How a ship would look in a street. The curious things behind are the screws which drive the ship through the water. The engines turn the screws round, and as they turn they push away the water and move the ship forward.
The passing of a ship at sea in the full light of the moon is one of the most impressive sights that we can see. The great ship seems to speak to us of the wonderful power of man as it sails along the waves with thousands of people on board. The picture on the opposite page gives us a glimpse of these people on board, living as happily as if they were in their own homes.
This shows the inside of hte ship opposite-- one of the big Cunard ships carrying 3,000 people at once. If we could cut it in two as we cut an apple, this is how it would look as it rides over the sea at night. It has ten floors. The captain's deck is at the top, with three decks below to walk on. Four times round one of these decks is a mile. Lower are the dining and drawing rooms; then come the sleeping-rooms, called state-rooms. Below is the baggage, and at the bottom, with the sea beating against its walls, is the engine- room, with the great fires and boilers which give the ship its awful power.
The sea is one of the busiest places in the world. Every day there are thousands of ships at sea, full of people and things-- men and women and children, and animals, and goods of all kinds. Much stuff that comes into this country must come over the sea, and some of the ships that bring it are many weeks on the way. If we go to India we live on the sea for weeks, and for a long time we may never see land. But the good ship carries us safety through the water, with music, and food, and friends, and toys, and beds, and all we want on board. This story tells us how the ship rides on the sea, like a floating town.
It is wonderful to read in the storybooks of giants carrying us about the world, over the hills and far away. It is more wonderful to know that in real life there are giants who do things just as wonderful. The steamship is more wonderful than all the giants in the fairy tales, for the steamship is a giant that carries thousands of people. Suppose there are five people living in your house, and you all want to go to Europe. Well, two hundred families like yours from the same village, and two hundred families more from a second village, and two hundred more families from a third village could all go to Europe by the same ship.
That would be three thousand people, as many as live in a small town. But that wouldn't matter. The ship could carry them all at one time, and take their trunks and boxes, too. Instead of being in a city on land, you would be in a city on the sea, racing across the water faster than the fastest horse can run. You would get to Europe in less than a week. There would be no need to take food with you. The ship carries food and drink; it carries beds for you to sleep in, baths for you to wash in, books for you to read, cows to give you milk, hens to lay eggs for you. It has a telegraph office without any wires, from which, while still at sea, you can send a message to your friends on land.
For itself the good ship carries thousands of tons of coal and thousands of gallons of water. It must carry water wherever it goes, to make the steam which drives the ship, because the water in the sea is salt. If that salt water were boiled to be turned into steam, it would leave the dry salt behind, and choke the boilers. So the ship has to carry fresh water, which has no salt, or else it must have a machine to remove the salt from the sea-water, and boil the water after the salt is gone.
This great ship carrying so many people and such heavy machinery is made to ride across the sea by the strongest giant that works for us. That giant is steam. It is just the same sort of steam which you see coming out of the kettle, only that which drives the ship is made hotter than that which curls out-of the kettle-spout.
A hundred years ago people would have thought a steamships very, very wonderful thing. In those days they did not travel by steamships. There were no such things then. When a boy sees a pond, he likes to get a big piece of wood and make a raft, so that he can ride on the water. That raft is as good as, the first boats which, long, long ago, men had to use. If they wanted to cross a lake or a river, they had to float across on an old log.
When men got to know more about making those things, they used to scrape out the inside of the log, so that they could ride inside, and not have their toes bitten off by crocodiles. Then they made better boats, and found out that they could make them go faster by using sails and oars. The oars are long pieces of wood, with flat ends, which dip in the Water, and when pulled through the water they make the boat go along. The sails are blown upon by the wind, and the wind drives them along, carrying the boat with them.
But for a long time men did not become much cleverer in making boats. They made them larger, but they had to use oars, or trust to the wind to drive them. When they made very big ships they could not use oars, so then they had only the wind to help them. When the wind did not blow the ship stood still, or was carried along by the water, perhaps where they did not want to go. Nelson's ships were all like this.
It took a long time for men to learn how to make a ship go by steam. Some men tried to do it, but people did not believe that it could be done, and would not help them. Many men tried and failed, and died broken-hearted. More than a hundred years ago a little ship was made to go by steam along the River Clyde, in Scotland. It pulled barges which were too heavy for horses, but people would not believe that it was any good, and that little ship was cast aside and neglected until it fell to pieces.
Years after, a ship driven by steam went across the Atlantic Ocean to England. Everybody said that this was wonderful, but they did not think it could always be done, so nearly twenty years more went by. Then a clever man named Brunel built a ship called the Great Western. It was driven by steam, and went from Bristol to New York in a fortnight, while the ships driven by wind, took at least a month. Since then thousands of steamships have been built, and now we can get to England in five days.
What is it that this wonderful steam does? Well, deep down in the bottom of the ships men burn great heaps of coal. The coal makes big fires in the furnaces, and turns the water in the boilers to steam. This steam is so strong that it drives the machinery of the ship; then it is cooled and turned back into water, and boiled up again to make steam once more. All the machinery of the ship is worked by this giant. At one end of the ship is a screw with three long blades. The steam turns this screw.
When you twist a screw against a piece of wood, the screw makes its way into the wood, turning round and round and going forward. That is what the screw does when the steam makes it go round in the water. The water is all round the screw, and when the screw twists round, the water resists-- that is, the water tries to stop the screw so as not to be pushed out of its place.
By resisting, the water becomes like wood, and the screw eats its way forward through the water, and so makes the ship go. The faster the screw turns round, the faster the great ship travels, so that we have a ship weighing 50,000 tons riding along as smoothly as a cab, but so quickly that it can go a mile in two minutes. The wind may be blowing the way the ship goes, or against it; it does not matter to the ship. The great giant steam sends the ship the right way.
Many men work on these ships-- sometimes 500 on one vessel. The hardest work is that of the stokers, who look after the fires. When you go on to a ship, you see people playing games on deck, or having dinner below, or reading in the library, or resting in the little cabins. And right down under them all are the men keeping up the great fires. Only an iron plate or so keeps the sea from these men, so deep down in the water are they. The heat is so great that cold air from above has to be pumped down by electric fans.
How a ship would look in a street. The curious things behind are the screws which drive the ship through the water. The engines turn
the screws round, and as they turn they push away the water and move the ship forward.
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| Every great ship has a doctor on board, and in his surgery he works as if he were on land. | Little children sleep as soundly on the sea as if they were in bed at home. The beds are fixed above the other in small cabins. |
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| The great furnaces on a big ship would weigh more than a cathedral. The men walk through them as if they were in a street, with iron walls almost as high as houses. Behind these great iron walls the fire is boiling the water and making the steams which drives the wheels of the engines round and moves the ship along. |
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| This is how the officers of the ship talk from the deck to the men down below in the engine-room. | The rooms on a ship are beautifully furnished, and some of them are big enough to hold a thousand people. This is the dining room of one of the great ships which cross the Atlantic many times a year. |