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8 THE MARINE RECORD. OCTOBER 31, I90I. ena MONI cise init awit GRADUAL DISAPPEARANCE OF THE SAILING SHIP. OBSERVATIONS ON A TRIP ABROAD AND REFLECTIONS ON THE INCREASING USE OF STEAMERS (Written for the Commercial News, San Francisco, by . Capt. William G. Goodman.) The sailing ship is being slowly displaced in the ocean carrying trade by cheaply built, large carrying, and economi- callly managed freight steamers. A visitor to the great shipping ports of the world cannot fail to observe that this statement is a matter of fact. And although our port of San Francisco is among the last to feel the effects of steamer competition, yet we have for an object lesson before us a fleet of large carrying steamers that are not here by accident, are not all discharged transports out of work, but have deliberately come to this North Pacific coast from far distant ports in ballast, and have accepted in most instances about the same rates of charter as the sailing ships. Much as the old out-of-date shipowner and shipmaster may deplore and lament the degeneracy of the times when a floating ‘‘steam-kettle’”’ is given the preference over a hand- some clipper ship, it is as certain as anything can be that steamers have come to stay; and it is after all a question of evolition and the survival of the fittest. The greatest and busiest seaports of the world are already given over to the steamships. To those who regret the passing of the sailing ship there will be one great consolation, that ‘‘sailors will go, too,’’ and in future the crews of the ocean tramps will be nothing more than sea laborers. The American sailing ship has been on the decline since the begin- ning of the Civil War, which has been generally considered as one cf the chief causes of that decline. But itis not doing justice to the bustling activity of the American business man to say that the cap- ture of between two and thre hundred, mostly small and a great many of them old, vessels and the sale of perhaps sixty or more good and larger vessels should perma- nently cripple a great nation’s mer- cantile navy, if in the judgment of the shipowners, shipbuilders and business men generally it had been considered a profitable venture to build and replace those which had been lost, more especially as every other industry which had been sus- pended or crippled by the operation of war had ina year or two, like the cotton raising business, for in- stance, more than doubled in value the best year’s crop previous to the war, the shipping would have re- vived along with all the other great industries of the nation if it had been considered profitable. The reaction following the cival war, when low freights prevailed for several years operated as a discourage- ment to shipbuilders, the overland railroad to the Pacific and the opening of the Suez canal and the increasing use of steamers, all operated to the detriment of American ship- building. THE PORT OF NEW YORK. On a recent visit to the city of New York after an absence of more than thirty years the writer was almost startled at the altered appearance of the port, the wharves on the Hast river side for three miles, once crowded with sailing ships, are now nearly all housed in and used for local river and coasting steamers and barges. The beautiful clipper ships of the several lines of California packets have long since been scattered and departed forever, some wrecked, burned or otherwise lost or sold to foreigners; and the wholesome and powerful old ships of the various lines of London, Liverpool and Havre packets have also disappeared, a few of them still in existence dragging out the remainder of their lives in the inglorious duty of a coal hulk in some obscure foreign port. One of the famous old Havre packets is doing duty as a combined coal barge and hopper in this port, and looking at the present remains of this old craft, the Germania, who would believe that such a sorry looking vessel could ever have been alluded to as ‘“‘a magnificent specimen of American naval architecture.’? Yet this old ship has a record of thirteen days from New York to Havre in 1859. As evidence that profitable employment was the principal necessity for the upbuilding of the ocean-going mercantile marine of the United States, it may be stated that a large number of very handsome ships which had been built in the ’70’s and ’80’s, and in some cases as recent as the ’90’s, are now masquerading as schooner-rigged barges, being towed to and fro between the Atlantic ports loaded with coal, in disguise as it were, as if ashamed to be seen by their old friends, their owners deeming it wiser to either sell them outright or more profitable to use them as coal barges in preference to sending them off on long voyages under the.r proper ship rig; and as a further instance of the good judg- ment and sagacity of Eastern sailing ship owners, last year they got rid of a fleet of large, handsome, good but elderly ships to Pacific coast buyers and themselves went into the steamship business. The same causes and effects are going on in the principal ports of the world. Liverpool for ocean commerce forty years ago was the busiest port in the world within its great stone docks, great at that time in compari- son with the size of the ships of that period but not so compared with the ships and steamers of the present day; within its docks could be seen the very best of the ships of not occupy as much space as ten 1,000-ton ships, which was above the average capacity of sailing ships of forty years ago; and she does her work with less fuss and expense than the collective ten small ships; and while the Liverpool docks of long ago were always crowded with the small ships of that period they are not so now; that more business is performed in a concentrated way by the use of immensely larger ships. Some of the docks are too small for the accommodation of the great ships of the present day and several of the smallest have been filled up or used as graving docks on both sides of the river, and larger docks have been built in their place. The Manchester canal takes away fully one-third of the trade of the Mersey, formerly done at Liverpool. But the accommodations of the Liverpool docks would be unequal now to the task of taking care of all the trade of the river Mersey. The Manchester canal has had considerable influ- ence in favor of building ocean freight steamers instead of sailing vessels. The approaches of the river Mersey have been vastly improved since my recollection. Forty years ago vessels of heavy draft only ventured to make the port at or near the time of high water and this peculiarity of a lack of water on the bar except at high water has been the indi- rect cause of the loss of many fine ships; one of which recurs vividly to my memory, that of the handsome, full- THE OLD METHOD OF DISCHARGING ORE AND COAL BY STAGING AND WHEELBARROWS. all nations, a goodly proportion of which and the handsom- est of all were admitted to be the American ships, then and for many years before and after, the model for all others to imitate or emulate, but which none could excel. They have all vanished. THE PORT OF LIVERPOOL, The city front of Liverpool at my first visit there in 1859, . to one entering the river from the sea presented the appear- ance of a dense forest of ships’ masts for a space of about five miles, with smaller clusters here and there on the Cheshire side from Birkenhead to Runcorn. Ona recent visit there after an absence of forty-one years, the change appeared even more surprising than that of New York. The city front looks naked and bare; instead of the long rows of ships’ masts which I had remembered, a few slim poles belonging to some 5,000 to 10,000 ton steamship hid- ing behind the long rows of warehouses, were only to be seen appearing over the roofs of these warehouses. ‘To those old-fashioned, out-of-date people who imagine because sailing ships are getting out of favor that the commerce of the world is going to perdition it may be well to say that it is generally allowed that one ton of a ten-knot steamer is equal to about two and one-half tons of a sailing ship. So that the 10,o00-ton freight steamer can, in a given time, do the work of 25,000 tons of sailing ships, except on the long- est voyages. This 10,000-ton steamer, though large, does rigged steamship Royal Charter, with over 450 lives, because I was in the port of Liverpool at the time, October, 1859, and passed by the remains of the wrecked vessel a few days after. LONDON. ' London, much like Liverpool, is bare of sailing ships. On my last previous visit, 1863, the American civil war was going on. The Victoria docks were crowded with the choicest specimens of American ocean-going ships, most of them for sale; all of them kept in port for fear of confederate privateers, which had been prowling around the British channel. In this year of our Lord, rgor, the change is very marked, a few ships only are to be seen in any of the docks, and the general aspect of the sailing ships in the London docks very much resembles that of a cocoa- nut grove at Waikiki, near Honolulu, described by our old friend Mark Twain as appearing like an ‘‘inverted feather duster struck by lightning.”” The sailing ships are disap- appearing, but their places are better filled by steamers. An American sailing ship in a British portis something very rare in these days. Months pass in some of the most prom- inent ports without an American vessel putting in an ap- pearance. At the time of my visit, a few months ago, there were only three square-rigged American vessels in the ports of the British Islands, two of them from San Francisco at Liverpool, Roanoke and Susquehanna, and the Adam W. Spies at Barry, FS