A LIVING BOAT.
CAPTAIN BOYTON'S voyage from Wapping to Lambeth in the inflated india-rubber suit which enables him at will either to float high and dry on his back and steer and propel himself feet forwards with his sail and paddle, or to tread the water while he eats his dinner, or fishes, or fires his gun, or reads a book from his little floating library, seems likely to effect a great revolution in the feelings with which men and women will embark on lakes and seas. If for the price of £12 or £14 you can get a suit of clothes in which you could not sink if you would, but might go to sleep on the water as comfor- tably as in a ship's berth,—nay, in which you have so great a buoyancy that two or three drowning persons might cling to you without a chance of dragging you down,—the awe with which voyages are undertaken by those who have read of catastrophes like that of the La Plata' or the Cospatrick ' would certainly in a very large degree vanish away. Not, indeed, that you can ex- pect emigrants who have probably hardly saved £12 or £14 a head at all, to carry such suits with them. Still, as soon as the question of the price of an invention of this kind becomes one of manufacturing ingenuity, it is always on the cards that the cost of production, if it be a very desirable article, may be reduced from a given number of pounds to as many shillings ; and it is easy to see how much the terror and panic of any disaster at sea would be decreased if it were possible for every one on board to contemplate, without any sort of immediate fear of death, the proposal to take to the water, and remain there like a corps of observation, as near the ship as was consistent with safety, till the catastrophe happened, and the crew had leisure to unite their energies on the making of a raft, or even the repair and pro- visioning of the boats. If the sea were as little immediately threatening to life, except for the difficulty of cooking food, as the desert,—and this deficiency of facilities for making a fire and cooking would really in this case remain almost the only difference, except, indeed, in shark-abound- ing regions,—if everybody felt quite at ease in the water, com- paratively few shipwrecks would be so very deadly. For on a lee shore,—the situation most dreaded by sailors,—it would appear that Captain Boyton's india-rubber dress would enable any one to get to land without difficulty or danger, unless it were from the violence of the breakers themselves, which he does not seem to fear, but his mode of evading which he has not ex- plained. And even in a fire at sea,—one of the most dangerous of catastrophes for this special apparatus, as undue heat would certainly melt it, and probably there might be the same danger under a tropical sun,—if the passengers were warned in due time and took to the water, with india-rubber bags of pro- visions attached, so as not to impede or harass the operations of the crew, there would seldom be the frightful catastrophe which the history of fires at sea so often shows. For in these cases the gain of a day or two, and of the means of getting on safely outside your temporary home, is an immense gain. If, for instance, the people in a ship's boat could get out while the sailors stopped a leak which was sinking her too low in the water, or if any one of the crew could walk away in the sea on a fishing excursion, and use his gun, as Captain Boyton has done in a like plight, for the bring- ing-down of birds, the danger of being swamped and the danger of being starved out would be far less than it is. One great feature of the apparatus is that it keeps the body, even in cold water, at a normal temperature ; probably, indeed, the waterproof texture would prove injurious if worn for many days consecu- tively, certainly so in a warm climate :—but for many hours to- gether, at least, it is perfectly harmless, and it is a perfect preserva- tive against cold. Another great feature of the apparatus is the inflated pillow on which the head rests in the attitude of floating, and which keeps it as buoyant as a cork. It is here that the ordinary life-preservers have so greatly failed ; for while they have kept the body up, they have trusted to the strength of the weak and easily exhausted muscles to keep the head above water. Captain Boyton's apparatus makes the head the most buoyant part of the whole body. Indeed, in his experiments on the Serpentine he showed how easy it was for him to anchor himself when in tolerably shallow water, and take his sleep as comfort- ably as if he were lying at home in bed. This feature alone in the apparatus, that it admits of recruiting the exhausted strength of those who use it, by natural rest, without suffering from cold, makes it as far superior to all previous inventions of the kind, as the breathing-space which gives your head time to recover its usual tranquillity is superior to the breathing-space which only gives it time to throb more and more wildly at the imminence of the in- evitable crisis. As far as we can see, there is no reason why, with such an apparatus as this properly fitted on, the adult passengers of a great steam-ship should not keep round it like a flock of Mother Carey's chickens for a day or more, till it could be seen how much of the wreck might be available to make rafts with, and how
many barrels of provisions could be collected to store them with Nor would the voyage on a raft itself have half the perils, in case- any one washed off it were in a condition of as little immediate peril as while he was still upon it.
The defect of the apparatus,—relatively, we mean, to its other merits, not relatively to any other invention of the kind, for all of them are far more defective in the same way,—appears be in the slowness of the rate of progress for which it provides. Captain Boyton took an hour and a half in making his way from Wapping to Lambeth, with the flood-tide in his favour, though the wind was contrary. He seems to have been a long time also,—long, we mean, in proportion to the distance,—in making his way to the Irish coast from the steamship Queen,' but that was in a gale of wind. Indeed, his sole moving powers are a paddle, which, in a very rough sea, is probably of more use for keeping the direction right than for actual propulsion, and, again, a small sail, which, under favourable circumstances, he can hoist between two little masts stuck in sockets attached to his feet, and which, with an aft wind, sends him forward through the water. It is pretty clear that neither of these sources of power will avail for anything but the slowest of voyages, nor would there be much power of tacking against a wind with no better rudder than a paddle, and a sail of which you could not alter the bear- ings in relation to the body at all. If it be true that Captain Boyton contemplates crossing the Channel in this dress, he must certainly take a good india-rubber wallet full of provisions with him, and avail himself of any Channel steamer that he comes within hail of, in case the wind turns contrary, or he will have to pass more than one night in the Channel, which would be anxious work for him without a large supply of rockets. Still, it is conceivable that this defect of propelling-power may admit of partial remedy, and that some day we may hear of a party of riflemen landing at night, with their rifles and a day's rations, on an enemy's shore, without any ships having been seen in the offing. But without contem- plating so great a surprise as this, it is clear that for the purposes of naval warfare no invention could be more useful in various pos- sible emergencies. It will enable any daring man to fasten a tor- pedo to an enemy's ship by night without much risk of failure,. and to explode it without any further danger than that the shock might engulf him, or destroy his water-proof harness, before he was at a safe distance again. Hence the greatest change the apparatus is likely to produce will be in the ease with which landings will be effected without boats. The pilot will probably take off the last letters for a ship without troubling himself to bring his boat with him, or to signal for one from the shore ; and passengers without luggage will commit themselves to the water when they are off the place at which they desire to land, with as much confidence as they get off the coach at the nearest point to their homes. If Captain Boyton could land in a gale on the Irish coast, leaving the ship while it was yet some miles from shore, we shall certainly find the use of piers and jetties, except for heavy luggage, very much diminished, and a great economy of time and labour effected by the change. Indeed, we may expect that short water excursions will in future be made, by those who can afford the new apparatus,. as commonly without boats as with them. The Goodwin Sands will become quite populous with tourists from Deal who have got a Boyton apparatus, and are as curious to visit the dangerous shoals where shipwrecks take place as they are to see the scenes of murders or the sites of old romance ; and as for the solitude of the Eddystone Lighthouse, the grim old warders there may, if they please, hear at least as much of the world as the inhabitants of the wilder parts of Dartmoor ; while the lighterman at the Nore may almost be en- couraged to institute a salon. As for the ferries, all parts of rivers will be equally available for passing under the new rigime, and no Bishop of the Antipodes will in future earn the fame gained by the present Bishop of Lichfield in swimming the river's of their wild dioceses. They will simply " paddle their own canoe," —that canoe being their own body, rendered rather dropsical in appearance by an inflated dress. Perhaps, indeed, Captain Boy- ton's invention may introduce a completely new amusement into the society of coast, and river, and lake towns,—where the sea, or the lake, or the river may make a natural Corso, upon which the inhabitants will meet in their leisure hours, each with a fanci- ful standard hoisted on his foot-mast. That possibility would suggest a very agreeable novelty in the way of personal regattas, —races between human yachts, pillowed at ease upon the tossing waves,—with which to diversify the amusements of the seaport or river-side village.
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