pounds. In 1912 they were $6.00. Ships salable at sixty to eighty dollars a ton before the war were eagerly sought at $300. It was not unusual for a ship to earn her cost on a single voyage. Naturally these prices caused a lively demand for ships, old and new, but it soon became apparent that it could not be met by unaided private enterprise. To establish a shipyard means a heavy expenditure of capital, running into tens of millions of dollars. To build a steel ship used to take well over a year, though war-time enterprise reduced this to an average of two months, while one vessel, the "Tuckahoe" was launched in 27 days and delivered ready for cargo in 37. But before the establishment of this record of speed and efficiency it appeared that a new comer in the shipbuilding trade would have to spend millions of dollars on his plant and not begin turning out completed vessels for nearly two years. Nobody could tell whether the war would last that long, and everybody knew that with the end of the war the charter value of ships would instantly drop. Naturally, therefore, private capital hesitated about embarking on so perilous an enterprise. The situation attracted the attention of Congress even before our entrance upon the war, but with that event the creation of a merchant marine at any cost became imperative, and September, 1916, the Shipping Board was created with authority "to encourage, develop and create a naval auxiliary and naval reserve, and a merchant marine to meet the requirements of the commerce of the United States." In April of 1917 the United States being then actively at war, a subordinate corporation-The Emergency Fleet Corporation-was organized with a capital of $50,000,000 to build ships, and to cooperate with private yards in their construction. Looking back upon the work then begun it is easy to discover grave faults in organization, instances of individual failure, seemingly wild extravagance, and a wide divergence from the highest forms of efficiency in the work of the Shipping Board, and its subordinate corporation. Much of this we may pass over hastily. Scandal is not history, and quarrels between otherwise eminent men over petty points of personal prerogative will be forgotten long before the ships the Government actually did build have begun to wear out. But it must be recorded that the nation was doomed to grave disappointment in the hopes it had formed of the rapid and business-like creation of a merchant fleet. The more eminent the men chosen for high service in this cause the more certain they seemed to quarrel among themselves over issues that seemed but trival to the public. There were repeated changes before an efficient organization could be formed and every change meant more delay. Very early in the history of the board came up the controversy between the advocates of wooden and of steel ships-and upon this rock of dissension the whole came near being wrecked. In this controversy great interests were arrayed against each other, and, furthermore, the honest convictions of many who had no special interest to serve enlisted them strongly upon one side or the other. The problem was to get a serviceable merchant marine in the quickest time possible. The advocates of an all-steel fleet laid heaviest emphasis on the word "serviceable." They insisted that the wooden ship was a thing of the past, and that, once the war was over, the nation would suffer heavily financially if left with a large fleet of such craft in its hands, as they were not economical to operate, and cost higher premiums for insurance. The champions of wooden ships urged in response that it would be impossible to build an all-steel fleet in season to meet the emergency. Conceding that the steel ship was the better they insisted that the time required for building yards suitable for this form of construction and the delay that would necessarily attend the furnishing of steel by mills already overcrowded by orders for munitions would postpone to the distant future the completion of a fleet which should be ready to take our soldiers to the theater of war and carry over the supplies necessary to maintain them there. Nor did the advocates of wooden ships fail to point out the special advantages possessed by their form of construction in this particular emergency. We were building to beat the submarine. Of all vessels the steel ship suffers most from the explosion of a torpedo beneath her hull. A hole of from five to ten feet long, and equally broad is torn in the thin "skin of the ship," which is not more than three-fourths of an inch thick at most, and the weight of the hull, deprived of interior buoyancy causes it to sink immediately. Many steel vessels of considerable size were totally engulfed in less than two minutes after sustaining a torpedo shock. A wooden bottom, on the contrary, is not so badly shattered by a torpedo explosion, while the natural buoyancy of the hull, unless laden with a particularly heavy cargo, will keep it afloat for some time after being torpedoed. In nearly every instance of the destruction of a wooden craft the submarine was forced to make her work complete by shell fire, or by sending a party aboard to put the torch to the victim. The annals of the sea are full of stories of wooden derelicts that floated for years after being abandoned by their crews as in a sinking condition. |