A tug is a towboat, and once a sea-going ship has reached a harbour, she is largely dependent on that harbour’s tugs. In appearance, at least, European tugs are very different from American.
In British and German and French ports, and elsewhere on the continent, one sees many paddle-wheel tugs—a thing unknown, or nearly so, in America. American tugs are universally propeller boats, except on shallow rivers, where paddle-wheel steamboats sometimes are made to do the work of tugs.
An American tug is a busy-looking boat. Her bow is fairly high, her deck slopes aft in a rather marked curve. Her stern is low. A deck house extends from the “towing bits,” or heavy built-in posts to which the towline is made fast, up to within ten or a dozen feet of the bow. This deck house is not high—hardly higher than a man’s head—and contains a galley and a mess room, besides entrances to the boiler and engine rooms. On top of this, at its forward end, is the wheel house, as high as the deck house on which it sits. Astern of the wheel house is a huge funnel for so small a boat, and astern of that sits a lifeboat, resting in its “chocks.”
But the surprise comes if an inquisitive observer goes to a local shipyard and sees one of these small steamboats in a floating dock with her bulky underbody visible. What stands above the surface seems but little compared with what is below. She may draw eight or ten or more feet. Her body lines are very full, and at her stern is mounted a propeller that seems almost large enough for a good-sized freighter. And it is, for these boats have not only themselves to propel; they must meet incoming ships which are more or less helpless to direct their movements in such limited spaces as are available in a harbour. If the new arrival be small, one tug can readily place her beside her pier. If the ship be the Majestic or the Leviathan, then a dozen or more tugs must push against her mighty side, or puff great clouds of steam as they strain at great hawsers before the giant is safely at her berth.
Every harbour needs these little workers, and their work is important, but there are other ships whose work is of a different sort, and even more important. These are the dredges that keep a harbour’s channels open, or cut new ones or widen the ones already there. I have not the space in which to go into a description of these grubbers in the mud, but I can mention a few of their more salient points.
There are several kinds. A suction dredge lowers a great pipe into the harbour mud and pumps great quantities of mud-charged water to the surface. This is run into tanks where most of the mud settles while the water runs over the top. In some cases it is possible for the pipe carrying this mud and water to be led ashore where a low spot is to be filled or where the mud is needed for some other reason. Here the water trickles gradually away, and the troublesome mud that had been silting up a channel is converted, perhaps, into valuable city property.
Another type of dredge carries an endless belt on which are great ladle-shaped containers, called “buckets.” One end of this belt is lowered to the bottom. The belt is set in motion, and each gigantic “bucket” dumps the mud of the harbour bottom into a great “well” built into the ship which is capable of carrying a startling quantity.
There are other types of less importance than these, but already this chapter has grown beyond the length assigned to it and I must bring it to a close. To pretend for a moment that I have amply described the ships I have mentioned would be, of course, ridiculous. I have done hardly more than mention the more important and more picturesque types of steamships that exist in the world to-day. A book could be written on any one of them, and my greatest hope is that I may interest a few readers who will go to other volumes more complete than mine, in order to learn more of some phase or another of this fascinating subject. Should I be so fortunate I shall be content, for one volume cannot do more than outline what can be found in countless others that have specialized on a thousand phases of the subject I am attempting to discuss.
CHAPTER VII
SHIPS OF WAR
Much of the story of ships is contained in the story of ships of war, which, from time immemorial, have been vital factors in the lives of nations. The Egyptians fought battles on the sea. The Greeks saved their civilization from the armies of Xerxes by defeating the ships of the Persians at Salamis. Rome defeated Carthage because Rome secured the upper hand on the sea. It is true that much of the story of the Punic Wars is the story of Hannibal and Hamilcar, but while Hannibal marched his army from Spain across the Pyrenees, across France, across the Alps, and finally into Italy, where he spent years harrying the land, Carthage owed her downfall to the ships of Rome, as Hannibal owed his final defeat by Scipio Africanus to those ships. Similarly Napoleon, two thousand years later, owed the collapse of his plans not so much to the defeats he suffered on land as the defeats he suffered on the sea at the hands of Nelson and the British Navy.