A MODERN VENETIAN CARGO BOAT
This is hardly more than a barge, with a sail plan of a modified form, somewhat suggesting the lateen rig common in the Mediterranean, and something like the lug sails common in French waters.
Tugs are even more necessary when sailing ships appear, for a large sailing ship without auxiliary power is hard to handle in a crowded and narrow harbour. Barges, too, require outside power, which the tugs furnish, for few barges have power of their own. Canal boats are barges of a sort, and once in a port can no longer depend upon the mule teams that tow them through canals. So the tug’s life is a busy and a varied one. It swings on the end of a huge hawser in its attempt to keep the Leviathan or the Majestic from sideswiping a pier. It tows barges loaded with coal, or piled high with any other kind of cargo. It tows a string of empty and wall-sided canal boats up the river, or steams along with one lashed to each side. Tugs carry no cargo, but they are for ever straining at hawsers in their energetic furthering of commerce.
Lighters are of any size and of a great variety of shapes. In New York they are likely to be capable of carrying from three hundred to six hundred or seven hundred tons of freight, and are merely huge scows, their sides parallel, their ends square, their decks slightly overhanging the water at bow and stern. Often there is a small deck house for the accommodation of the “crew,” which generally consists of one man, who serves as watchman, and also handles the lines as the lighter is made fast to tugs or piers or to the sides of other vessels. Other ports have other types of lighters. In Hamburg they range in size from comparatively small boats to comparatively large ones. The small ones, and even some of the larger, are often propelled along the shallow canals of the port by poles, or are pulled along the quays by men to whom lines are passed. These Hamburg lighters are often built of steel (the New York lighters are usually of wood) and have pointed bows and sometimes pointed sterns. They are broad and sturdy, some have decks, some covered decks, and some are open. In bad weather the freight on these open lighters is covered by tarpaulins. It is interesting that the largest Hamburg lighters about equal in size the smallest New York lighters. In vessels so simple as lighters are, there can be few differences save those of size and general shape, so one will find that most lighters fall into one or the other of the types I have mentioned. They are sometimes loaded directly from ships. They may be loaded from freight put ashore on piers, quays, at grain elevators and ore pockets. At some ports where the draft of water does not permit a heavily laden ship to enter, the lighters are sent out to where the ship is at anchor and “lightens” her, if she is discharging, or takes her her cargo if she is loading. Lighters, then, are floating delivery wagons, subject to many uses.
Canal boats hardly require much space. They are merely barges whose uses are largely restricted to canals. They have no power of their own, and their journeys are generally at the end of a towline hitched to a mule or a team which walks along a tow path beside the canal. They are unbeautiful but useful, and usually have a deck house for the use of the bargeman, who is often accompanied by his wife and children. There are no masts from which to spread sails or fly signal flags, but in lieu of this, one sometimes sees the housewife hanging out her washing on a clothesline stretched wherever she can place it. In their attempt to secure the comforts of home the bargeman’s family is likely to have with it a dog or a couple of pigs, and sometimes both. Such a collection of human and animal passengers can live on a canal boat with a considerable degree of comfort, for the dangers of the sea are not for them. Although life on a canal boat is subject to some handicaps, at least it does not include danger from high seas and uncharted reefs.
The introduction of the gasolene engine has made possible successful small boats, of almost every size and shape, speedy, slow, seaworthy, or cranky, depending on their design or lack of design. They scoot everywhere on a thousand errands and add a nervous note to ports that otherwise would seem to be calm and self-possessed. These motor boats are infinite in number and are put to every use. Here, however, I shall not do more than recognize the very apparent fact that they exist.
These vessels I have named are all a port would need to take care of its overseas commerce. Most ports, however, are busy with an infinite number of other ships engaged in coastwise or inland trade. River steamers, fishermen, ferryboats, and coasting freighters are perhaps commoner than ocean-going ships. Then, too, one sometimes sees a floating grain elevator, not dissimilar in appearance to some grain elevators ashore. There are water barges, which supply ships with fresh water. There are dredges, seemingly for ever at work. There are glistening yachts and frowning warships. There is everything that floats rubbing elbows with everything else that floats, and yet despite the seeming confusion, the whole port is orderly, and seldom indeed are there collisions or accidents to mar the smoothness of the flow of commerce.
CHAPTER IX
THE ART OF SEAMANSHIP
Seamanship is the art of handling ships and is not to be confused with navigation, which is the mathematical science of determining ships’ positions and their courses. Only sailors who have had experience at sea can be adept at seamanship, but it is quite possible for a person who has never seen a ship to learn all the intricacies of navigation. Neither is a knowledge of one requisite to the mastery of the other.
In this chapter I shall devote myself to a few of the more obvious phases of seamanship, leaving navigation for the next chapter, where I shall also touch upon piloting, a related science.