Ships of the seven seas

by Hawthorne Daniel

What I have called the “European type” of port is one in which piers, such as those in New York, are practically unknown. Many European ports have a handicap that does not trouble ports of the United States. This handicap is the high tide. While the tide at New York has a range of 4½ feet, at Boston 9½ feet, at Baltimore 1 foot, Liverpool is troubled with a range of 25 or 30 feet, and many other ports have as much, or almost as much. This means that while a ship may be tied up to a pier at New York and not be bothered by an extreme movement up and down great enough to make her any difficulty in the handling of her cargo, ships in Liverpool cannot be berthed at unprotected piers, for if they were they would find their decks far below the deck of the pier at low tide, while at high tide the water would raise them until their decks would be above it.

There are two ways of overcoming this difficulty. At Liverpool great landing stages are built, floating in the water parallel to the shore. Running from these to the shore are great hinged gangplanks which permit the landing stage to rise and fall with the tides while these gangplanks, which are really more like bridges, hold them parallel to the shore and serve as bridges as well. A ship, made fast to one of these landing stages, rises and falls as the stage does, and the two maintain their relative positions to each other regardless of the stage of the tide. In Liverpool these stages are largely used for passenger ships.

The other method, which is also in use at Liverpool as well as at many other ports, is to build a sea wall across the entrance to the docks, and in this sea wall to build a “lock,” or a water gate. When the tide is in, the water gate is opened and the harbour or the dock is flooded to the level of high tide. As the tide recedes this lock is closed and the water level behind it remains the same. Ships pass in and out, either at high tide, when the lock or gate can be left open for a time, or, if at other stages of the tide, by means of the lock, which, being made up of two gates at the opposite ends of a long, narrow, canal-like passageway, makes it possible for the ship to pass into the lock, where the water level can be made to coincide with the level of the dock or of the water outside. Then, by opening the inner or the outer gate, as the case may be, the ship can enter the dock or the unprotected waters outside.

Equipment of both these types is to be found at a number of European ports, while still other ports, not troubled with a great range of tide, do not find it necessary to instal them.

A NEW YORK HARBOUR LIGHTER

Lighters take various forms and perform various tasks. European lighters are more likely to have pointed ends. American lighters very often have square ends. Occasionally they have engines of their own, but generally they depend on tugs for power.

But the principal difference between the European and American types is to be found in the use by the former of huge quays, sometimes more or less similar in general shape to the American piers, but infinitely larger. Also they are surrounded by stone sea walls and are of dry land. On these great quays are warehouses, railroad tracks, derricks, cranes, and even great railroad yards. They are of various sizes and various shapes, but all of them, by comparison with piers, are very large. At Manchester, for instance, where a harbour has been built in that inland city and connected with the Irish Sea by the Manchester Ship Canal, there are only eleven or twelve quays, but their area is 152 acres, and they have a water frontage of more than five miles. The railways and sidings on and immediately adjacent to the quays have a total length of well over thirty miles. Great warehouses, some as many as thirteen stories high, are built on these quays, with berthing space for ships on one side and railroad sidings on the other. Inland canals as well as railroads serve this port and, of course, much local freight is moved by truck. Manchester is an excellent example of what I have termed the European type of port.

But as I have said, no two ports are identical. Each port has advantages and disadvantages, problems and solutions of its own. Descriptions of a few scattered ports may be of some service in giving an idea of the variety of problems and solutions that may arise, before I turn to a description of the details of port equipment.

I have given a little space to the arrangement of the ports of New York and Manchester, and Liverpool has been mentioned. Let us turn, then, to Rio de Janeiro, a port very different from these.