For the main royal shall never be stowed.—
J. St. A. Jewell.
The Introduction of Iron in Shipbuilding.
IT was the introduction of iron, as the chief material for the building of ships, that contributed more than anything else to the supremacy of the British Mercantile Marine.
Iron killed the competition of our American cousins, who, as long as wood was the chief factor, were able to give us a hard fight as to which should lead the world in shipbuilding. Yes, it was the advent of iron, more than the North and South War, more than the sinkings of the Alabama, more than any slump in freights or foolish shipping legislation on the part of the United States, and more even than our adoption of Free Trade, which made the British nation the carriers of the world.
Many people think, and they have been fostered in their belief by the good old conservative wood and hemp sailor, that iron also sounded the knell of the sailing ship. This is, of course, to a certain degree true, yet sail continued to flourish for 50 years after the advent of iron, and up to the late nineties no finer ships had ever been built or sailed than the iron clippers from the Clyde and other British shipyards.
It was the deterioration of the man before the mast which the advent of steam brought about, and the cutting of freights induced by coal, the cry for bigger ships and more luxury, and also, that soulless modern institution, the company manager, which drove sailing ships down and down in the trade of the world; these and the growing desire for mechanical speed, which have invaded almost every department of life, killed the windjammer.
But in iron, as in wood, sail had a zenith to reach before the decline set in, and through the last half of the nineteenth century the ports of the world were crowded with magnificent iron full-rigged ships and barques, such as it would have been hard to improve upon with all our new knowledge of wind pressure, streamlines, and least resistance curves.
The Drawbacks and Advantages of Iron.
Like everything else iron had its drawbacks as well as its advantages. At first its effect upon the deviation of the compass caused many a stranding and many a disastrous shipwreck. Then too, though an iron ship can be driven into a head sea in a way no dare-devil of a Yankee driver would have dared to attempt with his soft-wood clipper, iron has not the buoyancy of wood, and the sight of a modern four-poster’s main deck when running before the westerlies would have made a Black Ball skipper rub his eyes with astonishment. As a preventative of weed and barnacles, no anti-fouling has yet been discovered which can compete with copper, and thus an iron hull, especially if it had been long in certain well-known localities, was ever a handicap to a vessel’s speed through the water. Iron ships have never been able to equal their wooden sisters in light winds, and this chiefly owing to the trouble of foul bottoms.