Salt Lake Telegram | 1906-07-27 | Page 12 | Modern Freight Ships

MODERN FREIGHT .SHIPS. The Sun of New York discusses the modern sail ship. It gets its text from Shipping Illustrated and says : ' "The old sea dogs of the day of wooden hulls. square rigged, would be flabergasted were they to revisit re-visit the Seven Seas and note the changes that science and competition have worked in the interests of commerce." It thinks that poetry as well as romance have suffered suf-fered by the transformation. . It says a ship still "walks the waters as a thing of life," but her walk is not as graceful; she is one of the big cargo carriers, with a forest of derricks on her deck, because the hand worked ships have to receive and discharge cargoes on the jump. We have now the steel-hulled seven-masted schooner of 5000 tons, over 400 feet long and carrying carry-ing 43,000 square feet of canvas and a crew of only sixteen men to work her, because of steam-driven labor-saving appliances, and the hideous whale-back, shapeless turret -steamers, with floating tanks and clumsy hulls, fitted with decks that look like the steel roof of a skyscraper. It cites the steamship Orandesburg with the steam stack near the stern and her long deck covered with discharging gear, but she can unload 10,000 tons of freight in thirty hours and the modern seaman has become more of a machinist than a sail trimmer. Our fiction writers no longer deal with. Jack aloft, but with Sandy in the engine room. And the poetry of the sea if in the -engine room between decks.