Hull

“ If we take a trip down the Chesapeake Bay, in the day-time, we may see for ourselves the utter fallacy of the idea that when a vessel appears “hull down,” as it is called, it is because the hull is “behind the water:” for, vessels have been seen, and may often be seen again, presenting the appearance spoken of, and away—far away—beyond those vessels, and, at the same moment, the level shore line, with its accompanying complement of tall trees, towering up, in perspective, over the heads of the “hull-down” ships! ”

“ The hull of a first-rate occupies nearly one half of the picture to the right, her bows toward the spectator, seen in sharp perspective from stem to stern, with all her port-holes, guns, anchors, and lower rigging elaborately detailed, two other ships of the line in the middle distance drawn with equal precision, a noble breezy sea, full of delicate drawing in its waves, a store ship beneath the hull of the larger vessel and several other boats, and a complicated cloudy sky, all drawn from memory, down to the smallest rope, in a drawing-room of a mansion in the middle of Yorkshire. ”

“ Behind the harbor the slender mast of a cutter, which men are towing on the bowline, glides along slowly, then the hull appears, the hauled-up sails swell out, and gradually the vessel moves aways, dancing on the waves. ”

“ Flush-decked, with a graceful curving run, a clipper bow with gilt figure-head, and a long, overhanging counter, the hull painted a particularly pleasing shade of dark green down to within a couple of feet of the water-line, and polished black below that, she made a picture completely satisfying to the eye of the most exacting critic. ”

“ The hull of a ship is its prime necessity. Without a hull there can be no ship, just as without a foundation and without walls there can be no house, for a ship’s hull combines her foundation and her walls. In order, then, to understand the greatness of the gigantic liners we are discussing the first thing to understand is the hull.
All hulls of great size are built of steel. First a great steel framework is constructed, then it is covered with sheets of steel and many steel decks are built, and steel bulkheads are installed in order to give still greater strength. ”

“ It is the calm that brings ships mysteriously together; it is your wind that is the great separator.
The taller the ship, the further she can be seen; and her white tallness breathed upon by the wind first proclaims her size. The tall masts holding aloft the white canvas, spread out like a snare for catching the invisible power of the air, emerge gradually from the water, sail after sail, yard after yard, growing big, till, under the towering structure of her machinery, you perceive the insignificant, tiny speck of her hull. ”

“ Battleship, battle cruiser, light cruiser, destroyer, sloop, trawler, and all the other kinds and classes of patrol craft—each has its own distinctive smudge of smoke, its own peculiar way of revealing its identity by a blurred foretop, funnel, or superstructure long before its hull has lifted its amorphous mass above the sky-line. ”

“ Imagine the hull of a North Shore ferry boat, blunted a little at the ends and cut off about a foot below the water-line, and parallel to it, then you will have something shaped somewhat like the hull of a Darling mud-rooter. But the river boat is much stronger. ”

“ There was a steady breeze off the port beam, and the yacht, with every cloth which she carried on her, was driving through it as though she were in tow of a steamboat. The scene was full of life. On one bow was an English smack, as gaudy in the misty brilliance of the sunshine as an acquatic parrot, with her red mainsail and brown mizzen, and white foresail topping, aslant, the gloomy black hull from whose sides would break from time to time a sullen, white flash, like a leap of fire from a cannon's mouth, as the swing of the sea swerved the black, wet timbers to the morning lustre. ”

“ The hull is the boat itself without masts, spars, or rigging. A skiff and a birch-bark canoe are hulls.
The keel is the piece of timber running along the centre of the bottom of the hull, like the runner of a skate, and used to give the boat a hold on the water, so that she will not slide sideways.
When you are sitting in the stern of a boat, facing the bow, the side next to your right hand is the right-hand side of the boat, [75] and the side next to your left hand is the left-hand side of the boat. ”

“ As the horrible thought sank home, a cool breath of air, suggesting the smell of stagnant salt water, blew through an opening created by the crushing of the plates in the vessel's hull—an opening larger than the body of a man. ”

“ The ship, now distant not more than half a mile, came surging on, with her broad expanse of canvas fully distended by the following gale, and straining at the stout spars and tough hemp rigging as though it would tear the very masts themselves out of the hull and come flying down to leeward like cobwebs before a summer breeze; or as though, when the ship rose upon the ridge of a sea, lifting her fore-foot and some forty feet of her keel clear out of the water, she would take flight, and, leaving the sea altogether, soar away upon her canvas pinions like a startled sea-fowl. ”

“ The water washed with a thunderous sobbing sound along the metal bends of the ship, that, as she stooped her side into the brine, flashed up the swell in froth, hurling towards us also a recoiling billow, which made the dance of the boat horribly bewildering and nauseating. One moment we were floated, as it seemed to my eye, to the level of the bulwarks of the stooping ship; the next we were in a valley, with the great bare hull leaning away from us—an immense wet surface of red and black and chequered band, her shrouds vanishing in a slope, and her yard-arms forking up sky high. ”

“ But the work of cleaning, painting and varnishing a hull intrinsically sound may be accomplished by the man or boy of average intelligence and industry.
What is true about a hull is still more so of her rig. When I first went to sea on a deep-water voyage, as soon as the ship was out of soundings the crew's first duty was to undo the work of the professional rigger, stay the masts anew by shrouds and backstays, and replace the hurried botch-work of knots and splices by seamanlike and shipshape work. ”

“ Such a typical craft is a schooner of about eighty tons, clean-cut about the bows, and with a long overhang at the stern that would give her a rakish, yacht-like air, except for the evidences of her trade, with which her deck is piled. Her hull is of the cutter model, sharp and deep, affording ample storage room. ”

“ It required skilful handling to get her safely to the sea. Gently and softly she floated down, over bars where she almost grazed the sand, where but a few inches lifted her enormous hull above the river's bed. ”

“ Then, if you but watch patiently, the ball is seen to expand into a sheet of crimson light, terribly and weirdly beautiful, until the eye can discern the shadowy outline of a ship, or rather schooner, of fire, with hull and masts, stays and sails ”

“ After loading the light hull with our impedimenta, it was an easy business to place it at the water's edge, and, at a suitable opportunity, run it out into waist-deep water, jump on the almost uncapsizable hull, and with quickly-grasped paddles—no troublesome operation of shipping lengthy oars in row-locks—force the slender craft beyond the breakers. ”

“ These blocks are short, thick timbers, arranged in graduated piles, so that they form an inclined plane of over one in twenty, from which the completed hull can slide slowly into the water, stern first. Then comes the laying of the keel, that part which is to the whole vessel what {83} the backbone is to a man. ”

“ The hull of the “Great Eastern” is proof against the most formidable seas; it is double, and is composed of a number of cells placed between the deck and hold; besides these, thirteen compartments, separated by water-tight partitions, increase the security against fire or the inlet of water. Ten thousand tons of iron were used in the construction of this hull, and 3,000,000 rivets secured the iron plates on her sides.
36The “Great Eastern” draws 30 feet of water with a cargo of 28,500 tons, and with a light cargo, from 20 to 30 feet. ”

“ In the larger ships the type of hull gradually developed into that familiar in numerous pictures of the Armada period: low forecastle, very little higher than the waist, and moderately high poop, the guns being mounted on the main deck and in one or more fighting decks below it. ”

“ If the hull of the ship is, as it has been justly described, formed on the model of the aquatic fowl, if the sail has been copied from the wing of the swan inflated by the wind, and the oar from its webbed foot as it strikes the water, these are but a small part of Nature's loans to art. ”

“ Not a portion of the vessel remained above water, that could be seen, excepting the ends of the chimneys: the hull and all else was hidden by the cotton-bags, piled on each other, tier over tier, like bricks. When the boat headed the current, in order to steer in for the wharf, she was swept down bodily; and even after swinging into the eddy, I did not think she would ever muster way enough to fetch up the few yards she required to reach a berth. ”

“ Next pour melted lead in between the sides of the ballast tank and the hull while the boat is still in the tub of water and distribute it so that the boat floats on a perfectly even keel. When you have poured enough lead into the hull to make her sink to within an inch or so of her gunwales (the upper edge of the boat’s sides) and she is nicely balanced, let the lead cool, take the boat out of the tub and put her back on her stocks on your bench. ”

“ Whoever installed the equipment stopped at the aerial for there was no ground. It was no small job to get a decent ground for the ship, as I have said before, was an old-timer and had a wooden hull. Now where a ship has a steel hull all you’ve got to do to make a ground is to simply connect the ground wire to a water pipe, or any other metal part of the ship, for these lead to the steel hull; as the hull sets in the water the very best kind of a ground is had without any trouble to get it. ”

“ The power that drives the great hull against the rolling masses of water seems to have no sympathy with either the ship or the waves; and drenched from stem to stern, the vessel reels and staggers on her way, kept only to her work by careful use of helm. ”

“ With a desire to furnish ship-builders, and others interested in naval construction, a plan of the ship, D. J. Lawlor, Esq., naval architect, has constructed a model of the hull, including the upper works, as they must have originally existed. ”

“ The hull from water line falls in as shown, so as to describe at midships an arc of 4 feet 6 inches, and a circular deck of 1⁄8 inch plate is riveted on the hull. There are two man-holes, each 16 inches diameter in the clear, placed in end plates of the circular deck as shown, and provided with covers 3⁄8 inch thick, secured by twenty screws 3⁄4 inch diameter. The edge of each manhole is stiffened by a welded iron ring. ”

“ Length, 790 feet; breadth, 88 feet; depth, to boat deck, 80 feet; draught, fully loaded, 37 feet, 6 inches; displacement on load line, 45,000 tons; height to top of funnels, 155 feet; height to mastheads, 216 feet. The hull below draught line was divided into 175 water-tight compartments, which made it—so the owners claimed—“unsinkable.” ”

“ The chief points which characterize these vessels are that while the weather-side is rounded the lee-side is flat from stem to stern, that both stem and stern are exactly similar in shape, and that there is asmall similarly shaped hull swung out from the side of the main hull on poles, which acts as an outrigger and prevents the vessel heeling over. ”

“ Fifty hulls, at least, moulded on lines of beauty and speed—hulls of wood, of iron, expressing in their forms the highest achievement of modern ship-building—lay moored all in a row, stem to quay, as if assembled there for an exhibition, not of a great industry, but of a great art. ”

“ The hull and hull fittings of an unarmored cruiser built of wood will weigh from 49 per cent. to 52 per cent. of the total displacement. With high-powered engines it is doubtful if sufficient strength can be obtained with even 52 per cent. of the displacement for the hull, and this must suppose the absence of all protection to buoyancy, as water-tight compartments.
The hull and fittings of a steel cruiser, exclusive of protective decks, will weigh from 39 per cent. ”

“ Art. 7.—Ships, whether steamships or sailing-ships, when at anchor in roadsteads or fairways, shall, between sunset and sunrise, exhibit where it can best be seen, but at a height not exceeding twenty feet above the hull, a white light in a globular lantern of eight inches in diameter, and so constructed as to show a clear, uniform, and unbroken light visible all around the horizon, and at a distance of at least one mile. ”

“ By the time the hull is ready for launching it is often of great weight, all of which is borne upon the wooden blocks underneath the keel. Consequently, if the ground be not good, piles have to be driven in or concrete foundations laid to enable the huge mass of the ship to be supported. ”

“ As the more modern hull held nothing but the machinery, it was small in comparison with the superincumbent upper hull, and thus the force of the engine, once needed to propel a vast mass through the resisting medium of the ocean, was now employed upon a comparatively small hull, the great body of the vessel meeting with no resistance except that of the air. ”