Main deck beams and ’tween deck beams were unusually large and spaced unusually close together. The latter were placed on a water line instead of with a sheer, so that they were just below the load water line where the severest and most frequent ice pressure would come.
Each main deck beam together with the ’tween deck beam below it, and four stout diagonal braces to the ship’s sides and a 2½″ vertical steel tie-rod from the bottom of the keel to the upper side of the deck binding all together, formed a double king post truss, one superimposed upon the other.
This truss arrangement was made possible by my method of housing the personnel of the expedition in light roomy quarters on deck, rather than below the decks.
The sides of the ship varied from twenty-four to thirty inches in thickness. These sides, supported at every four feet of the ship’s length by the truss system above described, and still further reinforced by three solid timber transverse bulkheads, were immune from being crushed in.
To avoid unnecessary weight, no planking was used between decks; there were no interior fittings; and spars and rigging were as lightly made as possible. The hatch coamings were of stout white oak, built almost as high as the top of the bulwarks, to add to the safety of the ship in heavy weather.
To protect her planks from the gnawing of the ice while steaming through it, as well as to reduce friction, the ship was surrounded at the water line with an armor belt of dense slippery greenheart.
This wood imported from Guiana expressly for the purpose, is so tough and dense that spikes or bolts cannot be driven into it but must have holes bored for them.
The shipyard which puts on the greenheart usually has to get a new set of saws, planers and drills for the next job, and the echoes of profanity linger for a long time.
The massive construction of the Roosevelt so impressed the inhabitants of Bucksport, accustomed to usual ship building, that one of the village oracles is said to have delivered himself around the glowing stove of the “hotel” office of the following, “By heck there’s so much wood in the d—— ship that she’ll sink when they launch her.”
After the hull of the Roosevelt was completed, she was put into dry-dock and “watered”; that is, water was pumped into her to detect any bolt-holes that had not been filled with a bolt, or any seam that had been overlooked in calking, just as one would test a pail by filling it with water to see if it leaked.