The Great Lakes.The Vessels That Plough Them. Curwood James Oliver

who is investigating Lake shipbuilding for the first time will be astonished to discover that the modern freighter is in many ways a huge private yacht. They are almost without exception owned by men of wealth, and their cabins are fitted out even more luxuriously than those of passenger boats, for while these latter are intended for the use of the public, the passenger accommodations of freighters are planned for the friends and families of the owners. So above the deck which conceals ten thousand tons of ore the vessel may be a floating palace. The keenest rivalry exists between owners as to who shall possess the finest ships, and fortunes are expended in the fittings of cabins alone. Nothing that money can secure is omitted. In the words of a builder: “The modern freighter is like a modern hotel – only much more luxuriously furnished.” There is an electric light system throughout the ship; the cabins are equipped with telephones; there is steam heat; there are kitchens with the latest cooking devices, elegantly appointed dining-rooms; there are state-rooms which are like the apartments in a palace, and other things which one would not expect to see beyond the black and forbidding steel walls of these fortune-makers of the Lakes.

      With the first peep into modern methods one realises that the romantic shipbuilding days of old are gone. No longer does the shape, beauty, and speed of a vessel depend upon the eyes and hands of the men who are actually putting it together. For the ship of to-day is built in the engineering offices. In the draughting-room skilled men lay out the plans and make the models for a ship just as an architect does for a house, and when these plans are done they go to a great building which reminds one of a vast dance hall, and which is known as the “mould loft.” Seemingly the place is not used. Yet at the very moment you are looking about, wondering what this vacancy has to do with shipbuilding, you are walking on the decks of a ship. All about upon the floor, if you notice carefully, you will see hundreds and thousands of lines, and every one of these lines represents a line of the freighter which within three or four months will be taking her trial trip. Here upon the floor is drawn the “line ship” in exactly the same size as the vessel which is to be built. Over certain sections of this “line ship” men place very thin pieces of basswood, which they frame together in the identical size and shape of the ship’s plates. By the use of these moulds, or templates, the workman can see just where the rivet holes should be, and wherever a rivet is to go he puts a little spot of paint. These model plates are then numbered and sent to the “plate department,” where the real sheets of steel are made to conform with them and where the one million five hundred thousand or more rivet holes are punched. With the plates ready, the real ship quickly takes size and form.

      Some morning a little army of men begins work where to the ordinary observer there is nothing but piles of steel and big timbers. From a distance the scene reminds one of a partly depleted lumber yard. On one side of this, and within a few yards of the water of a slip, are first set up with mathematical accuracy a number of square timbers called “keel blocks.” Upon these blocks will rest the bottom of the ship, and from them to the water’s edge run long shelving timbers, or “ways,” down which she will slide when ready for launching.

      Children frequently play with blocks which, when placed together according to the numbers on them, form a map of the United States. This is modern shipbuilding – in a way. It is on the same idea. There is a proper place for every steel plate in the yards, and the numbers on them are what locate them in the ship. A giant crane runs overhead, reaches down, seizes a certain plate, rumbles back, to hover for a moment over the growing “floor,” lowers its burden – and the iron workers do the rest. Within a few days work has reached a point where you begin to wonder, and for the first time, perhaps, you realise what an intricate affair a great ship really is, and what precautions are taken to keep it from sinking in collision or storm. You begin to see that a Lake freighter is what might be described as two ships, one built within the other. As the vessel increases in size, as the sides of it, as well as the bottom, are put together, there are two little armies of men at work – one on the outer ship and one on the inner. From the bottom and sides of the first steel shell of the ship there extend upward and inward heavy steel supports, upon which are laid the plates of the “inner ship.” In the space between these two walls will be carried water ballast. The chambers into which it is divided are the life-preservers of the vessel. A dozen holes may be punched into her, but just as long as only this outer and protecting ship suffers, and the inner ship is not perforated, the carrier and her ten-thousand-ton cargo will keep afloat.

      When the construction of the vessel has reached a point where men can work on the inner as well as the outer hull, it is not uncommon for six hundred to eight hundred workmen to be engaged on her at one time. Frequently as high as one hundred gangs of riveters, of four men each, are at work simultaneously, and at such times the pounding of the automatic riveting machines sounds at the distance of half a mile like a battery of Gatling guns in action. So the work continues until every plate is in place and the vessel is ready for launching, which is the most exciting moment in the career of the ship – unless at some future day she meets a tragic end at sea. One by one the blocks which have been placed under her bottom are removed, until only two remain, one at each end. Then, at the last moment, these two are pulled away simultaneously, and the steel monster slides sidewise down the greased ways until, with a thunderous crash of water, she plunges into her native element.

      Thus ends the building of the ship, with the exception of what is known as her “deck work,” the fitting of her luxurious cabins, the placing of her engines, and a score of other things which are done after she is afloat. She is now a “carrier” of the Lakes. A little longer and captain and crew take possession of her, clouds of bituminous smoke rise from her funnels, and with flying pennants and screaming whistles she turns her nose into the great highway that leads a thousand miles into the North – to the land of the ore kings.

      II

      What the Ships Carry – Ore

      Picture a train of forty-ton freight cars loaded to capacity, the engine and caboose both in New York City, yet extending in an unbroken line entirely around the earth – a train reaching along a parallel from New York to San Francisco, across the Pacific, the Chinese Empire, Turkestan, Persia, the Mediterranean, mid the Atlantic – and you have an idea of what the ships of the Great Lakes carry during a single eight months’ season of navigation. At least you have the part of an idea. For were such a train conceivable, it would not only completely engirdle the earth along the fortieth degree of north latitude, but there would still be something like two thousand miles of it left over. In it would be two million five hundred thousand cars, and it would carry one hundred million tons of freight! Were this train to pass you at a given point at the rate of twenty miles an hour, you would have to stand there forty days and forty nights to see the end of it.

      Only by allowing the imagination to paint such a picture as this can one conceive to any degree at all the immensity of the freight traffic on our Inland Seas.

      “A hundred million tons,” repeated the mayor of one of our Lake ports when I told him about it recently. “A hundred million tons! That’s quite a lot of stuff, isn’t it?”

      Quite a lot of stuff! It might have been a hundred million bushels and he would have been equally surprised. His lack of enthusiasm does not discredit him. He does not own ships; neither does he fill them. He is like the vast majority of our millions, who have never given more than a passing thought to that gigantic inland water commerce which has largely been the making of the nation. It did not dawn on him that it meant more than a ton for every man, woman, and child on this North American continent; that in dollars it counted billions; that on it depended the existence of cities; that largely because of it foreign nations acknowledged our commercial prestige.

      No other hundred million tons of freight in all the world is as important to Americans as this annual traffic of the Great Lakes. To move it requires the services of nearly three thousand vessels of all kinds, employing twenty-five thousand men at an aggregate wage of thirteen million dollars a year. A million working people are fed and clothed and housed because of the cargoes this huge argosy carries from port to port.

      It is impossible to say with accuracy how this hundred million tons of freight is distributed and of what it consists. Only at the Soo and at Detroit are records kept of passing tonnage, so the figures which are given showing the tremendous commerce that passes these places do not include