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- The Dreadnaught
The Dreadnaught - The Gun was disharged
Piracy was an everyday occurence for the sailors. - The Ketch
The ketch was a two-master, sometimes rigged with lanteen sails, but more often with the foremast square-rigged, like a ship's foremast, and the mainmast like the mizzen of a modern bark, with a square topsail surmounting a fore-and-aft mainsail. The foremast was set very much aft—often nearly amidships. - The Prison Ship 'Jersey'
The "Jersey" prison-ship was not an uncommon lot for the bold privateersman, who, when once consigned to it, found that the reward of a sea-rover was not always wealth and pleasure. The "Jersey," which had been originally a 74-gun ship, then cut down to a hulk and moored at the Wallabout, at that time a lonely and deserted place on the Long Island shore, now about the center of the Brooklyn river front. - The Shallop
- The Snow. an obsolete type
The Snow. an obsolete type - The Treachourous Kayak
The Treachourous Kayak Mastering all the literature of the Arctic, he (Charles Hall) determined to undertake himself the arduous work of the explorer. Taking passage on a whaler, he spent several years among the Esquimaux, living in their crowded and fetid igloos, devouring the blubber and uncooked fish that form their staple articles of diet, wearing their garb of furs, learning to navigate the treacherous kayak in tossing seas, to direct the yelping, quarreling team of dogs over fields of ice as rugged as the edge of some monstrous saw, studying the geography so far as known of the Arctic regions, perfecting himself in all the arts by which man has contested the supremacy of that land with the ice-king. - The Whaleback
The Whaleback Another form of lake vessel of which great things were expected, but which disappointed its promotors, is the "whaleback," commonly called by the sailors "pigs." These are cigar-shaped craft, built of steel, their decks, from the bridge aft to the engine-house, rounded like the back of a whale, and carried only a few feet above the water. In a sea, the greater part of the deck is all awash, and a trip from the bridge to the engine-house means not only repeated duckings, but a fair chance of being swept overboard. - Waterfront
The Waterfront of New York - Whale sending boat flying
Whale sending boat flying While the right whale usually takes the steel sullenly, and dies like an overgrown seal, the cachalot fights fiercely, now diving with such a rush that he has been known to break his jaw by the fury with which he strikes the bottom at the depth of 200 fathoms; now raising his enormous bulk in air, to fall with an all-obliterating crash upon the boat which holds his tormentors, or sending boat and men flying into the air with a furious blow of his gristly flukes, or turning on his back and crunching his assailants between his cavernous jaws. - Whistling bouy
Whistling bouy Less picturesque than lighthouses and lightships, and with far less of human interest about them, are the buoys of various sorts of which the Lighthouse Board has more than one thousand in place, and under constant supervision. Yet, among the sailor's safeguards, they `rank` near the head. They point out for him the tortuous pathway into different harbors; with clanging bell or dismal whistle, they warn him away from menacing shallows and sunken wrecks. The resources of science and inventive genius have been drawn upon to devise ways for making them more effective. At night they shine with electric lights fed from a submarine cable, or with steady gas drawn from a reservoir that needs refilling only three or four times a year. If sound is to be trusted rather than light, recourse is had to a bell-buoy which tolls mournfully as the waves toss it about above the danger spot, or to a whistling buoy which toots unceasingly a locomotive whistle, with air compressed by the Page 355action of the waves. The whistling buoy is the giant of his family, for the necessity for providing a heavy charge of compressed air compels the attachment to the buoy of a tube thirty-two feet or more deep, which reaches straight down into the water. The sea rising and falling in this, as the buoy tosses on the waves, acts as a sort of piston, driving out the air through the whistle, as the water rises, admitting more air as it falls. - A Pink
A pink was rigged like a schooner, but without a bowsprit or jib. - A vanishing type on the lakes
A vanishing type on the lakes - Adrift on an ice-floe
Adrift on an ice-floe DeLong caught in the ice-pack, was carried past its northern end, thus proving it to be an island, indeed, but making the discovery at heavy cost. Winter in the pack was attended with severe hardships and grave perils. Under the influence of the ocean currents and the tides, the ice was continually breaking up and shifting, and each time the ship was in imminent danger of being crushed. In his journal DeLong tries to describe the terrifying clamor of Page 209a shifting pack. "I know of no sound on shore that can be compared with it," he writes. "A rumble, a shriek, a groan, and the crash of a falling house all combined, might serve to convey an idea of the noise with which this motion of the ice-floe is accompanied." - An Armed Cutter
An Armed Cutter - Early type of Smack
Early type of Smack For the fisheries a multitude of smaller types were constructed—such as the lugger, the shallop, the sharpie, the bug-eye, the smack. - Fleeing Slaver
A favorite trick of the slaver, fleeing from a man-of-war, was to throw over slaves a few at a time in the hope that the humanity of the pursuers would impel them to stop and rescue the struggling negroes, thus giving the slave-ship a better chance of escape. Sometimes these hapless blacks thus thrown out, as legend has it Siberian peasants sometimes throw out their children as ransom to pursuing wolves, were furnished with spars or barrels to keep them afloat until the pursuer should come up; and occasionally they were even set adrift by boat-loads. It was hard on the men of the navy to steel their hearts to the cries of these castaways as the ship sped by them; but if the great evil was to be broken up it could not be by rescuing here and there a slave, but by capturing and punishing the traders. - A deckload of cotton
A deckload of cotton - Four-course Cittern
- Cithara or Phorminx
Cithara or Phorminx, from a Greek vase vase in the British Museum. - Peruvian Pan Pipes
- Organ
- Early Organ
- Early form of the regals
- A Positive Organ
- Saxon Pneumatic Organ
The organ, already introduced into divine service, became, under the hands of St. Dunstan, a large and important instrument. William of Malmesbury says that Dunstan gave many to churches which had pipes of brass and were inflated with bellows. In a MS. psalter in Trinity College, Cambridge, is a picture of one of considerable size, which has no less than four bellows played by four men. [Comment on the same picture in book Musical Instruments, by Carl Engel Published in 1875 and Available from gutenberg.org] Some progress in the construction of the organ is exhibited in an illustration dating from the twelfth century, in a psalter of Eadwine, in the library of Trinity college, Cambridge. The instrument has ten pipes, or perhaps fourteen, as four of them appear to be double pipes. It required four men exerting all their power to produce the necessary wind, and two men to play the instrument. Moreover, both players seem also to be busily engaged in directing the blowers about the proper supply of wind. Six men and only fourteen pipes! It must be admitted that since the twelfth century some progress has been made, at all events, in the construction of the organ. - French Garrison Gun
French Garrison Gun (1650-1700). The gun is on a sloping wooden platform at the embrasure. Note the heavy bed on which the cheeks of the carriage rest and the built-in skid under the center of the rear axletree. - Light Artillery of Gustavus Adolphus
Gustavus abandoned the leather gun, however, in favor of a cast-iron 4-pounder and a 9-pounder demiculverin produced by his bright young artillery chief, Lennart Torstensson. The demiculverin was classed as the "feildpeece" par excellence, while the 4-pounder was so light (about 500 pounds) that two horses could pull it in the field. - breechloader
Under the Swedish warrior Gustavus Adolphus, artillery began to take its true position on the field of battle. Gustavus saw the need for mobility, so he divorced anything heavier than a 12-pounder from his field artillery. His famous "leatheren" gun was so light that it could be drawn and served by two men. This gun was a wrought-copper tube screwed into a chambered brass breech, bound with four iron hoops. The copper tube was covered with layers of mastic, wrapped firmly with cords, then coated with an equalizing layer of plaster. A cover of leather, boiled and varnished, completed the gun. Naturally, the piece could withstand only a small charge, but it was highly mobile. - trebuchet
The trebuchet was another war machine used extensively during the Middle Ages. Essentially, it was a seesaw. Weights on the short arm swung the long throwing arm. - Catapult
The catapult was the howitzer, or mortar, of its day and could throw a hundred-pound stone 600 yards in a high arc to strike the enemy behind his wall or batter down his defenses. "In the middle of the ropes a wooden arm rises like a chariot pole," wrote the historian Marcellinus. "At the top of the arm hangs a sling. When battle is commenced, a round stone is set in the sling. Four soldiers on each side of the engine wind the arm down until it is almost level with the ground. When the arm is set free, it springs up and hurls the stone forth from its sling." In early times the weapon was called a "scorpion," for like this dreaded insect it bore its "sting" erect. - Ballista - Caesar covered his landing in Britain with fire from catapults and ballistas.
The ballista had horizontal arms like a bow. The arms were set in rope; a cord, fastened to the arms like a bowstring, fired arrows, darts, and stones. Like a modern field gun, the ballista shot low and directly toward the enemy. - Using Bells phone
- Twine phones
The string telephones which for several years have been flooding the boulevards and the streets of the different cities of Europe, and whose invention dates back, as we have seen, to the year 1667, are very interesting apparatuses by them themselves, and we are astonished that they did not appear rather in the physics cabinets. They consist of cylindrical-conical tubes of metal or cardboard, one end of which is closed by a stretched membrane of parchment, in the center of which is fixed by a knot the string or cord intended to bring them together. When two tubes of this kind are thus joined together and that the wire is tight, as shown, it suffices for a person to apply one of these tubes against the ear and for another person to speak very close to the opening of the other tube, so that all the words spoken by the latter are immediately transmitted to the other, and one can even converse in this manner in an almost low voice.