United States or Dominica ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


Thus the committee went on, year after year, detailing to the Association the results of their experiments, and pointing out how the ship-builders were by degrees giving practical value to these results.

He was an intimate friend of a certain Parsi millionaire, whom the composer of the ballad has supposed to be Sir Jamserji Jeejeebhoy, but who was more probably a member of the great family of Wadia, the original ship-builders and dock-masters of the East India Company.

So long as European vessels were cooped up stagnantly in Canton river, and allowed to trade only under circumstances of great restriction and annoyance, little was effected except by the tea-drinking denizens of Great Britain; but when, by the treaty of Nankin in 1842, Sir Henry Pottinger obtained the opening of the four ports of Amoy, Foo-tchow-foo, Ning-po, and Shang-hae, and stipulated that foreign vessels should be allowed to share with those of England the liberty of trading at those ports, there was a great impetus given to ship-builders and ship-owners: those who had goods to sell, thus found a new market for them; and those who could perform the voyage most quickly, would have a quicker return for their capital.

The art of constructing those stupendous machines which displayed three, or six, or ten, ranges of oars, rising above, or falling behind, each other, was unknown to the ship-builders of Constantinople, as well as to the mechanicians of modern days.

Still, we do not, and properly do not, hold ship-building to be a fine art, nor preserve in our memories the names of immortal ship-builders; neither, so long as the mere utility and constructive merit of the building are regarded, is architecture to be held a fine art, or are the names of architects to be remembered immortally.

'A ship of two furlongs length would not be a ship at all. But the Lusitania is already not very far from a furlong and a half in length, and no one can even guess what is the upward limit of size which the ship-builders of a generation hence will have reached.

Italian mathematicians made the calculations on which all navigation was based; Italian cartographers drew maps and charts; Italian ship-builders designed and built the best vessels of the time; Italian captains commanded them, and very often Italian sailors made up their crews; while at least in the earlier period Italian bankers advanced the funds with which the expeditions were equipped and sent out.

His father had said he was to mind the sack, and he never let it out of his hands for a moment; as it was too heavy to carry, he had to drag it after him from place to place. He discovered a little ship, only just big enough for a man to lie down in, and full of holes bored in the bottom and sides. He investigated the ship-builders' big grind-stone, which was nearly as tall as a man.

They have intrusted the latter to some of the ablest ship-builders of the country, and it is well understood that most of these vessels are to be completed the present season. This measure, as far as it goes, is eminently wise; but our navy must still be below the requirements of the nation, and entirely disproportioned to the extent both of our commerce and of our sea-coast.

They earned quite large sums of money for their protégés by holding sales in places like Belfast and Manchester, where titles can be judiciously cheapened to a wealthy bourgeoisie, and the wives of ship-builders and cotton-spinners will spend cheerfully in return for the privilege of shaking hands with a Countess.