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Hoyland mentions a man of twenty-five who was discharging bar-iron from the hold of a ship; in a stooping position, preparatory to hoisting a bundle on deck, he was struck by one of the bars which pinned him to the floor of the hold, penetrating the thorax, and going into the wood of the flooring to the extent of three inches, requiring the combined efforts of three men to extract it.
The third division contained an African loom, and an African spindle with spun cotton round it; cloths of cotton of various kinds made by the natives, some white, but others dyed by them of different colours, and others in which they had interwoven European silk; cloths and bags made of grass, and fancifully coloured; ornaments made of the same materials; ropes made from a species of aloes and others, remarkably strong, from glass and straw; fine string made from the fibres of the roots of trees; soap of two kinds; one of which was formed from an earthy substance; pipe-bowls made of clay, and of a brown red; one of these, which came from the village of Dakard, was beautifully ornamented by black devices burnt in, and was besides highly glazed; another brought from Galam, was made of earth, which was richly impregnated with little particles of gold; trinkets made by the natives from their own gold; knives and daggers made by them from our bar-iron; and various other articles, such as bags, sandals, dagger-cases, quivers, grisgris, all made of leather of their own manufacture, and dyed of various colours, and ingeniously sewed together.
In 1787, we find Richard Crawshay manufacturing with difficulty ten tons of bar-iron weekly, and it was of a very inferior character, the means not having yet been devised at Cyfartha for malleableizing the pit-coal cast-iron with economy or good effect.
"W. Reynolds saw H. C. in a trial which he made at Ketley, Dec. 17, 1784, produce from the same pig both cold short and tough iron by a variation of the process used in reducing them from the state of cast-iron to that of malleable or bar-iron; and in point of yield his processes were quite equal to those at Pitchford, which did not exceed the proportion of 31 cwt. to the ton of bars.
The merits of the invention seem to have been generally conceded, and numerous contracts for licences were entered into with Cort and his partner by the manufacturers of bar-iron throughout the country.
Therefore, in 1809, moorings were laid down for a floating buoy, ‘but owing to the heavy swell of sea and the rocky sand-stone bottom on this part of the coast, it was found hardly possible to prevent the buoy from occasionally drifting, even although it had been attached to part of the great chain made from bar-iron an inch and a half square, with which the Bell-Rock floating-light had been moored for upwards of four years without injury.
It was the same with Cort's second patent, in which he described his method of manufacturing bar-iron from the ore or from cast-iron. All the several processes therein described had been practised before his time; his merit chiefly consisting in the skilful manner in which he combined and applied them.
In course of time he found it necessary to erect new furnaces, and, having adopted the processes invented by Henry Cort, he was thereby enabled greatly to increase the production of his forges, until in 1812 we find him stating to a committee of the House of Commons that he was making ten thousand tons of bar-iron yearly, or an average produce of two hundred tons a week.
Yet the fact is, that the Pope has placed its importation under an as stringent prohibition almost as the importation of heresy: perhaps he smells heresy and civilization coming in the wake of iron. The duty on the introduction of bar-iron is two baiocchi la libbra, equivalent to fifty dollars, or £12 10s., per ton; which is about twice the price of bar-iron in this country.
This seems to have taken effect; and in order to ascertain the quality of the article by testing it upon a large scale, the King commanded Dudley to send up to the Tower of London, with every possible speed, quantities of all the sorts of bar-iron made by him, fit for the "making of muskets, carbines, and iron for great bolts for shipping; which iron," continues Dud, "being so tried by artists and smiths, the ironmasters and iron-mongers were all silenced until the 21st year of King James's reign."
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