Chapter VI: Steamships of Many Types

Of the super-giant ships there were, in 1924, but ten, but as one starts looking for smaller ships, he finds them much more numerous. Under the British flag alone there are about two hundred ships of ten thousand or more tons. In the entire world there are about twenty-nine thousand steamships of five hundred tons or more.

It is this enormous fleet to which we now must turn in order that we may continue our ever-widening story of the development of ships. And with this vast fleet we shall include the countless thousands of still smaller steamers that serve as many thousand masters in a great diversity of ways. The ships to which I shall refer in this chapter are so diverse in size, in duties, and in model that it almost seems that the only thing they have in common is their universal ability to float on the surface of the water.

First there are the mail liners, which differ in few things other than size from the huge vessels I have described in Chapter V. And even in size they are more or less comparable, as they are from twelve or fifteen thousand tons to twenty-five thousand. As a class they are hardly less luxurious than their greater sisters, and their speed is only slightly less. And aside from these two things there is no essential difference, except that they are more numerous and are less expensive to build and to operate. And, too, they are less expensive to travel on, which is a blessing for those of us who cannot afford to pay the rates of the giant liners.

But other differences are few, and a description of the super-liners is, in all details save those I have just mentioned, a description of these other ships which travel most of the main ocean lanes, and girdle the earth with comfortable travel routes. They cross the North Atlantic between Europe and America. They cross diagonally from the Old World to the wonder cities of Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo, and Buenos Ayres. They journey through Suez on their trips to the Far East and return. They link China and Japan with the United States and Canada, and regularly sail from North America to South. For all their comparatively limited numbers these ships visit many of the world’s important ports, for they are busy—very busy—and one never sees them laid up when business is slack, nor do they idle about port for lengthy stays. Every minute that is possible they are on their way across the oceans, and a year or more ahead their sailing dates are scheduled. These are the ships that sail the great sea lanes almost as regularly as the great express trains pass along their tracks. And these are the ships that visit the most important ports of earth. But important though they are, we can give them no more time. Already we have told about their greater counterparts and, too, have said that there are no vital differences save size.

But dropping down the scale of size, which is the only yardstick that is ready at hand by which to classify these ships, we come to a more numerous category. Captain Bone, in “The Lookoutman,” lists these as “intermediate liners.” I have vainly endeavoured to find a better way to list them, but I always come back to his method, and so, I suppose, must use it.

The intermediate liners, ranging, perhaps, from five thousand tons to twelve or even fifteen, are of many types and are engaged in the performance of many tasks. They visit the lesser ports and the greater with a fine disregard for anything save the business on which they are engaged. You will find them stopping at Capetown on their way to Australia from Liverpool. You will find them at Central American ports loading bananas. They visit Guayaquil, Havana, Piræus, and Sydney, and lord it over the smaller craft that fill those busy harbours. They fill a less pretentious place in Liverpool and New York, and now and then they drop their anchors in tiny mid-pacific ports, or manage, with difficulty, to get behind the breakwaters at Ponta Delgada, or churn the tropic water at Mombasa, or anchor at Christchurch.

_These ships, while somewhat smaller than the biggest ships and not quite so fast, are perhaps the most popular of passenger ships, for their rates are not so high as those of the great ships, and their accommodations are more or less comparable._ ]

Some of them are dowdy and old and keep themselves respectable only by many applications of paint, as a man who has seen better circumstances will often keep his ancient suit from appearing too unpresentable by the frequent application of the whisk broom and the pressing iron. But others of these ships are sparkling in bright woodwork and have the smoothest of unscarred sides. Their decks are holystoned to the whiteness of a Dutch matron’s kitchen table, and their passenger accommodations are beyond criticism.

But the passenger space on these ships is generally somewhat limited, although many of them are most elaborately equipped, and the holds are for ever being emptied or filled with the kinds of freight that require rapid shipment, or, coming in small parcels, can afford to pay the higher rates these ships demand.

They sail on scheduled dates and have routes of their own, which often include more or less numerous ports of call, and they all belong to steamship lines of major or minor importance which maintain offices or representatives at most of the ports that give them their business. The United Fruit Company, the ships of which traverse the Caribbean, and call at Havana and other major ports in addition to many small ones on their voyages from and to New York, maintains great banana plantations, which furnish the larger portion of the freight these beautiful white ships carry. Other lines have other interests, some maintaining a rigid aloofness from interests farther from their ships than the passengers and freight of the ports at which they call. But these ships take one comfortably to many such out-of-the-way places as would hardly seem worthy of their attention.

Again, however, the fundamental differences, save size, between these and the great liners are comparatively slight. In size, it is true, the difference is vast. It would take a round dozen of the smaller intermediate liners to equal in bulk the great _Majestic_. And still these ships are not to be called small. They may, perhaps, be four or five hundred feet in length. Their speed, it is true, is likely to be far less than that of the great ships, for they make, perhaps, fifteen or sixteen or eighteen knots, while the great ships may reel off twenty-five or more an hour.

_Ships of this type were developed during the World War._]

Still, their likenesses, at least superficially, are greater than their differences. There is likely to be a difference in the number of funnels and masts. Derricks are probably more numerous on the smaller ships, for they carry more cargo, strange as that may seem, than the great ships. The intermediate liner has fewer decks, but that would seem at first glance to be because the proportions of the ship are such that numerous decks are impossible. The real reason, however, is that the cabin accommodations are limited. But a passenger on the intermediate liners will probably be very nearly as comfortable as a passenger on the greatest of ships, although he won’t find a Pompeian bath, or a Palm Garden, or any of those super-elegant appurtenances that are common on the greatest ships. But for pleasurable travel these ships—or at least the better of these ships—are often preferred by experienced travellers, for simple surroundings are to many people more pleasant than gorgeous elegance.

“Cargo liners,” again using Captain Bone’s classification, are of a different type. Their sizes are hardly subject to definite restrictions, for, granted that a ship belongs to a shipping line and sails on scheduled dates between two or more ports and carries such freight as may be brought to her, she is a “cargo liner,” whether she be of five hundred or of fifteen thousand tons. In practice, however, these ships range, perhaps, from five to fifteen thousand tons, and as they supplement, to some extent, the freight-carrying passenger ships of the lines to which they belong, their speed is high, for freighters. They make, perhaps, fourteen or fifteen or even sixteen knots an hour, and they are likely to be fine, wholesome-looking ships, handsome in their lines and proud in their appearance. And for this they have some reason, for they are the queens of the cargo fleets, and steam proudly past the dowdy tramps just as the giant liners and the mail liners sweep past the intermediate liners.

But now we come to what seems to me to be a more romantic class—the tramp steamers—for they are of the rank and file—as the farmer and the workman in our factories are of the rank and file. Kings and presidents, members of Parliament and of Congress are for ever in the papers, while the simple folk who give these people the exalted positions they hold seldom see their names in print. And likewise the great liners and, to a lesser degree, the mail and intermediate and cargo liners, are often in the public print, while the tramp steamers, which make possible the conditions that have brought the others into being, are seldom written of. For, from the point of view of the world’s work, these simple ships are mostly vitally important to it, just as the “common people” are of more value to a country than are the holders of high office.

And as one finds great differences among a country’s “common people” so does one find great differences among these “common people” of the sea, upon whose sturdiness and brawn and energy depends that vast web of commerce without which the modern world, as we know it, could not exist.

_A cargo liner is a freight ship that sails on scheduled dates and routes, and is different in this from a “tramp” which takes what cargoes it can at any time and to any port._ ]

There is hardly a single important thing that is common to all these ships. True, the possession of but one funnel seems to be an all but universal attribute, but aside from that the streaks of rust that mar their dingy sides are almost the only marks they all possess. Sometimes one sees a smartly painted tramp, it is true, and she presents a pleasant sight, but paint is not tough enough long to stand the wear and tear of this service, and coat after coat is scratched by piers or heavy freight, or peels beneath the blistering tropic sun, or is stained by chemicals or strange cargoes from outlandish ports. And even the most careful captain cannot prevent the rusty-looking spots, for red lead paint must first be applied to the denuded steel, ere it is covered with the more seemly black, and while one spot is being made more reputable, another is fast losing its thin armour of paint, so that rust or red lead seem always to be in evidence.

But all of this is merely superficial, and appearances, in ships as in people, often grossly deceive.

It is perhaps unfortunate that these hard-working ships should ever have been called “tramps,” for the word suggests a lack of respectable employment to people ashore, as well as a wandering spirit. Among people ashore a tramp is looked down upon because he is content with hardly more than enough to eat. He produces nothing. He works at nothing. His irresponsibility is ever uppermost, and he is sure to do but one single thing—to keep for ever on the move. But at sea a tramp is a ship that works most diligently. She journeys, it is true, on no set route, and never knows—or seldom—for what port she is likely next to steer. But she works! Every possible moment of her workaday life she works. From the day she has passed her builders’ tests and is turned over to her owners she labours as no man or no man’s beasts of burden were ever worked. Day and night she sails the lonely seas—from Liverpool to Shanghai—from Shanghai to Capetown—from Capetown to Sydney—from Sydney to New York—from New York, perhaps, to Liverpool again—but not for rest. She may, it is true, be docked and repaired, but once afloat again, and noisy, dirty streams of dusty coal pour chokingly into her cavernous holds, and off she goes again, perhaps to Spain, where her coal may be exchanged for a cargo of iron ore, and back she sails, to discharge and load again and sail, until, at last, when years have passed, she has outgrown her usefulness and is flung upon a scrap heap where everything of value is taken from her hulk and she is forgotten—as workmen sometimes are, who through all their lives have laboured, day after day, at forge or bench, making for the world some of the many things it needs, only to find themselves, when they are worn out, forgotten and replaced by a man more new.

_Perhaps the hardest-working machine ever designed by man, and undoubtedly the most romantic of all steam-driven ships._]

These are the ships that make world commerce possible. These are the ships that carry the world’s goods. These are the ships that make a nation’s merchant marine, and these, basically, are the ships that make necessary great navies and great ports. Here, then, lies the modern romance of the sea.

The most common type of tramp steamer has a raised section amidships, where are placed the bridge, the funnel, and a group of houses containing the galley (which is the kitchen of a ship), staterooms for her officers, and, perhaps, a messroom. Below this lie the boiler and engine rooms. Forward of the bridge the deck drops six or eight feet to a lower level, and as it nears the bow, it is raised again to a little above the altitude of the midship deck. This is still called the forecastle, after those weird structures raised at the bows of ships in the Middle Ages. Aft the midship section the deck drops away as it does forward, and at the stern is raised again, until the stern is about level with the midship deck. Long since, however, the name sterncastle has been dropped. This section is the “poop.”

Sometimes light bridge-like runways are raised above the lower parts of the deck forward and aft of the midship section, connecting the bow and stern with the group of deck houses amidships, for when the cargo has been stowed these ships are deep in the water, and these low decks are but a little way above the surface. Once they are at sea, at least in heavy weather, “lippers,” or waves that reach their crests just over the low bulwarks, seem for ever to be flooding these sections of the ship. And once a storm blows up, these decks are often buried beneath tons of solid water, and the crew, housed forward in the forecastle, and the captain, who sometimes lives astern, would, without the raised runway, be more or less marooned and helpless on board the very ship they are supposed to operate.

So diverse in design, in operation, and in equipment are these ships that it is impossible to describe them as a unit. Their tonnage ranges from a few hundred to ten thousand. Their crews range from fifteen, perhaps, to fifty. Their engines may be reciprocating or turbine. It is usual, however, for them to have but one propeller, and their speed is low. Seldom do they make less than eight knots an hour, and seldom, too, are they able to make as much as fifteen. Some are well equipped with useful auxiliary machinery for doing much of the heavy work. Others have hardly more than a few steam winches installed to aid in loading and discharging their strange variety of cargoes.

A ship may sail from Newport News to Havana with coal, and while she is discharging at her berth may receive orders to proceed to Caibarien for a cargo of sugar. She grunts and shrieks and groans as the Havana stevedores take the coal ashore, her crew more or less idle, except for odd jobs, for crews of tramps attend to neither the discharging of cargoes nor the loading. Once the coal is ashore, however, the crew has a job. The ship must be fumigated, by order of the port authorities, and once fumigated the hatches must be lifted off, and the vast caverns into which the new cargo is to go must be swept and cleaned with care, for sugar does not mix too well with coal dust. And then the ship is off down the Cuban coast, riding high out of water, her propeller blades splashing half in and half out. If the weather is pleasant the holds may be cleaned on the way, and once she arrives off Cay Frances—for she cannot enter the shallow harbour of Caibarien—her captain orders the motor boat over the side, if he has one, and journeys a dozen miles to the little port. Here he tries to hurry the cargo lighters out to his anchorage, for it costs money to keep a ship idle. She is paying dividends only when she is on her way from port to port, and it is one of a captain’s important duties to do everything he can to get her on her way again. If his company has an agent at Caibarien, which is unlikely, the agent, too, tries to speed matters, but Cuban ways tend to slowness, and it is likely to be a day or two before a couple of barges are brought alongside, with a gang of Negro stevedores who slowly commence their operations. The derricks are rigged beside each hatch and the great bags come aboard in sixes or eights and are dropped into what seem to be the bottomless pits below the yawning openings. Far below, another group of stevedores cast the tackle off, and one by one the bags are packed, so as to fill the hold to the exclusion of a cubic inch of space not utilized. All day they load, and all night, for as one barge is emptied another appears. Relief crews of stevedores appear, and under a cluster of lights hanging from bridge or mast they labour—their toil seemingly endless, but gradually, nevertheless, approaching its conclusion. Lower and lower the ship sinks into the water. Her propeller blades disappear, and down and down she goes. No longer is she the wall-sided affair that anchored a day or two before. And finally, as the bags reach up and up to the combings of the hatch, she is down once more, until her Plimsoll mark, which is cut in her side by Lloyd’s to show how deep she is permitted to ride, is washed by every wave. A few more bags—the last big barge is empty—the last bit of space in her great holds is filled and she is ready for her voyage to Brooklyn.

Once more the crew becomes active. Girders are lowered into their places across the twenty-foot-wide hatches. Great planks cover the opening, and several huge tarpaulins are unrolled and spread above the planks, for cargoes must be guarded against salt water. These coverings are carefully put in place while the stokers raise the boiler pressure once more, and ere the last of the preparations is completed another voyage has been begun.

* * * * *

There are many other types of ships that busy themselves about the sea. One of these is the oil tanker, a ship built for but a single purpose. These are owned by the big oil companies whose products come from Mexico or the Dutch East Indies, or, originating in the United States, are sold to countries not so fortunate as to have oil wells of their own.

_These ships have come to the seas in very recent years. They are used only for the transportation of oil, and are owned largely by the great oil companies._]

An oil tanker has an appearance more or less its own, although the great carriers of ore and grain on the Great Lakes are very similar.

On these ships the engines and boilers are in the stern, and sometimes, too, the bridge is there, with the funnel rising from behind it, in a position which few sailors can accept as normal. Sometimes, again, the bridge and a small deck house are amidships. On these tankers the propelling machinery is in the stern in order that the cargo may be insulated to the greatest possible extent from the fires. Incidentally, too, it is the empty tanker that requires the most care, for just as an empty gasolene tin will explode while one filled to overflowing with gasolene will not, so the empty tanker, reeking with the gas left by the oil it carries, is more apt to explode.

The turret steamer falls into almost any category. It is built in order to save money on certain port and canal dues and other taxes, and its appearance is perhaps the weirdest of that of any ship, save, perhaps, the antediluvian whalebacks once so common on the Great Lakes. Below the water line these turret steamers are much the same as other freighters, but from there up they are vastly different. Just above the water line their sides are turned in until they are almost a deck. These “decks” run forward nearly to the bow and aft almost to the stern. But the central portion of the ship from bow to stern is raised ten or a dozen feet above these strange side “decks,” which in reality are not decks at all, but only sections of the sides of these strange hulls. The turret ships have few, if any, advantages over more normal ships, their only purpose being to save what money they can in tolls that ships less strangely designed are forced to pay. The turret ship is only the naval architect’s way of making it possible for the ship’s owners to take advantage of certain technicalities in wording. They are few in number and are of minor importance.

* * * * *

In these days of large shipments it does not usually pay owners to send ships of small tonnage on long sea voyages. Few steamers of less than five or six hundred tons make voyages across the Atlantic, for instance. Time was, and not so long ago, when a five-hundred-ton clipper sailed halfway round the world, but steam and steel have made deep-sea cargo ships much larger than they were, and the smaller fry are kept in the coasting trades or busy themselves in the Mediterranean or other more or less landlocked waters. These “coasters” seem to be as diverse in design as naval architects are capable of producing. Every coast has developed its own particular type, although, of course, the fundamentals of their construction are basic and permit of little change. Many of them cross the North Sea, and consequently must be seaworthy, for the North Sea has a habit of being rough. The Irish Sea is filled with them—of many shapes and sizes. European ports seem always crowded with these little ships, which steam about their business with a sort of jaunty cocksureness that is amusing in smooth waters. But they lose that jauntiness when they poke their noses into the ocean swells, and as they roll and pitch along their way they have a worried but determined air. Europe is the home of more of them, perhaps, than all of the rest of the world combined. America uses schooners or sends out ocean-going tugs with long tows of ancient ships once proud under their own canvas, but now converted into barges with stubby masts and sawed-off bowsprits.

_These strange vessels are comparatively rare, and seem to be passing away entirely._]

Now and then one sees an ocean-going car ferry, carrying trains of box cars across some narrow arm of the sea. A notable one of these—the _Henry M. Flagler_—runs from Key West to Havana, carrying American freight trains to Cuba and Cuban trains back, in order that the freight need not be handled at each end: from car to ship, and again from ship to car.

The tourist, too, is sure, sooner or later, to travel on fast express steamers that cross similar narrow straits. The cross-channel steamers between Calais and Dover, the small ships from Copenhagen to Norway and Sweden, and others, are of this type. Their runs are short, and their schedules often are set to meet trains. Consequently, they are powerful, speedy, and sometimes most uncomfortable. But being meant for passengers, they are attractive, in their way. Sturdy, self-reliant, fast—they are perfectly adapted to the work that they perform.

Another type of vessel is the passenger ship that runs between ports not widely separated on the same coast. The United States has many of these. The ships running between Boston and New York are fast and well equipped. The lounges and dining saloons are handsome, and the staterooms, while they are small, are thoroughly comfortable. These ships are popular, and many travellers prefer the all-night ride on them to spending five hours on the train. Other ships run from New York to Norfolk; from New York to Charleston, Savannah, and Jacksonville. Others still make the longer voyage from New York to New Orleans. On the West Coast similar ships run regularly from Los Angeles and San Francisco to Portland and Seattle and return. Every continent has some ships in similar services, and they often reach ports which have no important land communications system. Such ships connect Japan and Korea; Ceylon and India; ports along the African coast; Marseilles and Tunis; and run on countless other routes. They are comfortable for short voyages, but many of them would not do well at transoceanic work, for in their size and their accommodations they are not comparable to the great ocean liners.

* * * * *

So far all the ships I have mentioned, save the Great Lakes freighters, float in salt water. But rivers and lakes the world over are often busy with ships, some of them of such size as to place them in a class with ships intended for the deep sea.

The greatest fleet of ships in the world on fresh water is the fleet that busies itself on the Great Lakes. During the winter these lakes are frozen and the whole fleet is laid up, which necessitates unusual activity for the rest of the year in order that they may pay their way. From Duluth, on Lake Superior, to Buffalo, on Lake Erie, these ships sail back and forth, deeply laden with the ore of Minnesota or the grain of the great Northwest. Piers specially designed to load the ore carriers pour huge streams of ore into their holds, and within a few hours of their arrival at Duluth the ships are on their way back to Gary or Cleveland or Erie. At these ports the cargoes are taken from their holds at such a speed as is not equalled at any salt-water port in the world.

The freighters of the Great Lakes make up the greatest part of the fleet, of course, but passenger ships comparable to almost any of the “intermediate liners” in the world sail regularly from half-a-dozen of these inland ports. Car ferries, too, are used by the railroads to take great freight trains across the lakes in order to save the land trip around. Ice-breakers, also, are used to keep open channels through the ice in order that ships may sail in winter. The ice-breakers are powerful ships whose bows are so cut away as to make it possible for them to ride up on the ice, as their powerful propellers drive them along. The ice is broken by the weight of the ship, the bow of which is built of exceptional strength to stand such rough usage. Such ships are used, too, in the Baltic, in Russia, and in Siberia, but little use is found for them elsewhere, and they are rare.

But other inland waters have developed other types of ships. The Rhine, because of its rapid current, has necessitated the building of fast steamers able to make headway against it—fast, small steamers that slowly make their way up stream and scurry rapidly down, laden with passengers or with freight, depending on the service for which they have been built.

The Seine, particularly at Paris, has a most attractive type of passenger boat which has always reminded me of a Fifth Avenue bus mounted on a hull. True, their lines are better than those of the bus, but their whole appearance, nevertheless, suggests a bus. They are long and narrow, sharp and fast, and carry many passengers along that historic river beneath the many bridges.

River boats in America are vastly different. The early Mississippi River boats were scows with stern wheels. These developed into strange boats with decks supported by what seemed to be fearfully weak timbers. They were high and wide, with blunt low bows and expansive forward decks. They usually possessed two funnels, rising high above the topmost deck and standing beside each other. The tops of these, and every place else on the boat that lent itself to decoration, were decorated with gewgaws and scrollwork. The pilot house stood high above the topmost deck, and in it was a steering wheel that sometimes was so great in diameter that it was swung through a slot cut in the deck, in order that the pilot, who was a vastly important person, could handle the spokes.

These ships burned wood, and great was the rivalry between them, and great the races that were run.

Mark Twain has told the story of these picturesque boats, and his story is their history. It could not be improved upon.

_A strange type of cargo steamer once common on the American Great Lakes, but gradually disappearing._]

But the famous old steamboats of the Mississippi are gone. A few of the species still ply up and down, and some find their way up the Ohio and other tributaries, but the life seems gone from them. The romance of the Mississippi steamboat is dead.

But a type of river steamer still in use is the one so common on the Hudson. Huge ships these are, with many decks, of great breadth, for often they are side-wheelers and their decks are carried out to the outside of the paddle boxes or, if they are propeller driven, still their decks reach out over the water. Deck on deck is piled one upon another, until the larger of these steamers may sail from New York to Poughkeepsie and West Point with as many passengers as the _Majestic_ is equipped to carry. But they are not to be compared to the _Majestic_ any more than a trolley car is to be compared to a Pullman.

This chapter is a hodgepodge, and contains as great an assortment of goods as a country store, so I may, perhaps, be permitted to jump from the river steamers, to which I have done scant justice, to the tugs and other harbour craft that are occasionally to be seen about the many-decked river steamers at such a port as New York.

Perhaps the ferries are most in evidence as they shuttle back and forth from Manhattan to Jersey City and Hoboken, to Weehawken and Fort Lee, to Staten and Governor’s islands, and to half a dozen slips in Brooklyn.

These ferries are powerful vessels, and are capable of getting quickly under way. They have no bows or sterns—or, if you prefer, each end is bow or stern, depending on the direction the boat is travelling at the moment. The two ends, to make it plain, are identical. Each is round on deck. Each has a sharp “cut water” over which the round-ended deck projects. Each has a rudder, and each a propeller, save the old-fashioned ones—of which there are a few still in existence—that are driven by side paddle-wheels. The ends of these ferries are rounded and the slips at which they dock are so constructed as to fit the bows perfectly—so perfectly, in fact, that the automobiles and trucks with which the ferry is generally crowded drive ashore without a gangplank.

In order to make simpler the task of docking these nimble craft two great rows of piles are driven into the harbour mud so that the ferries, entering between the outermost ends of these two “fences,” where they are at some distance from each other, are led directly to the slip by the converging lines of piles. Once the ferry’s nose has touched the slip, great hawsers are passed aboard and are made fast, whereupon special windlasses on the slip take up the slack and the boat is made fast, in hardly more time than it takes to tell of it. These ferries are sometimes of considerable size, but none of them are comparable in tonnage to anything more than the smallest of deep-sea steamers.

_This type of ship is eliminating the whaleback on the Great Lakes, and is used largely to transport ore and grain._]

In a modern harbour there is another type of boat more numerous than ferries, and, from the point of view of the deep-sea sailor, more important. This is the tug.

A tug is a towboat, and once a sea-going ship has reached a harbour, she is largely dependent on that harbour’s tugs. In appearance, at least, European tugs are very different from American.

In British and German and French ports, and elsewhere on the continent, one sees many paddle-wheel tugs—a thing unknown, or nearly so, in America. American tugs are universally propeller boats, except on shallow rivers, where paddle-wheel steamboats sometimes are made to do the work of tugs.

An American tug is a busy-looking boat. Her bow is fairly high, her deck slopes aft in a rather marked curve. Her stern is low. A deck house extends from the “towing bits,” or heavy built-in posts to which the towline is made fast, up to within ten or a dozen feet of the bow. This deck house is not high—hardly higher than a man’s head—and contains a galley and a mess room, besides entrances to the boiler and engine rooms. On top of this, at its forward end, is the wheel house, as high as the deck house on which it sits. Astern of the wheel house is a huge funnel for so small a boat, and astern of that sits a lifeboat, resting in its “chocks.”

But the surprise comes if an inquisitive observer goes to a local shipyard and sees one of these small steamboats in a floating dock with her bulky underbody visible. What stands above the surface seems but little compared with what is below. She may draw eight or ten or more feet. Her body lines are very full, and at her stern is mounted a propeller that seems almost large enough for a good-sized freighter. And it is, for these boats have not only themselves to propel; they must meet incoming ships which are more or less helpless to direct their movements in such limited spaces as are available in a harbour. If the new arrival be small, one tug can readily place her beside her pier. If the ship be the _Majestic_ or the _Leviathan_, then a dozen or more tugs must push against her mighty side, or puff great clouds of steam as they strain at great hawsers before the giant is safely at her berth.

Every harbour needs these little workers, and their work is important, but there are other ships whose work is of a different sort, and even more important. These are the dredges that keep a harbour’s channels open, or cut new ones or widen the ones already there. I have not the space in which to go into a description of these grubbers in the mud, but I can mention a few of their more salient points.

There are several kinds. A suction dredge lowers a great pipe into the harbour mud and pumps great quantities of mud-charged water to the surface. This is run into tanks where most of the mud settles while the water runs over the top. In some cases it is possible for the pipe carrying this mud and water to be led ashore where a low spot is to be filled or where the mud is needed for some other reason. Here the water trickles gradually away, and the troublesome mud that had been silting up a channel is converted, perhaps, into valuable city property.

Another type of dredge carries an endless belt on which are great ladle-shaped containers, called “buckets.” One end of this belt is lowered to the bottom. The belt is set in motion, and each gigantic “bucket” dumps the mud of the harbour bottom into a great “well” built into the ship which is capable of carrying a startling quantity.

There are other types of less importance than these, but already this chapter has grown beyond the length assigned to it and I must bring it to a close. To pretend for a moment that I have amply described the ships I have mentioned would be, of course, ridiculous. I have done hardly more than mention the more important and more picturesque types of steamships that exist in the world to-day. A book could be written on any one of them, and my greatest hope is that I may interest a few readers who will go to other volumes more complete than mine, in order to learn more of some phase or another of this fascinating subject. Should I be so fortunate I shall be content, for one volume cannot do more than outline what can be found in countless others that have specialized on a thousand phases of the subject I am attempting to discuss.