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Updated: June 9, 2025
The freeboard to the main deck, which runs the full length of the boat, but is only about 5-1/2 feet wide, is about 6 feet, and the cockpit at the top of the conning tower is about 15 feet above the water.
The sailing ship of contemporary times would for the same length have had a beam of about 40 feet and an extremely high freeboard; she was in consequence necessarily slow and incapable of sailing on a wind.
Such vessels are very slow and cannot stand rough weather, on account of their low freeboard. The speed of the monitors is seldom more than twelve or fourteen miles an hour, and they are intended to act in coast defence, usually in connection with shore-batteries. The best types in the navy are the Terror and the Puritan. The speed of a battle-ship is about eighteen miles an hour.
By this time the deck rails and rigging of many a naval vessel were crowded with officers and men, all anxious to know the fate of the plucky, or foolhardy, crew of the submarine. A few moments passed. Then the conning tower emerged from the water. Next, the boat appeared, and rode at her proper amount of freeboard over the water. What a deafening din of cheers filled the air.
With a clang the lid-like hatch to the conning tower was closed and clamped fast in its rubber setting, the gasoline engine began its rapid phut-phut, and the submarine boat began its long journey down Long Island Sound. The boat started in with her deck awash that is, with two or three feet freeboard or of deck above the water-line.
Behind us the French coast was a looming mass, then a thick blob, finally a thin blur hardly perceptible to strained eyes. I was thoroughly seasick, retching and vomiting over the narrow freeboard.
The Monterey is probably the most formidable monitor in the world; technically described she is a barbed turret, low freeboard monitor of four thousand tons displacement, 256 feet long, fifty-nine feet beam, and fourteen feet six inches draught.
More than that, he staved in every water cask, until, feeling that he had enough freeboard, he slipped his anchor, set his mainsail and jib, and bore down upon the stranded sea robber.
Here was a fresh reason for delay, for surely one must consider what this craft could be, and what had brought her here. She was too small for a privateer, too large for a fishing-smack, and could not be a revenue boat by her low freeboard in the waist; and 'twas a strange thing for a boat to cast anchor in the midst of Moonfleet Bay even on a night so fine as this.
Then they went on deck. The Ithuriel was lying outside the Greyhound, half submerged that is to say, with three feet of freeboard showing. Commander Hawkins looked at her with envious eyes. It is an article of faith with all good commanders of destroyers that their own craft is the fastest and most efficient of her class.
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