STEAMERS
Steamers and all other machine-driven craft are of very much greater
importance to Canada now than canoes and sailing craft together. But
their story can be told in a chapter no longer than the one devoted to
canoes alone; and this for several reasons. The tale of the canoe
begins somewhere in the immemorial past and is still being told to-day.
The story of the sailing ship is not so old as this. But it is as old
as the history of Canada. It is inseparably connected with Canada's
fortunes in peace and war. It is Canada's best sea story of the recent
past. And, to a far greater extent than the tale of the canoe, it is
also a story of the present and the immediate future. Moreover,
sailing craft helped to make turning points of Canadian history as only
a single steamer ever has. Sailing craft made Canada known
distinctively among every great seafaring people as steamers never
have. {130} And while the building, ownership, and actual navigation
of sailing craft once made Canada fourth among the shipping countries
of the world, the change to steam and steel, coinciding with the
destruction of the handiest timber and the development of inland forms
of business, put no less than eight successful rivals ahead of her.
Every one knows that James Watt turned the power of steam to practical
use in the eighteenth century. But it was not till the first year of
the nineteenth that a really workable steamer appeared, though the
British, French, and Americans had been experimenting for years, just
as ingenious men had been experimenting with stationary engines long
before Watt. This pioneer steamer was the _Charlotte Dundas_, which
ran on the Forth and Clyde Canal in Scotland in 1801. Six years later
Fulton's _Clermont_, engined by the British firm of Boulton and Watt,
ran on the Hudson from New York to Albany. Two years later again the
_Accommodation_, the first steamer in Canada, was launched at Montreal,
and engined there as well. She was built for John Molson by John
Bruce, a shipbuilder, {131} and John Jackson, an engineer. She was
eighty-five feet over all and sixteen feet in the beam. Her engine was
six horse-power, and her trial speed five knots an hour. She was
launched, broadside on, behind the old Molson brewery. She was fitted
up for twenty passengers, but only ten went on her maiden trip. The
fare was eight dollars down to Quebec and ten dollars back. The
following is interesting as a newspaper account of the first trip made
by the first Canadian steamer. It is taken, word for word, from an
original copy of the _Quebec Gazette_ of November 9, 1809.
The Steam Boat, which was built at Montreal last winter, arrived here
on Saturday last, being her first trip. She was 66 hours on the
passage, of which she was at anchor 30. So that 36 hours is the time
which, in her present state, she takes to come down from Montreal to
Quebec [over 160 statute miles]. On Sunday last she went up against
wind and tide from Brehault's wharf to Lymburner's; but her progress
was very slow. It is obvious that her machinery, at present, has not
sufficient force for this River. But there can be no doubt of the
possibility of {132} perfectioning it so as to answer every purpose for
which she was intended; and it would be a public loss should the
proprietors be discouraged from persevering in their undertaking.
They did not fail to persevere. When Molson found that ox-teams were
required to tow her up St Mary's Current, below Montreal, he ordered a
better engine of thirty horse-power from Boulton and Watt in England,
and put it into the _Swiftsure_ in 1811. This steamer was twice the
size of the _Accommodation_, being 120 by 24 feet; and the _Quebec
Gazette_ waxed eloquent about her:
The Steam Boat arrived here from Montreal on Sunday. She started from
Montreal at 5 o'clock on Saturday morning, and anchored at Three
Rivers, which she left on Sunday morning at 5 o'clock, and arrived at
the King's Wharf, Quebec, at half-past two; being only 24 hours and a
half under way between the two cities, with a strong head wind all the
way. She is most superbly fitted up, and offers accommodation for
passengers in every respect equal to the best hotel in Canada. In
short, for celerity and security, she well {133} deserves the name of
_Swiftsure_. America cannot boast of a more useful and expensive
undertaking by one individual, than this of Mr Molson's. His
Excellency, the Governor-in-chief, set out for Montreal on Tuesday
afternoon, in the Steam Boat.
The following letter from Molson, for the information of Sir George
Prevost, governor-general during the War of 1812, refers to one of the
first tenders ever made, in any part of the world, to supply steamer
transport for either naval or military purposes. It was received at
Quebec by Commissary-General Robinson on February 6, 1813:
I received a letter from the Military Secretary, under date of the 15th
Decr. last, informing me of His Excellency's approval of a Tender I had
made of the Steam Boat for the use of Government; wherein I am likewise
informed that you would receive instructions to cause an arrangement to
be made for her Service during the ensuing Season. For the Transport
of Troops and conveyance of light Stores, it will be necessary to fit
her up in a manner so as to be best adapted for the purpose, which will
be in my opinion something after the mode {134} of a Transport. For a
passage Boat she would have to be fitted up quite in a different
manner. If you wish her to be arranged in any particular manner under
the direction of any Person, I am agreeable. I should be glad to be
informed if His Excellency wishes or expects that I shall sail in her
myself, whether Government or I furnish the Officers and men to
Navigate and Pilot her, the Engineer excepted, the fuel and all other
necessarys that may be required for her use. I imagine the arrangement
must be for the Season, not by the Trip, as Government may wish to
detain her for particular purposes. Ensurance I do not believe can be
effected for less than 30 p. cent for the Season, therefore I must take
the risque upon myself.
Within five years of this tender Molson's St Lawrence Steamboat Company
had six more steamers running. In 1823 a towboat company was formed,
and the _Hercules_ towed the _Margaret_ from Quebec to Montreal. The
well-known word 'tug' was soon brought into use from England, where it
originated from the fact that the first towboat in the world was called
_The Tug_. In 1836, before {135} the first steam railway train ran
from La Prairie to St Johns, the Torrance Line, in opposition to the
Molson Line, was running the _Canada_, which was then the largest and
fastest steamer in the whole New World. Meanwhile steam navigation had
been practised on the Great Lakes for twenty years; for in 1817 the
little _Ontario_ and the big _Frontenac_ made their first trips from
Kingston to York (now Toronto). The _Frontenac_ was built at Finkles
Point, Ernestown, eighteen miles from Kingston, by Henry Teabout, an
American who had been employed in the shipyards of Sackett's Harbour at
the time of the abortive British attack in 1813. She was about seven
hundred tons, schooner rigged, engined by Boulton and Watt, and built
at a total cost of $135,000. A local paper said that 'her proportions
strike the eye very agreeably, and good judges have pronounced this to
be the best piece of naval architecture of the kind yet produced in
America.'
Canals and steamers naturally served each other's turn. There was a
great deal of canal building in the twenties. The Lachine Canal,
opening up direct communication west of Montreal, was dug out by 1825,
the Welland, across the Niagara peninsula, by 1829, and the {136}
Rideau, near Ottawa, by 1832. A few very small canals had preceded
these; others were to follow them; and they were themselves in their
infancy of size and usefulness. But the beginning had been made.
The early Canadian steamers and canals did credit to a poor and thinly
peopled country. But none of them ranked as a pioneering achievement
in the world at large. This kind of achievement was reserved for the
_Royal William_, a vessel of such distinction in the history of
shipping that her career must be followed out in detail.
[Illustration: TRANSPORT _BECKWITH_ AND BATEAUX, LAKE ONTARIO, 1816.
From the John Rose Robertson Collection, Toronto Public Library.]
She was the first of all sea-going steamers, the first that ever
crossed an ocean entirely under steam, and the first that ever fired a
shot in action. But her claims and the spurious counter-claims against
her must both be made quite clear. She was not the first steamer that
ever put out to sea, for the Yankee _Phoenix_ made the little coasting
trip from Hoboken to Philadelphia in 1809. She was not the first
steamer in Canadian salt water, for the _St John_ crossed the Bay of
Fundy in 1826. And she was not the first vessel with a steam engine
that crossed an ocean, for the Yankee _Savannah_ crossed from Savannah
to Liverpool in 1819. The {137} _Phoenix_ and _St John_ call for no
explanation. The _Savannah_ does, especially in view of the claims so
freely made and allowed for her as being the first regular steamer to
cross an ocean. To begin with, she was not a regular sea-going steamer
with auxiliary sails like the _Royal William_, but a so-called
clipper-built, full-rigged ship of three hundred tons with a small
auxiliary engine and paddle-wheels made to be let down her sides when
the wind failed. She did not even steam against head winds, but
tacked. She took a month to make Liverpool, and she used steam for
only eighty hours altogether. She could not, indeed, have done much
more, because she carried only seventy-five tons of coal and
twenty-five cords of wood, and she made port with plenty of fuel left.
Her original log (the official record every vessel keeps) disproves the
whole case mistakenly made out for her by some far too zealous
advocates.
The claims of the _Royal William_ are proved by ample contemporary
evidence, as well as by the subsequent statements of her master, John
M'Dougall, her builder, James Goudie, and John Henry, the Quebec
founder who made some castings for her engines the year after they had
been put into her at Montreal. {138} M'Dougall was a seaman of
indomitable perseverance, as his famous voyage to England shows.
Goudie, though only twenty-one, was a most capable naval architect,
born in Canada and taught his profession in Scotland. His father was a
naval architect before him and had built several British vessels on the
Great Lakes for service against the Americans during the War of 1812.
Both Goudie and Henry lived to retell their tale in 1891, when the
Canadian government put up a tablet to commemorate what pioneering work
the _Royal William_ had done, both for the inter-colonial and
inter-imperial connection.
The first stimulus to move the promoters of the _Royal William_ was the
subsidy of $12,000 offered by the government of Lower Canada in 1830 to
the owners of any steamer over five hundred tons that would ply between
Quebec and Halifax. Half this amount had been offered in 1825, but the
inducement was not then sufficient. The Quebec and Halifax Navigation
Company was formed by the leading merchants of Quebec joined with a few
in Halifax. The latter included the three Cunard brothers, whose
family name has been a household word in transatlantic shipping circles
from that day to this. On September 2, {139} 1830, Goudie laid the
keel of the _Royal William_ in the yard belonging to George Black, a
shipbuilder, and his partner, John Saxton Campbell, formerly an officer
in the 99th Foot, and at this time a merchant and shipowner in Quebec.
The shipyard was situated at Cape Cove beside the St Lawrence, a mile
above the citadel, and directly in line with the spot on which Wolfe
breathed his last after the Battle of the Plains.
The launch took place on Friday afternoon, April 29, 1831. Even if all
the people present had then foreknown the _Royal William's_ career they
could not have done more to mark the occasion as one of truly national
significance. The leaders among them certainly looked forward to some
great results at home. Quebec was the capital of Lower Canada; and
every Canadian statesman hoped that the new steamer would become a bond
of union between the three different parts of the country--the old
French province by the St Lawrence, the old British provinces down by
the sea, and the new British province up by the Lakes.
The mayor of Quebec proclaimed a public holiday, which brought out such
a concourse of shipwrights and other shipping experts as hardly any
other city in the world could show. {140} Lord Aylmer was there as
governor-general to represent King William IV, after whom the vessel
was to be named the _Royal William_ by Lady Aylmer. This was most
appropriate, as the sailor king had been the first member of any royal
house to set foot on Canadian soil, which he did at Quebec in 1787, as
an officer in H.M.S. _Pegasus_. The guard and band from the 32nd Foot
were drawn up near the slip. The gunners of the Royal Artillery were
waiting to fire the salute from the new citadel, which, with the walls,
was nearing completion, after the Imperial government had spent
thirty-five million dollars in carrying out the plans approved by
Wellington. Lady Aylmer took the bottle of wine, which was wreathed in
a garland of flowers, and, throwing it against the bows, pronounced the
historic formula: 'God bless the _Royal William_ and all who sail in
her.' Then, amid the crash of arms and music, the roaring of
artillery, and the enthusiastic cheers of all the people, the stately
vessel took the water, to begin a career the like of which no other
Canadian vessel ever equalled before that time or since.
Her engines, which developed more than two hundred horse-power, were
made by Bennett and Henderson in Montreal and sent to meet {141} her a
few miles below the city, as the vessel towing her up could not stem St
Mary's Current. Her hull was that of a regular sea-going steamer,
thoroughly fit to go foreign, and not the hull of an ordinary sailing
ship, like the _Savannah_, with paddles hung over the sides in a calm.
Goudie's master, Simmons of Greenock, had built four steamers to cross
the Irish Sea; and Goudie probably followed his master's practice when
he gave the _Royal William_ two deep 'scoops' to receive the
paddle-boxes nearer the bows than the stern. The tonnage by builder's
measurement was 1370, though by net capacity of burden only 363. The
length over all was 176 feet, on the keel 146. Including the
paddle-boxes the breadth was 44 feet; and, as each box was 8 feet
broad, there were 28 feet clear between them. The depth of hold was 17
feet 9 inches, the draught 14 feet. The rig was that of a three-masted
topsail schooner. There were fifty passenger berths and a good saloon.
[Illustration: THE _ROYAL WILLIAM_ From the original painting in
possession of the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec]
The three trips between Quebec and Halifax in 1831 were most
successful. But 1832 was the year of the great cholera, especially in
Quebec, and the _Royal William_ was so harassed by quarantine that she
had to be laid up there. The losses of that disastrous season {142}
decided her owners to sell out next spring for less than a third of her
original cost. She was then degraded for a time into a local tug or
sometimes an excursion boat. But presently she was sent down to
Boston, where the band at Fort Independence played her in to the tune
of 'God Save the King,' because she was the first of all steamers to
enter a seaport of the United States under the Union Jack.
Ill luck pursued her new owners, who, on her return to Quebec, decided
to send her to England for sale. She left Quebec on August 5, 1833,
coaled at Pictou, which lies on the Gulf side of Nova Scotia, and took
her departure from there on the 18th, for her epoch-making voyage, with
the following most prosaic clearance: '_Royal William_, 363 tons. 36
men. John M'Dougall, master. Bound to London. British. Cargo: 254
chaldrons of coals [nearly 300 tons], a box of stuffed birds, and six
spars, produce of this province. One box and one trunk, household
furniture and a harp, all British, and seven passengers.' The fare was
fixed at £20, 'not including wines.'
The voyage soon became eventful. Nearly three hundred tons of coal was
a heavy concentrated cargo for the tremendous storm she encountered on
the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. {143} She strained; her starboard
engine was disabled; she began to leak; and the engineer came up to
tell M'Dougall she was sinking. But M'Dougall held his course, started
the pumps, and kept her under way for a week with only the port engine
going. The whole passage from Pictou, counting the time she was
detained at Cowes repairing boilers, took twenty-five days. M'Dougall,
a sturdy Scotsman, native of Oban, must have been sorely tempted to
'put the kettle off the boil' and run her under sail. But either the
port or starboard engine, or both, worked her the whole way over, and
thus for ever established her claim to priority in transatlantic
navigation under steam alone.
In London she was sold for £10,000, just twice what she had fetched at
sheriff's sale in Quebec some months before. She was at once
chartered, crew and all, by the Portuguese government, who declined to
buy her for conversion into a man-of-war. In 1834, however, she did
become a man-of-war, this time under the Spanish flag, though flying
the broad Pennant of Commodore Henry, who was then commanding the
British Auxiliary Steam Squadron against the Carlists in the north of
Spain. Two years later, on May 5, 1836, under {144} her Spanish name
of _Isabella Segunda_, she made another record. When the British
Legion, under Sir de Lacy Evans, was attacking the Carlists in the bay
of St Sebastian, she stood in towards the Carlist flank and thereupon
fired the first shot that any steam man-of-war had ever fired in action.
Strangely enough, she cannot be said to have come to any definite end
as an individual ship. She continued in the Spanish service till 1840,
when she was sent to Bordeaux for repairs. The Spaniards, who are
notorious slovens at keeping things shipshape, had allowed her to run
down to bare rot after her Britisher-Canadian crew had left her. So
the French bought her for a hulk and left her where she was. But the
Spaniards took her engines out and put them into a new _Isabella
Segunda_, which was wrecked in a storm on the Algerian coast in 1860.
Her career of record-making is well worth a general summary: the _Royal
William_ was the first steamer built to foster inter-colonial trade in
Canada; the first Canadian steamer specially designed for work at sea;
the first sea-going steamer to enter a port in the United States under
the British flag; the first steam transport in Portugal; the first
steam man-of-war in {145} Spain; the first naval steamer that ever
fired a shot in action; and the first vessel in the world that ever
crossed an ocean under steam alone.
The next step in the history of Canadian steamers is not concerned with
a ship but with a man. Sir Hugh Allan, who, though the greatest, was
not the first of the pioneers. The Cunard brothers preceded the Allan
brothers in establishing a transatlantic line. Samuel Cunard had been
one of the shareholders in the _Royal William_. He had wonderful
powers of organization. He knew the shipping trade as very few have
ever known it; and his name has long since become historical in this
connection. The first 'Cunarder' to arrive in Canada was the
_Britannia_, 1154 tons, built on the Clyde, and engined there by
Napier. From that time on till Confederation, that is, from 1840 to
1867, Cunarders ran from Liverpool to Halifax. But Halifax was always
treated as a port of call. The American ports were the real
destination. And after 1867 the Cunarders became practically an
Anglo-American, not an Anglo-Canadian, line. During their connection
with Canada, partially renewed in the present century, the Cunards
never did {146} anything really original. They were not among the
first to make the change from wood to iron or from paddle-wheels to
screws. But they did business honestly and well and always took care
of their passengers' safety.
The Cunards were Canadians. Sir Hugh Allan was a Scotsman. But he and
the line he founded are unchallengeably first in their services to
Canada. Hugh Allan was born in 1810, the son of a Scottish master
mariner who about that time was mate of a transport carrying supplies
to the British Army in the Peninsular War. He arrived in Canada when
he was only fifteen, entered the employ of a Montreal shipping firm
when he came of age, and at forty-eight obtained complete control of it
with his brother Andrew. From that day to this the Allan family have
been the acknowledged leaders of Canadian transatlantic shipping.
Hugh Allan was a man of boundless energy, iron will, and consummate
business ability. The political troubles of the Pacific Scandal in
1873 prevented him from anticipating the present Canadian Pacific
Railway in making a single united service of trains and steamers to
connect England with China and both with Canada. But what he did
succeed in carrying {147} through, against long odds, was quite enough
for one distinguished business lifetime. He began by running a line of
sailing craft between Montreal and the mother country in conjunction
with his father's firm in Glasgow. Then, in 1853, he and his brother
headed a company which ordered two iron screw steamers to be built in
Scotland for the St Lawrence. The first of these, the _Canadian_, came
out to Quebec on her maiden voyage in 1854; but both she and her sister
ship were soon diverted to the Crimea, where high rates were being paid
for transports during the war.
In 1858 the Allans contracted with the government for a weekly mail
service and bought out all their partners, as they alone considered
that the time had come for such a venture. The subsidy was doubled the
next year to prevent the collapse of the service after a widespread
financial panic. But heavy forfeits were imposed for lateness in
delivering mails, an adverse factor in the greatest fight against
misfortune ever known to Canadian shipping history. Within eight years
the Allans lost as many vessels. In every case there was disastrous
loss of property; in some, a total loss of everything--vessel, cargo,
crew, and passengers.
{148}
No other firm has ever had to face such a storm of persistent
adversity. But the indomitable Allans emerged triumphant; and by the
time of Confederation, in 1867, the worst was over. Thenceforth they
were first in all respects till very recently. In the introduction of
shipbuilding improvements they are without a rival still. Their
_Bavarian_ was the first Atlantic liner entirely built of steel; their
_Parisian_ the first to be fitted with bilge keels; their _Virginian_
and _Victorian_ the first to use the turbine.
There are only two other salient features of Canadian steamer history
that can be mentioned beside the _Royal William_ and the Allans: the
Richelieu and Ontario Navigation Company and the Canadian Pacific
Railway's merchant fleet. True, neither of these comes into quite the
same class. The _Royal William_ occupies an absolutely unique position
in the world at large. The Allans are more intimately connected with
the history of Canadian shipping than any other family or firm. Both
the _Royal William_ and the Allans are landmarks. But the Richelieu
and Ontario Navigation Company and the Canadian Pacific Railway Company
have also shown abundant energy; turned to effective national account.
The Richelieu Steamboat Company was {149} formed in 1845, and took its
other title thirty years later, when it made its first great 'merger.'
It began in a very humble way, by running two little market boats
between Sorel and Montreal. From the first it had to fight for its
commercial life. The train was beginning to be a formidable
competitor. But the fight to a finish was the fight of boat against
boat. Fares were cut and cut again. At last the passengers were
offered bed, board, and transportation for the price of a single meal.
Every day there was a desperate race on the water. The rival steamers
shook and panted in their self-destroying zeal to be the first to get
the gangway down. Clouds of fire-streaked smoke poured from their
funnels. More than once a cargo that would burn well was thrown into
the furnaces to keep the steam up. The public became quite as keen as
any of the crews or companies, and worked excitement up to fever pitch
by crowding the wharves to gamble madly on this daily river Derby. The
stress was too much for the weaker companies. One by one they either
fell out or 'merged in.' After the merger with the Ontario Company in
1875 things went on, with many ups and downs, more in the usual way of
competition. Finally, in 1913, a {150} general 'pooling merger' was
effected by which practically all Canadian lines came under one
control, from the lower Great Lakes, down the St Lawrence, through the
Gulf, and south away to the West Indies. The title of this new merger
is the Canada Steamship Lines Limited. The Canadian Pacific Railway
Company has half a dozen different fleets at work: one on the Atlantic,
another as a trans-Pacific line, a third on the Pacific coast, a fourth
on the lakes of British Columbia, a fifth on the upper Great Lakes, and
a sixth as ferries for its trains. Thus, by taking the upper Great
Lakes and the West, it divides the trans-Canadian waters with the
Canada Steamship Lines, which latter take the lower Great Lakes and the
East. A company whose annual receipts and expenditure are balanced at
not far short of two hundred millions of dollars might well seem to be
all-important in every way, especially when its shipping tonnage
exceeds that of the Allans by over thirty thousand. But this Chronicle
is a history of at least four hundred years; while the famous 'C.P.R.'
has not as yet been either forty years a railway line or twenty years a
shipping firm. There is only one great C.P.R. disaster to record. But
that is of appalling magnitude. Over a thousand lives were lost {151}
when the Norwegian collier _Storstad_ sank the _Empress of Ireland_ off
Rimouski in 1914.
The five principal features of Canadian steamship history have now been
pointed out: John Molson's pioneer boats, the _Royal William_, the
Allan line, the 'R. and O.' (now the Canada Steamship Lines), and the
'C.P.R.' No other individual feature has any noteworthy Canadian
peculiarities. Nor does the general evolution of steam navigation in
or around Canada differ notably, in other respects, from the same
evolution elsewhere. Steamers have adapted themselves to circumstances
in Canada very much as they have in other countries, pushing their
persistent way step by step into all the navigable waters, fresh or
salt. The Canadian waters, especially the fresh waters, certainly have
some marked characteristics of their own, but the steamers have
acquired no special character in consequence.
Both Canadian and visiting steamers have always had their duplicates on
many other oceans, lakes, and rivers. There is the ubiquitous tug;
stubby, noisy, self-assertive, small; but, in its several varieties,
the handiest {152} all-round little craft afloat. It is worth noting
that in the special class of sea tugs the Dutch, and not the British,
are easily first: a curious exception to the general rule of British
supremacy at sea. Then, with many variations and several intermediate
types, there are the two main distinctive kinds of inland vessels: the
long, low, grimy, cargo-carrying whale-back, tankship, barge, or other
useful form of ugliness, simply meant to nose her way through quite
safe waters with the utmost bulk her huge stuffed maw will hold; and,
at the opposite end of the scale, the high, white, gaily decorated
'palace' steamer, with tier upon tier of decks, and a strong suggestion
of the theatre all through. Sea-going craft show the same variations
within a given type and the same intermediate types between the two
ends of the scale. But the general distinction is quite as well
marked, though the necessity for seaworthy hulls brings about a closer
resemblance along the water-line. There is the cargo boat, long,
comparatively low, and rather dingy; with derricks and vast holds,
which remind one of the tentacles and stomach of an octopus. The
opposite extreme is the great passenger liner, much larger and more
shapely in the hull; but best distinguished, at any {153} distance, by
her towering, white, superstructural decks, with their clean-run
symmetry fore and aft.
The 'Britisher' is the predominant type in Canadian waters. This is
natural enough, considering that the British Isles build nearly all
'Britishers,' most 'Canadians,' and many foreigners, and that the
tonnage actually under construction there in 1913 exceeded the total
tonnage owned by any other country except Germany and the United
States, while it greatly exceeded the total tonnage under construction
in all other countries of the world put together, including Germany and
the United States. The British practice is naturally the prevailing
one both in shipbuilding and marine engineering. But there is a
general conformity to certain leading ideas everywhere. The engine is
passing out of the stage in which the fuel-made steam worked machinery,
which, in its turn, worked propellers; and passing into the stage in
which the latent forces of the fuel itself are brought to bear more
directly on propellers, that is to say, into the stage of internal
combustion engines and the turbine-driven screw. The hull has changed
more and more in its proportions between length and breadth since the
supplanting of wood by steel. {154} Instead of a length equal at most
to five beams there are lengths of more than ten beams now. This means
a radical change in framing. The old wooden vessel, as we have seen,
had a frame looking like the skeleton of a man's body, with the keel
for a backbone and multitudinous ribs at right angles to it. But the
new steel vessel, especially if built on the excellent Isherwood
principle, looks entirely different. The transverse ribs are there, of
course, but in a modified form. They do not catch the eye, which now,
instead of being drawn from side to side, is led along from end to end
by what looks like, and really is, a complete ribbing of internal
keels. The whole system has, in fact, been changed from the transverse
to the longitudinal.
The subject is well worth pursuing for its own sake. But the modern
developments of naval architecture and waterborne trade which Canada
shares with the rest of the world do not concern us any further here.
{155}