THE WASTE OF THE WIND.
NOT long ago we published a paper by Mr. F. T. Bulled on "The Passing of the Sailing Ship." The melan- choly fact that the sailing ship is disappearing is hardly to be challenged. It leaps to the eye. Everywhere one sees steamers taking up the work of the old sailing ship, because our modern world depends for its sustenance and orderliness on regularity ; and the steamer gives, with small reservations, a regular service of which the sailing ship was incapable. Small coasting vessels, it is true—schooners, brigantines, ketches, and barges—are still built in considerable numbers to carry cargoes whieh need not be delivered with promptness, but in their ease the tendency is towards a regularisation of the trade formerly unknown. These vessels are owned by a comparatively few proprietors, instead of being distributed among many, and they approach a uniformity of size and design. The barges which successfully engage in the East Anglian and Thames trade are now all over one hundred tons, and the old eighty- and sixty-ton barges are laid aside and are to be bought cheap. One begins to wonder whether this systematising of the trade of our smaller coasting vessels may not after all spread upwards, and reimport into the dwindling trade of ocean-going sailing ships the element of life. Method and comparative punctuality might just turn the scale in favour of ocean sailing ships, and make it worth while to continue to build them.
It is by no means a new observation that the application of steam to ships arrested the development of the sailing ship. Contemporaneously with the first steamships wonderful pro- gress was still being made in building the fast clippers which sailed to the Far East ; but steam rapidly conquered all other ambitions, and since those days there have been few experi- ments in the designing of merchant sailing ships. We have heard it suggested by a marine engineer that even the theory of wind-power has not been fully explored, and that there is still something to be achieved from the lifting-power of wind. If his theory could be made at all convincing, it could only be by setting it forth mathematically. That is impossible here, but it may be said broadly that he rested his ideas on the fact that a ship when running tends to bury her nose in the sea, and that this tendency might be appreciably counteracted, while the lightness and buoyancy of the whole ship would be increased, by the supporting power of sails used as planes. We are not rash enough to offer an opinion on that subject, but go on to our point, which is that we civilised men do consent very easily to a considerable waste of a permanent force, not only in navigation, but for engineering and domestic purposes. We do not live in the "horse latitudes"; the wind is nearly always with us. Of course every one who wants a cheap motive force has tried to harness the wind. Every child has made a paper propellor or a windmill. But can it be said that the possible uses of the wind have been as arduously investigated as such recently discovered forces as steam and electricity and gases ? Is it not conceivable that the practical uses of the wind are underestimated just because they are so familiar ? We cannot help thinking that the wind will be more variously employed some day, in the same way that probably the problem of laying under con- tribution the great physical fact of the tides will be solved. One would think that the wind could be used for electric( lighting, yet there is no practical apparatus for the purpose. True, the wind is variable and occasionally absent ; but as electricity can be stored, one might suppose that this was the very case in which variability did not particularly matter.
Our thoughts have been turned to the future of merchant sailing ships by the great German ship Preussen,' which has been driven ashore near Dover. She is the largest sailing ship in the world, and for some eight years she has made her voyages between Germany and Chile with a punctuality which has astonished all who have watched them. As every one knows, there is no route on which there are more marked differences in the times of voyages than on the Horn route. Yet the 'Preussen' has made her voyages out and home with a variation of only a few days. She has more than once doubled the Horn four times in the year. We know that German sailing ships are better manned than British sailing ships; but we should like to know whether this is made
financially possible only by subsidies. If it is, our own ships could not be expected to compete with German ships; nor should we urge them to try, as the German advantage is in that case an unreal one, and can have no permanent effect on commercial competition. But is there not an explanation in the use of a type of ship which has not been tried in Great Britain ? Just as large barges pay and small barges do not, is it not likely that large sailing ships would pay, although our barques and full-rigged ships of a thousand to two thousand tons scarcely do so ? The • Preussen,' which was stranded through no fault of her navigable qualities, but through a series of mischances, is nearly six thousand tons gross,— as big as some of the P. and 0. liners which run to Australia.
The same principles which are at work in the large American coasting schooners are as far as possible employed in her. Everything, it has been said of the American schooners, is driven by machinery except the ship ; the sails are set by machinery, the ship is lighted by machinery, the ship's derricks are worked by machinery. Such ships are managed adequately by small crews. Of course the system of small crews cannot be safely employed in crossing the ocean, nor can machinery be applied to setting square sails as it can to the much simpler fore-and-aft sails. The American schooners, with their five, six, or seven masts, are able to run for shelter on the coast. Their fore-and-aft rig is most -unsuitable for ocean voyages owing to the dangers of gybing before heavy winds. In 1907 one of these large American schooners which crossed the Atlantic was totally lost off the Scilly Isles. But still, even in square-rigged ships a greater use of labour-saving apparatus is possible. If that were done, perhaps the condemnation of wailing ships would prove to be premature. We venture to say that this will almost certainly be so if auxiliary power from internal-combustion engines can be applied to large ships. For, after all, wind is cheaper than steam, if only speed and regularity in transport can be obtained, and ships can be worked with small crews. The 'Preussen,' unless her remarkable voyages are only a series of coincidences, has obtained both speed and regularity. Have we nothing to learn from her P And if we have, why should we continue to waste the wind ?
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