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Updated: May 1, 2025
Some gentlemen from Paris I think there were three of them, and one was said to be the Chairman turned up indeed and went from end to end of the ship, knocking their silk hats cruelly against the deck-beams. I attended them personally, and I can vouch for it that the interest they took in things was intelligent enough, though, obviously, they had never seen anything of the sort before.
D' you hear me, you rivets!" "Ease off! Ease off!" cried the bilge-stringers. "Don't hold us so tight to the frames!" "Ease off!" grunted the deck-beams, as the Dimbula rolled fearfully. "You've cramped our knees into the stringers, and we can't move. Ease off; you flat-headed little nuisances."
It is providential, though, that the wrench which the foremast gave to the deck-beams and bulkhead there when it carried away, so far weakened the ship forwards as to enable the gas to find vent in that direction, otherwise the entire deck would probably have been blown up when it would have been a poor look-out for all of us here aft!"
We have found, for the first time in the history of ship-building, that the inward pull of the deck-beams and the outward thrust of the frames locks us, as it were, more closely in our places, and enables us to endure a strain which is entirely without parallel in the records of marine architecture." The Steam turned a laugh quickly into a roar up the fog-horn.
"What massive intellects you great stringers have," he said softly, when he had finished. "We also," began the deck-beams, "are discoverers and geniuses. We are of opinion that the support of the hold-pillars materially helps us. We find that we lock up on them when we are subjected to a heavy and singular weight of sea above."
"New gang of rigging fore and aft new bulwarks, six feet high, fitted with hammock rail, etcetera, complete deck strengthened by doubling the deck-beams new coamings to hatchways," and so on, and so on, until my imagination had conjured up a picture of the trim little Susanne transmogrified out of recognition, and so stiffened and hampered by her extra deck-beams and new rigging, that we should have reason to deem ourselves fortunate should we ever succeed in screwing six knots out of her on a bowline.
We did not have to carry the bags of coal, as the rest of the crew did, from the wharf to the gangway of the vessel, as then we might have been seen; but we had to bear a hand over the hatches to shunt the bags down into the hold, into which we were afterwards sent with rakes and shovels to stow the rough lumps into odd holes and corners and make a smooth surface generally, until the brig was chock full to the deck-beams, when we couldn't even creep in on our hands and knees to distribute the cargo further!
Catharina, pouring in broadside after broadside, till the guns are leaping to the deck-beams with their own heat, and the Spaniard's sides are slit and spotted in a hundred places. And yet, so high has been his fire in return, and so strong the deck defences of the Vengeance, that a few spars broken, and two or three men wounded by musketry, are all her loss.
And finally, not to dwell at undue length upon this discovery, important though it was, he also found the keel, stem and stern-posts, rudder and trunk, deck-beams, wales, stringers, skin and deck-planking in short, every scrap and item of material and fittings required for the little vessel; so that nothing remained but to put the whole together.
"Talking of strain," said a low, rasping, unpleasant voice, "are any of you fellows you deck-beams, we mean aware that those exceedingly ugly knees of yours happen to be riveted into our structure ours?" "Who might you be?" the deck-beams inquired. "Oh, nobody in particular," was the answer.
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