This occurred close to the land, where there was plenty of help, and so we get the poor shipmaster’s deposition. But it might have occurred leagues out at sea, where there was no succour, and then the ship would have been missing, “nothing heard of the crew,” and the formal marine inquiry would have wound up with another handful of dots. And what caused that steamer to go down head foremost on a fine clear day, and in smooth water? There was no collision; there were no shoals. Had a butt started? Had a head-plate worked loose? One is inclined to say ex pede Herculem of such disasters as this. They should save marine courts a deal of brain-cudgelling over incidents which, in the days of teak, and oak, and treenails, would truly take very solemn rank among the “unaccountables.”
This deposition worked very strongly in my head the other day when I happened to find myself standing under the bends of the towering iron skeleton of a ship that, when completed, would be 100 A 1, and qualified to carry three thousand tons of merchandize. The hammering all about me was sharp and furious, the sparks flew wildly, and as the white-hot rivets popped out of the holes they were cut and hammered by the men as though they were carrots. There were other ships on a line with this, one completely plated and painted, another half-finished, a third a mere outline of frames and keelson and stern-post and stem-pieces. The scene was an imposing one, and especially imposing was the appearance of the completed ship with the polish of her clean metal run and the gilt tracings about her figurehead and quarters. And yet when I turned my eyes from her to the skeleton under which I was standing I felt a good deal of my admiration leaking away from me. I called to a man who was hammering close beside me. “Do you know what clagging is, my friend?”
“Ay,” said he, looking at me with a broad grin, “ye dorn’t need to go very fur to find out the meanin’ o’ that word.”
“These things,” said I, striking a long curve of metal, “which in a wooden ship would be spoken of as ribs, are called frames, aren’t they?”
“Ay, those are the frames,” he answered.
“I suppose they have a good deal of weight to bear, a good deal of pressure to resist?” said I.
“Why,” he replied, “they’re pretty nigh the ship, man!”
“Then what do you make of that flaw there, and that crack there, and there, and there?” said I, pointing to the places as I spoke.
“Pooh!” said he, “when the plates are on that’s all covered up.”
“Yes,” said I, “so I suppose; but do you know I don’t see a frame that hasn’t three or four—and yonder is one with six—of those cracks and flaws plain to be viewed upon it. Considering the dimensions of this vessel, do you think it wise—I’m speaking in the interest of human lives, my man—to put in such defective iron as this?”