-war.' Had this schoolboy known a
very little more he might {91} have added jackass brigs to his list of
male exceptions. The real explanation may possibly be that the English
still spoken at sea is, in some ways, centuries older than the English
spoken on land, and that the nautical 'she' comes down to us from the
ancient days in which all inanimate objects were endowed with life in
everyday speech and neuters were as yet unknown.
Immediately this most stirring ceremony ceases, the stentorian order
comes to 'Down dog-shore!' on which the dog-shore trigger is touched
off, the dog-shores fall, an awakening quiver runs through the
sliding-ways and cradle; and then the whole shapely vessel, still
facing the land from which she gets her being, moves majestically into
the water, where her adventurous life begins.
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