Viewing page 23 of 42

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

54. UNDER THE SHED.

It seemed as though this yard was built for me, and if it was not that I found it so practical, I should have thought it only pictorial. But in the shed in rows, in piles, in layers, lay every part of the ship ready to fit together, all in order; as I drew, boats and boilers came out of the shop and went to their places on board.

55. THE KEEL.

The shipyards are endless and their forms are endless and ever new — but I never before found one where from the water I could look down in the ship as it grew, as it did here, amid forests, its walls, which the ship in turn would soon tower over.

56. UNLOADING ORE.

When the great ore boats arrive "somewhere," they draw up at a crane, covered dock and almost as fast as they are loaded they are emptied — and the ore is in the furnaces and they steam away.

57. BUILDING SUBMARINE CHASERS.

All around the big ship the little boats grew and gathered — being built out of doors, anywhere near the water into which the crane swung them as soon as they were finished, and it is like this they are being built all over the country.

58. IN THE LAND OF BROBINAG.

THE ARMOR-PLATE BENDING PRESS.

Only Swift ever imagined and Gulliver ever saw presses and ladles and chains and cranes like these, but I have seen them, and there is no imagination in my study of the press or the ladle. A press so powerful it will slowly bend the thickest plate. A ladle so big the men were lost in it.

59. IN THE DRY DOCK.

These are the things that tower — that shine — whose power is terrible — but their smile does not make glad.

The officer said he could not see the ship like that — "Don't you wish you could," was the only answer I could think of.

(20)

[[end page]]
[[start page]]

60. THE ARMOR-PLATE PRESS.

The English maker rolls rapidly his armor plate in heat and smoke and flame. The American slowly presses it, but with a press so powerful it will crush the huge ingot, so sensitive that it will not break a watch crystal placed under it.

61. THE ANTS.

She came into the dry dock "at an Atlantic port." The water was pumped out, ropes were dropped over the side, and when the water was out, men at the bottom of the locks fastened planks to the ropes, and the crew with buckets of paint and brushes long, little, short and big swarmed over the sides, and fell with the paint upon the ship, and while I stared and tried to draw, she was painted both sides of her, and her propellers were polished like gold, by the ants — only ants don't work like that, only American sailors, and a few weeks before many of them had never seen a big ship.

62. THE PROW.

"Very pretty drawing," said the Admiral, when I showed him this leering, staring, slobbering monster, the spirit of war, a creation of our time and our country. It fascinates and is untellable.

63. THE BIRDS OF WAR.

Like birds, and they are birds, the planes chase each other around the field; now they soar, then they dive, in the sun they glitter, in the shadows they disappear, and far and near, high and low, they rise, they soar, they plunge, and then they skim, feeling for the ground; and then they come to rest upon it — the Birds of War.

64. THE WHITE AND THE BLACK HAMMERS.

"The biggest hammer in the world," said the foreman—maybe—anyway the shop was amongst the most pictorial of all those I have drawn devoted to shell-making.

"Say, friend," said the workman, "won't they let yer use a machine in war time; is that why youse does it by hand?"

(21)