Ship Money
an impost levied at various times in England, especially on the seaports for the purpose of furnishing ships for the king's service. Having lain dormant for many years, it was revived by Charles I., who in 1634 levied it on the coast towns, and in 1635 issued writs for ship money all over the kingdom.
The tax met with strong opposition, and the refusal of John Hampden to pay the $5 at which he was rated was one of the proximate causes of the civil war.
SHIPPING. The use of ships and shipping, using the words in the large sense, goes back very early in the history history of civilization. Ships figure in the earliest records of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, Chinese and Hindus. The inhabitants of the Nile Valley constructed vessels capable of carrying large cargoes or half a hundred persons some 4,000 years before the Christian era. It is probable that even at that early time the principles of the oar and the sail had become known and put into practice. By the time the Phoenicians dominated in the Mediterranean, the use of the oar and the sail had been developed and vessels of large size had become numerous. Little improvement was discernible in the craft that sailed the seas during the period of the Greeks and Romans. It can well be imagined that in the case of a people, in SHIPPING whom the sense of beauty was so highly developed as in the Greeks, vessels in their day must have had very distinctive features. The actual form of the vessel could not necessarily be subjected to much variation. Space, speed and seaworthiness had to be the governing principles alike in the case of the primitive Egyptian and the highly cultivated Athenian, but such representations as exist of the craft both of the Greeks and the Romans show that the greatly developed artistic sense, exhibited in the case of almost every object in the world of classical antiquity, found an outlet also in the building of ships. From the time of the Greeks and Romans to the sixteenth century, when voyages around the world became the vogue, the improvement was not very considerable. The stern and bow rising sheer out of the water had been retained and a hundred feet seemed to be the limit in length from the point of view of safety. The discovery of America and of the way to India round the Cape of Good Hope awakened the desire for vessels of a larger type and of greater speed, and immense activity was expended in construction so that some of the largest sailing vessels attained a length of 200 feet and were carried forward with an immense spread of canvas. The high bows and sterns were retained, but the hull was modified. The proportion of beam to length was about one to four.
Differences were made between merchant vessels and war vessels, but as in those days a merchant vessel on the ocean might be called on at any time to defend itself from pirate ships the differences were not great.
As long as ships relied on the sail as a driving agent progress could not necessarily be other than slow, but with the arrival and development of steam engines it took an immense step forward. Sailing ships came to be regarded as useless as a fighting unit. As in the case of almost everything new, new, the advent of steam so far from immediately d displacing the sail, aroused the older method to new activity.
In the sailing vessel every other consideration was abandoned in the effort to compete with steam in the attainment of speed. As a result the best clipper ships were able to make long voyages at a pace rivaling that of the steamer. The voyage between New York and Liverpool was cut down to thirteen and fourteen days, when the fast mail-steamer passage took ten days. The type of sailing vessel has since varied according as to whether speed or carrying capacity was desired.
Steel has displaced wood in the more modern sailing ships, but the total displacement of the sailing vessel by the steamer for utilitarian purposes appears only a SHIPPING matter of time, though a combination of sail and steam or oil power may delay the inevitable end.
There had been many experiments in the direction of using using steam as the driving power for boats before Watt took out his first patent in 1769. The earliest authentic case seems to have been that of Professor Denis Papin of Blois who in 1707 built a steamboat which he navigated on the river Fulda. Watt, whose engines were single-acting pumps, suggested in 1770 their use for propelling vessels. In 1782 he brought out the double-acting engine and improved the principle of its working by cutting off the steam at a point fixed by experiment instead of allowing it to complete the stroke. This development by Watt brought into existence the engine needed for propulsion and from that time forward the development of the steamer was only a matter of time. In 1784 and after, James Rumsey put on the water at Berkeley Springs, Va., a number of small boats, which, by the ejection of water through a tube at the stern, attained a speed of over four miles an hour. In 1788 a boat made by James Fitch with paddles at the stern made a trip from Philadelphia to Burlington, a distance of 20 miles, in a little over three hours.
Fitch in 1789 built a larger boat with side paddles that made a speed of eight miles per hour and was made a passenger and freight boat on the Delaware river in 1790.
While Fitch was making his experiments, Patrick Miller, a banker of Edinburgh, succeeded in developing at Dalswinton in Dumfriesshire a paddle boat driven by steam-power, which attained a speed of 7 miles per hour on the Forth and Clyde Canal. In 1801 Symington, the engineer of Miller's boat, built for Lord Dundas a steamer for towing barges with machinery very highly developed for the time. In Salem, Mass., Nathan Read in 1791 patented the multitubular boiler and built a successful paddle-wheel steamboat. John Stevens and Oliver Evans were making successful experiments about the same period. A boat built by Stevens in 1804 had twin screws.
His steamboat "Phoenix" carried passengers on the Raritan river between New Brunswick and New York City, and later navigated the Delaware for six years.
New possibilities were opened up with the appearance of the "Clermont" built by Robert Fulton. In 1797 Fulton went SHIPPING This was the famous "Clermont." From New York City she navigated the Hudson to Clermont, 110 miles away, and 20 hours later went to Albany. On the following day she began her return trip to New York City, and covered the distance in 30 hours at an average speed of five miles an hour. After an interval of a month she started running regularly between Albany and New York. This marked the start of steam navigation as a commercial undertaking. From that time forward the building of steamboats increased rapidly. The United States took the lead, but other countries were not far behind. The Dublin-Holyhead line began in 1819 and in the following year a beginning was made with the Calais-Dover service. The "Savannah," a vessel built in the United States, was the first steamer to cross the Atlantic.
She had a length of 100 feet, and a displacement of 350 tons, and she crossed from Savannah to Liverpool in 25 days.
She was provided with sails and these were used when the wind was favorable.
When the sea was smooth the paddle wheels were used and during an unfavorable sea they were taken on deck. In 1828 the steamer "Curaçao," built in Holland, successfully navigated the Atlantic and she was followed in 1832 by the Canadian "Royal William." The "Sirius" and "Great Western" registered a great step forward. Both started in April, 1838, arriving in New York in the same month within a day from each other. The "Great Western" averaged 208 miles per day and at her topmost speed she averaged 247 miles. She continued running as a regular transatlantic vessel, and may be said to have initiated the transatlantic steam service. It was left, however, to Samuel Cunard to make the service a paying commercial proposition. In 1839 he established the Cunard line with the help of a government subsidy. The Cunard line carried the bulk of the freight, passengers, and mail for ten years and was almost without a competitor till the Inman and Collins lines were started.
The loss of a subsidy from the United States Government obliged the Collins line, which was purely American, to withdraw in 1858 after the service had been continued for eight years. In 1850 two other American lines, the Vanderbilt line and the New York and Havre Steamship Con continued to run till British competition Company, were started and both of them during the Civil War swept American to France and experimented with sub-commerce from the seas. The Inman line marine torpedoes and torpedo boats. In 1801 he built a small steamer and in 1804 procured from Watt in England machinery for a large vessel which was built in New York and launched in 1807. from the beginning used vessels of iron propelled by screws, and its example was followed by the Cunard line, with which the screw gradually displaced the paddle wheel. The building of the " Princeton" by SHIPPING SHIPPING SUBSIDIES SHIPPING STATES. See SHIPPING. SHIPPING BOARD, UNITED the U. S. Navy, had proved the availability can shipping is looked for under the new of the screw, the chief advantage of Republican administration. which was getting the propelling machinery below the water line. The develop- development of the propelling machinery responded to the demand for increased speed and the tricompound and triple-expansion engine was evolved. The evolution of the water-tube boiler led to the quadruple-expansion engine until at last the turbine and similar forms of steam and internal combustion engines brought the development of steam-shipping to the modern types in transatlantic service.
From the middle of the last century the transatlantic service has naturally led in the development of shipping, size and speed being in nearly every case the governing considerations. Vessels like the "Germanic" have marked the milestones of progress reducing to about eight days the average length of passage between New York and Qu Queenstown. The "Mauretania" and the "Lusitania" showed the development of a generation, reducing the voyage in favorable weather to about five days. The White Star Line led the way in the development of vessels of large dimensions. The "Olympic" (46,000 tons) launched in 1910, marked the high water mark, and this was outclassed by the Hamburg-American "Imperator" (52,- 000 tons) in 1913. The World War had the result of retarding the construction of great passenger vessels, but the intensive competition in warship building had its bearing on commercial steamship service. As a result of the larger knowledge furnished by the experiences of the war, oil-burning vessels are likely to be the predominant type of the near future, and the scramble for oil-lands by the great nations is largely occasioned by future needs in that direction. the great A development of the war is the United States Shipping Board which was authorized by Congress in 1916 with power to investigate, regulate and fix the rates in United States marine business. The board has authority to issue bonds not exceeding $50,000,000 to build, purchase or lease vessels for a merchant marine.
It constitutes the head of a corporation to endure for a period not to exceed five years after the war. The annual salary of the members of the board was fixed at $7,500. During the war the Board operated the merchant marine as a national enterprise. As a result American shipping has promised to be as important in peace as in war. The decisive manner in which the United States entered the world of shipping during the war has awakened the most sanguine hopes of those interested in the development of an American mercantile marine, and legislation looking to the promotion of Ameri-