PART II—THE PRESENT ERA OF STEAM AND STEEL
The introduction of steam made little difference in naval affairs at first, so far as either strategy or tactics are concerned, although it changed the conditions of naval action in two principal ways and in many minor ones. Ships could now, like the early galleys, be placed in any position the commander pleased, and, unlike galleys, this effort could be sustained a long time, for engines do not tire out like human arms. On the other hand, ships propelled by steam needed to return to port at frequent intervals to obtain coal, and naval powers found it necessary to provide, either by possession or treaty, safe coaling-stations in various parts of the world for the use of their cruising fleets.
The first steam war-ships were naturally fitted with side paddle-wheels; but as soon as the screw-propeller came into use the navy was quick to adopt it. “By its use the whole motive power could be protected by being placed below the water-line. It interfered much less than the paddle with the efficiency and handiness of the vessel under sail alone, and it enabled ships to be kept generally under sail. Great importance was attached to this, as the handling of a ship under sail was justly thought an invaluable means of training both officers and men in ready resource, prompt action, and self-reliance.” For this reason masts and sails were retained long after they were admitted to be detrimental to the fighting qualities of battle-ships. Naval reformers had to wait until the last generation of “old salts,” trained on “blue water,” had died off, and their scornful sneers at “tea-kettle” seamanship had been silenced in the only way possible, before they could persuade governments to build or men to serve in the new style of vessels. In truth, the transition from the fighting machinery and methods that prevailed until, say, the bombardment of Acre, in 1840, to those that decided the inferiority of China in her struggles with Japan at the Yalu and elsewhere, was rapid enough to make even a sea-dog dizzy.
THE “KEARSARGE” GETTING INTO POSITION TO RAKE THE “ALABAMA” AT THE CLOSE OF THE COMBAT.
Excellent types of the war-steamers, intermediate between the old two- and three-deckers and the sailless “ironclads” that followed, were those two actors in that most glorious sea-fight of the American Civil War—the Kearsarge and Alabama.
In this great fight, which took place a few miles off the harbor of Cherbourg, France, one beautiful summer Sunday (June 19th) in 1864, much the same tactics prevailed as in any one of the earlier ocean duels. As the Alabama came on she began firing the two-hundred-pound pivot-rifle forward, which was her main gun, while the Kearsarge was yet a mile away. The latter waited a little before replying, but only a few moments elapsed before both were near enough and hard at it, each doing its best to get a position ahead of its antagonist for raking,—a disadvantage which the other steadily avoided; and this caused them to follow one another about in advancing circles, of which seven were described before the end came.
We have a story of the battle as seen from the deck of the Kearsarge, written by her surgeon, who had little to do except observe the conflict.
The Kearsarge gunners [he tells us] had been cautioned against firing without direct aim, and had been advised to point the heavy guns below rather than above the water-line, and to clear the deck of the enemy with the lighter ones. Though subjected to an incessant storm of shot and shell, they kept their stations and obeyed instructions.
The effect upon the enemy was readily perceived, and nothing could restrain the enthusiasm of our men. Cheer succeeded cheer; caps were thrown in the air or overboard; jackets were discarded; sanguine of victory, the men were shouting as each projectile took effect: “That is a good one!” “Down, boys!” “Give her another like the last!” “Now we have her!” and so on, cheering and shouting to the end.
After exposure to an uninterrupted cannonade for eighteen minutes without casualties, a sixty-eight-pounder Blakely shell passed through the starboard bulwarks below the main rigging, exploded upon the quarterdeck, and wounded three of the crew of the after pivot-gun. With these exceptions, not an officer or man received serious injury. The three unfortunates were speedily taken below, and so quietly was the act done, that at the termination of the fight a large number of the men were unaware that any of their comrades were wounded. Two shots entered the ports occupied by the thirty-twos, where several men were stationed, one taking effect in the hammock-netting, the other going through the opposite port, yet none were hit. A shell exploded in the hammock-netting and set the ship on fire; the alarm calling for fire-quarters was sounded, and men detailed for such an emergency put out the fire, while the rest stayed at the guns.
The Kearsarge concentrated her fire and poured in the eleven-inch shells with deadly effect. One penetrated the coal-bunker of the Alabama, and a dense cloud of coal-dust arose. Others struck near the water-line between the main and mizzen masts, exploded within board, or passing through burst beyond. Crippled and torn, the Alabama moved less quickly and began to settle by the stern, yet did not slacken her fire, but returned successive broadsides without disastrous result to us.
Captain Semmes witnessed the havoc made by the shells, especially by those of our after pivot-gun, and offered a reward for its silence. Soon his battery was turned upon this particular offending gun for the purpose of silencing it. It was in vain, for the work of destruction went on. We had completed the seventh rotation on the circular track and begun the eighth; the Alabama, now settling, sought to escape by setting all available sail (fore-trysail and two jibs), left the circle, amid a shower of shot and shell, and headed for the French waters; but to no purpose. In winding the Alabama presented the port battery with only two guns bearing, and showed gaping sides through which the water washed. The Kearsarge pursued, keeping on a line nearer the shore, and with a few well-directed shots hastened the sinking condition. Then the Alabama was at our mercy. Thus ended the fight after one hour and two minutes.
One incident of this battle much talked of at the time, and given as an excuse for their defeat by the Confederates (though without good reason), was the fact that the waist of the Kearsarge, opposite the engines, was protected by anchor-chains, hung in close festoons on the outside of the ship, and kept in place and concealed by a boxing of thin boards. This, however, was not the first attempt at protecting ships by armor, which had now become necessary to meet successfully the better guns and projectiles that year by year were increased in penetrative power. New powders and explosives were constantly being invented also, each more effective than the preceding; and as these were not only used in guns but applied to the filling of shells, these bursting missiles for a time almost displaced solid shot.
Along with this the discovery and perfection of the Bessemer and other processes of making steel, and methods of adapting rifling to great cannon, produced a rapid and varied increase in size and an improvement in quality in the guns supplied to ships as well as in those used upon shore.
Against these new weapons the old “wooden walls” were of no avail. Oak and teak, however sound and thick, failed to turn aside the conical projectiles as they had the old round shot and shell. The ponderous missiles would crash clear through, smashing everything in their path, and sending showers of death-dealing splinters right and left. The navy had to protect itself by a revival of the armor with which knights of the middle ages guarded against arrows and javelins and sword-points. By and by, when guns and bullets came, the knights thickened their armor in an attempt to resist these new missiles, until at last it reached a weight too great to be carried, and the whole cumbrous panoply had to be laid aside, and knightly tactics altogether changed. Many persons believe that this history will be repeated in the case of the sea-warriors of the world, which, within the memory of many a grizzled admiral, have changed from buoyant and beautiful ships to grim and shapeless fortresses afloat.
THE UNITED STATES FRIGATE “MERRIMAC”
BEFORE AND AFTER CONVERSION INTO AN IRONCLAD.
Compare with illustration on page 139.
The Americans, fearless of sea-traditions, were the first to propose armor for ships, but the French first practically applied it, building several “floating batteries,” covered with iron 4¾ inches thick, in 1855. The English copied them, in somewhat more ship-shape form; and then the French began boldly to sheathe some of their frigates with iron plates and call them “ironclads.” By this time iron hulls had begun to be used commonly in the British merchant service, but of course the men-of-war’s men, the slowest class of persons on earth to accept any change, insisted that iron would by no means do for war-ships. Nevertheless a few progressive spirits persuaded their high-mightinesses, the Lords of the Admiralty, to try an experiment in building one, and, in 1860, the first iron war-ship was launched and named Warrior, while all the old salts wagged their heads and predicted the end of “Britannia rules the waves,” until there wasn’t a really jolly tar to be found from Penolar Point to Pentland Firth. To a certain extent these hardy old growlers were right, though their idea of a remedy was wrong. It proved a failure to build old-style battle-ships of iron or even of steel, or to coat them all over with armor, even when greatly thickened. Not only were they slow and somewhat unmanageable, but by the time one of them had been built with thicker walls than its latest rival, somebody had invented artillery whose projectiles would penetrate it. Ships that are “ship-shape,” that is, possess masts and sails, but are constructed wholly of iron or steel, and more or less heavily armored, have survived, and will always be a part of the world’s navies, no doubt, but their uses will be subsidiary to heavy fighting; and with the disappearance of the wooden sailing line-of-battle ship in the Crimean war and of the iron war-steamer a quarter of a century later, all traditions of the “old navy” were ended—traditions that went back to the days of Drake.
But who could have foreseen that this swift and momentous upsetting should come about, not through the efforts of the great sea powers of Europe,—the giants who had been struggling for the control of the ocean for three hundred years,—but from the brain and purse of landsmen in a country of the New World not taken into account as a naval power at all.
You need not be told that it was Ericsson’s invention and Henry Grinnell’s building and Lieutenant Worden’s courageous fighting of the little Monitor in Hampton Roads, on that fair March Sunday in 1862, that brought about this change. When her turret—the “cheese-box on a raft”—successfully withstood the assault of that heavily armed floating battery, the Merrimac (or Virginia), all the war-ships of the world felt themselves beaten, too, and wise seamen saw that they must prepare to face a new foe.
SIDE ELEVATION AND DECK-PLAN OF THE “MONITOR.”
At once all maritime governments began to build fighting-vessels which were castles of steel afloat, and smaller ships for various services that more resembled a Nootka war-canoe in outline than one of the frigates that used to do their work. So shapeless were they that a new term had to be used, and we began to call them cruisers. All war-ships, in fact, are now classified by their work, not by their shape or size or rig.
First, fewest, and heaviest are the harbor-defense vessels—monitors and massively walled floating batteries, intended to remain in harbors, or close to the coast, as movable forts.
Second, battle-ships—the strongest, most thickly armored, heavily armed style of ships that can be made, and still be able to go to sea; but these are not expected to leave their home ports for a long time, nor to go to any great distance unless compelled to do so in actual war.
Third, cruisers. These take the place of the old-fashioned lesser fighting-ships, the seventy-fours, frigates, corvettes, and sloops, and vary greatly in size, model, speed, and power of armament.
Fourth, small, swift, strongly armed but lightly armored, torpedo-boat chasers, small gunboats for use in rivers and shallow coastal waters, despatch-boats, dynamite-cruisers, such as our American Vesuvius, tow-boats, and similar minor craft—the run-abouts of the naval service.
Fifth, torpedo-boats.
The material of all these is steel. Wood is no longer permitted even in the fittings of their cabins, because wood will splinter and burn.
The great hull of a modern battle-ship, as described by Lieutenant S. A. Staunton, U. S. N., which supports and carries the vast weights of machinery, guns, and armor, aggregating perhaps more than ten thousand tons, is built of plates of rolled steel, varying from 1⅜ inches thick at the keel to ¾ inch at the water-line. These are closely jointed and fitted, and bound together with straps, angle-irons, and brackets, so as to make a strong unyielding structure braced in all directions. Then, through the central part of the ship, at least, vertical plates are erected upon the frame and outside plating, which bear a second or inner bottom, thus forming the “double bottom” as high as the water-line, having the space between the inner and outer sheathing separated into a multitude of small water-tight cells, so that an injury to the outside hull would not cause the vessel to leak unless the inner bottom were also punctured.
Throughout the whole length of the vessel, reaching from side to side and from the keel to the main deck, are many steel bulkheads, sufficiently strong to resist the pressure of the water, and communicating only by water-tight doors, so that even were an accident, such as a collision or running upon a rock, or an enemy’s shell, to open a hole through both bottoms, the ship would still float, because the inflowing water would be confined to a single compartment, leaving the rest of the ship dry and buoyant. Nothing less than the blow of a ram, smashing through everything and throwing several compartments into one, would be likely to sink such a ship, and this is one reason why ramming has again become prominent in naval tactics.
THE FIRST SEA-FIGHT OF MODERN WAR-SHIPS.
The Peruvian turret-ship “Huascar” between the fire of the Chilean ironclads “Almirante Cochrane” and “Blanco Encalada,” October 8, 1879.
But while safety from sinking is thus reasonably assured, this is more a precaution of seaworthiness against the accidents of storms than toward injuries receivable in battle. Passenger and freight steamers now have the double bottoms and water-tight compartments, and the best of these have arrangements for mounting light but powerful guns upon their decks, so that they may be utilized by the government in a war emergency as light cruisers, as armed transports, as swift scouts, or in other highly important ways; they will then be coated with a light protective armor, but will not be expected to engage in a contest with a real fighting-vessel.
The idea of armor-plate is, as has been said, scarcely half a century old, and the moment it was put on (amid the jeers of the old line-of-battle tars, who thought they had done all that the dignity of the profession permitted when they arranged their rolled-up hammocks along the bulwarks to catch musket-balls, and spread nettings to prevent somewhat the flight of splinters) ingenious men began to improve their powder and strengthen their guns to overcome the new defenses. To meet these improvements armor has been increased and perfected, until now war-vessels are no longer “ships” in any proper sense of the word, but floating fortresses of steel, the names of whose defensive parts, even, have been borrowed from land fortifications, such as turret and barbette.
THE UNITED STATES BATTLE-SHIP “MASSACHUSETTS.”
A limit to this defensive strength is marked in two directions. First, by the size it is possible to make a vessel, and still keep her seaworthy and manageable; and, second, by the weight of armor such a vessel can carry, in addition to the weight of the framework, machinery, guns, and other things necessary. These limits seemed to be reached some time ago in some of the monstrous battle-ships built in Europe, and when it was found that even while they were in construction rifled guns had been invented that would drive their projectiles through the thickest wall of wrought-iron or steel that these or any other vessels could carry, naval constructors began to despair of keeping ahead of the gun-makers, and there was even talk of abandoning armor altogether, and fighting battles out with bared breasts as we used to do.
The percentage of weight which may be allotted to armor in the design of a ship limits the area which can be wholly protected, but often permits the partial protection of other areas of less importance to her vitality and destructive force. Motive power, steering-gear, and magazines stand first upon the list of those features demanding complete protection.... The heavy shells from an enemy’s guns may do many other forms of injury besides sinking a vessel and disabling her crew. They may strike and disable her engines, or pierce her boilers, causing disastrous explosions. They may injure her steering-gear, destroy the mechanism which controls her turrets and guns, or injure the guns themselves and their carriages. In every feature of offense which renders her a formidable and dangerous foe—her speed, her mobility, the fire of her guns—a man-of-war is dangerously vulnerable unless she be protected by armor, unless the enemy’s shot be rejected by plates which it cannot penetrate.
Then came an invention that put a new face upon the matter,—the surface-hardening of plates, composed of a mixture of nickel with steel,—which, from one of its perfectors, is known as “Harveyizing” it. Other processes also are known. This gave to the surface of the metal such a flinty hardness that the heaviest and most highly tempered steel projectiles would almost invariably break to pieces when they struck it—the same projectiles that were able to punch a hole clear through a target-plate of ordinary wrought-steel twenty-two inches thick!
Plates thus surface-hardened are now made in Europe, and as well, if not better, in the United States, where we have learned and taught the rest of the world how to make them by rolling—a much better, as well as cheaper, process than the former method of hammering them into shape.
It was found that with these hard-surfaced plates much less thickness was required to contend successfully with the great guns opposed to them than had been the case before; and the great saving of weight enabled a much larger extent of armor to be borne upon a ship than was formerly possible, so arranged as to protect all her hull and vital parts.
Thus, in a typical modern battle-ship, say 360 feet long, 72 feet broad, and drawing 24 feet of water, having an armor of surface-hardened nickel-steel, this armor is thus disposed: amidships, and a quarter of her length behind the point of the prow, is built up a semicircular “barbette,” or wall, of the thickest armor, behind which is a “turret,” moving to the right or left through an arc equal to half the horizon, no higher than necessary to cover and work the guns, and having its motor mechanism fully protected by the barbette. This is the forward turret—a swinging fort, carrying with it, as it turns, two of the heaviest guns in the ship.
THE UNITED STATES BATTLE-SHIP “INDIANA.”
Half-way from the center to the stern stands the after turret and its barbette, similarly built of the strongest armor,—ten to twelve inches thick,—and sweeping with its guns half the horizon.
From a point just in front of the forward barbette two walls of the heaviest possible armor, reaching vertically from four and a half feet below the water-line (loaded) to three feet above it, extend diagonally backward to the sides of the ship, then continue along its side in a “belt” to points opposite the after barbette, where they bend inward as before and meet just aft of the after barbette; but hereafter the increased efficiency of armor, by further reducing its weight, will probably enable the armor-belts to be carried to the extreme ends of the ship, which otherwise can be so seriously damaged by an enemy as to interfere with the speed and control of a ship in action, even if it does not disable her.
But while these upright walls will resist a direct shot, it is equally necessary to guard against a plunging fire, and therefore the space between the turrets, at least, must be roofed over with a steel deck, two or three inches thick, to deflect shot that come just over the top of the armor-belt.
In addition to this, on each side of the vessel are erected one or two smaller turrets, carrying somewhat smaller guns than those of the forward and after turrets, and also protected by heavy barbettes which reach down to the armor-belt and thoroughly protect the turning mechanism, passage of ammunition, etc. These various upper parts are connected by defenses which may not resist the largest shells, but are safe against smaller shot.
Now, what is the armament of this fortress which thus protects all the motive power and interior machinery of the ship, by which she can be made so terrible an engine of combative force? Well, it is as different from the bronze “long-toms” and carronades of the old three-deckers, or even from ten-inch smooth-bore “Dahlgrens” of the days of our Civil War, as is the ship itself from old-time models. In place of broadside batteries of forty or fifty cannon hidden in clouds of smoke, there are now six or eight big rifles, from whose muzzles wreaths of thin gas only drift to leeward; and, more striking still, in contrast, a ship is no longer comparatively helpless when headed or turned sternward to an enemy,—when the “raking,” formerly so justly dreaded, would be received,—but is rather more able to do damage in that position than by a “broadside.”
The guns themselves are marvels of structure and power. All of those used in the United States navy are made by the government in the gun-shops at the Washington navy-yard, and are “built up.” The methods and tools required for this are the invention of Americans, as well as the complicated arrangements for closing the breech, and the carriages and mechanism for overcoming the tremendous recoil and handling the ponderous ammunition; the latter, often weighing hundreds of pounds, is handed up to the gunners from the magazines below by hoists worked by electricity.
The history of the development of heavy ordnance, especially that applied to naval uses, is one of the most interesting chapters in mechanics; and a surprising number of ways of making a ship’s cannon have been tried and rejected. Out of this two things seem now to be settled: namely, that a gun composed of steel in separate parts welded together is best, and that the best missile to shoot from it is a conical shell, very hard and heavy, yet containing an explosive small in quantity but exceedingly powerful.
Such guns are built up of a tube or “core” of steel of the required size, upon which is shrunk a jacket, covering the rear, or breech half of the core, outside of which are shrunk on several broad hoops. The cutting out of the bore to exactly the proper caliber and the plowing of the spiral riflings put the gun in readiness for its breech-closing and other attachments. This process requires several months, involves large capital and powerful machinery, and good results imply the very highest workmanship.
THE UNITED STATES CRUISER “BROOKLYN” (STERN VIEW).
Such are the guns of modern men-of-war; and a first-class battle-ship carries four twelve- or thirteen-inch rifles (that is, having a bore twelve or thirteen inches in diameter), several eight- or ten-inch rifles, and many smaller guns arranged to be fired with extraordinary speed, and hence called “rapid-fire” guns; while her upper works and “military tops” fairly bristle with fierce little six-, four-, and one-pounders,—revolving magazine rifles, capable of discharging rifle-balls as fast as a man can turn the crank.
ON BOARD A BATTLE-SHIP GOING INTO ACTION. WORKING THE RAPID-FIRE GUNS.
To give some idea of the size and power of one of the 13-inch guns, whose long muzzles, in pairs, project so far out of the turrets that hide their mountings and firing-crew, let me tell you that it is 40 feet long, more than 4 feet in diameter, and weighs 60½ tons. “It requires 550 pounds of powder to load it, and the projectile weighs half a ton. The muzzle-velocity of the projectile is 2100 feet per second, with the stated charge, and its energy is sufficient to send it through 26 inches of steel at a distance of 600 yards. At an elevation of 40 degrees the range of the gun will be not far from 15 miles.”
In such a ship, deep down within the fortress is the massive and complicated machinery, steam and electric, upon which the life and activity of the whole structure depend. The power is generated in four enormous boilers, seventeen feet in diameter and twenty in length, their steel shells one and a half inches thick, built to carry a working-pressure of 160 pounds to the square inch. Each pair of these boilers, placed fore and aft and side by side, is installed in a separate compartment, with fire-rooms at the ends. Every boiler has four furnaces in each end, which give eight to each fire-room, or a total of thirty-two. The two boiler compartments are separated by a water-tight bulkhead, and by a deep, broad coal-bunker. At the sides of the ship are also coal-bunkers, which supplement the heavy armor-belt by the protection of a mass of coal twelve feet in thickness—in itself a not inconsiderable earthwork, which might arrest the fragments of a bursting shell that had succeeded in piercing the armor. No casualty of naval combat can be worse than the penetration of high-pressure boilers by heavy shells. Their complete protection is an imperative condition, quite as important as the protection of the magazines.
Such is a modern battle-ship—a “wonderful and complex instrument of warfare,” as Lieutenant Staunton has expressed it.
She is filled [he tells us] with powerful agencies, all obedient to the control of man—the creatures of his brain and the servants of his will. Steam in its simple application drives her main engines and many auxiliaries. Steam transformed into hydraulic power moves her steering-gear and turns her turrets. Steam converted into electrical energy produces her incandescent and search-lights, works small motors in remote places, and fires her guns when desired. Every application of energy, every device of mechanism, finds its office somewhere in that vast hull, and the source of all the varied forms of power lies in the great boilers, far down below danger of shot and shell, under which grimy stokers are always shoveling coal. Decades of thought and study, experiment and failure, trial again with partial success, and repeated trials with complete success, have assigned to each agency its appropriate function, and perfected the mechanism through which its work is performed.
These modern developments have added one entirely novel and tremendous adjunct to the fleet, in the torpedo-boat and its terrible weapon. These take the place to some extent of the fire-ship of a century ago, which was designed to injure the enemy not by silencing his guns or overcoming his gunners, but by insidiously destroying his ship itself.
The torpedo is, in its simplest form, simply some arrangement of a powerful explosive to be set off beneath or against the bottom of a ship, and shatter or sink it. The idea is as old as gunpowder, but it is only in recent times that it has been made effective,—how effective we do not yet know.
Torpedoes are used in two ways: one is by fixing the torpedo beneath the water, either to be exploded by means of a percussion-cap when the ship runs against it, or from the shore by means of electricity. Such arrangements as this, called submarine mines, are regarded as a most important means of defending harbors against hostile attack. During our Civil War they were extensively used by the Confederates, and were sometimes successful, as when one destroyed the monitor Tecumseh in Mobile harbor, during Farragut’s famous attack there in 1864.
THE MONITOR “TECUMSEH” SUNK BY A TORPEDO AT MOBILE, 1864.
The former class, for which the word torpedoes is now reserved, includes explosive agents which are to be placed or sent against a ship’s bottom at sea and exploded there. Various devices of that kind, also, have been used for a long time in naval warfare. The Confederates tried hard to destroy several Northern vessels in the blockading squadron by devising very small, half-submerged boats, towing torpedoes astern, or else projecting on a long spar from their bows; and now and then they succeeded, as when one of the latter kind was made to sink the Housatonic off Charleston.
THE SEARCH-LIGHT REVEALING THE TORPEDO-BOAT.
Then there have been invented, during the past fifty years, several cigar-shaped machines, which, by means of a chemical or compressed-air engine or clockwork, or some other application of power that might keep motive machinery within them going long enough, could be launched from shore or from another vessel and sent under water against a hostile ship. At first these were made to glide along just beneath the surface, carrying little flags that could be seen, and trailing two electric wires, enabling a person, by means of electric currents, to direct their flight; but latterly ingenuity has devised such an arrangement of rudders and self-acting balances within the torpedo’s mechanism that it will continue perfectly straight upon the course it is aimed for, swerving neither right nor left, up nor down, and will explode the instant it touches an object hard enough to jar the delicate cap of fulminate in its snout. This latter kind, called the automobile (self-moving) torpedo, is now almost exclusively used, and some modification of the Whitehead is most popular. It is cigar-shaped, and about twelve feet in length; the forward third is filled with gun-cotton—in quantity sufficiently powerful, if accurately applied, to ruin almost instantly the greatest battle-ship afloat.
A SELF-MOVING TORPEDO ON ITS WAY
TO ATTACK A MAN-OF-WAR.
All large war-ships are now fitted with tubes, opening near the water-line in various parts of the hull, which form gun-like exits for these terrible weapons, which are set in motion by a puff of gunpowder; but in addition to this every maritime government now has a number (Great Britain has more than 250) of small, swift steamers designed wholly for this purpose and called torpedo-boats. Most of them are a hundred feet or so in length, and intended to accompany the fleet wherever it goes and in all weathers; but some are so small that they may be carried on the deck of a big cruiser.
All are made long, low, and narrow, and the speed of many of them exceeds thirty miles an hour. There is almost nothing to catch the wind or show above deck except a pair of short, flattened smoke-stacks, one behind the other; and the steersman stands, with only his head and shoulders visible, in a little box with windows that serves the purpose of a wheel-house. A mere wire railing saves the crew from sliding off the deck, and in action everybody stays below. No weight is carried that can be avoided, and the engines, taking steam from two boilers, are as powerful as can be packed into the space at command. Usually only coal enough for a few hours’ steaming is carried, and every bushel of it is carefully selected as to quality, and is so treated and intelligently fed to the furnaces as to make the hottest possible fire, although never a spark must escape from the smoke-stack to betray the vessel in the darkness.
A TORPEDO-BOAT AT FULL SPEED.
Next to speed the most important quality is ability to turn quickly, upon which might often depend the safety of the audacious little craft.
Torpedo-boats, however, are designed for a wider service than simply to carry and discharge the frightful weapon from which they take their name. They are to the navy what scouts and skirmishers are to a land army. They form the cavalry of the sea, of which the cruisers are the infantry, and the battle-ships and monitors the artillery arm. They must spy out the position of the enemy’s fleet, hover about his flanks or haunt his anchorage to ascertain what he is about and what he means to do next. They must act as the pickets of their own fleet, patrolling the neighborhood, or waiting and watching, concealed among islands or in inlets and river-mouths, ready to hasten away to the admiral with warning of any movement of the adversary.
ONE FORM OF SUBMARINE TORPEDO-BOAT.
It is not their business to fight (except rarely, in the one particular way), but rather to pry and sneak and run, for the benefit of the fleet they serve.
But to insure all these fine results, both officers and men must be taught the art. Constant instruction and drilling are necessary, and in each navy a regular school of torpedo-practice is maintained, where the subject is studied in every way. In the United States such a school is kept at the Newport (R. I.) Torpedo Station, where the torpedoes themselves are fitted for use and supplied to the ships (the loaded war-heads are kept separately in the ship’s magazine), and where one or more torpedo-boats are reserved for drilling purposes.
COPYRIGHT, 1897, BY C. E. BOLLES, BROOKLYN, N. Y.
THE UNITED STATES BATTLE-SHIP “MAINE.”
Blown up in the harbor of Havana, February 15, 1898.
But a worse and more insidious foe than even these sneaking, hiding, surface torpedo-boats threatens us in the submarine torpedo-boat, which inventors have been experimenting with since naval warfare first began. It is said that twenty-five hundred years ago divers were lowered into the water in a simply constructed air-box, to perforate the wooden bottom of an adversary’s war-galley and sink it. Again, in our Revolutionary War, a tiny walnut-shaped boat was made by an American, which was actually tried. It would hold one man, and air enough for him to breathe for half an hour. He would close the hatch, let in enough water to sink him a little way, and then scull himself along by means of a screw-bladed stern-oar until he got underneath the keel of an anchored vessel, to which, by ingenious means, he would attach a can of gunpowder to be fired by clockwork, giving him time to get away. It was actually tried and nearly succeeded. Robert Fulton, who made the first success of the steamboat, tried for years to contrive a submarine boat that would work, and succeeded so far as to scare British blockaders in 1812 very badly indeed; and the Confederates repeated the scare when the North was blockading their ports in the Civil War.
The great advantage of a submarine boat is, of course, its invisibility, and its safety from shot even if discovered; but the difficulties of progress and control as to depth and direction under water, and at the same time effective appliance of the explosive and safe retreat, are so many that they have as yet been only partly overcome. If the thing is ever accomplished, naval warfare will be demoralized until some adequate means be found to combat this unseen, destroying agency.
The principal agent in submarine attacks would probably be some form of dynamite, which, inhuman as its use seems, is slowly but surely taking its place among the weapons of war. The United States has one vessel primarily designed to employ dynamite by hurling it in the form of shells. This volcanic craft is suitably named Vesuvius, and is a small, swift vessel having long tubes slanting upward through her forward deck, as shown in the illustration.
These tubes are the muzzles of great air-guns, through which she sends darts loaded with dynamite to fall upon a hostile ship or fort. It would not be safe, to say the least, to fire such bombs with gunpowder; and therefore pumps and engines in her interior compress air until it has acquired an expansive force sufficient for the purpose. When one of the darts has been laid in the breech of the tube, down beneath the deck, and suitably closed in, a valve is opened, the compressed air acts like burning powder, and away goes the dart, in a graceful curve to its target. In this case, of course, it is the vessel rather than the immovable gun that is aimed, and good marksmanship depends upon accurate calculation of distance; but remarkable shooting has been done. This system has never yet been tried in actual warfare, and may prove valuable chiefly in clearing harbors of mines.
CHAPTER VII
THE MERCHANTS OF THE SEA
The history of shipping in an earlier chapter will also answer as a history of early international commerce. It began with the Egyptians and Phenicians, and was confined to their parts of the Mediterranean until after the middle ages, when it moved steadily to the western borders of Europe.
How great, rich, and influential were Tyre and its people we have already seen. A thousand years before the Christian era they controlled the commerce of the ancient world by reason of their wisdom as traders and their skill and energy as navigators and seamen. Turn to the twenty-seventh chapter of Ezekiel, and see how the Phenician metropolis was regarded, even in the time of that prophet, six hundred years before Christ. These Syrians had gradually extended their commerce until it took in the whole known world; and by their caravans to and from the interior of Arabia, Persia, India, and the Soudan, by their trains (perhaps of pack-horses) across Europe, by their marine expeditions to the Nile,—which they forced open to trade, for ancient Egypt was much like China in its exclusiveness,—and by their ships to all the Mediterranean ports, and up and down the Atlantic coast, they gathered and exchanged in the bazaars of Tyre and Sidon the products, manufactures, and luxuries of every country that had anything to sell. To the Phenicians, indeed, was ascribed, by the Latin and Greek writers of a few centuries later, the invention of navigation; and even when Phenicia had become of little account as a nation, its conquerors noted with admiration the skill of the men of that coast in seamanship. “They steered by the pole-star, which the Greeks therefore called the Phenician star; and all their vessels, from the common round gaulos to the great Tarshish ships,—the East-Indiamen, so to speak, of the ancient world,—had a speed which the Greeks never rivaled.”
Later, in the days of the Roman supremacy, the trading-ships were as important to the country as its soldiers, for nearly every free man was in the army, and the slaves made poor farmers. A large part of the grain, as well as cattle, to supply the wants of the people, had to be brought from Egypt, which was pretty sure to have “corn,” as the Bible calls it, when the rest of the world was suffering from short crops. Egypt supplied grain to Rome during the second Punic war, thus enabling her to resist the invasion of Carthage, and it is possible that Rome’s later political alliance with Egypt was largely due to her interest in Egyptian crops. Large fleets of grain-ships, convoyed by armed vessels, were continually passing between the African coast and the Tiber, and so many were the risks they ran of wreck or capture, that the arrival of a flotilla with its precious freight of food was always a cause of rejoicing, at any rate, among the poor.
These merchant ships of classical times were broader and heavier than the war-galleys, and although they carried a few oars to help themselves in a difficulty, they ordinarily moved by means of sails, probably lugs. One of the grain-ships plying between Egypt and Italy about 150 A. D., according to Lucian, was one hundred and eighty feet long, slightly more than one fourth as broad, and forty-three and a half feet deep inside,— more like a barge than a “ship.” The largest used in this trade would carry about two hundred and fifty tons. The transports that accompanied one of Justinian’s fleets, A. D. 533, are stated to have carried one hundred and sixty to two hundred tons of supplies each.
These Roman vessels were made of pine, and were coated with a composition of tar and wax, then painted, often with elaborate decorations in bright colors, with pigments mixed with melted wax. Now and then one was built of truly vast proportions, as that one which brought from Egypt to Rome the first of the stolen obelisks.
A CAPTAIN IN THE MERCHANT MARINE.
With that grand awakening of interest in education, industry, and discovery which took place in the fourteenth century, the city of Venice gained the lead in power, and her merchants became the most enterprising and wealthy. It was the expansion of commerce that urged the explorations that marked the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, for by this time Venice had her banks—the first in the world to approach the character of modern banks—and her exchange on the famous Rialto bridge; Genoa was in close rivalry; Spain was gathering immense quantities of gold in South America; and England was coming to the front as a maritime power. The trade with Cathay—as India, China, and the Oriental islands were called collectively—was chiefly by caravans across the Persian deserts, and Spain, England, and Holland had small shares in it, since the only water-route known was through the Mediterranean and Red seas, where, between the perils of the ocean, the extortionate charges and stealings of the Arabs (who carried the cargoes from vessel to vessel across the Isthmus of Suez), and the risk of capture by Algerian pirates, there was little chance left for profit to either merchants or ship-owners.
To western Europe, then, Vasco de Gama’s discovery of the route around the Cape of Good Hope was a long advantage, and England and Holland at least were quick to seize it. The great “East India Companies” of the Dutch and English were formed by a group of powerful merchants in London and in Amsterdam, who were given vast privileges by their governments in respect to trading in the East. The Dutch company was not founded until 1602, two years after the English company, but it soon became the more prominent of the two, and was one of the principal means by which the Netherlands secured the preponderance of the carrying trade of the world, bringing to her ports, by the middle of the seventeenth century, almost all the commerce previously enjoyed by Cadiz, Lisbon, and Antwerp, and making very serious inroads upon that of London and Bristol. The Dutch East India ships, copied from the Genoese carracks, were the biggest merchant vessels then afloat, well able to cope with many of the war-ships; and two hundred of them were at this time engaged in the Asiatic trade alone.
A CLIPPER ESCAPING FROM THE “ALABAMA.”
It was in aid of the English rival company not only, but as an attempt to save and revive the commercial position of England generally, that Cromwell’s “navigation laws” were enacted, prohibiting the carriage of goods to or from British shores except in ships owned and manned by Englishmen,— laws that were aimed directly at the Dutch, and led to the long wars of the latter half of the seventeenth century. These were called wars for the supremacy of the sea, but actually they were a prolonged struggle for the biggest share of the world’s trade, which is the only real value of the “supremacy of the sea.” It is a saying that “trade follows the flag,” and so it does; but at the beginning the flag goes were the trade is to be had.
These companies were so mixed up in the politics of their respective governments that it would be a long task, although entertaining, to trace their growth, which is really that of western civilization in the East. They equipped fleets of merchant and war vessels, established forts, carried on small wars along the Oriental coasts, and were really little kingdoms within kingdoms, because of their wide monopoly, enormous wealth, and the national importance of all their enterprises. The final result was that, as Great Britain finally overcame the Dutch and French at home, so her East India Company ousted them from India; but it was not until 1858 that old “John Company,” which had come to be regarded by the natives of India as the government itself, was dissolved, and resigned its territories to the crown and a system of trade open to all the world.
Those were slow and costly times compared with the present, though seeming to us full of a romance impossible now. A voyage around the world occupied three years, and to go from London to Calcutta and back took from New Year’s to Christmas under the most favorable circumstances. Another important change, too, has gradually come about. Formerly, the vessels were owned almost entirely by the merchants themselves, or by a company of them; they paid all a ship’s expenses, and put into her a cargo of their own wares. They would send to China, for instance, cotton goods, household furniture, hatchets, tools, cutlery and other hardware, farming implements, and fancy goods of all sorts. In return the vessels would bring silks, tea, and porcelain, which would go into the owners’ warehouses and be sold in their own shops. Shipper, importer, and merchant were all one.
Now this is changed. The importers and merchants of London, Hamburg, and New York are not often those who own vessels and bring their own goods. Instead of this they have agents, who live permanently in each of the foreign ports, where they buy the merchandise they want and hire a vessel, or the needed space in a vessel, belonging to somebody else to bring them home. By the old way, the nation which had anything to sell carried it to the nation that would buy it, and brought back the best thing it could get in exchange; now the merchants go to various parts of the world, buy their cargoes, and order them sent home, in substantially the same way as you go a-shopping in town.
This has brought out a new department of sea-labor, unknown, as a class, a century ago—the business of carrying goods which the owners of the vessels have no property in. In London, New York, Hamburg, and all other seaboard cities of this and other countries, the great majority of the shipping is owned, not by the merchants of the city, but by “transportation companies,” who agree to carry cargoes at a certain rate.
THE SALOON OF A SAILING PACKET-SHIP, ABOUT 1840.
Merchant vessels may be divided into three classes, of which the first includes steamships and sailing-vessels planned primarily for freight transportation, which run back and forth between certain ports, and so constitute “lines” for freight. Such lines exist along even the remotest coasts, so that goods may be shipped directly, or by a single transfer, from any given seaport to almost any other in the world. Some of these lines, sailing between certain ports, are devoted to particular uses, such as those of oil-steamers and cattle-steamers. The oil-steamers run between America and Europe with American petroleum, and in the Black Sea and the Mediterranean with oil from Russia; the entire holds are divided into vast iron tanks for this liquid, which is poured into and pumped out of them as into and out of a great barrel. The cattle-steamers are specially arranged for the transportation of live stock, but one line, running between America and England, also carries passengers at a cheap rate. The second class of vessels consists of those which make the transportation of passengers their first object, loading their holds with first-class freight, for which high rates are paid in consideration of its swift delivery. The third class includes what are known as “tramp” steamers, which run irregularly, as the old sailing-vessels used to do, picking up cargoes wherever they find them and carrying them to any port. They are often of great size and power, but being under less close supervision are often less careful as to the safety of crews and cargoes, and are sometimes unseaworthy. They are always ready to answer any sudden demand for ships, their owners keeping watch of the chances and telegraphing to their captains where to go for their next cargoes. Without the submarine telegraph these tramp steamers could scarcely compete with the regular lines; but, besides the great transoceanic cables, all the sea-coasts are now festooned with electric cables, which have frequent stations and connect the important ports of America and Europe with those of Africa, Persia, India, the Spice Islands, Australia, and New Zealand, and there is now a plan to run a cable across the Pacific between America and New Zealand, by way of the Sandwich Islands, Samoa, and Fiji.
A CORNER IN THE SALOON OF A MODERN STEAMSHIP.
The passenger-ship is a distinctly modern feature of marine carriage. In former days the few persons who were obliged to cross the seas on business errands, and the fewer who went abroad for health or pleasure or the love of travel, had to accept such rough accommodations as the ordinary merchant ships afforded. But as soon as the East and West Indies were added to the map of the world, and colonies of Europeans began to settle on distant coasts and islands, the amount of travel justified owners of vessels in enlarging cabins and providing comforts likely to induce patronage of their lines. Even two hundred and twenty-five years ago the voyage between India and England around the Cape of Good Hope, though it became somewhat tedious, because it lasted six or seven months, was by no means a miserable experience in a well-found ship. Thus Dr. John Fryer has recorded of such a sea-journey in 1682 that “it passed away merrily with good wine and no bad musick; but the life of all good company, and an honest commander, who fed us with fresh provisions of turkies, geese, ducks, hens, sucking-pigs, sheep, goats, etc.”
A century later, when England had come firmly into possession of India, and thousands of her officers, troops, and traders, with their families, were colonizing her ports, there were demanded the largest and finest ships that could be built, combining accommodations for many passengers with great cargo capacity. Such were the great East Indiamen; and in those leisurely days a trip half-way round the world on one of these roomy old vessels was a continuous pleasure to almost every one that undertook it.
The ship was a bit of Old England afloat, where the passenger rented for so many months a well-lighted, roomy, unfurnished apartment, which, according to his taste and means, he fitted up for the voyage with numberless comforts and sea stores that none but a yachtsman would think of cumbering himself with at sea to-day; and, reading narratives of the old long sea-voyages, one is constantly coming across expressions of regret by passengers when they “took leave of the good ship that for so many months had been their floating home.” These fine old passenger sailing-ships were, like a man-of-war, entirely dismantled at the end of each homeward voyage, and underwent a complete overhaul and refit before starting out again on an outward one. Passengers usually sold their state-room furniture by auction on board the ship on her arrival in port.
Such a ship, the Atlantic packets, and even men-of-war bound on a long blockading cruise, did not hesitate to stow aboard all the live stock that room could be found for, sometimes by comical devices. In that book of charming reminiscences of ways and means afloat before the days of quick steam transit, “Old Sea Wings,” Mr. Leslie has a chapter which he calls “The Old Ship-Farm,” where one may learn curious particulars of this matter.
The man in charge of this part of the stores was the ship’s butcher, and he had as “mate,” or assistant, a youth of all work known to all sailors as “Jemmy Ducks.” Their barn, or storehouse, was especially the great long-boat, which often looked more like a model of Noah’s ark than a craft serviceable in case of shipwreck.
Always securely stowed amidships, well lashed down and housed over, the boat, as she lay upon the ship’s deck, was full of live provender, being divided, as to her lower hold, into pens for sheep and pigs, while upon the first floor, or main deck, quacked ducks and geese, and above them (literally in the cock-loft) were coops for another kind of poultry. This great central depôt was closely surrounded by other small farm-buildings, the most important being the cow-house, where, after a short run ashore on the marshes at the end of each voyage, a well-seasoned animal of the snug Alderney breed chewed the cud in sweet content. In fact, when, in the old days, a passenger-ship began her voyage, the hull of her clumsy long-boat was nearly hidden by the number of temporary pens and sheds required to house the live stock for the supply of her cabin table; and with its many farm-yard and homelike sounds a ship was, even then, more like a small bit of the world afloat than it is now.
There was always regular traffic between America and Europe, especially with Great Britain, and the rapid growth of emigration to the United States and Canada made it profitable, early in this century, to put on fast-sailing packet-ships, making voyages, at intervals of a month, between London and New York. By 1840 a man might find a large, well-ordered ship departing every week or so for the transatlantic passage, which usually required less than a month going east, but might be two weeks longer coming west. Their cabins were as comfortable and perhaps more homelike than any seen now, and quite as pretty, with their white and gold paint, cut-glass door and locker knobs, damask hangings, dimity bed-curtains, and other old-fashioned niceties; and the fare was abundant and varied, as it ought to be in a neat ship with a small dairy aboard, and perhaps a green-salad garden planted in the jolly-boat. None of these packets were more popular than those of the well-remembered Black Ball Line.
FAIR WEATHER ON THE DECK OF A CLIPPER-SHIP CARRYING GOLD-SEEKERS TO CALIFORNIA IN 1849.
The steerage passengers were not so well off then, though they seemed to stand the voyage quite as well as nowadays. The fare was twenty-five dollars, and the passenger found himself “in everything but fire and water.” “Steerage passengers then had to cook their own victuals, weather permitting, at an open galley-fire on the waist-deck; ... but in anything like rough weather, all steerage passengers had either to run the chance of getting constantly wet with salt water or keep below.” The ’tween-decks space allotted to them was almost completely filled by rows of bunks, built in each port by the ship’s carpenter, in three tiers, one above the other, though the ceiling was scarcely seven feet from the floor; and when in a stormy time the hatches were closed the only way the crowd could find room was by most of it stowing itself away in the bunks, while a few tried to sit or lie on the luggage piled in the narrow aisles. The only light was that of a few candle or whale-oil lanterns, and in a very bad storm everybody came near smothering, for then it was impossible to ventilate the steerage properly without flooding it. Considering that all the provisions for the steerage people were kept in this crowded, damp, and fearfully close room, it is marvelous that a pestilence did not break out during every voyage, but, in fact, sickness was rare.
The introduction of steam into oceanic navigation was experimented with as soon as river steamboats were successfully built. The first vessel to go across the ocean by the aid of a steam-engine is said to have been the Savannah. This vessel, built in Savannah, Ga., and having a steam-engine and paddle-wheels, certainly crossed to Liverpool in 1819; but it is asserted that she sailed all the way, using her steam very little, if at all, although making the trip in twenty-two days. In 1825 the English steamer Enterprise went from London to Calcutta; but it was not until some years later that ocean navigation by steam became successful in the beginning of operations by the Cunard Company in 1833.
These first steamers were side-wheelers, and their huge boilers and simple engines consumed so much fuel that the space taken up by the coal, added to that devoted to passengers, left little room for cargo. Moreover, their speed was less, often, than that of the “clippers,” so that for some time the sailing-packets maintained their competition. The adoption of the screw propeller, in place of the costly and cumbersome side-paddles, and the perfection of the compound marine engine, which effected a great saving in fuel, soon established the superiority of steam navigation for passenger service, fast freights, and service in war, yet even these improvements were not fairly brought about until the first half of the present century had gone; and sails are not yet abandoned, not only because they steady a vessel in a gale, and may help her decidedly when the wind is fair, but may save her altogether in case of the disabling of her machinery.
Great modifications and improvements on old models have grown out of the employment of steam and the screw, and human invention has been taxed to the uttermost to combine economy of space and expense with the various needs of different climes, or special cargoes, or the demands of a traveling public that is growing more fastidious every day. The most obvious changes in naval construction have been in the greatly elongated hull, the enormous dimensions aimed at, and the all but universal employment of iron. When the first steamship crossed the ocean the proportions of ships averaged three to five beams in length.... But it was discovered that with a given power and depth and beam the length could be increased without materially affecting the speed, thus adding to the carrying capacity of steam. Great length to beam, however, does not necessarily imply great speed; the speed of beamy vessels has too often been demonstrated. Fineness of lines is equally essential, together with the proper distribution of weights, and the like. The great average speed exhibited by the modern steamship is due in large part to the momentum of such a vast weight, which, once started, has a tremendous force.
Long after the transatlantic steamships were regularly running, sixteen or seventeen days was considered a good passage between New York and Liverpool. Then the Inman and White Star lines began to see the importance of faster speed, and their rivalry had cut this estimate in two by 1870, and ten years later the Guion Line’s Arizona and other crack boats took a full day off that. Since then there has been a steady improvement in speed, as is shown by the table below; and this seems to have followed proportionately the steady increase in length. The ships of 1850 never reached 300 feet in length, and few were over 2300 tons in burden measurement. By 1880 almost all the first-class “liners” of the world exceeded 450 feet, and some soon approached 600, as the City of Rome (586 feet, 8826 tons), and several of the famous Hamburg liners, White Stars, and Cunarders nearly equaled her in dimensions (Paris and New York, 580 feet each; Teutonic and Majestic, 582 feet); while some of the more recent boats are even longer, as Campania and Lucania, 620 feet, and the gigantic Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, 648 feet. Two other ships, now planned, will considerably exceed this length. The total number of transatlantic passenger-steamships regularly sailing from New York alone is now between 90 and 100, belonging to 14 different lines. The table of speed-records between New York and Queenstown, since the time was reduced to less than six days, is as follows:
| Year. | Steamer. | Line. | Direction. | Date. | Days. | Time. Hours. | Min. |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1882 | Alaska | Guion | Eastward | May 30 to June 6 | 6 | 2 | 0 |
| 1891 | Majestic | White Star | 5 | 18 | 8 | ||
| 1891 | Teutonic | White Star | Westward | Aug. 13-19 | 5 | 16 | 31 |
| 1892 | Paris | American | Westward | Aug. 14-19 | 5 | 14 | 24 |
| 1893 | Campania | Cunard | 5 | 12 | 7 | ||
| 1894 | Lucania | Cunard | Westward | Sept. 8-14 | 5 | 8 | 38 |
| 1894 | Lucania | Cunard | Eastward | Oct. 21-26 | 5 | 7 | 23 |
The approximate distance between Sandy Hook (light-ship), New York, and Queenstown (Roche’s Point) is 2800 miles. The fastest day’s run on record, however, was made by the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, of the Nord Deutscher Lloyds Line, averaging 22.35 knots (or nautical miles, of 6080 feet each) per hour, equal to about 25½ land miles. From Sandy Hook to Queenstown deduct 4 hours 22 minutes for difference in time. Queenstown to Sandy Hook add 4 hours 22 minutes for difference in time.
This eager rivalry in respect to speed, which insures not only a larger and more influential passenger service, but increased business in fast freight and in the carriage of mail—both highly remunerative—is only one feature of the sharp competition between these ocean carriers as to which shall offer the greatest advantages, and this is of benefit to the public, though it has not greatly cheapened fares.
EMIGRANT PASSENGERS EMBARKING UPON A TRANSATLANTIC “LINER.”
Men travel far more now than they were wont in the time of “good Queen Bess,” or even of our own grandfathers, and the few travelers for pleasure of those days would scarcely believe their eyes if they could look into the floating palaces—almost cities—in which we brave old ocean now. A ship of one of the better passenger lines is a little world in itself, containing almost all the appliances of the best modern hotels on shore, and reducing the inevitable inconveniences of life on shipboard by clever devices of every sort. In the one matter of ventilation the ingenuity of the builders is particularly taxed. Money is spent lavishly in the finishing and furnishing of these great ships, not to mention the expense of running them, which sometimes amounts in cost of fuel, food, and wages to $5000 a day.
The steamship lines between New York and Great Britain do not steer straight across the Atlantic, but on their way to this country keep well to the northward, so as to get to the west of the Gulf Stream, and into the favorable current flowing south from Baffin’s Bay; then they skirt Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and Cape Cod. Going east, however, the steamers—and sailing-vessels too—keep farther south, and work along with the Gulf Stream as far as they can. From Europe to South America, or through the Straits of Magellan on their way to the South Sea islands or Australia (though this route is not often taken), or to the Pacific coast of the Americas, vessels keep close down the African coast, and then steer straight ahead from Guinea to Brazil, and on down the American coast. (Put a map before you and you will understand these courses better.) Sailing-vessels to Europe or the United States from Cape Horn, however, would swing far out into the South Atlantic to avoid heading against the southward coast-current and to get the benefit of the southwest trade-wind and the equatorial currents. Between New York and the Cape of Good Hope the track is nearly straight.
In the Pacific, the steamer-route between San Francisco or Vancouver and China and Japan, instead of being as direct as a parallel of latitude, takes a southerly course when bound west, and a northerly course when bound east, the exact lines varying with the seasons as the prevailing winds and currents change. What these winds and currents are is explained in another chapter; but it is interesting to note that there is a difference of many miles in the ordinary westerly and easterly courses, the latter being much the shorter, although the vessels of the Canadian Pacific Line often sail so far north with the Japan warm current as to sight the Aleutian Islands. Sailing-vessels, moreover, curve so much farther south than steamers in going west from San Francisco, in order to take advantage of the equatorial current and the trade-winds, that the space is a thousand miles north and south between ships outward bound and those coming home. Between California and Honolulu a steamer takes a bee-line, but sailing-vessels find it best to make detours. In summer, when outward bound, this amounts to steering straight northward until under latitude forty degrees, before turning westward, making an angular course that looks very unnecessary to a landsman.
A “WHALEBACK” FREIGHT STEAMER, ALSO ADAPTED TO PASSENGER SERVICE.
I have said that the finding of a sea-route to the East around the Cape of Good Hope was a great boon to western Europe, and advanced commerce. It remained so until within the last seventy-five years. Lately, the corsairs being out of the way, and safety guaranteed in Egypt, merchants and sailors both began to wish they had a shorter route between England and India. Then, with immense labor and sacrifice, the canal was cut across the Isthmus of Suez, and commerce returned to its ancient channel through the Red Sea, saving thousands of miles of weary distance.
From the end of the Red Sea at Aden, the tracks of steamers both ways are straight courses to Bombay or Ceylon, and thence right up to Calcutta, across to Singapore, or down to Australia. Except East African coast lines, few steamers go around the Cape of Good Hope from England, excepting one line to South Australia, which steers straight eastward all the way from Cape Town to Adelaide, 6125 miles. But the Indian Ocean is so situated under the equator, is so filled with prevailing winds and currents and counter currents, that sailing-vessels must take very roundabout courses there, and can by no means steer the same track at all seasons of the year. These voyages from New York and London to the East are the longest regular sea-roads. A short table of distances between well-known ports along regular steamer-routes will be of interest; and by reversing them, or adding them together, the sailing distance between almost any two ports on the globe may be calculated.
| MILES. | |
|---|---|
| Acapulco to San Francisco | 1,850 |
| Aden to Bombay | 1,635 |
| Aden to Colombo (Ceylon) | 2,100 |
| Aden to Zanzibar | 1,770 |
| Auckland to Honolulu | 3,915 |
| Auckland to Suva (Fiji) | 1,140 |
| Cadiz to Teneriffe (Canaries) | 698 |
| Cape Horn to Rio de Janeiro | 2,350 |
| Cape Town to Plymouth (Eng.) | 6,016 |
| Cork to St. John’s (N. F.) | 1,730 |
| Ceylon to West Australia | 3,305 |
| Glasgow to New York | 2,790 |
| Havre to Martinique | 3,560 |
| Havre to New York | 3,160 |
| Hobart (Tas.) to Invercargill (N. Z.) | 930 |
| Hong Kong to Manila | 650 |
| Hong Kong to Shanghai | 800 |
| Hong Kong to Yokohama | 1,620 |
| Leith (Scot.) to Iceland | 1,050 |
| Lisbon via Dakar (W. Af.) to Pernambuco | 3,297 |
| Lisbon to Cape Verd Islands | 1,537 |
| Liverpool to Barbadoes | 3,646 |
| Lisbon to Para | 4,000 |
| Liverpool to Lisbon | 983 |
| Liverpool to Madeira | 1,430 |
| Liverpool to New Orleans | 4,767 |
| Liverpool to New York | 3,057 |
| Liverpool to Para | 4,010 |
| Liverpool to Quebec | 2,634 |
| Marseilles to Algiers | 410 |
| Montevideo to Magellan Strait | 1,070 |
| New Orleans to Havana | 570 |
| New York to Colon | 1,980 |
| New York to San Francisco, about | 17,000 |
| New York, via St. Thomas, to Para | 3,130 |
| Panama to San Francisco | 3,260 |
| Porto Rico (San Juan) to Havana | 1,030 |
| Rio de Janeiro to Plymouth | 4,941 |
| San Francisco to Honolulu | 2,080 |
| San Francisco to Yokohama | 5,280 |
| Shanghai to Yokohama | 1,033 |
| Singapore to Hong Kong | 1,430 |
| Suez to Aden (length of Red Sea) | 1,308 |
| Suva to Honolulu | 2,783 |
| Sydney to Auckland | 1,281 |
| Sydney to Vancouver (B. C.) | 6,780 |
| Teneriffe to Porto Rico | 2,790 |
| Trieste to Bombay | 4,317 |
| Yokohama to Honolulu | 3,445 |
| Yokohama to San Francisco | 4,750 |
| Yokohama to Victoria | 4,320 |
| Zanzibar to Bombay | 2,400 |
CHAPTER VIII
ROBBERS OF THE SEAS
As the sea has furnished opportunities for so much good,—for manly exertion, knowledge of the world, and acquaintance with people outside of one’s own country, and for gaining wealth,—so it has given a chance for unscrupulous men to show the worst that is in them; and the guarding of shore towns and merchant vessels from piratical attacks has always been a part of the usefulness and duty of a nation’s naval force.
As on land there are robbers and highwaymen, so on the ocean robber ships have often been lying in wait for vessels loaded with treasure, and have landed crews of marauders to make havoc with rich seaboard provinces. Such robbers on the high seas are termed pirates, and their crime was visited by the old laws with torturing punishments; yet they were never more daring than when the laws against them were severest.
The word is Greek, and the first pirates who figure in history are those of the Greek and Byzantine islands and coasts—bloody ruffians who originated the amusing method of disposing of unransomed prisoners by making them “walk the plank,” as has been done within the present century.
The intricate channels and hidden harbors of the Ægean Sea long remained a hiding-place of sea-robbers, and are still haunted by them, though every few years, from Cæsar’s time till now, the kings of the surrounding countries have sent expeditions to break them up. In the sixteenth century piracy in that region was especially prevalent. The crews then were chiefly Turkish, but the great leaders were two renegade Greeks, the brothers Aruck and Hayradin Barbarossa (“Redbeard”).
WALKING THE PLANK.
It happened that Spain, having conquered the Moors of Granada in 1492 and pursued her victories across the straits, had gained control of Algeria (at that time a collection of small Mohammedan states), and held it until the death of King Ferdinand in 1516. Then the Algerians sent an embassy to Aruck (sometimes spelled Horuk, or Ouradjh) Barbarossa, requesting him to aid them in driving out the Spaniards, and promising him a share in the spoils. He eagerly accepted this proposition, seeing a great deal more in it than the Algerians saw; and the moment the Spaniards had been beaten and expelled he murdered the prince he had come there to help, seized upon the city and port for himself, and made it the headquarters of that system of desperate piracy which became the dread of all Europe. These robbers of the sea called themselves corsairs, from an Italian word signifying “a race”; and they generally won, because they had the best and swiftest vessels of that time, such as feluccas, xebecs, and the like. The black flag which they flew was not blacker than their reputations, so that even yet to call a man as bad as a Barbary pirate is to mean that he could not be much worse if he tried. The Spanish colonies in America, a few years later, began sending home immense treasures dug in the silver-and gold-mines of Peru and Mexico, and extorted from the natives or stolen from the temples of those unhappy countries. A quantity of ingots and gold and silver ornaments equal in value to fifteen million dollars of our modern money was taken at one time by Pizarro, in Peru, as the ransom of the Inca Atahualpa, and booty amounting to a similar sum was gained in the sacking of various cities. This great inpouring of wealth caused a general giving up of manufactures and trade in Spain, and was one of the reasons of her final decline in power, and it had the immediate bad effect of making piracy more attractive than ever. The treasure-ships, though convoyed by war-ships, were often attacked and captured by the corsairs. Barbarossa’s fleets were more like armadas of a powerful nation than mere pirate craft; and whenever it happened that his commanders were defeated, they would land upon the nearest unprotected coast of Spain, France, or Italy, and pillage and burn some town in revenge. How galling this was to all merchants and travelers we can hardly understand in these days; but so strong were the corsairs that the fleets and armies of various governments, and even of the Pope, which were sent against them, could not gain their stronghold nor suppress their cruisers, at least for more than a short time. Charles V of Spain tried greatly to conquer them; but although his forces, attacking Aruck Barbarossa from the province of Oran, near Algiers, defeated and killed him, Hayradin (more properly spelled Khair-ed-din) Barbarossa succeeded his brother, and, placing himself under the protection of Turkey, continued to build up the power of the pirates. His first care was to fortify the city of Algiers, and he expended a great deal of money and labor on the perfection of the harbor, compelling all his prisoners and thousands of citizens to work as slaves on the defenses. Next he conquered Tunis, and was selected by the sultan as the only fit man to sail against Andrea Doria, the great Genoese naval commander of the Christians in their wars against the Turks early in the sixteenth century. Mediterranean commerce became so unsafe that watch-towers were built all along the coasts, and guards were kept afoot to give alarm at the approach of the corsairs. Charles V gathered together a powerful armament, and sailed to the rescue of Tunis, recapturing it for its rightful sovereign in 1535; but he was never able to capture Hayradin Barbarossa, who lived out his life in Algiers as “a friend to the sea and an enemy to all who sailed upon it.” After his time the power of the pirates continued under other leaders; and not Algeria alone, but Tripoli, Morocco, and even Tunis, harbored piratical vessels in every port, and the rulers shared their spoils; piracy, indeed, was the source of their national revenues, and was encouraged by the Sultan of Turkey inasmuch as all these states were his vassals.
Every few years some European power—Spain, France, Venice, or England—would lose patience, send a fleet, and open a campaign that would be successful in destroying certain strongholds, releasing a crowd of prisoners, and burning or sinking many ships. The city of Algiers was bombarded almost into ruins in 1682, and the job completed a year later, after the Algerians had tossed the French consul out to the fleet, with their compliments, from the mouth of a mortar. They were fond of such jokes. Nevertheless, the city speedily recovered, and piracy, complicated by Moslem fanaticism and Turkish politics, harassed commerce during all the next century, partly because Europe was so busy in its own wars that it had no time for outside matters, and partly because it was for the advantage of certain nations (particularly of Great Britain, which, in possession of Gibraltar and Port Mahon, might have suppressed this villainy) to let the corsairs prey upon its foes—especially France. The actual result was that most or all of the European powers fell into the custom of paying to Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, and other rulers of the Barbary (or Berber) States large sums of money as annual tribute to restrain them from official depredations upon their coasts and commerce, besides other large payments for the ransom of such Christian prisoners as each sultan’s lively subjects continued to take in spite of treaties.
In this shameful condition of affairs the newly independent United States was obliged to join during the first years of its existence, to secure immunity for our commerce in the Mediterranean, because we had not yet had time to create a navy. By the end of the century, however, the United States was able to defend itself at sea, and in 1801 answered the insults of Tripoli by bombarding its capital seaport until the dey sued for mercy and promised to behave himself. Nevertheless, he needed another lesson, and in 1803 a second American fleet was sent to the Mediterranean, commanded by Preble, in the Constitution, with such subordinate officers as Bainbridge, Decatur, Somers, Hull, Stewart, Lawrence, and others that later became famous. One incident of this campaign, which began by frightening the Sultan of Morocco at Tangier into abject submission, but was especially directed against Tripoli, is well worth remembering.
THE “ARGUS” CAPTURING A TRIPOLITAN PIRATE FELUCCA.
Captain Bainbridge, going alone in the fine frigate Philadelphia into the harbor of the city of Tripoli, had unfortunately run aground, and there, overpowered by the number of his enemies afloat and ashore, had been compelled to give up his ship, and find himself and all his crew taken prisoners. He managed to get word of his misfortune to Commodore Preble at Malta, and that officer at once took his fleet to Tripoli—Decatur, in the Argus, gallantly capturing on the way one of the great lateen-sailed piratical crafts of the enemy, which later proved a useful instrument in the contest. The fleet blockaded Tripoli for a while, and shelled the fortifications somewhat, just to give the bashaw a hint, and to encourage the poor prisoners; but none of the big vessels was able to enter the narrow, tortuous, and ill-charted harbor in the face of the many batteries, under whose guns the Philadelphia could be seen at anchor with the Tripolitan flag at her main, so they sailed away to Syracuse to make preparations for reducing this nest of barbarians. Gunboats of light draft and mortar-vessels had to be fitted out; but the first thing was to try to carry out a plan that Decatur and all his friends had been maturing ever since they had arrived—the destruction of the Philadelphia, not only because she had been refitted into a powerful weapon in the hands of the enemy, but because it was galling to national as well as naval pride to see her flying a foreign flag. The plan was this:
Decatur was to take a picked crew of seventy officers and men on the captured felucca (renamed Intrepid), and attempt at night to penetrate to the inner harbor of Tripoli in the disguise of a trader, supported as well as possible by the gun-brig Siren, also disguised as a merchantman. As his pilot was an Italian and a competent linguist, it was hoped the ketch could get near enough to set fire to the ship, whirl a shotted deck-gun into position to send a shell down the main hatch and through her bottom, fire it, and escape before the surprise was over. The chances of failure were enough to daunt the bravest, yet every man in the fleet wanted to go.
On February 15, 1804, Decatur in his felucca, and Somers commanding the brig, found themselves, toward evening, again in sight of the town, with its circle of forts crowned by the frowning castle. The great Philadelphia stood out in bold relief, closely surrounded by two frigates and more than twenty gunboats and galleys. From the castle and batteries 115 guns could be trained upon an attacking force, besides the fire of the vessels, yet the bold tars on the Intrepid did not quail.
The crew having been sent below, the pilot Catalona took the wheel, while Decatur stood beside him, disguised as a common sailor. It was now nine o’clock, and bright moonlight. Standing steadily in, they rounded to close by the Philadelphia, and, boldly hailing her deck-watch, asked the privilege of mooring to her chains for the night, explaining that they had lost their anchors in the late storm, and so forth, until at last consent was given.
Having dragged themselves close to the frigate, it was the work of only a moment to board her with a rush, overpower her surprised crew, and make sure of her destruction by means of the combustibles and powder they had brought with them. Before their task was done, however, they had been discovered, and it is almost a miracle that they were able to return to their felucca, and make their way out of the harbor, through a rain of harmless cannon-balls; yet they did so, and Decatur was justly honored for one of the most gallant exploits in naval annals.
A few weeks later Preble’s squadron shelled the pirate city and fortresses into ruin, forced Tripoli as well as Algiers and Tunis to respect them and thenceforth the American flag, and gave these arrogant rulers the new sensation of paying instead of receiving money for bad deeds. It put an end to the corsairs.
Turkish and Barbary pirates were not the only ones in the world, however. Although the old Norwegian vikings and rough Norman barons did not go under that name, they were scarcely anything else, in fact, as the neighboring peoples could testify, though this was far back before modern history began. But when the Spaniards and the French began to colonize the West Indies, and to dig mines in South and Central America, not only were the Barbary corsairs given a fresh incentive, but a new set of pirates sprang up, the most daring that the world has ever seen.
As the archipelago east of Greece had sheltered the hordes of the Turkish sea-robbers, so the many islands, crooked channels, reefs unknown to all but the local pilots, small harbors, and abundant food of the Antilles, made the West Indies the safest place in the world for pirates to pursue their work. To these new and wild regions, in the sixteenth century, had flocked desperados and adventurers from all over the world. When the wars with their chances of plunder died out after the campaigns led by Cortés, Pizarro, Balboa, and the rest of the Spanish conquistadores, many ruffians seized upon vessels by force, or stole them, and turned into robbers of the sea. At first, as a rule, they had farms and families on some island, and went freebooting only a portion of the year. The island of Hayti, or Santo Domingo, was then settled by farmers, hunters, and cattlemen, the last-named of whom, mainly French, passed most of their time in the interior of the island, capturing, herding, or killing half-wild cattle and hogs. But the monopolies which Spain imposed upon the colonists interfered with the market for their produce and induced an illicit trade, which led to frequent encounters with the Spanish navy. As the constant wars between Spain and France and England increased the difficulties of trade, large numbers of the colonists joined the freebooters, who then became extremely numerous and formidable, losing their old name and becoming known by that of the cattlemen—buccaneers, from the French word boucanier.
First Santo Domingo, then Tortugas, and finally Jamaica were headquarters of the buccaneers, who were made up of men of all nations, united by a desire to prey upon Spain as a common enemy. They were thousands in number, possessed large fleets of ships and boats, were well armed, and finally formed a regular organization with a chief and under-officers. The most noted of these chiefs, perhaps, was Henry Morgan, a Welshman, who was at one time captured and taken home to England for trial. To his own surprise, instead of being executed, he was knighted by Charles II, who had not been at all grieved at seeing Spanish commerce harassed; and Morgan was returned to Jamaica as commissioner of admiralty, where at one time he acted as deputy governor, using his opportunity to make it unpleasant for those of the buccaneers with whom he had formerly had disagreements as to the distribution of prizes.
The earlier buccaneers found ample plunder in the Spanish fleets. They patrolled the sea in the track of vessels bound to and from Europe, and seized them, allowing or compelling the crews to become pirates, or else to be killed or carried into slavery. This work, however, employed only a portion of the buccaneers; and early in the seventeenth century, as the commerce of Spain declined, it became too uncertain a means of wealth to suit them. But the rich Spanish settlements still remained; and often, therefore, they equipped a great fleet, enlisted men under certain strict rules as to sharing the spoils, and sailed away to pillage some coast. There was hardly an island in the West Indies from which, in this way, they did not extort immense sums of money under threat of destruction of the people. The mainland also suffered from the marauders. Great cities, like Cartagena in Venezuela, Panama on the Isthmus, Mérida in Yucatan, and Havana in Cuba, were attacked by armies of buccaneers numbering thousands of men. Sometimes their fortifications held good, and the enemy was beaten back; but sooner or later all these cities, and others, smaller, were captured, robbed of everything valuable that they contained, and burned or partly burned.
For years the buccaneers were the terror of the Caribbean region, and after the famous sacking of Panama, under Morgan, in 1671, their power spread across the Isthmus and scourged the southern seas. We have no way of knowing the amount of the treasure which they captured from the merchant vessels and from the coast of Peru; for the moment they got home from an expedition they wasted all their booty in wild carousing, so that the spoils earned by months of exposure, and wounds, and danger of death, would be spent in a single week.
At last even England and France, after secretly favoring the buccaneers, became roused to the necessity of controlling them, and it was with this object in view that a certain Captain William Kidd was fitted out at private expense toward the end of the seventeenth century, and armed with King William’s commission for seizing pirates and making reprisals, England being at war with France. Just why it was, nobody has explained, but Captain Kidd spent his time in loitering around the coast of Africa, where no pirates were to be found, until he grew quite disheartened, and, fearing to be dismissed by his employers and to be “mark’d out for an unlucky man,” he started a little pirate business for himself, in which he gained more of a certain kind of fame than any of the rest; for popular tradition supposes him to have hoarded his booty and buried it. “Captain Kidd’s treasure” has been sought for until the whole eastern coast of the United States is honeycombed with diggings for it; but probably he had eaten and drunk it up before 1701, when he was captured and executed in England. About this time, however, and without his valuable aid, the combined naval forces of all the nations interested in the commerce of the New World broke the power of the buccaneers, and their depredations ceased. Their story is one of the wildest, most romantic, and most terrible in the history of the world.
“In revel and carousing
We gave the New Year housing,
With wreckage for our firing,
And rum to heart’s desiring.”
The trade of piracy was carried on during the eighteenth century in the region of the West Indies by unorganized bands of desperados who had all the faults and none of the greatness of the men they succeeded, and who received little attention from the world at large. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the Barataria pirates came into notice on the coast of Louisiana, taking the place of the buccaneers, but in a much smaller way. Their leaders, Pierre and John Lafitte, carried on business quite openly in New Orleans; and their settlements on the marshy islands along the coast, and their “temple,” to which persons came out from the city to buy goods, were open secrets. But in the War of 1812, although the British tried to buy their services, they redeemed themselves by standing true to the American government, which had just been trying to exterminate them, and so they won public pardon and an added glamour of romance.
For the same reasons as those in the case of other island systems, the East Indies have always been infested with pirates, whose light, swift vessels run in and out of the intricate channels among the dangerous coral reefs, where government cruisers dare not follow, while the people on shore sympathize more with the pirates than with the police.
The East Indian sea-robbers are, as a rule, natives of that region—Malays, Borneans, Dyaks, and Chinese, with many half-savages of the South Sea Islands. This is more like a continuance of savage resistance to civilization than real piracy, since the pirates of the Atlantic are civilized sailors in mutiny against their own people and national commerce. The result is just as bad, however; for these East Indians are as bloodthirsty and cruel as the others, and if they do not kill their victims, or save them for some cannibal feast (as would probably happen in the New Hebrides and some other islands), they condemn them to a life of misery. But in these days of improved sea-craft, piracy, even in Malayan waters, is weak. Our consuls and government agents watch suspicious vessels; our telegraph warns the naval authorities in a moment; our steam-cruisers outspeed the swiftest craft of the black flag; our rifled guns silence their cheap artillery; and our coast surveys furnish maps so accurate that the pirate no longer holds the secret of channels and harbors where he can safely retreat. If, therefore, the old “Redbeards” should come back to life and try to be kings of the sea, as they rejoiced to be a couple of centuries ago, their pride would soon be humbled, and they would gladly return to their graves and their ancient glory.
There is a form of sea-roving which has been at times not very different from piracy; it is called privateering, and history shows a good many cases where it has degenerated into sea-robbery pure and simple.
A privateer is a ship, owned by a private citizen or citizens, to which authority is given by a government to act as an independent war-vessel. Its commission is called a “letter of marque” (lettre de marque in French), entitling it to “take, burn, and destroy” a certain enemy’s property on the sea or in its ports. It has no right, of course, to attack any one else.
The object and plea of the government issuing commissions to privateers is that thus a great many more armed vessels can be sent afloat than the government has money to equip, and that consequently far more damage will be done to the enemy, by crippling his trade and resources, than regular men-of-war alone can accomplish. Private capital has been willing to take the risk because rewarded by a large share of the prizes; and from the end of the fifteenth to the middle of the eighteenth century this was one of the most profitable of marine industries, for then nearly universal wars made almost any capture legitimate. In the earlier times even the limited regulation that came later was absent, and there was small choice between a privateer and a pirate. Queen Elizabeth found the hundreds of privateers which she had commissioned against the Spanish and Dutch preying upon her own people, and robbing fishermen, coasters, and small shore towns, to such an extent that she had to suppress them as bandits. Those were the times when Hawkins could use a royal fleet to wage war upon the Spanish colonies for private reasons; and when his ablest lieutenant, Drake, could make his notable journey around the world a history of robbery and slaughter. On the west coast of South America he spent months in destroying Spanish vessels and ravaging and burning settlements; yet it was thought remarkable, when he returned from his circumnavigation of the globe, that the Queen hesitated somewhat before recognizing his great achievements as a seaman, for fear of complications with Spain!
MALAY PIRATES ATTACKING A STEAMER.
Spain, in those days of first harvest from her American possessions and the East Indies, was the prey of everybody on the high seas able to rob her, and formalities were joyously disregarded by both sides. Her galleons carried precious cargoes of spices, silks, and East India goods around the Cape, and brought silver ingots and gold bars from the Spanish Main. They were usually convoyed by regular war-ships, and had to run the gantlet of the enemy’s fleets whenever Spain happened to be openly at war with somebody, as was usually the case; and otherwise must escape buccaneers in West Indian waters, Malayan and Chinese pirates in the far East, and irregular sea-rovers along the West African coast, while the corsairs made the Mediterranean route doubly dangerous.
PAUL JONES’ FIGHT IN THE “BON HOMME RICHARD” WITH THE “SERAPIS.”
The gradual growth of organized navies, the development of international law, and the increasing organization of the civilized world generally, slowly tamed these wild practices and reduced privateering to some sort of control. Thus Jean Bart, the popular hero of French naval history, who flourished toward the end of the seventeenth century, was recognized and supported by the French monarch as a free-lance in the Mediterranean, because his humble birth prohibited him from taking a commission in the regular navy, which amounted to a sort of apology for his deeds.
During the wars of the United States with England privateering was extensively practised on both sides, and was of especial value to the Americans. Congress issued private commissions as early as March, 1776, and the ablest statesmen upheld it as a means of employing the ships, capital, and thousands of seamen that must lie idle when the enemy’s cruisers were ranging the ocean highways unless permitted to arm themselves and assist the government in an irregular warfare, trusting to the value of their captures for remuneration. That the chance of such reward was enough inducement is shown by the fact that during the first year of the Revolution nearly three hundred and fifty British vessels were captured, chiefly West Indiamen, worth, with their cargoes, five million dollars. As Great Britain did not recognize the flag of the United States, not only these, but even our regular naval officers, were regarded by them as pirates, rather than true privateers—Paul Jones first of all; but she never acted on this theory with the severity that would have been visited upon true pirates.
In the naval warfare that came later between the United States and France, privateering again flourished, and was a source of immense profit to the principal seaports whence these swift, effective Yankee vessels were despatched. No less than three hundred and sixty-five American privateers were sent out between 1789 and 1799, and swept the seas almost clean of the French merchant flag.
Then came the second war with Great Britain, which was fought over a question of the sea rather than of the land,—the right of search claimed by the British,—and once more American and British privateers swarmed upon the highways of commerce. Of our merchant ships in all parts of the world, about five hundred were lost; but this was more than paid for, since our two hundred and fifty privateers captured or destroyed, during the three years and nine months of the conflict, no less than sixteen hundred British merchant vessels of all classes.
This disparity of results was largely due to the greater number of English merchant vessels, but is also to be credited to the superior speed and handiness of the Yankee vessels, most of which were “Baltimore clippers,” topsail-rigged schooners with raking masts, that could outsail and out-manœuver anything afloat. “They usually carried from six to ten guns, with a single long one, which was called ‘Long Tom,’ mounted on a swivel in the center. They were usually manned with fifty persons besides officers, all armed with muskets, cutlasses, and boarding-pikes.”
An English writer, Mr. R. C. Leslie, is of the opinion that this type of vessel grew out of models in vogue in the West Indies, long before, for the small piratical craft that made those waters the terror of travelers.
DRAWN BY W. TABER.ENGRAVED BY HENRY WOLF.
UNITED STATES FRIGATE “CONSTELLATION” OVERHAULING THE SLAVER “CORA.”
These Baltimore clippers, too, enlarged and square-rigged, but still the fastest things on the western ocean, formed the craft with which the slave-trade was continued between Africa and America long after it had been condemned by the civilized world. For many years previous to the American Civil War, which put an end to the larger part of the traffic by destroying its market, England and the United States kept squadrons patrolling the African coast to arrest the slavers and free their “cargoes.”
What wild, wild tales of the sea do these reminiscences of piracy, privateering, and the slave-chase bring to mind—tales of horror, and yet full of such deeds of daring and romance and fierce delight as must stir the heart in spite of brain and conscience!
Pirates are things of the past—no more to be feared except in a small way in the Malayan and Chinese archipelagoes. The African slave-trade is extinct, so far as shipment across the ocean is concerned, save where, now and then, an Arab dhow steals with its black cargo along the East African foreland, or flits across the Gulf of Aden or the Red Sea. Privateering has been forbidden by international treaty among the larger European powers, which now recognize that trade goods, even of belligerents, must be held safe in the ships of neutrals (except articles declared contraband of war), because the business of the world cannot stop, or even be put in jeopardy, by a quarrel between two nations. Privateering, therefore, has been abandoned in Europe as a method of war since the treaty of Paris in 1856, though Prussia came pretty near it in 1870, by organizing what she called a volunteer fleet, and Spain reserves the privilege of commissioning privateers.
The United States, however, and some other countries whose policy or ability forbid them to have a large navy, would not enter into the European agreement above mentioned, mutually to abstain from privateering, on the plea that to do so would be to yield the most powerful weapon of a nation weak in naval armament and sea commerce, against any of many possible enemies whose large sea-borne commerce would expose it to the most serious wounds. In our Civil War the President issued no letters of marque, although authorized to do so. It was customary to speak of the Confederate cruisers Alabama, Shenandoah, Florida, etc., as privateers, or even pirates, and they actually played the part with a success woeful to us of the North, and to Great Britain, which had to pay for the damages caused by the Alabama; but, strictly speaking, they were neither, because commissioned by a temporary but regular government, whose flag might have been recognized if its arms had succeeded.
More lately (1898) the United States has announced it as its policy to refrain from privateering, though no formal signature has been given to any international agreement to that effect.
STEAM YACHT.“HALCYON.”SANDY HOOK LIGHT-SHIP.“VOLUNTEER.”“MAYFLOWER.”
A SPIN OUT TO SEA.—WELL-KNOWN YACHTS ROUNDING THE SANDY HOOK LIGHT-SHIP.
(From the painting by J. O. Davidson, owned by F. A. Hammond, Esq.)
CHAPTER IX
YACHTING AND PLEASURE-BOATING
Yacht is a word derived from the Dutch language, which has given to the English so many of its sea-terms, meaning, originally, a fast boat, such as was built for chasing pirates and smugglers, and, later, a pleasure-boat. The latter meaning alone is now kept in view by the word, which is properly applied to anything designed and used for pleasure-sailing, whether moved by sails, steam, or electricity.
In Great Britain, where yachting, as we now understand it, arose, it was not until about 1650 that races between pleasure craft began to be sailed on the Thames and in the quiet waters about the Isle of Wight, while the first yacht-club was not formed until 1720 (at Cork, in Ireland). Even then, a century elapsed before yachting as a sport attracted much attention even among the British, famous for their love of the sea. In 1812 a “yacht-club” was founded at Cowes, in the Isle of Wight. It received a new impetus and became the “Royal Yacht-Club” in 1817, the Prince Regent having joined it, and in 1833 was again reorganized by King William III as the “Royal Yacht Squadron,” the designation it bears to-day. It carried on races, or regattas, as they soon came to be called (borrowing from the Italians a term descriptive of the old Venetian gondola races), but all sorts of cruising-boats were matched against one another, classified by a tonnage rule with no allowances for size or any of the systems by which contestants are now classified and equalized.
By this time, however, there was peace on the North Atlantic, and many a good seaman was free to turn his attention to enjoying and improving the tools of his profession. By this time, also, the Americans had made great headway as ship-builders and seamen, and by rivalry with the Old World for trade, and by experience in the Newfoundland fisheries and the West Indies fruit-trade, had acquired a skill in building and rigging ships that astonished the world by their speed and weatherly qualities. It was natural that these ideas should influence pleasure craft on this side of the water, as Great Britain’s long sea-struggles had influenced its sailors; and when, in 1844, the New York Yacht-Club was founded, the conditions were favorable for beginning that home development of yachting as a sport which was soon to place the Americans and Canadians among the leading yachting peoples of the world, and to lead to those international tests of speed that nowadays excite so wide-spread and intense an interest.
“AMERICA” (AS ORIGINALLY RIGGED) AND “MARIA.”
The great preponderance in numbers and value of pleasure-vessels in the United States, and in the number of clubs and club-members, is due not only to our large population and long coast-line, but to the great extent of inland waters furnished by our rivers and interior lakes, and to the prevalence of bays or protected lagoons, such as Narragansett Bay, the Great South Bay of Long Island, New York harbor, Delaware and Chesapeake bays, and the long series of “sounds” that border the southern Atlantic coast from Barnegat to Biscayne. The Great Lakes are bordered by yacht-clubs on both sides, and furnish space and weather for quite as serious work as tries the skill of ocean navigators, while a hundred smaller lakes make fine pleasure-waters and excellent training-grounds for fresh-water sailors.
Though the first regatta in America was sailed in 1845, little over half a century ago, the evolution of American yachts began with the building of the sloop Maria by Robert L. Stevens, one of that family of remarkable inventors, who had already devised the first practical screw-steamer, and afterward created the Monitor. Her model, as we learn from an excellent article in “The Century” for July, 1882, by S. G. W. Benjamin, was suggested by the low, broad, almost flat-bottomed sloops employed to steal over the shallows of the Hudson and the Sound—vessels depending upon beam rather than on ballast for stability, and imitated by many of our coasters, which are so stiff that they sometimes make outside voyages without either cargo or ballast; but the Maria had a long, sharp, hollowed bow, whence she expanded aft, with little taper at the stern, so that her deck-plan was that of an elongated flat-iron. The principal novelty about her, however, was the use of two “center-boards.”
A center-board is a plate of wood or metal, suspended, usually by a corner pivot, within a sheath or box in the waist, which can be let down through the keel into the water, so as to form an adjustable keel. It is the most convenient form of a very old device for preventing a boat’s drift to leeward, or tendency to capsize under the pressure of the wind. In earliest times, a mat was hung over the side. Later this was replaced by the leeboard, apparently a Dutch invention, which may still be seen on the canal barges in Holland, and which was a feature of the pirogues or periaugers (shallow double-ended sailing-canoes) that in early times formed almost the only type of small sail-boat in New York waters. Two other novel, foreshadowing features possessed by Mr. Stevens’ boat, were the use of rubber compressors on the traveler of the main boom to ease the strain of the sheet (rubber is applied in many places about modern rigging), and the bolting of lead to the keel as outside ballast.
The Maria justified the expectations aroused by these and other novelties in hull and rig by beating everything in existence, until a Swedish gentleman in New York constructed a much smaller boat, the Coquette, on very different lines, for although only sixty-six feet long she drew ten feet of water; and in a match on the open sea she beat the Maria easily, showing the superiority of the deep-keeled model for windy weather.
Profiting by these experiences and widely gathered information, a new designer essayed the task of making a still better yacht. This was George Steers, the son of a British naval captain and ship-modeler, who had become an American naval officer and was the first man to take charge of the Washington navy yard. He built several graceful and fleet-winged sloops, famous in their day, such as the Julia, David Carl’s Gracie, and many pilot-boats and ships. His most celebrated production, however, and the one which gave our yachtsmen an international reputation and established their method of pursuing recreation as the foremost American sport, was the America, from which the “America Cup” races take origin and name.
The origin was really accidental. When the first World’s Fair was to be held at the Crystal Palace in London, one of the attendant festivities was a great national gathering of British yachts in their favorite harbor, Cowes, at which, it was announced, foreign yachtsmen were to be welcome, especially Americans. In preparation for it, John C. Stevens, of Hoboken, then Commodore of the New York Yacht-Club, and some of his friends, ordered a new yacht from George Steers with which to cross the Atlantic and meet the English racers. This new boat, completed in the spring of 1851, and named America, was schooner-rigged, but had raking masts, no topsails except a small main gaff, and only one jib, whose foot was laced to a boom. Such was the style of the day; but later she was changed in rig so as to carry far more and bigger sails, more like those of a modern schooner-yacht.
The moment she arrived in Cowes, in the early summer of 1851, her superiority in speed was conceded, and no British captain would consent to meet her; but finally a match was extemporized, open to all nations, for which a prize was offered in the form of a cup presented by the Royal Yacht Squadron—not by the Queen, as usually said. Fifteen yachts responded, but none showed what it could do, for there was little wind, and the cup was awarded to the America more in general acknowledgment of its excellence than because of any great performance there. Not much importance was attached to the incident, but the silver tankard was brought home and left to ornament Commodore Stevens’ drawing-room until 1857, when its owners dedicated it to the purpose of a perpetual challenge cup, in charge of the New York Yacht-Club, for international races under specified conditions. Fifteen years elapsed, however, before the first contestant appeared.
The America had differed prominently in shape from all her opponents at Cowes, by having fine hollowed bows and a wide stern, instead of the bluff bows and narrowing after part—the “cod’s head and mackerel’s tail” pattern—of English craft; she also had sails that hung very flat instead of bellying out under the wind as was the foreign style. In these directions British yachtsmen saw good, and tried to improve; but they would have nothing to do with center-boards, and clung to their cutter-rig. We, on the other hand, had gained ideas as to improving rig, especially in the schooners, and in the bestowal of ballast, outside and in.
FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY G. WEST & SON, SOUTHSEA, ENGLAND.
“GENESTA,” “TARA,” AND “IREX”—THE BRITISH TYPE OF CUTTER OF 1884-85.
“Galatea,” 1885, belonged to the same type.
At length, in 1870, an English schooner, the Cambria, came over to compete for the cup, and was pitted against a fleet of crack yachts off Sandy Hook; but again the wind was so light that the boats did little more than drift. The Englishman, nevertheless, was outdrifted by nine others, and the leader was the little sloop Magic, which became the custodian of the cup. The next year, however, another challenge was received, and the British keel-yacht Livonia appeared and was defeated by the American keel-schooner Sappho, which, under a new rule, had won her right to defend the cup by first beating in preparatory ocean races all other rivals for the honor. As this contest was between single representative yachts, tried in five races, and in all sorts of weather, it was a fair and conclusive measure of comparative qualities. The next yacht to come after the international cup was the Canadian Countess of Dufferin, which was promptly defeated by the Magic in 1876. Five years later another Canadian appeared, the Atalanta, differing from previous contestants in being a single-masted center-board yacht; but her rigging and finish were so bad that her excellent model could not save her from defeat (1881) at the hands of the elegant iron sloop Mischief which had been built especially for the race, and had won her foremost place through severe trial races, as before.
Up to this time, as Mr. W. P. Stephens tells us in “The Century” for August, 1893, whence many of the portraits of these racers have been taken, no pleasure-boats had been built except after the rule of thumb—some practical sailor whittled out a model according to his ideas, and the builder followed it.
Systematic designing was unknown, and ... one type of yacht was in general use, the wide, shoal center-board craft, with high trunk cabin, large open cockpit, ballast all inside (and of iron, or even slag and stone), and a heavy and clumsy wooden construction. Faulty in every way as this type has since been proved, in the absence of any different standard it was considered perfect, and open doubts were expressed of the patriotism if not the sanity of the few American yachtsmen who, about 1877, called into question the merits of the American center-board sloop, and pointed out the opposing qualities of the British cutter—her non-capsizability, due to the use of lead ballast outside of the hull; her speed in rough water; and the superiority of her rig both in proportions and in mechanical details.
A wordy warfare over these types raged for several years, gaining strength with the building of the first true English cutter, the Muriel, in New York in 1878, and bearing good fruit a year later in the launching of the Mischief, an American center-board sloop, but modified in accordance with the new theories. The plumb stem, the straight sheer, and higher free-board, with quite a shapely though short overhang, suggested the hull of the cutter, and though quite wide—nearly twenty feet on sixty-one feet water-line—she drew nearly six feet. Even with her sloop rig she was a marked departure from the older boats of her class, especially as she was built of iron in place of wood, and consequently carried her ballast, all lead, at a very low point.
One of the results of this controversy was the sending to this country, from Scotland, of a little ten-ton racing cutter, the Madge, purely to show what capabilities lay in “a deep, narrow, lead-keeled craft with the typical cutter rig.” The only American able to beat her was the Shadow, a famous Herreshoff sloop of unusual depth, and she did it but once. Nevertheless, the controversy was not decided in the United States, and the Britishers thought it worth while to try to give us another lesson. In 1884 they launched two big cutters, Irex and Genesta, and in 1885 a third, Galatea; and Sir Richard Sutton, owner of Genesta, and Lieutenant William Henn, R. N., owner of Galatea, challenged for the America Cup.
Then the question arose: What should be done to meet them? The British cutters differed from those previously met, in that they were built for racing, not for general use—were “racing machines” instead of cruising-yachts. To meet this, a scientific designer of marine vessels, Mr. A. Cary Smith of New York, was called upon to produce a moderately deep, center-board, iron sloop-yacht on the lines of the Mischief, but much larger, and he produced the Priscilla. But while she was building there was quietly begun another yacht, the Puritan, owned and built in Boston from designs by an almost unheard-of architect, Mr. Edward Burgess, who previously to this performance had been renowned only as a student of insects!
“The stout oak keel of the new Puritan was laid upon a lead keel of twenty-seven tons, carried down into a deep projecting keel; the plumb stem, the sheer, and the long counter suggested the British cutter rather than the American sloop; the draft of eight feet six inches was greatly in excess of all of the old center-board boats, and the rig was essentially that of the cutter rather than of the sloop.”
A struggle decided that she was better than the Priscilla, and in the cup races in September she proved herself better than the famous English cutter Genesta.
THE CUTTER “MURIEL,” SHOWING THE ENGLISH
DEEP-DRAFT TYPE OF BUILD AND RIG.
Nevertheless, when the Galatea, whose challenge had been postponed until 1886, came out, the Puritan had already been distanced by an American rival, the Mayflower, practically a larger copy of herself, as Galatea was of Genesta, and, therefore, a lead-keeled center-board boat, having a cutter-like rig. Trial races showed that the Mayflower was able to beat all her beautiful predecessors, and again the British contestant was obliged to take a defeat and leave the prize in New York.
The result of this last contest (1886) was to cause British yachtsmen to abandon their old tonnage rule of measurement and adopt the far better modern one of load-line and sail-area measurement. Another challenge immediately came from Glasgow, supported by a boat named Thistle, built under the new rule; and to oppose it Mr. Burgess built the Volunteer, which differed from its predecessors mainly in increased draft and tendency toward the cutter model. She easily beat the Thistle, and the discouraged foreigners rested for some years before trying again to wrest from us the coveted trophy.
“PURITAN.”
In 1891, however, there came to New York, from the yards of the Herreshoff Brothers, in Rhode Island, a new forty-six-foot yacht, which soon put the fame of the Volunteer and all her glorious rivals into the background. This was the Gloriana, “remarkable as a daring and original departure from the accepted theories.” The radical novelty in her form consisted in the great cutting away of her bulk under water while preserving the full extent of the water-line, and the making of a very deep, heavily loaded keel, trusted for stability. Her hull was also novel, consisting of a double skin of thin wood on steel frames, while the upper part of the hull projected excessively at both ends. She was everywhere a winner, and was immediately followed by a smaller boat, the Dilemma, whose keel was an almost rectangular plate of steel, the ballast, which alone was trusted for stability, being in the form of a cigar-shaped cylinder of lead bolted to the lower edge of the “fin,” as this kind of keel was appropriately styled. Many boats of this pattern were soon afloat, most of them highly successful at home and abroad, and carrying a surprising spread of canvas.
FROM PHOTOGRAPHS BY J. S. JOHNSTON AND PURVIANCE.
“MAYFLOWER.”
The year 1893 brought another challenge for the cup in the person of Lord Dunraven, sailing the yacht Valkyrie, but he was met by a new, well-proved Herreshoff fin-keel, the Vigilant (built of a new alloy—Tobin bronze), and handsomely defeated. The following season the Vigilant went to England, and found herself equally overmatched by the Britannia, owned by the Prince of Wales, while Valkyrie II was wrecked. In 1895 Lord Dunraven sent a second challenge, backed by a new Valkyrie (III); and this produced a fresh American contestant, again designed and built by the Herreshoffs, named Defender. The races came off amid intense public excitement, outside of Sandy Hook, but were most unsatisfactory; “in the first, Defender won; in the second, Valkyrie was disqualified as the result of a foul, and Lord Dunraven declined to sail a third.”
COMPARISON OF OLD AND NEW TYPES.
1. “America,” 1851, water-line 90 feet.—2. “Cambria,” 1868, water-line 100 feet.—3. “Magic,” 1857-69, water-line 79 feet.—4. “Sappho,” 1867, water-line 120 feet.—5. “Mischief,” 1879, water-line 61 feet.—6. “Puritan,” 1885, water-line 81 feet.—7. “Genesta,” 1884, water-line 81 feet.—8. “Thistle,” 1887, water-line 86 feet.—9. “Volunteer,” 1887, water-line 85 feet.—10. “Gloriana,” 1891, water-line 45 feet.—11. “Wasp,” 1892, water-line 46 feet.—12. “El Chico,” 1892, water-line 25 feet.
Such has been the history of this long series of races for the America Cup, and such the development of its defenders; but while they and their work have stimulated interest in yachting all over the world, they have really not influenced it greatly, because all of the later boats competing were not practical yachts, in which one might cruise and live afloat, and enjoy life with his friends, but “machines” in which every quality tending to comfort and safety was sacrificed to the requirements of speed. In fact, the owners of these “big boats” kept small, handy, comfortable yachts for their own enjoyment, and the racers were as a rule sailed by a skipper and crew of professional racing sailors.
There are said to be over two hundred yacht-clubs in the United States, enrolling about four thousand yachts, an eighth of which are steam or electric boats, scattered wherever any water suitable for the sport exists. With the lakes and rivers we have nothing to do, except to say that the yachtsmen of Montreal and Quebec are really salt-water sailors, for they cruise in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and elsewhere at sea as well as their fellow-sportsmen of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. At the other extreme the Havana Yacht-Club has American members who take their boats to the West Indies every winter. Bermuda is another favorite resort, and the scene of lively races with a local, narrow sort of craft, called a “flyer,” which will beat almost anything if only it can be kept right side up.
On the Pacific coast, ... wherever there is a bay that will afford a harbor, and a town that will support people, the yacht is used as a vehicle of pleasure.... Many of the San Francisco boats are large schooners, a number are powerful sea-going sloops, while of smaller craft there is an abundance of almost every type, although the New York catboat and the flat-bottomed sharpie of Long Island Sound are seldom met with, and seem not to be in favor.... Pacific yachters appreciate the good points of the yawl, for the squalls which blow over the waters of the west coast are sudden and severe, and no rig meets these conditions of weather so well as does the yawl.
DRAWN BY W. TABER
FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY WALTER BLACKBURN.
THE NEWPORT CATBOAT.
The most important and numerous yachting interest of the country, however, as would be expected, is along the northeastern seaboard, where, measured by numbers and the investment in boats, wharves, club-houses, and equipments generally, it surpasses any other district in the world. More than one hundred clubs exist between Maine and Philadelphia.
The earliest form of yacht [as Mr. F. W. Pangborn reminds us in “The Century” for May, 1892] was, of course, a rowboat with a sail.... From the primitive sprit-sail pleasure-boat comes the ever-present and universally favored center-board catboat, a type of yacht which, for speed, handiness, and unsafeness, has never been surpassed. Keel catboats are also built, but the typical American “cat” is the center-board boat of light draft, big beam, and huge sail. The two objectionable points about boats of this class are their capsizability, and their bad habit of yawing when sailing before the wind. Yet the cat is the handiest light-weather boat made. It is very fast, quick in stays, and simple in rig; but it can never become a first-class seaworthy type of yacht. It belongs among the fair-weather pleasure-boats....
RIG OF THE YAWL.
From the center-board catboat grew the jib-and-mainsail sloop, a type of yacht which has always been noted for its great speed and general unhandiness. Small yachts of this kind are always racers, and the interest in racing is sufficient to keep them in the lists of popular boats. In design they are like the catboats, the only difference being in their rig. These two boats, the center-board cat and the jib-and-mainsail sloop, are what yachters call “sandbaggers”; that is to say, their ballast consists of bags of sand which are shifted to windward with every tack and thus serve to keep the yachts right side up. A boat ballasted in this manner can carry more sail than rightly belongs on her sticks, but she cannot be very safe or comfortable. Her place is in the regatta. It is not beyond the truth to assert that the sandbaggers constitute probably two fifths of the total of small yachts. They will never cease to be popular, for the reason that speed and sport are synonymous terms with a great many yachters, and no one can deny that these boats, like Brother Jasper’s sun, “do move.”
DRAWN BY W. TABER,
FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY WALTER BLACKBURN.
ENGRAVED BY A. NEGRI.
A SANDBAGGER SLOOP.
Passing the sandbaggers, the next popular and most universally used yacht is the ballasted sloop. A sloop may be a center-board boat, or a keel boat, or a combination of both. She has only one mast and carries a topmast. Her sails are many, and, like the cutter, she is permitted to carry clouds of canvas in a race. Technically speaking, a cutter differs from a sloop only in one point, as the terms “sloop” and “cutter” really apply to the rig of the yacht. The cutter has a sail set from her stem to her masthead; the sloop has not. This sail is called a forestay-sail, and its presence marks the cutter-rig. The term “cutter,” however, is usually applied to the long, narrow, deep-keeled vessel, and has in common parlance grown to mean a boat of that type. It is in that sense that it is generally understood. It is worthy of notice that nearly all yachters who cruise about in summer, and especially those who are fond of speedy boats, use either sloops or cutters; and it is remarkable to see how much comfort can be found in boats of these types, even when quite small....
A SHARPIE.
The average yachting man, if he be of that stuff of which good seamen are made, soon finds his chief delight in being master of his own vessel. He likes to feel that it is his skill, his prowess, his intellect, that rule the ship in which he sails; and finding this complete mastery of the vessel to be impossible aboard a big boat, he longs for one which he can handle alone. This independent and sportsmanlike instinct of the American yachter has culminated in a liking for certain classes of very small boats,—“single-handers” they are called,—and this liking has given impetus to the building of some little vessels which are really marvels in their way. Simplicity and handiness of rig have been considered in their construction, and this has led in many cases to the adoption of what is known as the yawl style, a rig which for safety and convenience has never been surpassed by any other. The yawl is really a schooner with very small mainsail. For small cruising-yachts it is an excellent rig, and preferable to the cat rig. Cat-yawls are also in use; they are merely yawls without jibs. With such rigs as these a yachter can go alone upon the water without fear of trouble and with no need of assistance. Naturally, with men of moderate means who love the water, these small single-handers have become very popular. Some of them are not over sixteen feet long, yet the solitary skipper-crew-and-cook, all in one, of such a boat finds in his yacht comfortable sleeping-quarters, cook-stove, dinner-table, and all necessary “fixings.” The ingenuity displayed in fitting out the cabins of these little boats is quite remarkable.
A BUCKEYE.
Of the many nondescript rigs which are applied to small yachts, two are in common use. One of these is the sharpie, a simple leg-o’-mutton rig used with flat-bottomed boats. Large sharpies have been built with fine cabin accommodations, and such boats are particularly adapted to the shoal waters of the South. They are fast sailers, but owing to their long, narrow bodies and light draft, are not always trustworthy. They are cheaper to build than boats of other designs....
Buckeyes are favored only in the South. Originally the buckeye was a log hollowed out and shaped into a boat, and was used by the negroes. To-day, however, buckeyes are built upon carefully drawn plans, and many of them are excellent vessels. They are common on the coast waters south of the Delaware Bay, and are used chiefly for hunting-boats, their cheapness, handiness, and roominess rendering them useful to the sportsman. A true buckeye is a double-ender, but some large ones have been built with an overhang stern, which destroys the ideal and creates a new kind of craft.
OLD-STYLE PIROGUE WITH LEEBOARD.
A few years ago the sailing public was surprised by the appearance upon the waters of a spider-like contrivance which its friends said was a “catamaran.” This new claimant for yachting favor was like the raft of the South Sea Islanders only in name; in fact, it was not a catamaran at all, but a new device for racing over the water by means of sails. Wonderful feats were predicted for the future of the catamaran, and it certainly did accomplish something; but after a long and fair trial (for the yachter, no matter how bigoted he may be, will always try a new boat) it was discarded as a useless, dangerous, and decidedly unsatisfactory kind of craft....
Leaving the discussion of the odds and ends of yacht styles, we come, by natural progress, to a type which is destined to greater popularity as time goes on, and yachters learn the ways of the sea and the best methods of dealing with them. Although the schooner is generally deemed a big yacht, it is nevertheless a fact that small schooners are desirable boats to have, and that the number of schooners of small tonnage is increasing. There is no denying the advantage of the schooner’s rig over that of the sloop. A schooner of forty feet is handier, safer, and less expensive to run than a forty-foot sloop. The rig of the schooner is peculiarly adapted to all weathers, and a small crew can handle such a vessel with ease, when to manage a sloop of equal size would require the best efforts of “all hands and the cook.” The reason for this is that the schooner’s sails can be attended to one at a time, which is not the case with the big-mainsail sloop.
FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY WALTER BLACKBURN.
YACHTS WAITING FOR A BREEZE.
It is the small yachter [Mr. Pangborn declares in conclusion] who gives to the sport its wide popularity, and makes yachting so universally loved by men who are fond of aquatic pleasuring. The small yachter is everywhere upon the waters. From the coast of Maine, from the shores of the harbor of the Golden Gate, from the beaches of the Atlantic seaboard, and from the borders of the inland lakes, he can be seen, all summer long, sailing about in his little vessel, and enjoying in all its fullness the excitement and delight of this most noble and health-giving sport. With a pluck and energy that mark the true lover of the sea, and a tact and skill that bespeak the real sailor, he handles his little craft, in fair weather and in foul, in a manner that leaves no room for doubt as to its fitness for the work which he is doing; for, whether he sail alone, or with the help of his friends, or that of a hired man to run his boat, he is always the master of his vessel,—which is seldom the case with the proprietor of the big boat,—and is in reality a “yachtsman” under all circumstances, at all times, and in all weathers. He must be cool-headed and calm in times of peril, affable and courteous on all social occasions, and generous and prompt to respond to all calls upon his courage—in brief, a gentleman.
THE “ADLER” PLUNGING TOWARD THE REEF AT SAMOA.
CHAPTER X
DANGERS OF THE DEEP
Neither ships of the stanchest steel, nor seamen however skilful, nor pilots never so knowing, can wholly avoid the dangers of a seafaring life. Experience in reading the signs of the ocean and of the skies, surveyors’ charts of coasts and harbors, added to the appliances of powerful modern machinery, have lessened the perils, it is true, since the old times; yet even now ships sail proudly out of sunny havens, their topsails watched by loving eyes till they disappear at sunset, and are never seen again. On a calm day in 1782 the great hundred-gun line-of-battle-ship Royal George sank at her anchors in the harbor of Spithead, carrying down almost a thousand souls; thirty years ago the Captain, then one of the finest of England’s steam turret-ships, capsized at sea, and not a man survived. Each of these vessels was perhaps the best of its kind in the world. No better navigators exist than naval officers, yet they ran the historic old steam-frigate Kearsarge on Roncador Reef, in the Caribbean Sea, in broad daylight, and left her there a total wreck. Not a year passes that does not record some dire calamity on the ocean, and many lesser accidents.
The wild oceanic storms are responsible for fewer of these than anything else—I mean the mere power of wind and waves in the open sea. When a captain has sea-room, and knows in advance, as he almost always may, of the coming of a storm, so that he can make everything snug, the loss of his vessel, or even serious damage to her, is not common. Yet the mere violence of the gale has overturned, beaten down, and extinguished the greater part of the Newfoundland fishing-fleet again and again, and doubtless many of the ships that are recorded as “missing” have been sunk simply by overwhelming waves.
Certain rare and extraordinary mishaps nevertheless may meet a vessel in the open ocean. One of these is a stroke of lightning, powerful enough to set a ship on fire in spite of her lightning-rods, and such a fire is likely never to be quenched. Another extraordinary occurrence would be an overwhelming waterspout, such as not infrequently is seen in the tropics, especially along the Chinese coast, where it often plays havoc with fishing junks. A third unusual, yet possible, peril is the meeting with those waves of sudden and extraordinary size and volume which sometimes engulf vessels in storms that otherwise might be safely weathered, or are surmounted only by a miracle, as it were. These are said to be produced in some cyclones, as one of the effects of that whirling form of storm, and are often called tidal waves, but the tide has nothing to do with their formation or progress.
THE U. S. S. “ONEIDA” AFTER COLLISION WITH A STEAMSHIP.
To say that a ship in mid-ocean might be destroyed by an earthquake seems paradoxical and absurd, yet it is true. Whenever a subterranean convulsion occurs beneath or at the edge of the sea, the water will be agitated in proportion to its force. Strike a tub of water a gentle tap and see how its liquid contents shiver and ripple. Watch a railway train running at the edge of a body of water, and observe how the water trembles under the percussion of the wheels upon the ground.
Earthquake shocks give rise sometimes to great disturbances, either by a direct jar to the water, or by setting in motion waves whose rolling does damage, especially in confined harbors. Sometimes a port will be suddenly invaded by a wave, the cause of which was an earthquake, which rolls in upreared like a wall, and carries death and destruction in its course. The principal port of the island of St. Thomas, in the West Indies, was once devastated by this means. The incoming wave is said to have been over forty feet high, and broke inland, destroying much property and causing many deaths. “So tremendous was this breaker that it landed a large vessel on a hillside half a mile from the harbor.”
Such catastrophes are not uncommon in volcanic districts, where the ocean retorts with terrible vengeance when it is struck by the land. That appalling explosion in 1883 of Krakatoa, in the Strait of Sunda, was followed on neighboring coasts by a series of vast billows that rolled inland, deluging a wide extent of shore, sweeping away over 150 villages, and crushing or drowning more than 30,000 persons. Within a few years the coasts of northern Japan have been inundated repeatedly by earthquake waves with similar dire calamities, and they are likely to occur again. Now and then earthquakes are felt even in the open sea, far from land. Thus, Captain Lecky, a scientific writer upon the sea, tells us that in one instance where he was present, the inkstand upon the captain’s table was jerked upward against the ceiling, where it left an unmistakable record of the occurrence; and yet this vessel was steaming along in smooth water, many hundreds of fathoms deep. “The concussions,” he says, “were so smart that passengers were shaken off their seats, and, of course, thought that the vessel had run ashore.” All this disturbance was, nevertheless, only the result of a shock at the bottom; and when the non-elastic nature of water is considered, the severity of the jar is not surprising.
It would seem as though in the vast breadth of the “world of waters,” and with nothing to obstruct the view, two ships might easily give one another a wide berth; yet a collision is one of the ever-present dangers of voyaging, even far from land. It is to avoid this peril that all the maritime nations have agreed upon certain signals, and “rules of the road” which are the same in all parts of the world, and without which it would now be almost impossible to carry on commerce or travel on the water.
The rules of the road say that when two vessels are approaching one another, head on, each shall turn off to the right far enough to avoid the other; that when two vessels are crossing one another’s courses, the one which has the other on her starboard (right hand) must turn to starboard (the right), and go behind the other vessel, while the latter continues along her course; and that a steam vessel must always get out of the way of a sailing vessel, one at anchor or disabled, or a vessel with another in tow.
It is presumed that every ship will keep a sharp lookout, and that in the daytime two approaching ships will see each other in time to keep safely apart; but in the darkness of night none could be safe unless all carried lights by which the position and character of each could be determined.
In ancient times this matter of lights at sea was a much more troublesome one than now. We know that the Roman navy managed it somehow, and had methods of signaling by lanterns and torches. In medieval and early times, say up to a couple of centuries ago, a ship’s lights were a much more conspicuous and bothersome part of her than now, when, indeed, electricity has simplified as well as perfected signaling as much as it has benefited general illumination on ship’s board. In such ships as those of the Armada, and long afterward, three huge lanterns made of ornamental iron-work, sometimes large enough to enable a man to move about inside them, surmounted the elevated after-quarter; and these were filled with dozens of great candles. How important candles were in the stores of one of these old ships is shown by the fact that we still call a merchant who outfits vessels a ship-chandler. Regular rules were formulated for judging of a ship’s position and movements, and how you ought to steer by the way these beacons grouped themselves. The introduction of whale oil gradually superseded candles and as the sperm-lamp did not require a glass house, smaller lanterns took the place of the big ones, until finally, by aid of lenses, reflectors, and kerosene, and still more lately by the use of electricity, ship’s lights have become the small, handy, and powerful ones they are to-day.
The present rules as to lights are these—using the language of a United States navy officer, Lieut. John M. Ellicott, who has written many instructive and entertaining essays on sea-affairs:
When you face toward a ship’s bow the side at your right hand is called the starboard side, and the side at your left hand is called the port side. On her starboard side a ship carries at night a green light, and it is so shut in by the two sides of a box that it cannot be seen from the port side or from behind. On her port side she carries a red light, and it is so shut in that it cannot be seen from the starboard side or from behind. If the ship is a steamship she carries a big white light at her foremast-head, but if she is a sailing vessel she does not. This white masthead light can be seen from all around except from behind....
It is for the red and green lights, commonly known as the side lights, that the officer of the deck most intently watches (when the lookout warns him that lights are in sight), for by them he can tell which way the vessel is going. If her red light shows, he knows that her port side is toward him and she is crossing to his left; if it is her green light, her starboard side is toward him and she is crossing to his right; but if both the red and green are showing, she is heading straight in his direction.... If a vessel has another vessel in tow, she carries two masthead lights instead of one; and when a vessel is at anchor she has no side lights or masthead light, but a single white light made fast to a stay where it can be seen from all around her.
In rivers and crowded harbors it is often impossible to follow the rules of the road; and sometimes even at sea the officer of the deck of one vessel discovers that the other is not heeding the rules. Then the steam-whistle is used to tell the other vessel what the first is doing. Thus, one whistle means “I am going to the right”; two whistles mean “I am going to the left”; and three whistles mean “I am backing”; while a series of short toots means “Look out for yourself; get out of the way!”
There is one class of vessels which is most annoying to those who direct the course of large steamers. These are small fishing-vessels. On the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, on the coast of Spain, and on the coasts of China and Japan big fleets of these little vessels are found at all times. They show no lights at night, preferring to save the expense of oil, and take their chances of being sent to the bottom; but when they see a big ship rushing down upon them, they light a torch and flare it about. Often they pay for their folly with their lives. The torch is seen too late, or not seen at all, and the great iron bow of the steamship crushes into the frail little craft, perhaps cutting her clean in two; and the unhappy fishermen sink into the foaming wake of the churning propellers, leaving not a soul to tell their wives what became of them.
ELECTRIC-LIGHT SIGNALS AT SEA: ARDOIS SYSTEM.
Signaling with lights is principally of use to men-of-war, where, also, lanterns hung in the rigging in a particular order have a definite significance. For long-distance signaling the best system is that invented by Lieutenant Very, U. S. N. These night-signals “consist of a white, a red, and a green star, each fired into the air from a pistol, so that by firing one, two, or three of them in quick succession and in different orders, with a pause between the groups, different letters or signal numbers can be made until a sentence is complete.” They can be easily read from vessels twelve miles away. For nearer work the system of the Spanish navy officer, Ardois, which consists in flashing and extinguishing, by means of a switchboard on deck, a series of red and white electric lamps in the rigging, serves very well; and close at hand a signal-man waves an incandescent electric bulb by night as he would a flag by day.
THE “VERY” ROCKET-SIGNAL AT SEA.
It is, however, when the land is approached that the sailor’s perils become menacing. Here Old Neptune is still a match for us when he asserts himself. Nevertheless, we must go upon the restless waters, and must risk a contest with their power along the coasts, where the ocean’s line of battle may be said to be. Therefore, every effort has always been made by men on land to be of aid to their brethren at sea by erecting beacons to guide them by night as well as by day, by marking the channels, so that hidden shoals, rocks, and obstructions may be avoided, and by contrivances to save life and property when the fury of the gale renders seamanship futile, and the noble ship is cast away in the surf thundering on some wild shore, to break up in a few hours.
What could be more humiliating to our pride, as well as terrifying to our hearts, than such a scene as that at Samoa, in 1889, when a whole fleet of ships, including powerful men-of-war, was wrecked while at anchor in the beautiful harbor of Apia. Of small use, then, were all their charts and lighthouses, buoys and breakwaters!
The disturbed state of affairs in Samoa caused the assemblage there, during March, 1889, of three small German men-of-war, Adler, Olga, and Eber, the British corvette Calliope, and the American steamships Trenton, Vandalia and Nipsic. The Trenton, Captain Farquhar, was one of our largest war-ships at that time, and the flagship of Rear-Admiral Kimberley; the Vandalia, Captain Schoonmaker, was somewhat smaller, and the Nipsic, Commander Mullan, was still less in size. On March 15 a hurricane demolished the whole of this fleet, except one, and ten merchant vessels besides, and caused the loss of nearly one hundred and fifty lives. It is an extraordinary story, which has been fully related by Mr. John P. Dunning, from whose article in “St. Nicholas” for February, 1890, the accompanying facts and illustrations are drawn.
THE “CALLIOPE” ESCAPING FROM APIA HARBOR.
The harbor in which the disaster occurred is a small semicircular bay, around the inner side of which lies the town of Apia. A coral reef, visible at low water, extends in front of the harbor from the eastern to the western extremity, a distance of nearly two miles. A break in this reef, probably a quarter of a mile wide, forms a gateway to the harbor. The space within the bay where ships can lie at anchor is very small, as a shoal extends some distance out from the eastern shore, and on the other side another coral reef runs well out into the bay. The war-vessels were anchored in the deep water in front of the American consulate. The Eber and Nipsic were nearest the shore. There were ten or twelve sailing-vessels, principally small schooners lying in the shallow water west of the men-of-war. The storm was preceded by several weeks of bad weather, and on Friday, March 15, the wind increased and there was every indication of a hard blow. The war-ships made preparation for it by lowering topmasts and making all the spars secure, and steam was also raised to guard against the possibility of the anchors not holding.
The wind rose to a hurricane and was accompanied by heavy, wind-driven rain, and when toward morning it became evident that some smaller ships were already ashore, and that the war-ships were dragging their anchors in spite of every effort, the whole town was awake, and much of it down by the beach seeking what shelter it could from the sleet-like blast. This night of horror gradually lightened into dawn, when it was seen that all the war-ships had been swept from their former moorings and were bearing down toward the inner reef. The decks swarmed with men clinging to anything affording a hold. The hulls of the ships were tossing about like corks, and the decks were being deluged with water as every wave swept in from the open ocean. Several sailing-vessels had gone ashore in the western part of the bay. Those most plainly visible now were the Eber, Adler, and Nipsic, very close together and only a few yards from the reef.
The little gunboat Eber was making a desperate struggle, but her doom was certain. Suddenly she shot forward, the current bore her off to the right, and her bow struck the port quarter of the Nipsic, carrying away several feet of the Nipsic’s rail and one boat. The Eber then fell back and fouled with the Olga, and after that she swung around broadside to the wind, was lifted high on the crest of a great wave and hurled with awful force upon the reef. In an instant there was not a vestige of her to be seen. Every timber must have been shattered, and half the poor creatures aboard of her crushed to death before they felt the waters closing above their heads. Hundreds of people were on the beach by this time, and the work of destruction had occurred within full view of them all. They stood for a moment appalled by the awful scene, and a cry of horror arose from the lips of every man who had seen nearly a hundred of his fellow-creatures perish in an instant. Then with one accord they all rushed to the water’s edge nearest the point where the Eber had foundered. The natives ran into the surf far beyond the point where a white man could have lived, and stood waiting to save any who might rise from the water. There were six officers and seventy men on the Eber when she struck the reef, and of these five officers and sixty-six men were lost. This was about six o’clock in the morning.
“THE SAMOANS STOOD BATTLING AGAINST THE SURF, RISKING THEIR LIVES TO SAVE THE AMERICAN SAILORS.”
During the excitement attending that calamity the other vessels had been for the time forgotten, but it was soon noticed that the positions of several of them had become more alarming. The Adler had been swept across the bay, close to the reef, and in half an hour she was lifted on top of the reef and turned completely over on her side. Nearly every man was thrown into the water, but as almost the entire hull was exposed, all but twenty succeeded in regaining her deck, and the remainder were rescued toward the close of the day when almost exhausted.
Just after the Adler struck, the attention of every one was directed toward the Nipsic. She was standing off the reef with her head to the wind, but the three anchors which she had out at the time were not holding; and orders were given to attach a hawser to a heavy eight-inch rifle on the forecastle and throw the gun overboard. As the men were in the act of doing this, the Olga bore down on the Nipsic and struck her amidships with awful force. Her bowsprit passed over the side of the Nipsic, and, after carrying away one boat and splintering the rail, came in contact with the smokestack, which was struck fairly in the center and fell to the deck with a crash like thunder. For a moment it was difficult to realize what had happened, and great confusion followed. The iron smokestack rolled from side to side with every movement of the vessel, until finally heavy blocks were placed under it. By that time the Nipsic had swung around and was approaching the reef, and it seemed certain that she would go down in the same way as had the Eber. Captain Mullan saw that any further attempt to save the vessel would be useless, so he gave the orders to beach her. She had a straight course of about two hundred yards to the sandy beach in front of the American consulate, where she stuck and stood firm.
Two attempts to lower boats were failures and every man crowded to the forecastle. A line was thrown, double hawsers were soon made fast from the vessel to the shore, and the natives and others gathered around the lines, where the voices of officers shouting to the men on deck were mingled with the loud cries and singing of the Samoans. One by one, and in a very orderly manner, the men of the Nipsic came down the hawsers toward the shore, but many would never have reached it, had it not been for the assistance of the Samoans, who, at the peril of their lives, stood in the boiling torrent, grasping those whose hold was broken from the rope.
Meanwhile, the four large men-of-war, Trenton, Calliope, Vandalia, and Olga, were still afloat and in a comparatively safe position; but about ten o’clock the Trenton was seen to be in a helpless condition; her rudder and propeller were both gone, and there was nothing but her anchors to hold her up against the unabated force of the storm. The Vandalia and Calliope were also in danger, drifting back toward the reef near the point where lay the wreck of the Adler; and they came closer together every minute, until finally the English ship struck the Vandalia and tore a great hole in her bow. Then Captain Kane of the Calliope determined to try to steam out of the harbor as his only hope, and he at once cut loose from all his anchors. The Calliope’s head swung around to the wind and her engines were worked to their utmost power. Great waves broke over her bow and she gained headway at first only inch by inch, but her speed gradually increased until it became evident that she could leave the harbor. This manœuver of the British ship is regarded as one of the most daring in naval annals—the one desperate chance offered her commander to save his vessel and the three hundred lives aboard.
The Trenton’s fires had gone out by that time, and she lay helpless almost in the path of the Calliope. The decks were swarming with men, but, facing death as they were, they recognized the heroic struggle of the British ship, and a great shout went up from aboard the Trenton. “Three cheers for the Calliope!” was the sound that reached the ears of the British tars as they passed out of the harbor in the teeth of the storm; and the heart of every Englishman went out to the brave American sailors who gave that parting tribute to the Queen’s ship.
When the excitement on the Vandalia which followed the collision with the Calliope had subsided, it was determined to beach the vessel, and straining every means at hand to avoid the dreaded reef, she moved slowly across the harbor until her bow stuck in the sand, about two hundred yards off shore and probably eighty yards from the stem of the Nipsic. Her engines were stopped and the men in the engine-room and fire-room below were ordered on deck. The ship swung around broadside to the shore, and it was thought at first that her position was comparatively safe, as it was believed that the storm would abate in a few hours, and the two hundred and forty men on board could be rescued then; but the wind seemed to increase in fury, and as the hull of the steamer sank lower the force of the waves grew more violent, yet no one on shore was able to render the least aid.
These terrible scenes had detracted attention from the other two men-of-war still afloat; but about four o’clock in the afternoon the positions of the Trenton and Olga became most alarming. The flagship had been in a helpless condition for hours, being without rudder or propeller, while volumes of water poured in through her hawser-pipes. Men never fought against adverse circumstances with more desperation than the officers and men of the Trenton displayed during those hours, yet the vessel was slowly forced over toward the eastern reef. Destruction seemed imminent, as the great vessel was pitching heavily, and her stern was but a few feet from the reef. This point was a quarter of a mile from shore, and if the Trenton had struck the reef there, it is probable that not a life would have been saved. A skilful manœuver, suggested by Lieutenant Brown, saved the ship from destruction. Every man was ordered into the port rigging, and the compact mass of bodies was used as a sail. The wind struck against the men in the rigging and forced the vessel out into the bay again. She soon commenced to drift back against the Olga, which was still standing off the reef and holding up against the storm more successfully than any other vessel in the harbor had done, and in spite of every effort on the part of both ships a collision took place which severely damaged both. Fortunately, the vessels drifted apart, whereupon the Olga steamed ahead toward the mud-flats in the eastern part of the bay, and was soon hard and fast on the bottom. Not a life was lost, and several weeks later the ship was hauled off and saved.
The Trenton was now about two hundred feet from the sunken Vandalia, and seemed sure to strike her and throw into the water the men still clinging to the rigging. It was now after five o’clock, and the daylight was beginning to fade away. In a half hour more, the Trenton had drifted to within a few yards of the Vandalia’s bow, and feelings hard to describe came to the hundreds who watched the vessels from the shore.
Presently the last faint rays of daylight faded away, and night came down upon the awful scene. The storm was still raging with as much fury as at any time during the day. The poor creatures who had been clinging for hours to the rigging of the Vandalia were bruised and bleeding; but they held on with the desperation of men who were hanging between life and death. The ropes had cut the flesh on their arms and legs, and their eyes were blinded by the salt spray which swept over them. Weak and exhausted as they were, they would be unable to stand the terrible strain much longer. The final hour seemed to be upon them. The great, black hull of the Trenton was almost ready to crash into the stranded Vandalia and grind her to atoms. Suddenly a shout was borne across the waters. The sound of four hundred and fifty voices was heard above the roar of the tempest. “Three cheers for the Vandalia!” was the cry that warmed the hearts of the dying men in the rigging.
The shout died away upon the storm, and there arose from the quivering masts of the sunken ship a response so feeble it was scarcely heard upon the shore. Every heart was melted to pity. “God help them!” was passed from one man to another. The cheer had hardly ceased when the sound of music came across the water. The Trenton’s band was playing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The thousand men on sea and shore had never before heard strains of music at such a time as that. An indescribable feeling came over the Americans on the beach who listened to the notes of the national song mingled with the howling of the storm.
But the collision of the Trenton and Vandalia, instead of crushing the latter vessel to pieces, proved to be the salvation of the men in the rigging. When the Trenton’s stern finally struck the side of the Vandalia, there was no shock, and she swung around broadside to the sunken ship. This enabled the men on the Vandalia to escape to the deck of the Trenton, and in a short time they were all taken off.
The storm had abated at midnight, and when day dawned there was no further cause for alarm. The men were removed from the Trenton and provided with quarters on shore.
During the next few days the evidences of the great disaster could be seen on every side. In the harbor were the wrecks of four men-of-war: the Trenton, Vandalia, Adler, and Eber; and two others, the Nipsic and Olga, were hard and fast on the beach and were hauled off with great difficulty. The wrecks of ten sailing-vessels also lay upon the reefs. On shore, houses and trees were blown down, and the beach was strewn with wreckage from one end of the town to the other.
Ever since men began to go to sea lights have been placed on shore to guide them to a landing-place; but in early times these were nothing more than fires on headlands, kindled, perhaps, by the wives and children of the captain and his crew of neighbors, when these mariners were expected home. These friendly services became a little more systematic when merchants began to risk their property on the water; and on the shores of the Mediterranean, which we have found to be the cradle of civilized navigation and trade, harbor-beacons were erected in very early times as guides to a safe anchorage.
The giant statue known as the Colossus, at Rhodes, is supposed to have been used as a beacon and lighthouse, a fire burning in the palm of its uplifted colossal hand at night. Although the account of the Colossus is only a matter of guesswork, it is historically true that in those ages of ignorant heedlessness of the need of beacons, a lighthouse was built so grand in proportions, so enduring in character, that it became known as one of the Seven Wonders of the World, and outlived all the others, save the Pyramids, by centuries, and in some ways has never been excelled by any similar structure in modern times, unless it be by our mammoth marble monument to Washington. This was the lighthouse built on the little island of Pharos by Ptolemy Philadelphus, king of Egypt, two hundred and eighty years before Christ, to guide vessels into the harbor of Alexandria. From all descriptions, it must have closely resembled our Washington monument; for it was built of white stone, was square at the base, and tapered toward the apex. Open windows were near its top, through which the fire within could be seen for thirty miles by vessels at sea.
The destruction of these beacons in the general smash and ruin that seem to have overtaken the world when the Roman empire went to pieces is only indicative of the way the darkness of barbarism returned and enveloped the minds as well as the works of men, until light broke through the clouds again with the rise of organized sea-powers in Western Europe. Then beacons were gradually rebuilt, but in almost all cases by private hands—the feudal lords of coast estates, the master or authorities of sea-ports, the monks in monasteries near dangerous landings, and now and then the king at his principal port, setting up marks for steering by day and lighting fires on dark nights. Most of the latter were hardly more than tar-barrels, which would burn brightly in a gale, and the better class were towers of stonework, on top of which a mass of coal was ignited in an iron cage, and kept stirred into brightness by a watcher.
It was an easy matter to imitate such beacons, and wreckers would often set up false lights. Many a fearful tradition has come down of the doings of wreckers, not only in England and Spain, but in America and in the East. One of their tricks, when they saw a ship approaching in the evening, was to hang a lantern upon a horse’s neck, and let him graze, well-hobbled, along the beach. This would appear like the rocking of a lantern on a vessel at rest—what is called a riding or anchor light; and, deceived by this promise of a safe anchorage, the stranger would not discover that he had been cheated until his keel struck a reef or sandbar, and the pirates had begun their villainous attack. It is said to have been a device of this kind which caused the wreck in 1812, on the Carolina coast,—whose islands and lagoons are reputed to have been infested by such ruffians, there known as “bankers,”—of a vessel carrying the beautiful Theodosia Burr, daughter of Aaron Burr, and wife of Governor Alston of South Carolina. Her death at the hands of these men is illustrated on [page 172].
During the reign of Henry VIII of England, an association of mariners called, in short, the Guild of the Trinity was chartered and given various powers and privileges in connection with the newly instituted royal navy and dockyards. It encouraged coast-lights, and in 1573 Queen Elizabeth formally placed authority to erect and govern lighthouses and coast beacons in the hands of this corporation, and there it remains to this day; for its headquarters, Trinity House, on Tower Hill, in London, are a recognized office of the British government, answering to our Lighthouse Board.
It was not long before it encouraged the founding of a permanent light on Eddystone Shoals, a group of reefs near Plymouth, exceedingly dangerous because they lie precisely in the track of ships bound up or down the English Channel, yet almost invisible. Upon the mere standing-room afforded by the crest of this rock, Sir William Winstanley managed to erect, two hundred years ago, a tower of wood and iron trestle-work, bolted to its foundation and carrying a glass room or lantern containing a coal-grate, eighty feet above low-water mark. This was completed in 1698. One winter’s experience convinced him that it needed strengthening, and in 1699 a case of masonry was built about the tower, and made solid to the height of twenty feet, while the whole structure was increased to the height of one hundred and twenty feet. Then, it is related, Winstanley boasted that the sea had not strength enough to tear it down, and all England rejoiced in so noble a beacon; but we now know that the construction was faulty, in its large diameter, polygonal outline, excess of ornament, and lack of weight. While Sir William was within it making repairs, four years later, the memorable hurricane of November 20, 1703, swept the coast, and left scarcely a trace of the tower. Its value had been proved, however, and it was replaced, in 1706, by a straight-sided tower of oaken timbers, weighted in their lower courses by stone. This was designed by an engineer named Rudyerd, and lasted until burned down in 1755; and engineers say it was better for its place than was the round, solid-based stone tower of Smeaton that followed it, and became so celebrated. This was finished in three years, and in 1760 was lighted, not by a fire, as of old, but by candles—the first use of such an illuminant. This truly illustrious lighthouse remained until a few years ago, when it became so racked by the assaults of the sea as to be unsafe. It was then replaced by the one that stands there to-day, rivaling its magnificent neighbor on the Biscay shore opposite, the lighthouse of Carduan, which was built to support a bonfire of oak, but has remained to be lighted successively by oil-lamps, by gas-burners, and finally by electricity.
ENGRAVED BY R. C. COLLINS.
THE WRECK OF THE FIRST MINOT’S LEDGE LIGHTHOUSE.
A somewhat similar history belongs to some of the lighthouses on this side of the Atlantic. The first one regularly set up in the United States was that on the north side of the entrance to Boston harbor, erected in 1716; but many others go back to Colonial days—that on Sandy Hook, for instance. Perhaps the most interesting history is attached to the light on Minot’s Ledge, in Boston harbor. This is a dangerous reef, concealed at high water and so exposed that the problem of lighting it was much the same as that presented at Eddystone, Bell Rock, Dhu Heartach, and other well known islets on the British coast.
The first lighthouse on Minot’s Ledge was built in 1848, and was an octagonal tower resting on the tops of eight wrought-iron piles sixty feet high, eight inches in diameter, and sunk five feet into the rock.
These piles were braced together in many ways, and, as they offered less surface to the waves than a solid structure, the lighthouse was considered by all authorities upon the subject to be exceptionally strong. Its great test came in April, 1851. On the fourteenth of that month, two keepers being in the lighthouse, an easterly gale set in, steadily increasing in force.... On Wednesday, the sixteenth, the gale had become a hurricane; and when at times the tower could be seen through the mists and sea-drift, it seemed to bend to the shock of the waves. At four o’clock that afternoon an ominous proof of the fury of the waves on Minot’s Ledge reached the shore—a platform which had been built between the piles only seven feet below the floor of the keeper’s room. The raging seas, then, were leaping fifty feet in the air. Would they reach ten feet higher?—for if so, the house and the keepers were doomed. Nevertheless, when darkness set in the light shone out as brilliantly as ever, but the gale seemed, if possible, then to increase. What agony those two men must have suffered! How that dreadful abode must have swayed in the irresistible hurricane, and trembled at each crashing sea! The poor unfortunates must have known that if those seas, leaping always higher and higher, ever reached their house, it would be flung down into the ocean, and they would be buried with it beneath the waves.
A SCREW-PILE OCEAN LIGHTHOUSE.
To those hopeless, terrified watchers the entombing sea came at last. At one o’clock in the morning the lighthouse bell was heard by those on shore to give a mournful clang, and the light was extinguished. It was the funeral knell of two patient heroes.
Next day there remained on the rock only eight jagged iron stumps.
Thus, everywhere, and in all latitudes, the beacons and wooden towers and huge pyramids of long ago have given place to slender spires of solid masonry, holding powerful signals perhaps hundreds of feet above the waves, and visible as far as the curve of the earth’s surface will permit. Yet in place of the sturdy bonfire of oak, or the huge iron cage full of coals, there is only a single lamp, whose rays are gathered by deep reflectors into a compact bundle of unwasted rays, and doubled and redoubled by rows of magnifying lenses until they can dart to the furthest horizon in a strong beam of steady light. No longer does the mariner trust to his wife to kindle the tar-barrel to guide him home. He knows that nowhere is his government more watchful of its subjects than in its lighthouse service, and that he may trust to having that bright signal to welcome him in the darkness, as well as he can trust his own eyes to see it. The United States alone expends over $2,500,000 annually in looking after her lighthouses, lightships, and buoys.
THE LIGHTHOUSE AT ST. AUGUSTINE, FLORIDA.
Indeed, these beacons have become so thickly planted that it has been found necessary to distinguish between them in order to avoid mistaking one for another. At first this was done by doubling, as in the case of New York’s “Highland Lights,” or the twin lights of Thatcher’s Island off Cape Ann, or even trebling them as at Nauset, on Cape Cod, but now the display is made to vary. Thus some of them are simply fixed white lights; some are white and revolve—the whole lantern on the summit of the tower being turned on wheels by machinery, and the flame disappears for a longer or shorter time; while others are white “flash” lights, glancing only for an instant, and then lost for a few seconds, or giving a long wink and then a short one with a space of darkness between. Some lighthouses show a steady red light; others, alternate red and white. By these colors and varying periods of appearance and disappearance (noted on charts, and published by the government in a general seaman’s guide called the “Coast Pilot”), navigators know which light they are looking at when several are in sight. For daylight recognition the towers may be painted half black and half white, or in stripes or bands or spirals, like the big barber’s pole in front of St. Augustine, Florida.
It is impossible here to describe in detail the beautiful machinery by which the rays from the large but simple argand kerosene lamp are condensed into a single beam and projected through the Fresnel system of condensers and lenses, and by which the revolution and “flashing” are effected. Petroleum has superseded all other oils for general use, but electricity is now being extensively employed in the illumination of coast lights, especially in France, where they are introducing new principles, such as producing lightning-like flashes with a certain recognized regularity, and waving stupendous search-light beams in the sky, so that the approach to the coast may be seen when the land and lighthouse themselves are still below the horizon. If you have an opportunity to go into the lantern of a lighthouse, by all means take advantage of it; and if you can be there when a storm is raging, or when, on some misty night, the lantern is besieged by migrating birds, you will never forget the scene.
On some especially dangerous—because hidden—shoals, reefs, or bars, like those off Nantucket or the extreme point of Sandy Hook, it may be out of the question or bad policy to erect a lighthouse. Here its place is taken by anchoring a stout vessel, built to withstand the severest weather, and arranged to carry lanterns at its mastheads.
These are called “lightships,” and they are manned by a crew of keepers who have a very monotonous and uncomfortable time of it; yet in some cases men have spent twenty years or more in the service.
The most desolate and dangerous lightship station is that of No. 1, Nantucket. “Upon this tossing island, out of sight of land, exposed to the fury of every tempest, and without a message from home during all the stormy months of winter, and sometimes even longer, ten men, braving the perils of wind and wave, and the worse terrors of isolation, trim the lamps whose light warns thousands of vessels from certain destruction, and hold themselves ready to save life when the warning is vain.”
Seven years ago Mr. Gustav Kobbé, and the artist, William Taber, spent several days on the lightship and gave a graphic account of the life there, which I wish I were able to quote in full.
The anchorage is twenty-four miles out at sea beyond Sankaty head, at the extremity of the shoals and rips which make all that space of water beyond the visible coast of Nantucket fatal to ships, hundreds of which are known to have been beaten to pieces on its treacherous bars. She is moored to a 6500-pound mushroom anchor by a chain two inches in thickness, yet she has been torn adrift twenty-three times, and has wandered widely before returning or being overtaken.
“No. 1, Nantucket New South Shoals,” to quote Mr. Kobbé,
is a schooner of two hundred and seventy-five tons, one hundred and three feet long, with twenty-four feet breadth of beam, and stanchly built of white and live oak. She has two hulls, the space between them being filled through holes at short intervals in the inner side of the bulwarks with salt.... She has fore-and-aft lantern-masts seventy-one feet high, including topmasts, and directly behind each of the lantern masts a mast for sails forty-two feet high. Forty-four feet up the lantern-masts are day-marks, reddish brown hoop-iron gratings, which enable other vessels to sight the lightship more readily. The lanterns are octagons of glass in copper frames five feet in diameter, four feet nine inches high, with the masts as centers. Each pane of glass is two feet long and two feet three inches high. There are eight lamps, burning a fixed white light, with parabolic reflectors in each lantern, which weighs, all told, about a ton. Some nine hundred gallons of oil are taken aboard for service during the year. The lanterns are lowered into houses built around the masts. The house around the main lantern-mast stands directly on the deck, while the foremast lantern-house is a heavily-timbered frame three feet high. This is to prevent its being washed away by the waves the vessel ships when she plunges into the wintry seas. When the lamps have been lighted and the roofs of the lantern-houses opened,—they work on hinges, and are raised by tackle,—the lanterns are hoisted by means of winches to a point about twenty-five feet from the deck. Were they to be hoisted higher they would make the ship top-heavy.
LIGHTSHIP NO. 1, NANTUCKET NEW SOUTH SHOALS.
A conspicuous object forward is the large fog-bell swung ten feet above the deck. The prevalence of fog makes life on the South Shoal Lightship especially dreary. During one season fifty-five days out of seventy were thick, and for twelve consecutive days and nights the bell was kept tolling at two-minute intervals.
The actual work to be done is small, the daily cleaning of the lamps requiring only two or three hours, and other chores being very light, and the men nearly die of loneliness and “nothing to do.” It is pathetic to read how intense and friendly an interest they take in a single red buoy anchored near them; and they admit that fog is dreaded more because it hides this neighbor than for any other reason.
Mr. Kobbé tells us that the emotional stress under which this crew labors can hardly be realized by any one who has not been through a similar experience.
The sailor on an ordinary ship has at least the inspiration of knowing that he is bound for somewhere; that in due time his vessel will be laid on her homeward course; that storm and fog are but incidents of the voyage: he is on a ship that leaps forward full of life and energy with every lash of the tempest. But no matter how the lightship may plunge and roll, no matter how strong the favoring gales may be, she is still anchored two miles southeast of the New South Shoal.
CLEANING THE LAMPS ON A LIGHTSHIP.
Besides enduring the hardships incidental to their duties aboard the lightship, the South Shoal crew have done noble work in saving life. While the care of the lightship is considered of such importance to shipping that the crew are instructed not to expose themselves to dangers outside their special line of duty, and they would therefore have the fullest excuse for not risking their lives in rescuing others, they have never hesitated to do so. When, a few winters ago, the City of Newcastle went ashore on one of the shoals near the lightship, and strained herself so badly that although she floated off, she soon filled and went down stern foremost, all hands, twenty-seven in number, were saved by the South Shoal crew and kept aboard of her over two weeks, until the story of the wreck was signaled to some passing vessel and the lighthouse tender took them off. This is the largest number saved at one time by the South Shoal, but the lightship crew have faced great danger on several other occasions.
This is, perhaps, the extreme picture of lightship life, but apart from the prolonged isolation and continuous roughness of the water, the experiences of the men off Sandy Hook and elsewhere are not greatly removed from it, and no philanthropy is more worthy of support than that which seeks to mitigate the loneliness of these exiles by providing them with reading matter. The Lighthouse Board provides a small circulating library for these ships, and contributions of books and files of illustrated periodicals will be gratefully received and put to good use by the Superintendent of the Lighthouse Service in Washington.
THE FOG-BELL.
But there are times—and they occur very frequently in northern waters—when fogs which no light can penetrate envelop sea and coast, and that is the most dangerous of all times to an approaching ship. The only means by which a warning can be given, in such an emergency, is by sound. In many places bells are rung, but often the place to be avoided is so situated that the roar of the surf would drown a bell’s note, and then fog-horns are blown. These fog-horns are of a size so immense, and voices so stentorian, that it requires a steam engine to blow them, and they utter a booming, hollow blast, a dismal note as we hear it when we are safe on the land, but sweet to the anxious captain whose vessel is laboring through the gloom under close-reefed topsails, and uncertain of her exact position. One kind of these horns is very complicated in its structure, and screeches in a rough, broken blare, a note far-reaching beyond any smooth, whistling sound that could be made. This shriek is so hideous, so ear-splitting, when heard near at hand, that no name bad enough to express it could be found; so its inventors went to the other extreme, and called it a siren, after those most enchanting of sweet singers who tried to entice Ulysses out of his course. This name is opposite in a double sense, indeed, for the sirens of old lured sailors to wreck, while our siren hoarsely bids them keep off. Finally, buoys, which at first were simply tight casks, but now are usually made of boiler-iron, are anchored on small reefs, to which are hung bells, rung constantly by the tossing of their support; and on other reefs buoys are fixed having a hollow cap so arranged that when a big wave rushes over, it shuts in a body of air, under great and sudden pressure, which can only escape through a whistle in the top of the cap, uttering a long warning wail to tell its position.
It is in such times as this that the pilot comes out strong.
A pilot is a man who has made himself thoroughly acquainted with certain waters where navigation is dangerous, and who is licensed by some proper authority, after training and examination, to direct vessels in safety in entering harbors or passing through other intricate places. A ship-captain may be an excellent navigator, but he is not expected to know every rock and sandbar crouching under the waves, and all the twistings and turnings of the entrance and channel of a foreign harbor, especially as these channels are subject to constant change. In this country, indeed, although coasting-vessels may refuse a pilot, the law will not permit captains coming from or bound to a foreign port to do so; and if any accident happens when no pilot is aboard the insurance money will not be paid, and the ship’s officers may be punished.
A SIREN RIGGED UPON A MERCHANT STEAMSHIP.
Pilots, then, are important men and are able to charge very high prices for their services (generally rated according to the draft of the vessel), and their profession is so organized and guarded that not only must a man be thoroughly competent, but he must wait for a vacancy in the regular number before he will be admitted to their ranks.
Their method of work is very exciting. A dozen or so together will form the crew of a trim, stanch schooner, provisioned for a fortnight or more, which can outsail anything but a racing yacht, and is built to ride safely through the highest seas. A few steamers are coming into use, but the procedure is much the same. You will now and then see one of these beautiful little vessels sailing up the quiet harbor, threading its way through the black steamers and sputtering tug-boats and great ships, as a shy and graceful girl walks among the guests at a lawn party, and you know from its air as well as the big number on its white mainsail that it is a pilot boat, even if it does not carry the regular pilot-flag, which in the United States is simply the “union” or starry canton of the ensign.
BURNING A “FLARE” ON A PILOT-BOAT.
But these fine schooners and the brave men they carry are rarely in port. Their time is spent far in the offing of the harbor, cruising back and forth in wait for incoming ships, and the New York pilots often go two and three hundred miles out to sea, and in storms may be blown much farther away. Other pilot-boats are waiting also, and the lookout at the reeling mast-head must keep the very keenest watch upon the horizon. Suddenly he catches sight of a white speck which his practised eye tells him is a ship’s top-sails, or of a blur upon the sky that advertises a steamer’s approach. The schooner’s head is instantly turned toward it, and all the canvas is crowded on that she will bear, for away off at the right a second pilot-boat, well down, is also seen to be aiming at the same point and trying hard to win.
The first pilots of New York harbor were stationed at Sandy Hook, and visited incoming vessels in whale-boats; and many a stately British frigate or colonial trader was forced to wait anxiously outside the bar, rolling and tossing in the sea-way, or tacking hither and yon, hoping for a glimpse of that tiny speck where flashing oars told of the coming pilot. It is in this way, as the late Mr. J. O. Davidson, the artist, who knew all about such things, told us in “St. Nicholas” (January, 1890), that many vessels are still met, off some of our smaller harbors, and at the mouth of the Mississippi River. There the waters of the great river pouring into the Gulf of Mexico through the Port Eads Jetties make a turbulent swell with foam-crested billows that roll the stoutest ship’s gunwale under, even in calm weather; yet the little whale-boats, swift and buoyant, dash out bravely in a race for the sail on the distant horizon, for there are two pilot-stations at the Jetties, and it is “first come first engaged.”
Sometimes, on the other hand, it is the ship that looks for the pilot, cruising about with the code-letters P T flying from her signal-halyards in token of her need. She may even run past a pilot-boat in the night and get into danger without being aware of it. To prevent this, says Mr. Davidson, the pilots burn what is known as a “flare” or torch, consisting of a bunch of cotton or lamp-wick dipped in turpentine, on the end of a short handle. It burns with a brilliant flame, lighting up the sea for a great distance and throwing the sails and number of the pilot-boat into strong relief against the darkness. On a dark clear night, the reddish glare which the signal projects on the clouds looks like distant heat lightning.
Having sighted his vessel, the pilot whose turn it is to go on duty hurries below and packs the valise which contains such things as he wishes to take home, for this is his method of going ashore; and when he has departed, if he is the last one of the pilot-crew, the little vessel returns herself to port in charge of the sailing-master, cook, and “boy,” to refit and take on a new set of men.
The storm may be howling in the full force of the winter’s fury, and the waves running “mountain-high,” but the pilot must get aboard by some means. It is rough weather indeed when his mates cannot launch their yawl and row him to where he can climb up the stranger’s side with the aid of a friendly rope’s end.
A PILOT BOARDING A STEAMER.
Yet frequently this is out of the question. Then a “whip” is rigged beyond the end of a lee yard-arm, carrying a rope rove through a snatch-block, and having a noose at its end. The steamer slows her engines, or the ship heaves to, and the pilot-schooner, under perfect control, runs up under the lee of the big ship, as near as she dares in the gale. Then, just at the right instant, a man on the ship’s yard hurls the rope, it is caught by the schooner, the pilot slips one leg through the bowline-noose, and a second afterward the schooner has swept on and he is being hoisted up to the yard-arm, but generally not in time to save himself a good ducking in the coaming of some big roller. Going on shipboard in this fashion is not favorable to an imposing effect; nevertheless, the pilot is welcomed by both crew and passengers, who admire his courage and trust his skill, but smile at the high hat beloved of all pilots.
Now the pilot is master—stands ahead of the captain even—and his orders are absolute law. He inspects the vessel to form his opinion of how she will behave, and then goes to the wheel or stands where best he can give his orders to the steersman and to the men in the fore-chains heaving the sounding lead. He must never abandon his post, he must never lose his control of the ship, or make a mistake as to its position in respect to the lee-shore, or fail to be equal to every emergency. If it is too dark and foggy and stormy to see, he must feel; and if he cannot do this he must have the faculty of going right by intuition. To fail is to lose his reputation if not his life. This is what is expected of pilots, and this is what they actually do in a hundred cases, the full details of any one of which would make a long and thrilling tale of adventurous fighting for life.
It is to help pilots and navigators of all sorts to avoid the perils that beset them that governments not only spend large sums in surveying coasts and harbors, publishing charts and descriptions, and maintaining lighthouses and lightships, but mark out bars and channels with floating guides, and their borders with shore-beacons and “ranges,” to form so many finger-posts for the right road. Were it not for these sign-posts no ship could safely enter any commercial harbor in the world; and it will be valuable to quote somewhat from an article, with capital illustrations, written for “St. Nicholas” (March, 1896) by an officer of the United States Navy, Lieut. John M. Ellicott, since it describes how the long, winding approaches to one of the greatest ports of the world are marked out by day and by night—I mean the harbor of New York.
Suppose, then, that we are on a big transatlantic steamer approaching the United States from Europe.... Having secured his pilot, it is the captain’s next aim to make a “land-fall”—that is to say, he wishes to come in sight of some well-known object on shore, which, being marked down on his chart, will show him just where he is and how he must steer to find the entrance to the harbor.
A special lighthouse is usually the object sought, and in approaching New York harbor it is customary for steamers from Europe to first find, or sight, Fire Island Lighthouse. This is on a sandy island near the coast of Long Island. When, therefore, the liner steams in sight of Fire Island Light she hoists two signals, one of which tells her name and the other the welfare of those on board. The operator then telegraphs to the ship’s agents in New York that she has been sighted, and that all on board are well or otherwise. [Other despatches go to the newspapers, who have observing stations and telegraph arrangements here and at Sandy Hook.]
DAY-MARKS IN NEW YORK HARBOR.
The ship’s course is then laid to reach the most prominent object at the harbor entrance, in this case Sandy Hook Lightship. She is easily recognized. The course from this lightship to the harbor entrance is laid down on the chart “west-northwest, one quarter west,” and, steering this course, a group of three buoys is reached. One is a large “nun,” or cone-shaped, buoy, painted black and white in vertical stripes; another has a triangular framework built on it, and in the top of this framework is a bell which tolls mournfully as the buoy is rocked; while the third is surmounted by a big whistle.... These mark the point where ocean ends and harbor begins, and can be found in fair weather or in fog by their color and shape, or noise. They are the mid-channel buoys at the entrance to Gedney Channel, the deep-water entrance to New York harbor. Here it may be noted that mid-channel buoys in all harbors in the United States are painted black and white in vertical stripes, and, being in mid-channel, should be passed close to by all deep-draft vessels. At this point the pilot takes charge.
Ahead the water seems now to be dotted in the most indiscriminate manner with buoys and beacons, and on the shores around the harbor, far and near, there seem to be almost a dozen lighthouses. If, however, you watch the buoys as the pilot steers the ship between them, you will soon see that all those passed on the right-hand side are red, and all on the left are black. Where more than one channel runs through the same harbor, the different channels are marked by buoys of different shapes. Principal channels are marked by “nun” buoys, secondary channels by “can” buoys, and minor channels by “spar” buoys.
| NUN BUOYS. | CAN BUOYS. | SPAR BUOYS. |
Gedney Channel is a short, dredged lane leading over the outer bar, or barrier of sand, which lies between harbor and ocean. Its buoys are lighted at night by electricity, through submarine cables, the red ones with red lights, the black ones with white lights. Moreover, a little lighthouse off to the left, known as Sandy Hook Beacon, has in its lamp a red sector which throws a red beam just covering Gedney Channel. Thus this channel can be passed through in safety by night as well as by day. If it is night the pilot knows when he is through it by the change of color in Sandy Hook Beacon light from red to white. Then he looks away past that light to his left for two fixed white lights on the New Jersey shore and hillside, known as Point Comfort Beacon and Waackaack Beacon, for he knows that by keeping them in range, that is to say, in line with one another and himself, and by steering toward them he is in the main ship channel. By day the main ship channel buoys would guide him, as in Gedney Channel, but at night these buoys are not lighted.
Only a short distance is now traversed when the ship comes to a point where two unseen channels meet. This is indicated by a buoy having a tall spindle, or “perch,” surmounted by a latticed square. From here, if she continues on her course, she will remain in the main ship-channel, which, although deeper, is a more circuitous route into port; so, if she does not draw too much water, she is turned somewhat to the right, and, leaving the buoy with the perch and square on her right, because it is red, she is steered between the buoys which mark Swash Channel. If it were night this channel would be revealed by two range-lights on the Staten Island shore and hillside, known as Elm Tree Beacon and New Dorp Beacon, both being steady-burning, white lights; but we are entering by daylight, and when half-way through Swash Channel we notice a buoy painted red and black in horizontal stripes. To this is given a wide berth by the pilot. It is an “obstruction” buoy marking a shoal spot or a wreck.
OBSTRUCTION BUOY.
Channel buoys are all numbered in sequence from the sea inward, the red ones with even, and the black ones with odd numbers, and the larger ones are anchored with “mushrooms” while the smaller have “sinkers” of iron or stone. They are made of iron plates in water-tight compartments, so that if punctured by an over-running ship or some other accident, they will not be likely to sink. In harbors where ice forms in winter, large summer buoys are replaced in winter by a smaller sort less liable to be torn adrift. Buoys do go adrift, however, now and then, and sometimes take a voyage across the ocean or far down the coast before they can be found by the tenders of the Lighthouse Service, which is constantly looking after these and other marks. Lieutenant Ellicott tells us that all changes in the position of buoys or lightships, or the placing of new buoys to mark a change of channel, or an obstruction, are published promptly in pamphlets called “Notices to Mariners,” which are distributed as quickly as possible through well organized means of communication. A few years ago one of the largest of our handsome new cruisers was approaching New York harbor from the West Indies in a light fog. Sandy Hook Lightship had been found, the usual course laid for Gedney Channel, and the ship was steaming onward at full speed, her captain, having been inspector of that very lighthouse district but a short time before, feeling that he knew his way into that port better than the most experienced pilot. Presently, however, he was startled by the alarming cry of breakers ahead! A large hotel also loomed up, and, as the ship was backed full speed astern, all hands realized that they had barely escaped running high and dry on Rockaway Beach. When the vessel got into port it was learned that Sandy Hook Lightship had been moved considerably from its old position, and that the notice of this change had failed to reach the captain of the cruiser before he sailed from the West Indies.
A WHISTLING BUOY, OUT OF COMMISSION.
Shipwrecks still occur, however, in spite of lighthouses and sirens and buoys and coast-surveys; therefore we add to our precautions arrangements to help those cast away. Societies to save wrecked persons have existed, it is said, for many centuries in China, but in Europe they are hardly a hundred years old. The early humane societies, like that of Great Britain, placed life-boats and rescuing gear in certain shore towns, and organized crews, who promised to go out to the aid of any lost ship, and to take good care of the persons rescued.
In America, however, our coasts are so extensive, and so much of the dangerous part of them is far away from villages, or even a farmhouse, that the government has been obliged to do whatever was necessary. Thus came about the Life Saving Service, which now has its stations close together along our whole sea-coast, and upon the great lakes, covering more than ten thousand miles in all.
Each of these stations is a snug house on the beach, tenanted by a keeper and six men, all of whom are chosen for their skill in swimming, and in handling a boat in the surf—something every man who “follows the sea” cannot do successfully. Beaching a boat through surf is an art.
PATROLMEN EXCHANGING THEIR CHECKS.
During all the season, from October till May, two men from each station are incessantly patrolling the beach at night, each walking until he meets the patrolman from the next station. No matter how foul the weather, these watchmen are out until daylight looking for disasters. The moment they discover a vessel ashore, or likely to become disabled, they summon their companions and hasten to launch their boat. These boats are of two kinds. On the lakes and on the steep Pacific coast is used the very heavy English life-boat, fitted with masts and sails if necessary, which a steam tug is required to tow to the scene of the wreck, unless it is close in shore. But upon our flat, sandy Atlantic beaches only a lighter kind of surf-boat, made of cedar, can be handled. This is built with air-cases at each end and under the thwarts, so that it cannot sink. The station men drag it on its low wagon to the scene of its use, unless horses are to be had, and when it is launched they sit at the six oars, each with his cork belt buckled around him, and his eye fixed on the steersman, who stands in the stern, ready to obey his slightest motion of command, for rowing through the angry waves that dash themselves on a storm-beaten beach is a matter requiring extraordinary skill and strength. Then, when the vessel is reached, comes another struggle to avoid being struck and crushed by the plunging ship, or the broken spars and rigging pounding about the hull. But skill and caution generally enable the crew to rescue the unfortunate castaways one by one, though frequently several trips must be made, in each one of which every surfman risks his life, and in many a sad case loses it; yet there is no lack of men for the service.
SAVING A SAILOR BY MEANS OF THE BREECHES-BUOY.
It is a common occurrence, however, that the sea will run so high that no boat could possibly be launched. Then the only possibility of rescue for the crew is by means of a line which shall bridge the space between the ship and the land before the hull falls to pieces. We read in old tales of wrecks of how some brave seaman would tie a light line around his waist, and dare the dreadful waves, and the more dreadful undertow, to save his comrades. If he got safely upon the beach, he drew a hawser on shore and made it fast. Now we do not ask this; but with a small cannon made for the purpose, a strong cord attached to a cannon-ball is fired over the ship, even though it be several hundred yards distant. Seizing this line as it falls across their vessel, the imperiled sailors haul to themselves a larger line, called a “whip,” which they fasten in a tackle-block in such a way that a still heavier cable can be stretched between the wreck and the land and made fast.
Then by means of a small side-line and pulleys a double canvas bag, shaped like a pair of knee-breeches, is sent back and forth between the ship and the shore, bringing a man each time, until all are saved. Should there be many persons on board, though, and great haste necessary, instead of the breeches-buoy a small covered metallic boat, called the life-car, is sent out, into which several persons may get at once. These varied means are so skilfully employed, that now hardly one in two hundred is lost of those whose lives are endangered on the American coasts.
THE SELF-RIGHTING LIFE-BOAT.
CHAPTER XI
FISHING AND OTHER MARINE INDUSTRIES
The grandest sea-chase is that after the whale—the most gigantic of mammals, the most extraordinary in appearance and habits, and the most valuable to man, for the capture of one may mean ten times as much reward as the ivory of an elephant or the rarest otter-skin would afford, and perhaps a hundred times as much, if ambergris be found within its body.
Men have had the hardihood to chase these huge and often savage creatures in their own turbulent element, and with the most primitive weapons, ever since the art of navigation was acquired.
The Japanese and other Asiatics of the western shore of the North Pacific have dared to go out in rowboats and attack the largest whales since the origin of their traditions, and they had a method of entangling these leviathans in nets, which must have produced exciting scenes, as the monster struggled amid the bloody turmoil of waters to free himself from the innumerable connected cords that embarrassed his movements, rather than subdued his strength, until his life ebbed away through a hundred wounds.
AN OLD WHALER.
On the Alaskan coast, and southward as far as Oregon, the Indians, and especially those of the Queen Charlotte Islands and the coasts of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, were accustomed, hundreds, perhaps thousands of years ago, to go far away into the ocean in their dug-out canoes, searching for and spearing the whales with lances made of flint or bone, having detachable barbed heads. These were attached to shafts by rawhide lines, and to the shafts were attached buoys of large inflated bladders. When the animal was struck, the heavy pole would drive the lancehead through the skin and then fall off. The barbs would not only hold the instrument there, but cause it to work deeper and deeper, and the whale, darting away or diving, would be so impeded by dragging the poles and buoys after him, that he would soon return to receive other darts, and so, between loss of blood and exhaustion, would ultimately be killed. It is extremely interesting to read the stories, gathered by early travelers from the lips of the Indians,—old Haidas or Makahs are living yet who have taken part in such nerve-testing canoe-chases,—of their fights with this gigantic foe far from land, and their hair’s-breadth escapes; and it is not strange that many quaint ceremonies were devised to placate the waters and the power of the whale-god in advance, and to honor the sea-hunters when they returned.
The Greenlanders and Eastern Eskimos do not seem to have been able in their small skin boats to conquer the largest sort of whales, but the smaller ones, such as the white whale, fell to their spears in a similar way; and they took great pains to secure any dead or stranded cetacean that came within their reach, the bones of which were as valuable to them, in the absence of wood, as were the flesh, oil, and sinews.
The history of European whaling begins with the excursions of the Basques, who, as long ago at least as the tenth century, were accustomed to go out from their shore-towns in search of the southern right whale which frequents the Bay of Biscay and its offing. Doubtless their boats were small, half-decked, lugger-rigged “shyppes,” carrying ten to fifteen men, and looking much like many of the Channel fishermen of to-day. This “fishery” supplied all Europe during the Middle Ages with the whalebone and oil which were among the luxuries of the rich at that time; but by the time the sixteenth century had arrived, whales had become so scarce in the Eastern Atlantic—where now they are almost extinct—that this industry must have ceased had not the Cabots shown the way to Newfoundland, to whose shores the Basques at once extended their voyages with excellent results, for in those days whales were commonly seen all along the American shore of the North Atlantic. But this remote fishery would have been too precarious and costly to be of great consequence had it not been for the early efforts, related in Chapter V, to find a passage to the East north of the continents. The earliest of these failed, but they brought back reports that the edge of the frozen sea abounded in whales, and men rushed into this newly discovered field of wealth, as, centuries later, they abandoned everything in headlong haste to go to the gold-fields of California, Australia, South Africa or the Yukon Valley.
The English did their best to monopolize the whale fishery at once, but the Dutch sent war-vessels, and in a fleet action almost at the edge of the ice in 1618 the Dutch conquered and opened the seas to all comers, while separate districts on the coast of Spitzbergen were assigned to each nationality. The English interest in the fishery declined, but the Dutch increased their attention to it, taking over one thousand whales each year. “About 1680,” we read, “they had two hundred and sixty vessels and fourteen thousand seamen employed. Their fishery continued to flourish on almost as extensive a scale until 1770, when it began to decline, and finally, owing to the war, came to an end before the end of the century.” The Germans were always associated with them, and continued to send a whaling fleet to Barentz Sea and the Jan Mayen waters until 1873. Meanwhile the Greenland whaling-grounds had begun to attract British whalemen, followed by the Danes in the early part of the last century; then this local industry fell off, but was revived about 1800, remained prosperous for many years, and is still the support of Peterhead and a few other Scotch ports.
WHALERS TRYING OIL OUT OF BLUBBER.
The abundance of whales near the coast was one of the prime inducements held out to colonists by North America, where whales often appeared close to the shore, or in harbors, as occasionally they do yet. Here, at first, whale-fishing was pursued wholly in rowboats launched from the beach. Many shore towns owned whaleboats and gear, each with its trained crew, and some kept a regular lookout, day by day, whose duty it was promptly to announce the appearance of any whale in the offing. Such was the case at Southampton, Long Island, for many years, and even now, occasionally, the town-crew there rushes away through the breakers after some stray visitor amid the excitement of the whole neighborhood, but this happens only at intervals of several years.
Before the end of the seventeenth century, however, the people of Nantucket Island were wont to cruise about the neighboring ocean for right whales, their voyage lasting six weeks or so as a rule, and now and then they would pick up a sperm whale. By the middle of the eighteenth century, however, sperm whaling was no longer profitable in the Northern Atlantic, while the Greenland grounds were overrun by European ships. American fishermen therefore turned their attention to the West, and for many years confined themselves mainly to catching the sperm whale, finding at first their best “grounds” in the south-middle Pacific. When the War of Independence came on, Nantucket was the leading whaling-port of the country, but all the New England towns were more or less engaged, and no less than three hundred and sixty vessels, large and small, were out. The Revolutionary War nearly destroyed the industry, and before it could well revive, the War of 1812 again subjected the whaling-ships to capture by English privateers and men-of-war all over the world. After that, however, they spread all over the Southern seas, and between 1840 and 1850 more than seven hundred were flying the flag of the United States.
The whaling vessels were large, stanch craft, usually bark-rigged, distinguished by their old-fashioned shape, weather-stained, smoky appearance, enormous boats swinging from end to end of the ship from lofty davits, and try-works forward. They kept longer than any one else many relics of rigging, custom, and language, belonging to the seamanship of earlier generations; and no sea-peril could daunt either the vessel or its crew. They would sail on voyages lasting two or three years, and sometimes would circumnavigate the globe and return without having touched at a port. As a rule, however, they would gain part of a cargo, and then go to some port, ship it to London or New York, and refit for a new voyage. The profits of a trip were thus very great sometimes, but other trips were attended only by expense and misfortune.
DRAWN BY W. TABER.
A RACE FOR A WHALE.
The capture of whales in those days had more danger if not more excitement than now, for the only method was by rowing after them, helped by the sails, in the 28-foot, double-ended rowboats made for the purpose (of which every vessel carried six or eight), and sinking into their vitals darts and lances until they died. They were then towed to the vessel’s side, held by tackle from the yard-arms in a suitable position, and cut up. The oil in early days was packed in casks, but later has been run into iron tanks built into the hold, after having been tried out of the blubber in the great caldrons set in brick on the forward deck, which gave a whaler so peculiar an appearance, at all times, and would lead any one to suppose her on fire while the process of trying-out was going on, and the great volumes of black smoke caused by the use of whale-fat and waste as fuel were drifting to leeward.
One of the best accounts of a chase published is that by the late Temple Brown, of the United States Fish Commission, in an article in “The Century” for February, 1893, from which I am permitted to make an extract:
While cruising on the coast of New Zealand, one day about 11.30 A. M., the lookout at the main hailed the deck with: “Thar sh’ b-l-o-w-s! Thar sh’ b-l-o-w-s! Blows! B-l-o-w-s!”
“Where away?” promptly responded the officer of the deck.
“Four points off the lee bow! Blows sperm-whales! Blows! Blows!” came from aloft.
“How far off?” shouted the captain, roused out of his cabin by the alarm, as his head and shoulders appeared above deck. “Where are they heading?” he continued, as he went up the rigging on all-fours.
“Blows about two miles and a half off, sir,” replied Mr. Braxton, the mate, looking off the lee-bow with his glasses, “and coming to windward, I believe.”
“Call all hands!” said the captain. “Haul up the mainsail, and back your main-yards. Hurry up there! Get your boats ready, Mr. Braxton!”
At the first alarm the men came swarming up the companionway of the forecastle, divesting themselves of superfluous articles of clothing, and scattering them indiscriminately about the deck. Rolling up their trousers, and girding their loins with their leather belts, taking a double reef until supper-time, they flitted nervously here and there in their bare legs and feet, observing every order with the greatest alacrity, and holding themselves in readiness to go over the side of the vessel at the word of command. There is a certain order, systematic action, or red tape, observed on all first-class whaling-vessels, however imperfectly disciplined some of the boat-crews may be. The captain indicates the boats he wishes to attack the whales; the boat-header (an officer) and the boat-steerer (the harpooner) take their proper positions in the boat, the former at the stern and the latter at the bow, while suspended in the davits. At the proper moment the davit-tackles are run out by men on deck, and the boats drop with a lively splash; the sprightly oarsmen meantime leap the ship’s rail, and, swinging themselves down the side of the vessel, tumble promiscuously into the boats just about the time the latter strike the water. Although it may be said that there is a general scramble, there is not the least confusion. Every person and thing has the proper place assigned to it in a whaleboat; the officer has full command, but he is subject to the orders of the captain, who signals his instructions from the ship, usually by means of the light sails. The manner of going on to a whale, the number of men and their positions in the boat, and the kind of instruments and the manner of using them, have been perpetuated in this fishery for more than two centuries.
“Clear away the larboard and bow boats!” shouted the captain. “Get in ahead of the whales, Mr. Braxton, if you can. Here, cook, you and cooper lend a hand there with them davy-taycles. Are you ready? Hoist and swing your boats.”
Down went the larboard boat and the bow boat almost simultaneously.
“Shove off! Up sail! Out oars! Pull ahead!” were the orders from Mr. Braxton, the officer of the larboard boat, in rapid succession. “Let’s get clear of the ship. Come, bear a hand with that sail, do,” he added, coaxingly, with his eye on the third mate’s boat. “Don’t let ’em get in ahead of us.”
“All right, sir; here you go, sheet,” replied Vera, the harpooner, a well-developed and intelligent American-Portuguese, with his accustomed good spirits.
Hastily laying aside his paddle, like a tiger couchant, with eager eyes upon his prey, he picked up his harpoon, and stood erect, his tall, muscular frame swaying above the head of the boat. He placed his thigh in the clumsy-cleat,—a contrivance to steady the harpooner against the motions of the waves,— and with his long, springy arms turned and balanced the harpoon-pole previous to poising the instrument in the air.... Under the motive power of sail and paddle the space between the boat and whale was rapidly diminishing, and apparently they would soon come into collision. The enormous head of the cetacean, as it plowed a wide furrow in the ocean, and the tall column of vapor rising from the blow-holes, as it spouted ten or twelve feet in the air, were to be seen right ahead; the expired air, as it rushed like steam from a valve, could be heard near by; the bunch of the neck and the hump were plainly visible as they rose and fell with the swell of the waves; and the terrible commotion of the troubled waters, fanned by the gigantic flukes, left a swath of foaming and dancing waves clearly outlined upon the surface of the sea....
Mr. Braxton laid the boat off gracefully to starboard, and the mastodonic head of a genuine spermaceti whale loomed up on our port bow. The junk was seamed and scarred with many a wound received in fierce and angry struggles for supremacy with individuals of its own species, or perhaps with the kraken; the foaming waters ran up and down the great shining black head, exposing from time to time the long, rakish under-jaw; but what small eyes!
“Now!” shouted the officer, as if Vera was a half-mile off, instead of about twenty-five feet. “Give him some, boy! Give him—!” But his well-trained and faithful harpooner had already darted the harpoon into the glistening black skin just abaft the fin; the boat was enveloped in a foam-cloud—the “white water” of the whalemen, stirred up by the tremendous flukes of the whale.
“Stern all!” shouted the officer; and the boat was quickly propelled backward by the oarsmen, to clear it from the whale. “Are you fast, boy?”
“Fust iron in, sir; can’t tell second,” replied Vera; but the zip-zip-zip of the line as it fairly leaped from the tub and went spinning round the loggerhead and through the chocks, sending up a cloud of smoke produced by friction, indicated the presence of healthy game.
“Wet line! wet line!” shouted Mr. Braxton, as he went forward to kill the whale, and Vera came aft to steer the boat, unstepping the mast on his way; for all whales are now struck under sail. The whale, however, soon turned flukes, and went head first to the depths below. Meantime, the other whales had taken the alarm, and with their noses in the air, were showing a “clean pair of heels” to windward.
The boat lay by awaiting the “rising” of the cetacean. Twenty minutes passed, twenty-five, stroke-oarsman began to feel hungry; thirty, thirty-five, and still the line was either slowly running out or taut; but soon it began to slacken. “Haul line! haul line!” said the officer, peering into the water. “He’s stopped.” The line was retrieved as fast as possible and carefully laid in loose coils on the after platform. “Haul line, he’s coming! Coil line clear, Vera!” said Mr. Braxton, shading his eyes with his hand and looking over the gunwale at an immense opaque spot beginning to outline itself in the depths below.
DRAWN BY W. TABER. ENGRAVED BY J. W. EVANS.
FAST TO A WHALE.
“Look out! Here he comes! Stern all! Look out for whale!”
But the mate’s injunctions were received too late. The whale, fairly out of breath, came up with a bound and a puff, scattering the water in all directions, and catching the keel of the boat on the bunch of its neck. The boat bounded from this part of the whale’s anatomy to the hump, and, careening to starboard, shot the crew first on the whale’s side and then into the water. The stroke-oarsman now began to feel wet. The whale, terrified beyond measure by the tickling sensation of the little thirty-foot boat creeping down its back, caught the frail cedar craft on one corner of its flukes, and tossed it gracefully, but perhaps not intentionally, into the air, as one would play with a light rubber ball. As the boat descended, with one tremendous “side wipe” of the mighty caudal fin, and with a terrible crash that was heard on the ship nearly two miles away, the whale smashed it into kindling-wood.
A WHALE-BOAT CUT IN TWO.
This is only one of the exciting tales Mr. Brown has to tell, and the history of whaling in every country could add many more. He tells us that approaching a whale at all times is like going into battle, and says that many of the deeds remembered by old hands were purely heroic, since the danger might have been avoided by declining to attack the animal under the especially hazardous conditions that often present themselves.
The persecution suffered by whales of all kinds in all parts of the world made the more valuable kinds so scarce by the middle of the present century that many voyages were almost fruitless, not only by reason of small catches, but because the substitutes invented for whalebone, and the constantly increasing use of mineral oils had lowered prices to an almost ruinous level. The American fleets suffered with the rest, until during the Civil War they were nearly swept from the seas by the ravages of the Shenandoah and other Confederate privateers.
Since then there has been only a partial revival, accompanied by a good many changes. A few Scotch and German whalers still go to the northern seas, working in the ice, and some American vessels from the Eastern States, and a greater number from California search the Pacific and the waters off Alaska. All or nearly all of these whalers are provided with steam-propellers, having an arrangement by which they can lift the screw out of water and use their sails for ordinary purposes. Many of them chase with a steam-launch instead of the old-fashioned whaleboats, and save their men the back-straining labor of towing a prize perhaps two or three miles to the ship. In place of the hand harpoon they have several forms of swivel-guns and shoulder-guns discharging harpoons and explosive darts by gunpowder, so that a large share of the danger as well as the labor is saved to modern whalemen, who are also much better housed and fed in their large iron steamships than those used to be who wrestled with scurvy in the grim old hulks of half a century ago.
The ships that go up through Davis Straits now frequently winter there, in order to be on hand in May to meet the whales that appear in the first open water, to which the men drag their boats over the ice between their ships and the first open channels. For the same purpose many vessels of the American fleet are accustomed to pass the winter in company under the shelter of islands near the mouth of the Mackenzie River. Here they have a rendezvous where buildings have been erected and means for social comfort have been established, such as billiard tables, books, etc. These western vessels do not force their way into and through the ice, as do those among the eastern archipelagoes, but operate in comparatively open water, as long as it lasts, along the edge of the paleocrystic ice. Delaying the departure of those who mean to return to the Pacific and home until the last moment, it occasionally happens that some are caught and frozen in. These are usually destroyed, but thus far their crews have managed to escape either to more fortunate vessels or to the shore, where, at Point Barrow, the government has built and keeps furnished a strong house, with stores, fuel, and provisions, as a refuge for shipwrecked mariners.
Walrus-hunting is not much followed nowadays by civilized seamen, though the animal is still of great value to the Eskimo and Siberians. It has become very scarce in easily accessible waters, but is occasionally taken by whalers, who find a market for the ivory of its tusks.
Sealing is an industry which still claims considerable attention from the Scandinavians and Scotchmen who go to the coasts and waters about Spitzbergen, Jan Mayen, and Greenland, as well as to nearer resorts, in pursuit of several species yielding oil and valuable hides; and in the North Pacific the pursuit of the fur seal still occupies many small vessels, but seems likely to come soon to an end. Antarctic seals are practically extinct.
The industry of fishing is probably one of the oldest in the world, and it remains among the most important, for the fisheries not only furnish a vast amount of nutritious and pleasant, yet remarkably cheap, food, but many other things useful to mankind. Hence it is not strange to find that in all the early reports of the discovery of new lands and waters that followed one another so rapidly from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the fish and other sea-animals to be found were always given a prominent place in the list of valuable assets pertaining to each locality. Even the Spaniards and Portuguese, in their insane rush for gold and silver, to the neglect and ruin of everything else, had to pay some little attention to fishing and allied industries in both the East and West Indies; while in the case of the exploitations of new regions by the calmer, more prudent people of western Europe—the British, French, Dutch and Scandinavians,—the value of the harvest of the sea was really more in view, at first, than that of the land, at least when they began to visit and colonize North America. Take, as an example, the history of St. Pierre, Miquelon, and the others that form a group of islets in the Gulf of Newfoundland, half way between Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland. Mr. S. G. W. Benjamin, in whose “Cruise of the Alice May” you may find many interesting and picturesque materials for an account of them, tells us a French settlement was begun on St. Pierre as early as 1604, and that tradition says the islands were resorted to by the Basques two centuries before that, as is very likely true.
In 1713 the colony numbered three thousand souls, and had become a very important fishing port. In that very year St. Pierre was ceded to Great Britain, together with Newfoundland, the French being merely allowed permission to dry their fish on the adjacent shores. But when the victory of Wolfe resulted in the loss of Canada to France, she was once more awarded this little group of isles lying off Fortune Bay, to serve as a depot for her fishermen. The French now gave themselves in earnest to developing the cod-fisheries, determined, apparently, that what they had lost on land should be made up by the sea. In twelve years the average exportation of fish amounted to six thousand quintals, giving employment to over two hundred smacks, sailed by eight thousand seamen. The English recaptured the isles in 1778, destroyed all the stages and store-houses, and forced the inhabitants to go into exile. The peace of Versailles restored St. Pierre to France in 1783, and the fugitives returned to the island at the royal expense. The fisheries now became more prosperous than ever, when the war of ’93 once more brought the English fleets to St. Pierre. Again the inhabitants were forced to fly. By the peace of Amiens, in 1802, France regained possession of this singularly evanescent possession, and lost it the following year, when the town was destroyed. In 1816 St. Pierre and Miquelon were finally re-ceded to France, in whose power they have ever since remained.
CURING FISH AT ST. PIERRE.
As these islands were of no use to any one for any other purpose, all this struggle for their possession was in order to retain the privilege and naval control of fishing in those waters. The French government has carefully fostered this interest ever since, and now the islands not only have a settled population of several thousand, but at the height of the season sometimes as many as ten thousand strangers (sailors and fishermen) congregate at the principal port, St. Pierre, which is one of the most important centers in the world for the marketing, curing, and export of sea-caught fish.
Of all waters those of the North Atlantic seem to excel in useful fishes; from the oil-shark hand-lining off the coast of Lapland, or the sardine-catching of Spain, to Yankee sword-fishing, this ocean is alive with fish and fishermen, on both sides and at all seasons of the year.
The whole coast of Norway supports this industry, especially around the far northern Lafoden Islands. The North Sea, shallow and cold, is the home of many valuable species that are sought by extensive fleets from Denmark, Holland, and the north of France, while thousands of British sailors make a living along their own eastern coasts and among the islands north of Scotland; but the waters on all sides of the British Isles are fishing waters, especially the English and Irish channels and the western lochs of Scotland; the herring-catch alone is worth eight and a half millions of dollars a year, while Great Britain’s mackerel-catch amounts to two millions, and her share of the codfishery to another two millions. Nearly half of all the products of British fisheries are obtained by the use of the beam-trawl—a huge dredge-like bag-net, handled and towed by steamers in pretty deep water, which scoops in everything near the bottom, where the most desirable sea-fishes stay. Among the prizes are the turbot and sole—toothsome and valuable species not known along American shores.
More southerly are the profitable fisheries for pilchards, sprats, and especially sardines—little fishes taken in vast numbers and canned or preserved in various ways. The abundance of sardines, a recent writer tells us, may be inferred from the fact that the Spanish fishermen take annually about one hundred thousand tons of these little fishes, having a value of from $400,000 to $600,000. A peculiar method of capturing the sardines at night prevails in the Adriatic. The location of the shoals of fish is literally felt out by a light sounding-line, and by means of the attraction of a fire of resinous pine the fish are slowly coaxed into some creek or estuary and surrounded with a seine. The demand for wood for use in this and other night fisheries causes a serious drain on the neighboring pine-forests.
The great fishery of the Mediterranean, however, is that for tunnies—huge fishes allied to mackerel, sometimes weighing several hundredweight, and regarded in America as poor food. They have been taken by means of pounds and strong enclosing nets ever since classical antiquity, and preserved tunny flesh is still popular in Spain, Italy, and North Africa, while the same fish is the object of one of the principal sea-industries of Japan.
But important as are the catching, preserving, and utilization of these and many other European fishes, they are far outranked by the marine fisheries for the cod and its relatives, the halibut, haddock, hake, etc., in waters about Newfoundland, Labrador, and Iceland, where also great quantities of mackerel, herring, and other food fishes are regularly obtained. The principal grounds are on the Banks of Newfoundland, which have been resorted to for more than three hundred years by men from both continents.
HAND-LINE FISHING ON THE GRAND BANKS.
The Banks of Newfoundland are a series of shoals—submerged islands, in fact—which lie off the northeastern coast of America from Cape Cod to the farther end of Newfoundland. The shallowness of the water over them makes them advantageous places for fishing, because many of the species caught remain near the bottom, and in deep water are therefore beyond convenient reach. It is possible, also, to anchor there—often a necessity.
But just here are presented some of the worst perils to which fishermen are exposed. Nowhere are old ocean’s storms worse than on these Banks, where the sand is sometimes stirred five hundred feet below the surface. The best fishing comes in winter—the season of the heaviest gales. The vessels must anchor close together, too, for the areas of good fishing are small, and if one breaks its hawser, or the anchor drags, there is great danger of drifting afoul of some neighbor, which is likely to end in the destruction of both. Then there is ever present the danger, in these latitudes of almost ceaseless fog, of being run down by the transatlantic steamers, in whose track the fishing fleets must anchor. The skipper keeps his bell tolling, or a great horn blowing, but if a steamer comes down the wind her lookout will hardly be able to hear it before it is too late to stop or change the course of the monster rushing at full speed through the thickness of mist and flying spray. “Before anything can be done the relentless iron prow cuts into the schooner, which for a moment quivers and then disappears into the depths.... One of these great iron ships might cut the bows off a fishing schooner of sixty or eighty tons and not, perhaps, experience a sufficient shock to alarm the passengers sleeping calmly in their staterooms.”
The vessels which go upon this perilous quest are the stanchest, swiftest, and withal handsomest little vessels that sail our seas. Their rig is adapted to this purpose, and spreads almost as much canvas as a racing-yacht, which, in fact, on this side of the Atlantic has been modeled from Banks fishermen. The best of them probably are those hailing from Gloucester, Mass., and these are never used for any other purpose.
The old-fashioned hand-line fishing, such as still holds a place in the mackerel fisheries—although even there it has given way in most vessels to purse-netting,—is no longer practised in the American codfishery, which now uses the trawl-line altogether, by which the men have added to the hardship and danger of their adventurous life as well as to its profits.
This trawl is not a huge dredge as is the beam-trawl of the North Sea fishermen, from which it has unfortunately copied its name, but is a strong rope between three and four hundred feet long, having at each end an anchor and a flag-buoy. It is so arranged that when it is stretched out and anchored the line will be several fathoms beneath the surface. To this line, at intervals of six feet or so, are hung short lines, each carrying a stout hook. When the fishing-ground has been reached, the captain anchors his vessel, or, if the weather permits, he sails gently to and fro. Previously, six trawls have been baited with clams brought from home, and one put in each of the six small boats which the vessel carries. Two men now put off in each of these boats and anchor the trawls at convenient distances from each other, in such a way that the trawl-line, with its fringe of hooks, shall be stretched taut and at the proper depth. How long they stay down depends on the weather—five or six hours, or from evening until morning, is the usual period. Then the men go out, and taking up the anchors at one end, haul each trawl into the boat, coiling it in the bottom and taking off the hooks each captive fish as fast as they come to it.
A FISHING SCHOONER “HOVE TO” IN A GALE ON THE BANKS.
Simple as this sounds, it is terribly hard work. The trawls are heavy and stiff, and armed with dangerously sharp hooks. The busiest season is midwinter, and no dread of cold or danger must stop the fisherman, who boldly ventures in his little dory into the teeth of a howling snow-storm and fast increasing gale, piling the water “mountain-high” about him and encasing his body in a sheet of icy spray; this must he do, in spite of discomfort and the imminent risk of death, if he would save from destruction his valuable trawls and the booty they may have hooked for him. A fine day on the Banks of Newfoundland is a rare thing; fog and snow and icy gales are the rule, and only the boldest courage, endurance, and skill will enable a man to resist that ocean and wrest from it his self-support. A vivid picture of the hardships and dangers of fishing on the Banks is to be found in Rudyard Kipling’s story, “Captains Courageous.”
The intrepid and skilful voyages of our whalers and fishermen, daring every fatigue and danger in the open sea, have been schools for the best seamen of the world. Every nation is glad to draw these sailors into their navies, and it is they who make the bravest yet most cautious captains of our merchant marine, showing to their comrades and to landsmen splendid examples of heroism and fortitude. This is the schooling I meant when I said that in its industries we get not only food, but formation of character, from old Ocean,—and this is the highest result attainable from either land or sea.
CHAPTER XII
THE PLANTS OF THE SEA AND THEIR USES
The ocean was the home of the first living thing, either plant or animal, that appeared on our planet; seaweeds and salt-water animals are found in much older rocks than any that contain the fossils of land life. Moreover, though called a “wide waste of waters,” and seeming a complete desert as we gaze upon its restless surface on a dull morning, there is a greater number of animals and plants by count, and quite as large a variety, under the waves as above them, and the bottom of the sea—at all events near its margin—is more populous than any bit of woods you ever saw.
There exists in our ponds and ditches a race of plants so minute that it requires a powerful microscope to examine them. Under this instrument it is seen that they have delicate, flinty shells or armor, which is of a great variety of forms,—coiled, globular, boat-shaped, spindle-like, and so on,—and always beautifully sculptured. These minute and beautiful diatoms, as they are called, move about freely, and were long supposed to be animals; now they are known to be the simplest of seaweeds, consisting of only one cell. Since life first began, these diatoms, and other microscopic plants much like them, have swarmed not only in the fresh waters, but in all the oceans of the globe, furnishing food for mollusks and all the lowly animals whose food is brought into their mouths by the currents. Innumerable, and as wide-spread as the salt water itself, every one of these myriads of minute plants has left a record; for its delicate, glass-like shell was indestructible, and when the bit of life was lost, it sank slowly down to the bottom. What effect toward perceptible sediment could come from a thing so small that it would scarcely be felt in your eye? One or two, or even a million, would go for little; but century after century, through ages too long for us to comprehend, a steady rain of these exquisitely engraved particles of flint showered down upon the still sea-floor, almost as thickly as you have seen motes in a sunbeam, until there was deposited a layer, many feet in thickness, of nothing but diatom-skeletons. Though this went on to a greater or less extent everywhere in the sea, such deposits are not now to be discovered everywhere, because disturbing causes swept the shells away, or broke up the floor after it had been laid down; but in various parts of the world to-day, you may find wide beds of rock made up wholly of such skeletons, soldered together into hard stone; while in some regions the mud of our sea-bottom appears to consist of almost nothing else. The mighty chalk cliffs of Great Britain and the French coast were built up in precisely this way at the bottom of an ancient sea, whence they have been lifted, but they are composed of much besides diatoms.
From the simplicity of diatoms the vegetation of the sea can be traced upward through larger and more complicated kinds of plants until we reach the enormous algæ that break the gloom of black headlands by their brilliant tints, and furnish a lurking-place under their wide-spreading and dense foliage for hosts of marine animals—some hiding for safety, others to watch for prey.
Seaweeds grow in all latitudes, even close to the pole, but mainly along the shore, for below the depth of about one hundred fathoms none but microscopic forms are known. These latter float about, of course, and many of them have been thought to be animals because they seem able to move at their own will. They come to the surface as well as haunt the depths; and the Red Sea takes its name from the fact that a minute carmine-tinted alga occasionally rises to the surface in throngs so dense and wide as to tinge the water for miles at a stretch. The same thing occurs in the Pacific, where the sailors call it “sea-sawdust.”
The proper home of the seaweed, however, is a rocky shore between tide-marks or just below them, and it is because the eastern coast of the United States is deficient in rocks—at least south of Cape Cod—that this is poor in algæ, compared with other regions. The seaweed has no roots, and only clings to the rock for support; shifting sand therefore would not hold it, and there are great sandy deserts under the ocean, bare of algæ, as some land regions are sandy deserts naked of terrestrial plants.
It often happens, however, that masses of weed will be torn away from their moorings and set adrift. This does not necessarily kill them, for they go on flourishing while afloat, and such is supposed to be the origin of those great areas of “gulfweed” vegetation in mid-ocean called “sargasso seas.” You will remember that a branch of the Gulf Stream, striking over toward the Moorish coast of Africa, is turned southward there, and sweeps down to the equator, then westward again, circumscribing a broad region in the middle Atlantic whose only currents go round and round in a slow whirlpool; and here it is that the gulfweed concentrates in masses sometimes dense enough to impede the progress of a ship—Columbus reported among the wonders of his first voyage the trouble he had in sailing through it—and covering an area between the Azores and the Bahamas as large as the Mississippi valley. This is the Sargasso Sea ordinarily referred to in books, but it is not the only one. A thousand miles west of San Francisco there is a similar collection of floating plants, and others exist under like conditions in the southern oceans.
THE MARBLED ANGLER ON ITS GULFWEED RAFT.
These floating meadows, as it were, are chosen as the abode of a long list of animals that rarely quit the safety and plenty of their precincts. Among these are innumerable pretty jelly-fishes, sea-worms, and mollusks without shells, which cling to the buoyant plants, and perhaps feed solely upon them. Here are to be had in abundance the fairy-like, rare pteropods, the richly purple janthinas towing their curious rafts of eggs, and no end of small crabs. Here a small fish, something like a perch, spends his whole time building a nest like a bird’s in the tangled weed-masses, and carefully guarding his treasures against the large marauding fishes that haunt the place to the dread of its peaceful inhabitants; and here those far-flying birds, the wandering albatross and the petrels, hover about in search of something to capture and eat. The Sargasso Sea is an extremely interesting part of the ocean, except to the luckless sailor becalmed and balked in its midst, as was Sir John Hawkins when he penned the following quaint observations, some three centuries ago:
Were it not for the Moving of the Sea, by the Force of Winds, Tides and Currents, it would corrupt all the World. The Experience of which I Saw Anno 1590, lying with a Fleet about the Islands of Azores, almost Six Months, the greatest Part of the time we were becalmed, with which all the Sea became so replenished with several sorts of Gellies and Forms of Serpents, Adders and Snakes, as seem’d Wonderful; some green, some black, some yellow, some white, some of divers Colours, many of them had Life, and some there were a Yard & a half, & some two Yards long; which had I not seen, I could hardly have believed.
A PIECE OF GULFWEED.
It is inhabited by two sea-slugs, protected
by their resemblance to its leaflets, and by
small crustaceans, hydroids, etc.
In favorable places a surprising variety of seaweeds can be picked out, and books exist by which you may learn the method of classification and names of the different species, the chief of which, for America, is Harvey’s splendid work, published by the Smithsonian Institution. Not only in the shape and colors of the fronds (as the leaf-like expansions or branching tufts of the stem are called) do seaweeds differ greatly among themselves, but in size, varying from many diminutive or even microscopic sorts to the cable-like growths of California, which would measure a quarter of a mile in length if stretched out.
Algæ, as I have said, constitute, with very few exceptions, the whole vegetation of the salt water, together with a large part of the vegetation in fresh water; and they serve the same useful purpose there that land-plants do for the dry parts of the globe, continually making and throwing off the oxygen which is necessary to keep the water as well as the air pure. To this end they do a very important work.
This is not the whole of their service in ocean matters, however. I think it may be said that if it were not for seaweeds animals could not live in the ocean, as truthfully as that if it were not for herbage no animals would be able to exist on land. Seaweeds are fed upon directly by all sorts of salt-water life, from mollusks as big as your thumb to turtles the size of a dining-table, and they make a shelter for thousands of little fellows who never leave their shadow.
But this is a small part of the story. The diatoms, and other minute plants like them, form the main portion, if not all, of the food of a large number of sponges, polyps, mollusks, and other stationary, sluggish creatures, that otherwise, so far as I see, would not be able to live at all. These, in turn, are fed upon by larger predaceous animals. Thus, though the fishes and cetaceans may never bite a seaweed themselves (those large marine herbivores, the manatee and dugongs, subsist almost wholly upon it, however), they depend for food upon creatures that do. We may say, therefore, that the algæ form the basis of all ocean life.
Men have been able to make marine plants of service to them also—a resource more important formerly than now. In the last century, for example, the kelp trade was the one great industry of the islands at the west of Ireland and Scotland, employing thousands of persons, and paying vast revenues to the lordly owners of the shores. Kelp is the name of any large, leathery sort of seaweed, whose leaves float at or near the surface, supported by bladder-like expansions; but in this case the word meant the ashes of any seaweed dried in the sun and then slowly burned in kilns, clouding the air with huge volumes of strongly odorous smoke. The slow burning of the seaweed left the ashes fused into a solid mass, which was broken up like stone before being sold. In France this substance was called varec; and in Spain, where the algæ were mixed with beach-plants, cultivated for the purpose, and burned in shallow pits in the ground, it went to market as barilla.
In those days, kelp ash was the only source of the valuable alkali soda needed in manufacturing glass and soap. Then a French chemist discovered how to make such soda out of common salt, and the kelp ovens were abandoned, except a few in Scotland, supplying the demand for iodine and several other chemicals contained in this residuum which is so rich in iodine, used in photography and in medicine, that a ton of kelp ash will sometimes yield twenty pounds; yet only about 100,000 pounds are now produced in this way, while five times as much is obtained by chemical treatment of Chile saltpeter. It is a curious fact that barbarous people have long chewed seaweeds as a remedy in diseases for which physicians now prescribe iodine. Iodine is a violet dye, and the bluish and purple tints of many algæ, shells, and sea-animals appear to be due to the large amount of this element in sea-water.
Seaweeds and other marine plants, like eel-grass, are collected in great quantities by farmers in all parts of the world to be used as a fertilizer. Shell-mud, dead fish, and other marine products are also of high value as manure, on account of the large proportion of lime, carbon, and soda which they contain. Indeed, there is a kind of seaweed growing at great depths called the nullipore, which takes up so much lime from the water that its substance becomes almost like stone, so that the plant retains its shape and full size when dried. Some of these nullipores are beautifully fan-shaped, scarlet or pink, and are often seen in museums, marked corallines.
SEAWEEDS.
1. Laminaria digitata.
2. L. longicruris.
To return to the gathering of seaweeds by farmers, nowhere is it more customary than in some parts of New England. Thus the well-known Second Beach, just east of Newport, is in the fall of the year the scene of a vast activity in this direction. “It may easily happen,” we are told, “that the pilgrim to Whitehall, topping the hill on a brilliant autumn morning, shall come upon a scene in which quiet plays no part. The seaweed, that harvest which, ripening without labor, is neither bought nor sold, is setting inshore under the urgings of wind and tide, and scores of farmers have crowded to the spot to gather it. An artist could hardly wish a better subject for his pencil than one of these wild harvestings—the plunging horses, forced far out into the surf, their slow return, half swimming, half wading, dragging the heavily loaded rakes which leave behind them a long furrow of foam, the heaped-up kelp glistening in the sunshine, the oxen, yoked by fours, waiting for their load, the shouts of the men, the dash, the excitement, and beyond and above all, the wonderful blues and iridescent greens which are the peculiar property of Newport waters and the Newport sky.”
Cattle and horses that are accustomed to rough pastures, like the Scotch and Irish moors, eat seaweed and thrive on it, especially as winter fodder, and from several species are derived dishes for our own tables. The Irish moss, or carrageen,—which is not a moss at all, but a seaweed,—is the most important of these, and grows on both sides of the northern Atlantic. In England the market supply comes chiefly from the western coast of Ireland, while Massachusetts Bay gives America all that is wanted, principally the red, coral-like Chondrus crispus. The little port of Scituate, Massachusetts, is the chief point of supply, where many thousands of pounds are gathered. In early June, two or three hundred men and women go to the rocks at low tide and pick off the small brown plants, each man getting about a barrel in one day’s work. When the tide rises, the people get into small boats and pull up the moss with rakes.
The moss gathered each day is taken to the beach, where a gravelly space has been prepared, and is spread out to lie bleaching during all of the next day, when it is taken up, washed in tubs, and again spread out. The washing and drying in the sun continue for seven days, by which time it has bleached to a yellowish white. In cookery, jellies, blanc mange, and various methods of boiling in milk and mixing in soups are used to make it palatable. Besides being of value for food, carrageen serves to make sizing used by paper-makers, cloth-printers, hatters, and so on, to clarify beer in the brewery vats, as a medicine, and to make bandoline for stiffening the hair.
Other species beside the Irish moss serve as food in Europe, generally in a raw state, often proving the only salty relish which the Irish peasant has to eat with his potatoes. One of these is the dulse of the Scotch (the dillisk of Ireland), which also abounds in the Mediterranean, and is there made into a soup. The natives of the South Sea Islands eat algæ, which are extraordinarily abundant and varied in Oriental latitudes; and the poor among the Japanese and in the interior of China, where the weed is sent dried, prize it especially, because it has a sea flavor and saves salt, which with them is a costly luxury. These people mix it with vegetables and other materials, to form thick, delicious soups and dressings. A peculiarly bad-smelling sauce, prepared from seaweed, is among the exports China sends to Europe as a condiment.
Along the shores from Japan to Sumatra grows an alga which the natives of those coasts dry and keep as long as they please. When the substance is wanted they steep some of the dried pieces in hot water, where the weed dissolves, and then, having been taken off the fire, stiffens into a glue which is said to be the strongest cement in the world.
A kind of false isinglass, also, is a product of the Eastern seaweeds, and it not only enters into the pastry and confectionery of Chinese bakers, but serves to varnish and glue thin paper and to stiffen the light transparent gauzes of fine silk used in making Oriental screens, fans, hangings, etc., so that painters can decorate them. With a poorer quality the bamboo stretchers of paper umbrellas, lanterns, and various toys are smeared to give them hard and polished surfaces.
Seaweed has also been used in the manufacture of paper, and its complete success in this branch of industry is as yet hindered only by the difficulty of perfect bleaching. Certain species of it are utilized in enormous quantities by upholsterers as stuffing for sofas, chairs, and mattresses; in Japan it is formed into a substitute for window-glass; ornaments and small articles of use, like knife-handles, are made by several nations out of large dried seaweeds; and, finally, albums of preserved fronds are one of the prettiest things to be found in a naturalist’s cabinet.
The great majority of seaweeds grow between tide-marks, and they undoubtedly perform an important service in preventing the wear and tear of the coast in many situations. Some, however, grow in much deeper waters, and these, also, may serve as breakwaters of no mean strength. Such is the case, for instance, at San Pedro, near Los Angeles, California, where the abundant growth offshore forms such a barrier to the ocean rollers as to turn the open roadstead into a calm harbor within it.
This belongs to the group of gigantic kelps of which those at the Falkland Islands and about Tierra del Fuego are other and noted species. Were it not for the growth of this strong, cable-like, buoyant plant, large numbers of other plants and sea-animals would find it impossible to exist exposed to the violence of the South Pacific waves. Sometimes the stems reach twelve hundred feet in length, and the bladders by which the immense fronds are buoyed up are as big as kegs.
This gigantic seaweed is plentiful all along the Pacific coast of America to Alaska, and the natives of our northwest coast used to make extensive use of it in the way of ropes, etc. It was from this weed that, by a careful preparation, they made the lines for their harpoons and deep-sea fishing; and the bladders furnished them ready-made receptacles for eulachon oil, for water for their seatrips, and for other liquids.
A California correspondent of the New York “Evening Post” gave a pretty picture, not long ago, of one of the kelp patches at St. Nicholas Island, where the beds of this wonderful plant reach out for a mile or more, growing up from the rocks below and forming an effectual break; the seas losing their force in their effort to pass through the submarine meshwork.
The vines constitute a veritable forest, and, drifting over it in fifty or sixty feet of water, you may see a perfect maze of stems with broad leaves waving gracefully in the current, forming arbors, arches, and colonnades. Here, poised idly, in rich contrast to the olive-hued mass, may be seen fish of a bright golden color, others in tints of blue and green. The sea swell coming in causes an undulatory movement, and the long colonnades seem to melt one into another, reappearing in different shapes. When the leaves reach the surface, the shore wind, sweeping down from the hills, lifts them from the water, and they flutter in the air like mimic sails. Each leaf is a study. Many are encrusted with a delicate bryozoön, which presents the effect of white lace upon the surface, while a close inspection will reveal minute anemones, coiled tubular worms, which throw out flower-like organs of exquisite beauty; while flat shells lie among them, and crawling here and there are marvels of animal life, shell-less mollusks, which so mimic the weed that it is almost impossible to distinguish them.
DIATOMS, MAGNIFIED, IN A DROP OF WATER.
This protective feature is a characteristic of life among the kelp forests that line the entire Pacific shores of North and South America, many animals simulating it so perfectly in color that the best-trained eyes often fail to observe them. This is especially true of the crabs and shell-less mollusks. The latter have not only assumed the exact tint of the weed, but are often covered with barbels of flesh that simulate the tangles of the substance. Upon the backs of the crabs are singular markings in green and white, which so resemble the minute incrustations of the kelp that the resultant protection is complete. [Compare illustration on [page 252].] Each vine is fastened to a stone, and the clinging roots shelter hordes of creatures of various kinds—deep-water crabs, octopods, starfishes, and a host of others.
A MARINE NATURALIST.
CHAPTER XIII
ANIMAL LIFE IN THE SEA
The primitive idea of the ocean was that it was a vast desert, and a strange disbelief in its being inhabited by more than the very few forms that everybody was compelled to recognize persisted up to quite modern times among those who should have known better. Pliny boldly asserted, for example, that nothing remained in the Mediterranean Sea unknown to him after he had made a list of 176 marine animals! But now we know that the sea teems with living beings as densely as do the fresh waters or the air. In it began the life of the globe, for the fossil records of the rocks show that the first animals lived in the ocean, and that ages passed before any of them began to people the newly formed lands and breathe the atmosphere instead of the air in the water; and, abundant as oceanic life now is, the paleozoic seas held immensely greater hordes, of which many forms were giants as compared with those of our day. Some of the old straight chambered shells were twelve feet long; and I have seen fossil ammonites, extinct relatives of our coiled pearly nautilus, which when alive must have been too heavy for a man to lift. The fishes, too, could tell great stories of the glory of their ancestors in size and strength and numbers. Some of them wore solid coats of mail upon their heads, and could do battle even with the huge swimming reptiles that were the dreaded tyrants of the Mesozoic deep.
Life in the ocean in those old geologic days was a long guerrilla warfare—every animal guarding against attack, and at the same time watching sharply for an opportunity to seize and prey upon some weaker companion. As for the foraminifers and other microscopic creatures, they were countless, and their skeletons, singly invisible, have by accumulation built up great masses of rock, like the chalk-beds of England and France.
Though lessened in numbers and reduced in size, because the land has gradually won over to its side many sorts of animals which in former ages were exclusively confined to the water, and for other reasons, the sea still holds its share of every “branch” and “class” (except birds, and it may almost claim some of them, such as the albatross, penguins, and petrels), and a majority of the “orders” of animal life. Glance at the catalogue: Foraminifers, sponges, and polyps are chiefly confined to salt water; starfishes, urchins (or sea-eggs), and the like, wholly so: mollusks (next higher) are principally oceanic, and the majority of the crabs inhabit salt water. Among the last-named one species, the common horse-foot (Limulus) of our shores, remains as the solitary representative of that immense and varied group, the trilobites, which so crowded the Paleozoic sea-bottom that some rocks—for instance, the limestones of Iowa—are packed almost as full of their fossils as is a raisin-box of raisins.
None of the insects is truly marine, yet some of them are seafaring, truly, for they spend their lives on drifting sea-wrack, or on beaches just out of reach of the tides; but most of the true worms are dwellers in the mud of sea-shores and sea-bottoms. No one knows of any land fishes; but I need not tell you that fishes throng in the fresh waters as well as in the salt, and that many species inhabit both at different seasons.
In respect to the reptiles, of which the ancient oceans contained gigantic and horrid types, I do not know any now that are truly oceanic except the turtles, if you leave out the “sea-serpent,” of which we hear so many wonderful and not quite satisfactory tales. You will hear of “sea-snakes” in the East Indies, but they are only certain kinds of serpents which swim well, and pass the most of their time in the salt water, as several species of our own country do in the rivers and ponds; all the oriental sea-snakes are venomous.
It is in this manner, too, that we may count certain birds, such as the petrels, auks, penguins, albatrosses, frigate-birds, and their kin, as belonging to the ocean. They spend all their life flying over the waves, seeking their food there, and some of them rarely go ashore, except to lay their eggs and hatch their young on remote rocks, resting and sleeping on the billows, when not busy at their hunting. In the highest rank of all, however, the mammals, several families are natives of the “great deep”—the whales, dolphins, and porpoises, the seals and walruses, and the manatees and dugongs. But all these must come to the surface to breathe, not having gills like fishes, but true lungs.
As it is only within the last thirty years that machinery suitable for deep-sea dredging has been invented, so it is only lately that we have been able to learn much as to the population of the ocean beneath the surface layer and marginal shallows. Now by means of beam-trawls, dredges, tangle-bars, etc., worked by steam-machinery on shipboard, naturalists may scrape up the bottom-ooze and obtain living objects or their bony relics at the depth of even 3000 to 4000 fathoms or more than four miles, for living beings are found in these profound abysses. Many scientific expeditions, such as those of the English exploring steamer Challenger, about 1874, have carried out these dredging investigations, and the United States Fish Commission possesses the large, specially built, sea-going Albatross, provided with all the necessary apparatus for deep-sea exploration. By means of these and other vessels an enormous amount of study—all useful in ascertaining the habits and methods of reproduction of food-fishes—has been carried on by American marine naturalists.
It appears that as you go further and further from shore, and into deeper and deeper water, the fewer animals and plants are obtained, and that very few species indeed which live along shore are to be found also at a depth greater than about 100 fathoms.
LANDING THE BEAM-TRAWL ON DECK.
Almost all animals, moreover, have a limited distribution in the sea, as is the case among those on land, though we cannot always, or perhaps often, say why the limits we find should exist; one sort of crab, or mollusk, or polyp, appearing here and another different one exclusively there, when the conditions seem to us very similar, and no barrier is perceptible. It is not easy to explain why a certain sort of cowry, for example, should be found only along a particular strip of coast, when nothing that we can see prevents its extending its range much further. It is believed that the temperature of the water is the chief fact which sets these invisible boundaries to the wanderings of animals living near the surface, only a few of which are very wide-spread in their distribution. The direction and character of the ocean currents have much to do with the geographic distribution of oceanic life, as has been mentioned in Chapter II ([page 25]).
Now in deep-sea life the case is different. Here temperature cannot be of so much account, since only a short distance down, the water becomes almost as cold as ice, and preserves this uniform chill all around the globe. The life found at a great depth, too, is very wide-spread, instead of restricted in its range, often occurring in two or more ocean basins; but here the restriction is an up-and-down one, rather than horizontal, and the secret is found in the word pressure. Few animals are able to live both in the shallows and under the enormous weight of sea water three or four miles deep.
A TYPICAL JELLYFISH.
This species (Pelagia cyanella) is a characteristic
oceanic discophorous medusa, common along the
Atlantic coast of the United States; it is
semi-transparent and lustrous pink.
This has recently (1897) been summed up very clearly by Prof. Arthur P. Crouch, in an article in “The Nineteenth Century,” from which it will be worth while to quote a paragraph or two:
The conditions under which they [that is, deep-sea animals] have to live in the abysmal areas seem very unfavorable to animal existence. The temperature at the bottom of the ocean is nearly down to freezing-point, and sometimes actually below it. There is a total absence of light, as far as sunlight is concerned, and there is an enormous pressure, reckoned at about one ton to the square inch in every 1000 fathoms, which is 160 times greater than that of the atmosphere we live in. At 2500 fathoms the pressure is thirty times more powerful than the steam pressure of a locomotive when drawing a train.[7] As late as 1880 a leading zoölogist explained the existence of deep-sea animals at such depths by assuming that their bodies were composed of solids and liquids of great density, and contained no air. This, however, is not the case with deep-sea fish, which are provided with air-inflated swimming-bladders. If one of these fish, in full chase after its prey, happens to ascend beyond a certain level, its bladder becomes distended with the decreased pressure, and carries it, in spite of all its efforts, still higher in its course. In fact, members of this unfortunate class are liable to become victims to the unusual accident of falling upwards, and no doubt meet with a violent death soon after leaving their accustomed level, and long before their bodies reach the surface....
The fauna of the deep sea—with a few exceptions hitherto only known as fossils—are new and specially modified forms of families and genera inhabiting shallow waters in modern times, and have been driven down to the depths of the ocean by their more powerful rivals in the battle of life, much as the ancient Britons were compelled to withdraw to the barren and inaccessible fastnesses of Wales. Some of their organs have undergone considerable modification in correspondence to the changed conditions of their new habitats. Thus down to 900 fathoms their eyes have generally become enlarged, to make the best of the faint light which may possibly penetrate there. After 1000 fathoms these organs are either still further enlarged or so greatly reduced that in some species they disappear altogether and are replaced by enormously long feelers. The only light at great depths which would enable large eyes to be of any service is the phosphorescence given out by deep-sea animals. We know that at the surface this light is often very powerful, and Sir Wyville Thomson has recorded one occasion on which the sea at night was “a perfect blaze of phosphorescence, so strong that lights and shadows were thrown on the sails and it was easy to read the smallest print.” It is thought possible by several naturalists that certain portions of the sea bottom may be as brilliantly illumined by this sort of light as the streets of a European city after sunset.
THE BOTTLE-FISH AND THE PELICAN-FISH.
AT THE BOTTOM OF THE TROPICAL SEA.
The large floating object is the phosphorescent, compound, oceanic hydrozoan Agalma elegans, a physophore related to the jellyfishes. Its tentacles trail over dead corals,—madrepore, brain-corals, etc.; while the living reef beyond is crowned by branching corals, corallines and seaweeds.
One of the most striking examples of this vertical distribution, which forms layers of animal life, as it were, in the ocean from the abysses to the shallows, is shown by the coral-reefs. The foundations of these polyp-built barriers or islands are laid by the millions of minute individuals of one solid, heavy kind of coral which can flourish only in pretty deep water. When these have reached their highest growth they cease to propagate there, and a second kind comes and colonizes upon the summit of this massive foundation and carries the work a little farther up. Then these die off, and a third kind plants itself upon their remains and carries the structure to the top, near the surface of the sea, where many surface-corals, corallines, and various other limy and flinty plants and animals help to erect a dry reef, upon which land vegetation can find a root-hold, and where, after a while, men may dwell. When these coral-built islands are ring-shaped they are called atolls, and are believed to be living crowns about the summits of submerged mountains.
Men make use of something in nearly every branch of ocean life, from humblest to highest. The lowest of all, as I have already said, are the foraminifers; it is their skeletons which make up our common chalk. A close ally of theirs is the sponge, of which a dozen or so varieties are sold in the shops. Sponges come chiefly from the Mediterranean, the Persian and Ceylonese waters of the Indian Ocean, and from the Gulf coast of Florida. In the Old World they are obtained chiefly by diving. Men who are trained from boyhood to this work go out to the sponge-ground in boats on fine days. Fastening a netting-bag about their waists, and taking a heavy stone in their hands, they dive head-foremost to the bottom,—often twelve or fifteen fathoms below,—tear the sponges from the rocks, and rise with a bagful, to be dragged almost utterly exhausted into their boat, often fainting immediately after. This requires them to hold their breath under the water for two minutes or more; but none but the most expert can do that, and a diver does not live long. In Florida, however, the sponge-gatherers do not dive, but go in ships to where the sponges grow, and then cruise about in small boats, each of which contains two men: one steers, while the other leans over the side searching the bottom. In order to see it plainly, he has what he calls a “water-glass”—a common wooden pail the bottom of which is glass. Pressing this down into the water a few inches, he thrusts in his face, and can then perceive everything on the bottom with great distinctness. When he sees a sponge he thrusts down a long, stout pole, on the end of which is a double hook, like a small pitchfork, set at right angles to the handle, and drags up the captive.
The sponges, having been obtained, must be put through long operations of rotting, beating, rinsing, drying, and bleaching before their skeletons—the serviceable part—are fit for use. Only a few, however, out of the large number of species of sponges have any commercial value.
The limy skeletons of the coral polyps form what we term “corals.” The round white ones and the variously branching ones may come from any one of several parts of the equatorial half of the globe, and are of value chiefly as mantel ornaments. The red coral of which necklaces and other bits of jewelry are made, especially at Naples, is procured by divers about the shores of Sicily and Sardinia, and its gathering, cutting and mounting into ornaments, form a flourishing industry in southern Italy.
Rising in the zoölogical scale to starfishes and sea-urchins, I can only say that the starfishes interest oystermen because they prey upon their oysters, and the former often do enormous damage to planted beds, especially in Long Island Sound. In the old days it was thought that medicines made out of the “stars” and the “sea-eggs” were very potent in certain diseases. The trepang—some one of several sorts of holothurian, an elongated creature related to the starfish, and covered with a prickly, leathery hide, so that it looks like a sort of sea-cucumber—which is dried and eaten by the Chinese and Malayans, belongs here too; considerable quantities of these queer food-creatures are gathered by the Chinese along the coasts of Mexico, Southern California and the outlying islands, and are sold in San Francisco mainly for export to Asia. The sea-urchin itself is eagerly sought as food by the Indians of the American northwest coast.
Coming to crustaceans—do we not eat crabs gladly, from the “shedder” to the huge lobster? On the coast of Maine whole villages of sea-side people get their support almost wholly by catching lobsters and canning them to send abroad. In Virginia and North Carolina, at certain seasons, hundreds of men are engaged in catching and shipping crabs for market, and in Louisiana large factories are devoted to canning shrimps, which are also extensively used as food in the Old World, where they are cooked by parching or boiling, and sold by peddlers in the streets.
This brings us to the mollusks, in our glance at the useful animals of the ocean; and to prove their importance, it is enough to remind the reader that these include the “shell-fish” of our coasts—the oyster, clam, mussel, scallop, cockle, and all the rest—not a few!
I found by my long study of the subject, when, in 1879 and 1880, I was gathering statistics of the United States shell-fisheries for the United States Fish Commission and the Tenth Census, that at that time there were taken from our waters, of oysters alone, almost 23,000,000 bushels each year, worth to the oystermen about $13,500,000. During the twenty years that have elapsed since that investigation—the figures of which you may obtain in full in my Report to the Tenth Census upon the Oyster Industries—these amounts have largely increased.
This business employs over 100,000 persons in this country alone; and oysters, clams, and other shell-fish are gathered all round the globe, forming one of the most important of all natural supplies of food. In the most thickly populated parts of the world the natural supply of oysters long ago ceased to suffice for the demand, and artificial propagation and cultivation were resorted to and now prevail on both sides of the North Atlantic, and to a less degree elsewhere.
STARFISHES AT HOME.
This is the common eastern American form (Asterias vulgaris) upper and under views.
The Romans, away back in the days of Horace, raised oysters in ponds along the Italian coast, and Eastern nations preserved the custom during the middle ages, when Europe was doing little except quarreling and making pretty pictures on parchment. More recently the French of the Channel coast took it up, and the English followed, finding that their natural oyster and mussel beds were becoming exhausted. The same fate has overtaken our oyster-beds everywhere north of the Chesapeake, and largely there; so that now nearly all the oysters brought to market are those which have been raised upon private planted beds, which men own or lease and attend to as they do to estates on shore; indeed, it is common to speak of such under-water estates as “farms.”
SEA-SHELLS IN THE SURF.
An oyster-farm may be conducted in two ways. One is to place upon a certain space of bottom, in some shallow bay, as many young oysters as it will conveniently hold. These young oysters, generally hardly bigger than your thumb-nail, are dredged in summer from certain reefs in deep water, where the oysters are never allowed to grow to full size; and to a large extent they are brought northward by the ship-load from Maryland and Virginia, which have more “seed,” as it is called, than they need for their own planting. These young oysters, protected from harm, and having plenty of space to grow, come to a proper size for market in about three years, and are then gathered by their owners and sold.
Another method is to spread old shells, pebbles, etc., on the bottom, to which the floating eggs emitted by adult oysters in the neighborhood adhere. The thick “catch” of infant mollusks hatched from these captive eggs is then taken up and respread in a more scattered way upon new ground, and is allowed to grow to maturity. The oysters raised by either of these methods are of better appearance and taste, as a rule, than those that grow naturally, because each has room enough to perfect its proportions.
MELEAGRINA.
Meleagrina (Avicula)
margaritifera.
b. byssal foramen or notch;
g. suspensors of the gills.
Mussels, clams of many varieties, and even sponges and peak-shells, are also cultivated to some extent, each according to the plan its natural habits make advisable. In this way certain great areas of favorable ocean-bottom have become as valuable as the neighboring shore-land, or even far more so, if you compare, acre for acre, the yield of the crops below with those above the water-line.
But mollusks are useful in many other ways than as human food. As they are known to be the principal food of several valuable fishes, enormous quantities are devoted to baiting hooks in both hand-lining and trawling for cod and similar commercial species. The quaint squids are mollusks, and these are especially useful for bait in certain places and seasons, and are taken in the North Atlantic in vast numbers for that purpose.
The shells of mollusks are applied to a surprising variety of purposes, from paving roads to making shirt-studs, while their natural beauty has suggested their utilization as ornaments in a hundred ways. We cut them up by the million into buttons and various small objects, such as parasol handles, and polish and fashion them into all sorts of knickknacks, thus giving employment to thousands of persons. Many ship-loads of shells are brought to New York from the West Indies every year for such purposes. I need not dwell upon this, but turn to the interesting subject of pearls.
CASSIDIDÆ.
Helmet-shell
(Cassis flammea).
Mother-of-pearl is the bright inside surface, or nacre, of the large oyster that gives us pearls, which are themselves composed of the same substance formed in a nodule around some intruding substance, like a grain of sand, which irritates the mollusk’s skin until it is made smooth and comfortable by this iridescent coating.
Bivalves yielding this beautiful substance exist in various parts of the world; but in America the only fishery for the pearl-oyster is in the Gulf of California, and that is by no means as productive as it used to be. The season for pearl-fishing on the Pacific coast of Mexico is from June to December, but the diving can be done only in good weather, and for about three hours at the time of low water, since the tide there rises twenty feet, which would make a large dive of itself; and, besides, the currents are troublesome during high water.
SCORPION-SHELL.
(Pteroceras lambis.)
At the right hour the Mexicans go out in their canoes, one man of the four or five in each canoe paddling, while the rest scrutinize the bottom. It may be rocky and weed-grown, but the water is clear, and their practised eyes detect a single round oyster where you or I certainly would overlook a dozen of them. Then down a man goes and brings up his prize, with perhaps some additional ones. Sixty or eighty feet is not too deep for these adventurous divers, who will stay a whole minute upon the bottom. No food is eaten by these men on the day they dive until their labor has been done.
Western Australia is another fruitful field for pearl-oysters, and until a few years ago they were taken there by native blackfellows, diving without weights or any other assistance in any water not more than ten fathoms deep. The inshore shallows have now been so cleared of shells that the only profitable industry is to go down in deep water in diving-dress and make a thorough clean-up of each “patch” where the shells seem numerous.
The divers find it an interesting and curious world where they work, but one full of fright and peril. Some men who attempt it are so unnerved that they will never make a second descent. None can endure the practice long without ill health resulting; and the native Australians will never enter a diver’s dress, declining to go down where it is too deep to dive naked.
MITER-SHELLS.
a. Mitra vulpecula.
b. Mitra episcopalis.
As for the dangers, drowning by some accident to the apparatus, or through the stupidity of the boatmen above, is only one of them. The warm waters in which these men work are the home of the largest and most deadly sharks, and of various other submarine creatures one would rather not meet in their own element. Of them all the sharks are most to be dreaded, especially by the naked men. As a rule, however, they are easily frightened away, or can be avoided by the clever swimmer, who quickly stirs up the mud of the bottom, and rises in the fog before the dull shark discovers that he has gone. East Indians are said to fight sharks quite fearlessly, stabbing them with a knife as they roll over preparatory to a close attack. I have read a story to the effect that formerly the Mexican Indian divers on our western coast used to take down with them a stick of hard wood about two feet long and sharpened at both ends. When a shark was encountered from which they could not readily escape, they would snatch this weapon from their belts, grasp it in the middle, and thrust it dexterously crosswise into the widely distended mouth of the monster, opened to seize them. To shut down his jaws upon such a skewer would undoubtedly discomfit a shark or anything else; but when one thinks of the time, nerve, and sure aim it would require to accomplish this feat, he begins to doubt whether it really ever was tried. I advise you, therefore, to prove the story better than I have been able to do, before you pin all your faith to it.
VENUS’ COMB, ONE OF THE MURICES OF CHINA.
A MUREX (“MUREX PALMA-ROSÆ”) OF CEYLON.
An Australian pearl-diver, writing about this matter in “The Century” magazine a few years ago, assures us that a fifteen-foot shark, magnified by the water, and making a bee-line for one, is sufficient to make the stoutest heart quake, in spite of the assertion that sharks have never been known to attack a man in a rubber diving-dress. He adds:
Neither is the sight of a large turtle comforting when one does not know exactly what it is, and the coiling of a sea-snake around one’s legs, although it has only one’s hands to bite at, is, to say the least, unpleasant. A little fish called the stone-fish is one of the enemies of the diver. It seems to make its habitation under the pearl-shell, as it is only when picking up a shell that any one has been known to be bitten. I remember well the first time I was bitten by this spiteful member of the finny tribe. I dropped my bag of shells, and hastened to the surface; but in this short space of time my hand and arm had so swollen that it was with difficulty I could get the dress off, and then was unable to work for three days, suffering intense pain the while. Afterward I learned that staying down a couple of hours after a bite will stop any further discomfort, the pressure of water causing much bleeding at the bitten part, and thus expelling the poison.
All the oysters when brought ashore are opened in vats of water, and carefully examined for the pearls they may contain half embedded in their mantles; but very few reward the diver with gems worth selling separately or otherwise than by weight as “seed” pearls. Many divers, therefore, do not themselves take the trouble of opening what they catch, but sell them unopened at a few cents a dozen, preferring the small and steady assured income to the chances of failure or a fortune.
The round, flat, beautiful shells are saved, and their sale (for mother-of-pearl work) brings nearly as much money into the pearl-fishing communities in the course of a season as is derived from the pearls themselves.
What beauty, as well as usefulness, have shells! And how wide is the science (conchology) that deals with them, and tells us not only their structure and manner of life, but interprets the part which their extraordinary forms, ornaments, colors, and appendages play in their “struggle for existence” down in that populous green under-world of the waters!
ON THE GULF STREAM SLOPE, FROM ONE TO TWO MILES BELOW THE SURFACE.
I know a picturesque old house [writes a charming pen in one of the early volumes of “Scribner’s Monthly”] that has a many-shelved pantry devoted to the exhibition and sale of shells, collected in many a long voyage to the remotest parts of the five oceans. Apart from their scientific interest, their associations with alien races and far-off countries, how beautiful these shells are in themselves! and how readily might the prevailing vulgarities and absurdities in the decoration of glass and porcelain be corrected by studying the ceramics of nature! How, for instance, is our sense of cleanliness served and our appetite wooed by the extreme smoothness, hardness of surface, and pearly white of the oyster-shell! What decoration in the part that receives the viand, what metallizing the surface or changing it into artificial marble, or covering it up with pictures, would take the place of the pure, colorless shell?
Every species of these shells has a principle of growth, or law of form, peculiar to itself and yet based upon some more general law of form common to other species.... In the comb of Venus, for instance, the initial impulse of structure tends to produce a series of spines of a peculiar curvature, and arranged after a certain order that involves the use of similar curves. It is interesting to study the development of this simple principle into the complex and singular form of beauty comprised in the shell itself, the idea being carried into the most minute particulars—even the dark markings at the mouth being shaped like spines, and every small projection on the surface evidently being an arrested development of spines. In the Murex haustellum, on the contrary, nodules take the place of spines. In the M. endivia an entirely different idea is developed. Notice the cross-striations. Instead of prolonging themselves into cylindrically pointed spines, as in the case of the Venus’ comb, or bunching themselves into knobs, as in the M. haustellum, they expand into wonderful foliated projections, the edges of which are beautifully fluted, like the leaves of the lettuce. Another fine effect is afforded by the different texture of the inside and outside surfaces, down to the smallest foliation, the inner parts exhibiting a polished pearly white, and the outside a gray and wrinkled skin. Observe that, however rough or dull of hue the outside of a shell, its lips are always pure and often flushed with lovely color; for, as a rule (and here is another hint to decorators), Nature distinguishes by some adornment the most significant parts of her creatures, where life and use are centered.... The ocean, indeed, beautifies all it touches. Give it any rough shard, and it will so roll it about, and lick it with its waves, and smooth it with their soft attrition, that it will return you a polished and shapely nodule, exhibiting all the beauty of color and surface of which the material is capable.
