Herman Melville, in “Redburn,” speaks of an old-fashioned glass ship, about eighteen inches long, of French manufacture. “Every bit of it was glass, and that was a great wonder of itself; because the masts, yards, and ropes were made to exactly resemble the corresponding parts of a real vessel that could go to sea. She carried two tiers of black guns all along her two decks; and often I used to try to peep in at the portholes to see what else was inside.... Not to speak of the tall masts and yards and rigging of this famous ship, among whose mazes of spun glass I used to rove in imagination till I grew dizzy at the main truck, I will only make mention of the people on board of her. They, too, were all of glass, as beautiful little glass sailors as anybody ever saw, with hats and shoes on, just like living men, and curious blue jackets with a sort of ruffle round the bottom. Four or five of these sailors were very nimble little chaps, and were mounting up the rigging with very long strides; but for all that, they never gained a single inch in the year, as I can take my oath. Another sailor was sitting astride of the spanker-boom, with his arms over his head, but I never could find out what that was for; a second was in the foretop with a coil of glass rigging over his shoulder; the cook with a glass axe was splitting wood near the fore hatch; the steward in a glass apron was hurrying towards the cabin with a plate of glass pudding; and a glass dog with a red mouth was barking at him; whilst the captain in a glass cap was smoking a glass cigar on the quarter-deck.”
Among strange vessels may be classed fabrics—no matter of what size—of copper, leather, canvas, cloth, and (for the age) iron. The ancient Briton’s coracle was the leather boat. This is Rees’ presumption, in his “Beauties of South Wales,” from the circumstance of the fishermen in certain Welsh rivers using a corwg, or coracle, “which,” says he, “is probably coeval with the earliest population of the island.” The form of the coracle was nearly oval, its length five feet, and its breadth four. The frame was formed of split rods, plaited like basket-work and covered with raw hide. It was a portable boat, and its owner carried it on his back when he wished to convey it to or from his home. How far iron, as a material for the construction of ships, can be traced back I do not know. Grantham, a sound authority, gets no further than 1787. I can beat that record by ten years. In the “Annual Register” for 1777, under the month of June, I find, “A new pleasure-boat, constructed of sheet-iron, was lately launched into the river Foss, in Yorkshire. She is twelve feet long, sailed with fifteen persons, and is so light that two men may carry her.” Clearly a strange ship to those who beheld her! Twelve years later another strange craft was sent afloat: “A very curious experiment was tried—that of proving how far an entire copper vessel would answer the purpose of sailing. Mr. Williams, a joint proprietor of the great copper mines, was the projector, and a very numerous party attended the experiment. It was launched at Deptford, and promises to answer every purpose for which it was designed. Should it do so entirely it will prove a very singular advantage to the British navy.” The joint proprietor’s patriotic scheme apparently bore no fruit. What would the ship-builder of this day think of copper vessels?
A cheaper experiment in strange craft was adventured in the direction of cloth. What particular merit this boat had is not stated. It was the invention of a Frenchman named Desquinemara. The fabric was said to be impermeable to air and water. All that I can learn of this boat is, the experiments proved so successful that an account of them was sent to the class of the Physical and Mathematical Sciences of the Institute, in order that a decision should be come at as to the useful purposes to which this novel invention was applicable. After which this cloth boat, sliding past on Time’s current, slips into blackness and disappears. Of a strange vessel made of canvas I find a tolerably full account. She was the invention of a certain Colonel Brown, whose brother, a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, accompanied by thirty persons, crossed the Thames in her, and passed through one of the arches of Westminster Bridge, in the view of many thousands of spectators. She is described as a military batteau made of prepared canvas, so as to be impervious to water. Her length was seventeen feet, width five feet, and depth three feet, and when loaded with thirty people she drew only three inches. She was capable of carrying one hundred soldiers with arms, accoutrements, and baggage, fifty of them sitting and fifty lying. She weighed sixty pounds, and could be taken to pieces and put together again in three minutes. I do not learn that this strange vessel was ever employed.[[63]]
[63]. In “Shipwrecks and Disasters at Sea,” vol. i. (1812), there is preserved a singular narrative of an escape of some men from captivity by means of a canvas boat. The title is quaint: “A small monument of great mercy, in the miraculous deliverance of five persons from slavery at Algiers, in a canvas boat; with an account of the great distress and extremities which they endured at sea.” By William Okeley, 1644.
Another account of a strange craft I find in 1793. This was a vessel intended to “sail” against wind and tide, and on trial she managed to do it at the rate of four knots an hour. She was fitted with a pump of a diameter of two feet, worked by a steam engine, by means of which a stream of water was driven through the keel. The impetus of the water forced through the square channel against the exterior water acted as an impelling power. This idea has been again and again revived, possibly by some who considered their scheme as surprisingly novel and revolutionary.
One of the strangest vessels which ever floated was the paddle-wheel boat of 1472. A sketch of one form of this boat[[64]] exhibits a periagua-shaped vessel, sharp at both ends, and fitted with five sets of paddles fitted to beams, which work in orifices like tholes. A somewhat similar boat is heard of in 1681, in which year a vessel, fitted with revolving oars or paddles, distanced the King’s barge, leaving her far astern, though she was manned by sixteen rowers. An ingenious gentleman, in the Middle Ages, invented a mode of propulsion by erecting an immense bellows in the stern of a vessel. He thought that, when the wind dropped, there was nothing to do but fill his sails with the bellows, and so blow himself along his course. He hardly foresaw that the bellows and the sails would act against each other, and leave the ship motionless; or worse yet, in a calm, give her a small sternway. Jonathan Hull’s ship of 1736 would also be reckoned by his contemporaries a strange vessel. She was, indeed, the first steamer that ever blackened the surface of water with the reflection of the smoke of coal. His patent was for “a machine for carrying ships and vessels out of or into any harbour or river against wind and tide, or in a calm.” Hull’s was a stern-wheel boat, and adaptation of his invention of late years has familiarized to us an object that would have been viewed with wonder even a quarter of a century since.
[64]. Lindsay’s “History of Shipping.”
An illustrated history of shipbuilding would furnish the student with a series of plates of objects quite as astonishing for variety of shapes and freaks of taste as anything to be found in pictures in books of zoology and the physiology of fishes. The summit of perfection in form, beauty, in an almost spirit-like interpretation of the poetry of the sea, moulded and embodied by the hand of the shipwright and the rigger, was reached in some of the frigates afloat at the period of the introduction of iron. Grace and loveliness are now perpetuated by the yacht builder. Some of the iron sailing ships are, it must be admitted, framed with much elegance of judgment. But the vicious obligations of economy, supplemented by the severe conditions which now enter into naval arming, have forced us into many hideous forms, and render this age in the matter of marine taste the heaviest sinner of all the centuries. The uncouthness of the junk, the clumsiness of the galliot, the absurd freeboard, crowning poops, square bows, and tower-like rigs of the ships of olden times are admitted features; but all staring qualities were sobered by an atmosphere of quaintness, a complexion of romance, by elements of colour and furniture and apparel, which did somehow greatly help the imagination into ideal surveys and considerations. But is there anything to idealize in the leviathan mass of twelve-inch plates that floats past like a gasworks gone adrift? And what of poetry may we find in a metal tube that shows nothing above water but a short polemast and a conning-tower?