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Then Benson watched as, from the yards high up on the gunboat's signaling mast, colored electric lights glowed forth, twinkling briefly in turn. This is the modern method of signaling by sea at night. "He wants to know," said Benson, to Mr. Farnum, as he turned, "whether there is safe anchorage for a twelve-hundred-ton gunboat of one hundred and ninety-five feet length."
Then Benson watched as, from the yards high up on the gunboat’s signaling mast, colored electric lights glowed forth, twinkling briefly in turn. This is the modern method of signaling by sea at night. “He wants to know,” said Benson, to Mr. Farnum, as he turned, “whether there is safe anchorage for a twelve-hundred-ton gunboat of one hundred and ninety-five feet length.”
She was a twelve-hundred-ton, triple-screw, turbine-driven boat, and, thanks to the space-economy of the new system, her builders had been able to stow away fifteen thousand horse-power in her engine-room, and this when fully developed gave a speed in smooth water of thirty-five knots or a little over forty statute miles an hour.
The Indiaman was a twelve-hundred-ton ship, as large as one of the small class seventy-four in the king's service, strongly built, with lofty bulwarks, and pierced on the upper deck for eighteen guns, which were mounted on the quarter-deck and forecastle.
"Never," said Wilton Sargent to himself, "has an American seen England as I'm seeing it"; and he thought, blushing beneath the bedclothes, of the unregenerate and blatant days when he would steam to office, down the Hudson, in his twelve-hundred-ton ocean-going steam-yacht, and arrive, by gradations, at Bleecker Street, hanging on to a leather strap between an Irish washerwoman and a German anarchist.
That makes a pay load of a ton an' a half, and you'd have to burn a hundred an' eighty tons of fuel old-style to take it to the moon, and another hundred an' twenty for every ton the rocket ship weighed. You might get a man to the moon with a twelve-hundred-ton rocket maybe. That's with the old fuels. He'd get there, an' he'd live two months, an' then he'd die for lack of air.
Here, where the hoot of the Haverstraw brick-barge-tug answers the howl of the locomotive on either shore, you shall find, with a complete installation of electric light, nickel-plated binnacles, and a calliope attachment to her steam-whistle, the twelve-hundred-ton ocean-going steam-yacht Columbia, lying at her private pier, to take to his office, at an average speed of seventeen knots an hour, and the barges can look out for themselves, Wilton Sargent, American.
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