The can of storm oil fits inside a cone-shaped canvas bag called a sea anchor. The sea anchor floats ahead of the boat and keeps it pointed toward the wind, while the oil drips slowly out and calms the waves. It’s important to be pointed into the wind, because a boat that bobs around sidewise can easily be tipped over by a wave. Long ago sailors discovered what a wonderful help oil can be in stormy weather, and that’s where the expression “oil on troubled waters” came from. It means to calm things down.
A blast from the ship’s whistle tells seamen when it’s time for lifeboat drill. Every man knows which boat he’s supposed to use. He runs first for his life jacket, then up the ladders by the shortest route to his boat. All the knots and fastenings on the boat are made so that they can be loosened with one jerk. Quickly the men work machines called davits that are always in perfect order, ready to swing the lifeboat out over the water. In a real emergency, the boats would be lowered into the sea, and the men would scramble down rope ladders which are kept ready on deck. But in a drill, seamen just test the davits and lines.
Most lifeboats are double-enders. This means that the bow and stern are rounded and look just alike. The rounded shape helps keep waves from tumbling in at either end. Lifeboats are modeled after the old-time boats in which sailors rowed away from sailing vessels when they went out to harpoon whales.
“THAR SHE BLOWS”
Nowadays, a group of very modern vessels go out together on whaling expeditions. A big ship called the factory ship waits in one place while a half-dozen or more killer boats cruise around hunting whales. The killer boats are power driven, and they are almost as big as an old-time sailing ship.
In June or July, one of these little fleets sets out for the South Pacific. At the whaling grounds, each killer boat begins its search. Suddenly—“Thar she blows!” A whale rises to the surface and spouts. The killer boat dashes after it. The harpooner in the bow aims a gun that’s fastened to the deck. The harpoon in the gun is as tall as a man and heavy, with an explosive charge in its pointed head, and a line attached to the shaft. When the head strikes the whale, the charge goes off inside, killing the great animal. The harpoon barbs spread out. Now the whale is held tight at the end of the line. The killer boat tows it back to the factory ship.
The stern of the factory ship is open. A ramp leads up from the water to the ship’s after deck. Machinery pulls the whale up the ramp and onto the deck. There men with knives that look like big hockey sticks cut up the blubber and throw it into vats where the whale oil is boiled out.
Hour after hour the killer boats bring in whales, sometimes forty or fifty a day—or even more! Everybody works day and night, with very little time to eat and sleep. The oil tanks in the factory ship begin to fill up. Now an ordinary tanker comes alongside. The whale oil is pumped from the factory ship to the tanker which delivers it at some big port thousands of miles away.
When at last the factory ship again has all the oil she can hold, she steams off toward home. For seven or eight months her crew has not been ashore.
Now, as well as in the old days, men on whaling vessels proudly bring home scrimshaw. That is carving they have done on the teeth or jawbones of whales. It is often very delicate and beautiful.
On the return trip the factory ship’s speed is much less than when she started out—and not just because her tanks are full. In June her hull was smooth and freshly painted, and it slipped easily through the water. Now in February she has barnacles all over the hull under water—such a rough coat of barnacles that she’s held back a great deal.
Barnacles are tiny sea creatures that grow by the millions. They attach themselves to anything under water and form hard little shells. They hold so tightly to the ship that they must be chipped off. That’s a job to be done in a place called drydock.
DRYDOCK
All ships go to drydock for regular cleaning and repairing and painting. This is what happens: The ship noses into a place surrounded by three concrete walls. Huge water-tight gates swing shut behind her, penning her in. Mooring lines hold her steady in the exact center of the dock, and pumps go to work taking out all the water in which she floats. Slowly the ship settles into a sort of cradle that has been prepared on the floor of the dock to fit her hull just right. When the water is all out, there she stands, balanced and braced. Now men can work under her and all over her—and inside. They scrape off the barnacles, paint the hull, and repair any parts that have begun to wear out. To reach some parts of the hull painters use long-handled brushes—really long. They’re often three times as tall as a man!
Experts go over the ship as carefully as doctors examine people. But many men work at top speed in shifts around the clock, and a ship often spends only twenty-four hours in drydock. Then the gates open. Water flows back into the dock. The ship floats again, ready to go to sea.
Sometimes a ship can’t get to drydock. Then a floating drydock comes to the ship. It works the same way as a regular one. Floating drydocks have traveled to distant parts of the world, pulled by seagoing tugs.
TUGS
A tug is a vessel that looks small but has an enormously powerful engine—an engine almost as big as one that moves a cargo ship. In fact, the tugboat’s job is to push and pull cargo and passenger ships around.
Big ships need help getting in and out of the narrow spaces between piers in a harbor. If they used only their own power, they might either smash themselves up or crush the piers. Tugs, working together, can push a little here, pull a little there, and ease a huge vessel gently into place.
A tugboat captain must have a great deal of knowledge about the harbor in which he works. In order to pass his captain’s examination, he has to draw a map of the harbor from memory, showing every pier and marker and even the rocks, hills and valleys underwater. Most important, he must have a feel for what a ship is going to do when he nudges her at a certain point or when he reverses his propeller and pulls.
For all his skill and responsibility, the captain wouldn’t think of wearing a uniform at work. He prefers old work clothes, and he sits down with the crew when the cook serves up jumbo-sized meals.
The cook goes on duty in the galley at any time from one o’clock in the morning on, depending on what time the tug must start work. Breakfast may be at three or four, but the usual time is six. And often the cook’s job isn’t over at four in the afternoon when he serves supper. If the tug is working overtime, he fixes a meal called a “midnight snack” which the men eat perhaps around seven o’clock. There’s enough food in the snack to feed a shoreside person for a whole day.
Besides the captain and the cook, a tug needs a chief engineer, an oiler, a fireman and a deckhand. The deckhand works with the hawsers that are often used when a tug has to pull a big ship.
This is what happens: An AB aboard the ship holds a coil of light line, called a heaving line. At the end of the line is a ball-shaped knot called a monkey fist. The AB gives a big swing and sends the monkey fist and line flying down to the tug. The deckhand on the tug grabs for the line. He’s not an outfielder trying to catch the ball. The monkey fist is there only to make the line uncoil and go straight.
The deckhand pulls on the heaving line, which is attached to a hawser on the ship. (Sailors don’t say the line is attached or tied. They say it’s “bent” to the hawser.) The hawser is so big that it can’t be thrown, but it can be hauled onto the tug by the heaving line. The deckhand makes the hawser fast to a bitt on the tug’s deck, and now she can pull.
For pushing jobs the tug has a thick pad called a bow fender made of heavy rope hung over the bow. After the fender has been used a while, it gets worn and shaggy and is often called a “beard.” It protects any ship the tug is pushing. There are fenders along each side of a tug, too. Sometimes they are made of rope. Sometimes they are old automobile tires or just logs hung loosely over the side. The logs get so much banging around that they may have to be replaced every few days.
Very often a tug has something on its bridge that looks like a gun. It’s not. It’s a water nozzle attached to a pump, and it’s there to help fight fires on ships.
The kind of tug that you can see on the Mississippi River is called a towboat. She doesn’t tug, and she
doesn’t tow. She just pushes. A Mississippi towboat gets behind a whole string of flat-bottomed barges and shoves them up and down rivers. She often pushes ten barges at a time, loaded with twice as much cargo as an ordinary seagoing freighter can carry.
Many towboats have all of the latest inventions for quick and safe travelling in water that is often more tricky than the open sea. There’s a lot of traffic to watch out for on the Mississippi, and the river sweeps around in many bends. Mud collects on the river bottom, so the captain can’t always know how deep the water is going to be. Uprooted trees and other big things that could damage vessels often come floating downstream. And when it’s pitch dark, or when a thick fog hangs over the water, all these problems get much worse.
Radar is one of the inventions that help towboats avoid danger. Radar sends out radio waves which bounce back to the towboat from anything they hit. In the towboat’s pilothouse is a radarscope, which is a little like a television screen. The returning radio waves show up as spots of light called pips on the radarscope. By looking at the pips, the pilot can locate the shores of the river, other vessels, floating trees and anything else that’s dangerous.
Another wonderful invention, called a depth recorder, tells the pilot how deep the water is under the head barge in his tow. If the river seems to be getting shallow, he can steer the whole tow into safer water. The depth recorder works by sending out sound waves and making a record of them when they bounce back from the river bottom.
In the old days, river craft had a leadman who measured depth with a line tied to a lead weight. Knots and pieces of leather marked the line. Even at night the leadman could tell by feel how deep the water was. For instance, if his fingers felt that the line was wet up to a place where there were two strips of leather, he would know that two fathoms (twelve feet) of water lay underneath. Two markers at two fathoms. “By the mark twain,” the leadman would call out to the captain.
There was once a Mississippi River pilot named Samuel Clemens who, like all pilots, loved to hear that call. It meant that there was enough water to keep his vessel afloat. Later, when he began to write books, he signed them with the name Mark Twain.
In Mark Twain’s time, the Mississippi River boats were driven by huge paddle wheels. As the wood-burning steam engine turned the wheels, the paddles pushed against the water and shoved the boat forward.
Steam engines began working in rivers very quickly after the first successful paddle boat, the Clermont, proved that she could push upstream. River boatmen needed engines more than seafaring men did, because winds seldom blow upstream as they do on the Nile.
Before there were paddleboats, men took cargo down the Mississippi in keelboats. Then they had to get the boats up-river again almost entirely by muscle-power. Pushing against the bottom with poles, or pulling with ropes from the shore, river boatmen worked the whole way up from New Orleans to Pittsburgh.
A river boatman still works hard, but in a very different way. In his time off, he may listen to radio or even watch television on board the towboat. In the old days, he would have caught fish and fried them over a fire built in a pile of sand on the keelboat deck. Today the cook takes food from a freezer, prepares it on an electric range, and stows the dirty dishes in an automatic dishwasher.
In the old days, the river was the quickest way for passengers to travel, and for freight, too. People now go faster by bus or train or plane. But there’s more and more cargo for the barges to carry on the Mississippi and the other rivers that flow into it. Oil, coal, grain, steel, ore, sulfur are some of the things that move along ahead of the powerful streamlined towboats.
GREAT LAKES SHIPS
Grain, coal, ore and limestone for making steel travel on Great Lakes ships, too. So do many other kinds of cargo. Long ago, explorers believed that the enormous sea-like lakes would lead them all the way around the world to China. One man even wore Chinese clothes as he paddled westward in an Indian canoe, so he would be properly dressed when he arrived!
For nearly three hundred years since then, vessels have used these great inland waterways to carry goods and the most precious cargo of all—people. Settlers by the thousand from Germany, Sweden, Scotland and other countries filled the decks of sailing vessels and paddle steamboats that took them right up to the frontier. Today almost five hundred modern cargo vessels shuttle back and forth on the Lakes, carrying the wealth that the descendants of those pioneers have created.
A Great Lakes ship doesn’t look like any other. She is broad and low and very long—so long, in fact that she is less rigid than most ships. Seamen say she feels “willowy” if she steams along in heavy weather after her cargo is unloaded. The wheelhouse of a Lakes ship is forward in the bow, along with quarters for the officers and a few passengers. The engine and the crew’s quarters are away at the stern. In between, are holds—a great many more of them than on any ocean-going ship. Marvellous loading machines dump ore or any other loose cargo into the holds. Other wonderful unloading machines quickly scoop the cargo out.
Many of the ships run between ports on Lake Huron and Lake Superior. Lake Superior is 22 feet higher than Lake Huron. So ships must use a sort of ladder to get from one to the other through a canal called the Sault Sainte Marie—or Soo for short. Locks in the canal are the ladder-rungs. Suppose a ship is going up. She enters the narrow canal. Ahead are gates. Gates close behind her. She is in a lock. Now the gates in front open and let more water into the lock, lifting the ship higher. She moves forward into another lock and is lifted again in the same way. Sometimes as she goes along, seamen on board toss money to ice cream sellers on shore, and catch the pop-sticks that are thrown back.
For eight months each year, the Lake ships keep hurrying back and forth between Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, Chicago, Duluth and other port cities. There’s hardly a time when a man can’t see smoke from other vessels on the horizon. Then winter comes, and the Lakes freeze over. Lake sailors tie up their ships and go ashore. Most of them have been on the water day and night through the whole season.
Sometimes a ship stays out too late in the year and can’t get to port because ice has locked her in. Then a ship called an ice breaker comes to her rescue. An ice breaker smashes up ice early in the spring, too, so that ships can begin to move.
AMERICAN MERCHANT SHIPS
Merchant seamen man all the different kinds of cargo ships you see in the pictures on these two pages. Their jobs take great skill and patience and very often courage. It has always been that way with men who follow the sea. Some of the things they do are as old as ships themselves. But many things are different now.
On old sailing vessels, the crew had to get their sleep wherever they could find a place to lie down. They might curl up on a coil of rope or on the cargo in the hold. Later, they were given one room, the forecastle, for the whole crew. Everybody was on watch at least twelve hours a day. It is only in the last twenty years that seamen have worked eight regular hours a day.
Almost all ships now have more comfortable bunkrooms, with only two or four men in each one. Instead of living on old-fashioned salt meat and salt fish and crackers called hardtack, seamen have almost the same things that they eat ashore. In the old days, seamen often got a disease called scurvy because they had no fresh food. Then the British discovered that lime juice prevented scurvy, and every one of their ships carried barrels of it. That’s why American seamen still call British seamen limeys.
There are laws and regulations now that provide for better food and working hours and pay on ships. Seamen in their unions have worked hard to get the laws and rules that have made life better for them.
FISHING VESSELS
Fishermen have always been among the most daring and hardworking men of the sea. For thousands of years they have experimented and invented, always in search of the boats and ships and nets that will do the best job for them. New England fishermen used to be great whittlers of ship models. They carved out their models partly for fun, partly to give shipbuilders new ideas for improving their designs.
One of the great fishing towns is Gloucester, Massachusetts, and there’s a story about it that goes this way: Almost two hundred and fifty years ago, a ship builder in Gloucester launched a vessel that everyone admired. On the day when she first slid into the water, a big crowd gathered to watch. She was graceful and light, and she fairly skimmed along—the way a flat stone does when a boy skips it over the water. In those days in New England, some people called skipping “scooning.”
All at once, someone in the crowd called out, “See how she scoons!” The builder called back, “A scooner let her be!” And according to the story, the name schooner—a new spelling—has stuck to this very day.
A modern schooner still has sails, but not so many as the early ones. An engine now gives her power, so that she can make fast time to and from the fishing grounds, and her sails are used mostly to steady her in the sea while the men work. The engine also helps with the heavy work of handling the nets.
Each kind of fish has its own habits, and the fishermen know them well. Some fish, such as cod and flounder, live down near the floor of the sea. They are caught in drag nets which are towed at the right speed behind the vessel. Men haul the net in, dump the catch into ice-cooled bins in the hold, then drag the net again.
Mackerel behave differently. They swim along in huge groups called schools near the surface of the water. The lookout man on the mast keeps his eye on the sea till he can yell, “School O!” Quickly the men lower a boat that sets a huge net called a purse-seine. At first the net is really a fence. Hundreds of floating corks at the top, and lead weights at the bottom, hold it in place, while the seine-boat draws it into a circle around the fish. Then, at a signal, a motor in the seine-boat pulls on a sort of drawstring in the bottom of the net, closing it and turning it into a kind of giant sack. The seine is “pursed” with the fish trapped inside.
This is what happens on a lucky day. But mackerel can be very irritating fish. Sometimes the whole school will suddenly dive and race away to safety, just the moment before the trap closes. Fishermen must have patience as well as skill.
Before engines went to sea, the men had to purse the seine by hand. Since their schooner carried no ice, they cleaned the fish, salted them and packed them into barrels as fast as possible. Everybody, including the skipper, worked at top speed. Even the cook lent a hand, and he was often a boy of ten who hung his pots in an open fireplace or smoked some of the mackerel in the chimney.
Fleets of fishing vessels go out together when the season is right. There’s a race for the fishing grounds, and then a race back to deliver the catch to market. In fishing towns all around the seacoasts, small forests of masts fill the harbors when the fleets are in.
Among the schooners you can also see sturdily-built trawlers, which are usually driven by steam-power. Newest of all are the vessels that work like quick-freeze factories. Machines on board clean the fish, cut them up, package them and freeze them right where they are caught. Or the fishermen may quick-freeze the whole fish, then bring them back to be thawed and sent to market.
People in fishing towns are proud of their fleets, and there’s a warm welcome for the vessel that comes in first with a big load.
THE UNITED STATES
The day a ship returns safely has always been important to seafaring men. It’s especially important if she has made a new record of some kind. All the seamen in New York harbor were excited when the passenger liner United States came in after crossing the Atlantic faster than any other liner had ever done. And they all showed their respect in the traditional way.
On tugs and freighters, on tankers, on other liners, skippers passed down the word, “Break out the bunting!” This meant take out all the brightly colored signal flags and hang them on the stays. (On page 91 you can find out what the signal flags are.) The United States had her bunting out, too. When she appeared in the harbor, every vessel there greeted her with tremendous whistle blasts. Fireboats filled the air with high curving streams of water from all their nozzles.
Aboard the United States, the members of the crew were more excited than any one else in the harbor, but their work went right on through all the happy hullaballoo. The AB’s got ready to tie their huge ship up. Others, from the black gang to the steward’s department, were busy with last-minute jobs. Working together as one huge team, they had made the world’s fastest crossing. On the trip from New York to England, the United States averaged 35.9 knots. (That means she travelled nearly 42 land miles an hour. Seamen never say “knots per hour.” They just say knots.) Before that the passenger liner Queen Mary held the record. It took the United States 10 hours and 2 minutes less than the Queen Mary to cross the ocean.
The United States is really more than a ship. With a thousand people in her crew and two thousand passengers, she is a floating town. Besides the seamen who do their regular seamen’s work, there are crew members with special jobs. In the ship’s shopping centers, storekeepers sell souvenirs, and all kinds of things that passengers want and need. Movie operators work in her two theaters. A children’s nurse takes care of children in the nursery. A veterinarian cares for pets on board. Guards watch over the swimming pool. A doctor and a registered nurse are ready in the ship’s hospital to help anyone who is sick. Air conditioning experts see that every room in the ship is kept at the right temperature. Everything from the engine room to the dog kennels is air-conditioned.
Curtains, chair covers and rugs on the ship are made of material that doesn’t burn. There is no wood at all in the ship except in the butchers’ chopping blocks and in the pianos. But suppose a passenger drops a match into a wastebasket in his stateroom. There’s an automatic smoke-smelling gadget that sends a signal to a room on the bridge. The officer there turns on the fire alarm, then pulls a lever which closes that particular stateroom door and blocks the fire off.
There are lifeboats for all three thousand people in case of emergency. These lifeboats are driven by propellers—but they have no engines. People supply the power for the propeller. They push handles back and forth. Even on this most modern ship in the world, there are boats that move in the oldest way—by muscle power.
The four propellers of the liner herself are each as tall as a two-storey house. They are turned by enormous steam turbine engines. Smoke from the boilers goes out through unusual-looking stacks. Inside each one are giant filters that take away most of the soot. Besides, there are wings called vanes at the top of the stacks to help keep the smoke from swirling down onto the deck.
Although the United States is about five city blocks long and twelve decks high, she looks as light and graceful in her way as the old clipper ships. The clippers were American sailing vessels that got their names because they went at a very fast clip. A hundred years ago they held speed records all over the world. No wonder the captain of the United States proudly said that his seamen were carrying on the clipper ship tradition.
Many people think the clippers were the most beautiful ships ever built. Certainly they were the first sailing ships to be planned by men who used scientific ideas in their work. At that time, science was bringing modern machinery of all kinds to the world. Inventors had already put steam engines into ships, but they had not yet studied what was the best shape for a speedy vessel. And speed was becoming very important as more people and cargoes crossed the oceans.
No one knew whether steamships could go fast. But some shipbuilders believed that sailing ships could go faster than ever before. They built the record-breaking clippers. Soon the magnificent vessels began to have races all the way from China to New York and London. It was many years before steamships caught up with the clippers, but in the end they proved to be faster. More important, they could keep going whether there was any wind or not.
OTHER PASSENGER SHIPS
It’s the job of a passenger ship to carry people—and give them a good time on their journey. But passenger ships also carry cargo. That’s true of big ones and little ones, such as the City of Norfolk which belongs to the Old Bay Line, the oldest American shipping company.
The City of Norfolk goes on short trips back and forth between Norfolk and Baltimore on Chesapeake Bay. She takes on cargo during the day and sails at night. Although she’s an old ship, she has radar to help guide her through the busy waters of the Bay. All around are fishing craft, ferries, ocean-going vessels—endless traffic through which the officers must steer a safe course. In the dark wheelhouse, soft small lights hold the key to safety—the sea-green light by which the man at the wheel sees the markings on the compass, the yellow pips and the revolving blue line on the radarscope.
In the hold below are automobiles, piles of second-hand truck tires, crates holding all kinds of things, copper sheets by the ton which have come by train from Utah, and will end up in some eastern factory.
Passengers stroll all over the decks. Some are travelling on business; some are just sailing for fun. A group of school boys and girls on their class trip dance to phonograph records. Their staterooms are air-conditioned, but the inside of the ship looks almost as it did in their grandmothers’ day, with balconies and big living-rooms called saloons.
The City of Norfolk—and many other ships like her on bays and rivers and lakes—is really a sort of combination ferry boat and hotel. Most ferries, of course, have much shorter runs, and they are built to fit the needs of their own special work.
Many ferries look exactly the same fore and aft. They have propellers, rudders and wheelhouses at both ends, and there’s a good reason why. A double-ended ferry makes quick trips back and forth. She can save time if she doesn’t have to turn around in the water when she goes in and out of her dock which is called a slip.
The big ferries carry automobiles, trucks, and as many as three thousand people at a time. Some of them, on long runs, have up-to-date snack bars so passengers can get quick meals. For safety, they carry lifeboats and life jackets, just as ocean-going vessels do. But a ferry could never go to sea. She is built very broad, with very little of her under the water and a great deal above. Big ocean waves would tip her over.
Men have used ferries from the earliest times. Hundreds and even thousands of years ago people and animals were ferried across rivers on rafts. Even today there are raft-like ferries which men guide across our rivers by steel cables.
Train ferries take loaded freight cars across harbors where there are no railroad bridges. In some harbors, the cars travel on flat-bottomed barges which tugboats shove along.
Long ago, barges were quite different. They were elegant vessels in which kings and important people travelled on rivers. And fancy barges, towed along behind paddle steamboats, once carried passengers up and down the Hudson River, too. At that time the steam boilers on paddleboats often exploded. Many crewmen and passengers were killed. So, in order to attract customers, some steamboats towed “safety barges” behind.
Nowadays barges are plain cargo vessels that do heavy work. Most of them have no power of their own. They must be towed or pushed. The seaman who handles a barge is called a barge captain. He must be an AB to get the job, and on some barges he lives in a house at the stern. If he has a family, they may make their home there the year round.
Before the days of railroads, a whole system of canals joined many of the important American cities. Along these waterways horses or mules pulled barge-loads of freight. Many a canal boatman started before he was twelve years old, driving a mule on long trips all by himself. There are still some canals in use, and powerdriven barges carry cargoes on them.
FIREBOATS AND OTHER HELPERS
The old-fashioned engines that used to explode are gone now. So are the candles and whale-oil lamps that lighted ships. All these caused fires in wooden vessels. But even today, when most ships are made of steel, with fireproofing equipment, there’s work for fireboats to do.
The seamen aboard fireboats belong to the Fire Department. They do deck work or engine work, and they also handle the pumps and nozzles that shoot enormous streams of water. The pumps suck in water through holes in the side of the boat and force it through hoses and nozzles that can be aimed like big guns.
Sometimes fireboats go a little way outside their harbor to help a burning ship. On the way, the fireboat captain guides his vessel between buoys that mark the channels where ships can go. All harbors have these channels, which are really streets for water traffic. The buoys are floating signals anchored to the bottom. On a clear day, seamen can tell by looking at the shape and color what each buoy means. In a fog or at night, they listen for the bells or whistles on some special buoys and watch for the flashing lights on others.
Rivers have channels marked with buoys, too, and men who belong to the United States Coast Guard Service have the job of placing and repairing them.
The Coast Guard also cares for lighthouses at dangerous points along the shore. Powerful lights and foghorns in the lighthouses warn ships away from rocks or shallow water and also help them find out exactly where they are. In some places, lightships anchored in the sea do this same job. A lightship is really a giant buoy. Seamen live aboard her to care for the safety equipment. They get their food and mail from vessels called tenders. (Any vessel that supplies another is a tender.)
Coast Guardsmen help seamen in other ways, too. Suppose a ship is sinking. Fast, tough little Coast Guard cutters race off to the rescue the minute the dreaded SOS signal comes over their radio. (SOS is the code
signal for “help!” and every radio man understands it, no matter what language he speaks.)
Using a special gun, men on the cutter shoot a lifeline across to the sinking ship, and a breeches buoy is rigged on it. This is a canvas seat, made like a pair of short pants. The seat hangs from a wheel called a block which runs along the line. One by one the seamen sit in the seat and are pulled along to safety.
CHARTS FOR SAFETY
In the days when the United States was still a very new country, many people in Europe longed for the freedom they were sure they could find here. One of them was Ferdinand Hassler, a young Swiss mathematician. Hassler was no seaman when he set out for the new world in a sailing ship. But luckily he did know a great deal about the stars. After the captain of his vessel collapsed in a terrific storm, Hassler was able to look at the stars and tell the seamen how to steer the ship.
The things Hassler knew about mathematics made it easy for him to navigate, but real troubles began when the ship came into Delaware Bay. The map of the bay was old and very inaccurate. Hassler could not tell whether the ship was in shallow water or deep water, except by watching the leadline day and night.
This last part of his adventure made young Hassler very angry because it was so unscientific. He realized that the safety of all ships depended on accurate maps, called charts, of the coasts and harbors. Soon after he landed he began to make plans for a survey of the whole American coast. He talked to President Jefferson who agreed with him, and Congress finally gave him the job. At last his good charts began to help save lives.
Today the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey carries on the work Hassler started. Using many ships and small boats with marvellous equipment, the scientific men of the sea go about their important and often dangerous work. It’s their job to map the earth that lies under the oceans, rivers and harbors. Here are some of the things they do along the Alaskan coast.
A survey ship moves through the water sending sound waves to the bottom of the ocean. A delicate machine records the echoes made when the sound waves bounce back from the deep valleys and the high mountain tops that lie beneath the surface. Scientists know how fast sound travels in water, so they can tell exactly how deep it is. But some of the peaks are narrow and sharp. Even the wonderful machines miss them. And so these very modern vessels must do something old-fashioned and simple. Two of them travel side by side with a long wire cable hanging between them. If the cable catches on a rock, the men know they have snagged a sunken mountain top.
Often, men on shore help the men on ships with their surveying. The instruments they use are so delicate that the warmth of direct sunlight would cause inaccuracies. One slight error might mean a shipwreck. So, even in Alaska, a surveyor works under an umbrella.
You might think that all the charts and maps should have been finished in the long years since President Jefferson’s time. But the work of making charts can never be finished. The coastline is always changing. Currents and tides, storms and floods shift millions of tons of sand near the coast. Earthquakes and volcanoes raise land or lower it. A place that was safe for ships yesterday may be dangerous today.
In Alaska, glaciers that run into the sea grow bigger or melt back. Sometimes these enormous rivers of ice push themselves out under the water. The little survey vessels mapping the ocean’s bottom have to sail over the sunken glaciers. There is always danger that, at any moment, a great mountain of fresh-water ice may break loose and rush toward the surface. When this happens, any vessel nearby is almost certain to be destroyed.
Seafaring men need to know about the tides when they enter or leave harbors. Tides are very different at different places along our enormous coastline, and they change from one day to another. The Coast and Geodetic Survey has worked out a wonderful way of telling ships about tides in advance. Every day, records pour into Washington from all along the seacoast. The figures they give are put into a fantastic “thinking machine,” together with other figures about the sun and moon which cause the tides. Electricity is turned on, and in no time the machine tells what tides will be like with ordinary weather tomorrow or even next month.
Men have come a long way since they first learned to float on a blown-up animal skin or a bundle of reeds. For thousands of years, they have been inventing new and better ways to travel across water. But the oceans have an enormous power and force. Science and seamen still have much to learn about the power which they must fight and make work for them—and which will always be exciting.