THE S.Y. “TRIAD.”
From a Photograph. By permission of the Caledon Shipbuilding Co., Ltd.
With the capabilities of which the motor has shown itself to be possessed, the future of the steam yacht is perhaps a little uncertain. Economy would seem to indicate that the former has numerous merits in that it enables sail power to be utilised more readily, and thus may arrest the fashion which is advancing in the direction of steam. For long passages the extreme comfort which is now obtainable in the modern liner leaves no choice in the matter. To keep up a steam yacht for the usual summer season of four months is a very serious item of expenditure. If we reckon £10 per ton as the average cost—and this is the accepted estimate—it will be seen that such a yacht as the Wakiva, for instance, leaves but little change out of £10,000 per year, and for this expenditure most men would expect to get a very large return in the way of sport and travel. Whether or not a like proportionate return is made, at least in giving employment to thousands of shipbuilding and yacht-hands, this special branch of sea sport is deserving of the high interest with which it is regarded.
CHAPTER XI
THE BUILDING OF THE STEAMSHIP
We propose in the present chapter, now that we have seen the evolution of the steamship through all its various vicissitudes and in its special ways, to set forth within the limited space that is now left to us some general idea of the means adopted to create the great steamship from a mass of material into a sentient, moving being.
Around the building of a ship there is encircling it perhaps far more sentiment than in the activity of almost any other industry. Poets and painters have found in this a theme for their imagination not once, but many times. Making a ship is something less prosaic, a million times more romantic, than making a house, for the reason that whilst the ship, as long as she remains on the stocks, is just so many thousand tons of material, yet from the very moment when she first kisses the water she becomes a living thing, intelligent, with a character of her own, distinct and recognisable. In the whole category of man-made things there is nothing comparable to this.
Fig. 1.—FLUSH-DECKED TYPE.
