Every-day Science: Volume 7. The Conquest of Time and Space

by Henry Smith Williams; Edward Huntington Williams

MODERN SAILING SHIPS

For a full century after the voyage of Columbus little progress was made in ship construction; short, stocky boats, with many decks high above the water-line at bow and stem continuing to be the most popular type. In the opening years of the seventeenth century, however, the English naval architect, Phineas Pett, departed from many of the accepted standards of his time, and produced ships not unlike modern full-rigged sailing vessels, except that the stern was still considerably elevated, and the bow of peculiar construction. One of Pett's ships, The Sovereign of the Seas, was a vessel 167 feet long, with 48 foot beam, and of 1,683 tons burthen. The introduction of this type of vessel was a distinct step forward toward modern shipbuilding.

THE OLD AND THE NEW—A CONTRAST

The replica of Henry Hudson's famous Half Moon, a typical fighting ship of the 16th century, and a modern submarine. The photograph was taken in New York Harbor during the Hudson-Fulton celebration, September, 1909.

The tendency of shipbuilders during the eighteenth century was to increase the length of vessels in proportion to the breadth of beam and diminish the depth of the hull and superstructures, above the water line, with improved sailing qualities. England's extensive trade with India and the far East was conducive to this development, as the "East Indiamen" were necessarily a combination of merchant vessel and battleship.

In the first half of the nineteenth century America rose to great commercial importance thanks to her fleets of fine sailing vessels. Speed rather than strength in their ships was the aim of American ship-builders, to gain which they built boats proportionately longer and narrower than ever constructed before for ocean traffic. The culminating type of wooden sailing ship was represented by the "Baltimore clippers," in which the length was five, and even six, times the beam, with light rigging and improved mechanical devices for handling it, whereby the amount of manual labor was greatly lessened. One of these ships, the Great Republic, built in 1853, was over three hundred feet long, and 3,400 tons register. She was a four-masted vessel, fitted with double topsails, with a spread of canvas about 4,500 square yards.

The modern descendant of the wooden clipper ship is the schooner with from four to six masts. Some of these vessels exceed the older boats in size and carrying capacity, if not in speed. Perhaps the largest schooner ever constructed is the Wyoming, which was completed at Bath, Maine, early in the year 1910. This vessel is 329 feet long and 50 feet broad. It has a carrying capacity of 6,000 tons. The construction of such a vessel at so recent a period suggests that the day of the sailing ship is by no means over notwithstanding that a full century has elapsed since the coming of the steamboat. Here, as so often elsewhere in the history of progress, it has happened that the full development of a type has not been reached until the ultimate doom of that type, except for special purposes, had been irrevocably sealed. Ever since the full development of the steamboat in the early decades of the nineteenth century, the sailing ship has seemed almost an anachronism; and yet, in point of fact, the steamship did not at once outrival its more primitive forerunner. Even in the matter of speed, the sailing ship more than held its own for a generation or so after the steamship had been placed in commission. In 1851 the American clipper Flying Cloud made 427 knots in twenty-four hours; and The Sovereign of the Seas bettered this by averaging over eighteen miles an hour for twenty-four consecutive hours. The Atlantic record for sailing vessels is usually said to have been made in 1862 by the clipper ship Dreadnought in a passage between Queenstown and New York, the time of which is stated as nine days and seventeen hours. It should be remarked, however, that the authenticity of this extraordinary performance has been challenged.

Be that as it may, it is certain that the speediest sailing ships, granted favorable conditions of wind and wave, more than surpassed the best efforts of the steamship until about the closing decades of the nineteenth century. But of course long before this the steamship had proved its supremacy under all ordinary conditions. Even though sailing ships continued to be constructed in large numbers, their picturesque rigging became less and less a feature in all navigable waters, and the belching funnel of the steamship had become a characteristic substitute as typifying the sea-going vessel.

The story of the development of this new queen of the waters must now demand our attention. It begins with the futile efforts of several more or less visionary enthusiasts who were contemporaries of James Watt, and who thought they saw great possibilities in the steam engine as a motive power to take the place of oars and sails for the propulsion of ships.