CANTILEVER-FRAMED SHIP.
By permission of Sir Raylton Dixon & Co., Ltd.
To a still more exceptional purpose has the steamship been adapted in order to act as an ice-breaker and give liberty to those ships which, in certain parts of the world, have, with the approach of winter, been compelled to enter a lengthy imprisonment. Such localities are found in both Canada and Russia. Thanks to the ice-breaker steamship it has been made possible to keep open the Baltic ports with a passage of sufficient width. Constructed of a strength which is possessed by no other vessel than a man-of-war, the ice-breaker attacks the frozen masses as a battleship used to ram her foe. She goes for the ship’s enemy with her curved bow, and wages war with all the ability which the ship-builder and naval architect have given her. Her bow is specially strengthened to suffer the force of the contact with the heavy ice masses, and the lines of the hull are such that the ice in its endeavour to crush the ship finds difficulty in getting a good grip upon it. Nevertheless, these ships are fitted with numerous water-tight compartments. Their means of propulsion are, of course, screws.
Similarly, across the North Atlantic, the steamship on the Great Lakes, where for one third of the year the water is frozen, has to battle with the ice-fiend. Ordinary steamers have to be laid aside, but the train-ferry steamship still goes on with her work, being specially designed to break through the impeding ice. As in the Russian ice-breakers, so here the principle employed is that the ship shall forge her way unto the ice, and by means of her overhanging bow, and its weight, shall break through the obstruction.
Across the wide harbour of New York the steamship train ferries, carrying rolling stock run aboard by lines, are employed to an extent that is strange in comparison with English customs, although the idea is not new to the Mersey, and the evergreen scheme of instituting a ferry of this nature across the English Channel to France, so that international travellers can go from Charing Cross to the other end of the world without having to change their compartments, is still advocated with enthusiasm.
We pass now to another type of steamship, which is endowed with as much distinctive character as the steam tug. The steam trawler may not be as smart as a steam yacht nor as fast as a torpedo destroyer; yet, for all that, she is able to encounter as bad weather and—size for size—is perhaps a good deal better sea-boat. In the North Sea, which has been the favourite cruising ground of the steam trawler, there is to be encountered as nasty and dangerous a short sea as can be found, perhaps, in any other part of the world. In all weathers, and at all times of the year, the trawler has to go about her business, and the comparatively few disasters that overtake her is a credit at once to the seamanship of her skipper and the seaworthiness of the little ship herself. [Opposite this page] we show a photograph of a typical North Sea steam trawler. This is the Orontes of Hull, built in 1895, of iron, by Messrs. Cochrane and Sons, of Selby. She measures 110 feet long, 21 feet wide, and 12 feet deep, her net tonnage being 76, and her horse-power 60. The evolution of the steam trawler was on this wise: When the value of steam had been shown to be worth the consideration of the fisherman he responded. At first the old-fashioned paddle-steamer was used tentatively on the north-east coast of England, and the writer remembers in the early ’eighties the singular unattractiveness—the total absence of beauty, indeed—which these vessels possessed. By birth and adoption these were properly tugs, but they did a bit of trawling on their own account when not otherwise required, and met with sufficient success to repeat the experiment many times. Some of these ugly old craft are still to be seen in the neighbourhood of Scarborough and Whitby.
THE NORTH SEA TRAWLER “ORONTES.”
From a Photograph. By permission of Messrs. Cochrane & Son, Selby.
