AN AIRPLANE VIEW OF THE U. S. S. LANGLEY
An airplane carrier. In order to build the great flying deck the funnel had to be led to the port side, where it projects only slightly above the deck.
The Dreadnaught was built in 1906. She is 490 feet long, 92 feet wide, and displaces 17,900 tons. From this will be seen the enormous increase in size that ships had gone through since the introduction of steel. She carried ten 12-inch guns, mounted in five turrets, and in addition to these, originally carried no other guns save twenty-four 12-pounder rapid-fire guns. She could steam at 21½ knots an hour, and the distance she could go without replenishing her supply of coal was 5,800 miles.
This ship, as I have suggested, revolutionized modern battleship design, and, since she first appeared, the leading naval powers have built ships of her type as their first line of defense. It is true that her secondary battery was found to be inadequate and that later dreadnaughts and super-dreadnaughts have increased the size of the guns in this minor battery, but they still retain the huge and powerful battery of big guns of a uniform size.
Dreadnaughts have enlarged their guns from 12-inch to 14-inch and at last to 16-inch, which, under the Disarmament Treaty signed at Washington in 1921, is the limit in size, and some of the newest ships have their guns mounted three in a turret instead of one or two, but the characteristic that made the Dreadnaught a dreadnaught is still a characteristic of all present-day first-line battleships.
Other types have come into existence, but unfortunately I have no space in which to discuss them. Battle cruisers are fast ships of tremendous size—they are the largest of modern warships—which carry little armour but are armed with huge batteries of the heaviest guns and are capable of enormous speed. They can make from 28 to 35 knots an hour—a speed that can be equalled only by destroyers. There are submarines, those slinking creatures that infested the North Sea, the Atlantic, and the Mediterranean during the World War. The hours I have spent on duty in the English Channel and the Bay of Biscay, leaning on the bridge rail, scanning every wave and every bit of wreckage, helping to pick up occasionally the crew of a torpedoed steamer, searching night and day for the submarines sent out from Kiel and Zeebrugge, have not made of submarines a type of warship for which I have any love. But I realize that, despite the aversion I grew to have for them, they are marvellous structures, capable of amazing feats, and capable, too, of better, or at least not such vicious, uses as those to which the Germans put them.
But the warships of to-day—they are of almost innumerable designs and sizes and uses. A modern fleet is no longer able to maintain itself with fighting ships alone. Supply ships, hospital ships, airplane carriers, colliers, gunboats, fleet submarines, ordinary submarines, destroyers, scout cruisers, battle cruisers, dreadnaughts, super-dreadnaughts—these are some of the types that only an encyclopædia of naval information could adequately describe.
CHAPTER VIII
PORTS AND PORT EQUIPMENT
Not all of the story of the sea is in the story of ships. Ships have always required shelter from the stress of sea, where repairs could be made, where cargoes could be loaded and unloaded, where crews and passengers could be taken on board or put ashore. In ancient times a river’s mouth might have been sufficient, or a natural indentation in the coast line where a small protected body of water lay in the lee of a jutting headland. Sometimes a small bay, almost completely surrounded by land, and still deep enough for ships to ride at anchor, served as a harbour of refuge. Sometimes islands might be found that protected a small arm of the sea.