SAILING THE SEVEN SEAS

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXIX, Issue 20065, 23 March 1935, Page 12

SAILING THE SEVEN SEAS

EVOLUTION IN SHIPPING THREE CHANGES IN CENTURIES OF CONSTRUCTION Ending a heterodox story of ships, with the prediction that the brief century of steam is already nearing its end, Hendrik Willem Van Loon in his entrancing book “Ships, and How They Sailed the Seven Seas” (issued by Simon and Schuster, New York), insists that airship will soon take the place of the giant liners and famous ports like Capetown soon will be as deserted as the port of ancient Rome. Transatlantic aircraft will find better places on Long Island than on Manhattan or along the Thames, he says, and London and New York will be changed cities. A rash prediction, but Van Loon, who is fifty-three, points out that when his son was bom, no one had flown the English Channel; when his grandson was bom so many people had flown across the ocean that the event no longer was news. Pen Sketch of Author The author of the book is Hendrik Willem Van Loon, Dutch-American author and historian. He was bom in Rotterdam, 1882, around the comer from the birthplace of Erasmus. At twenty-two he migrated to the United States, was graduated from Cornell in 1905, went a year to Harvard, and received his Ph.D. from the University of Munich in 1911. He was an American press correspondent in Russia during the Revolution of 1906 and later in Europe throughout the World War. Returning to New York, Van Loon was unsuccessful at advertisingwriting, and lived in poverty until the publication of his one-volume “The Story of Mankind.” This book won him the Newberry Prize, and bought him a home in Westport, Connecticut. Beauty and Horror of the Sailer Oh, those beautiful old clipper-ships! Beautiful from the shore, says Mr Van Loon; but they were the torturechambers of the damned to those who sailed them, as ships had been throughout that whole long story of human martyrdom which is the history of navigation. Only the big, dirty steamships have made decent human existence at sea possible, Van Loon says, and the tradition of savage discipline at sea has lingered even on the roomy Diesel steamships. Evolution of Shipbuilding This is a new and unromantic kind of tale of seafaring. Mr Van Loon knows his history and his ships, and has his own tried methods as an entertainer. His book is illustrated with scores of his amusing, scratchy drawings, and dotted with characteristic reflections on the vagaries of human history.

There have been only three important changes in ship-building in the last'. 3,000 years, according to Mr Van Loon’s breezy view of maritime history. The first came about in the fifth century 8.C., when the Asiatic barbarians began to invade Western Europe. They provided the peoples of Italy and Greece with an unlimited reservoir of cheap man-power which profoundly altered the history of shipbuilding. The galley-slave came into existence, and for 2,000 years slaves propelled the big ships of the world. That tradition of slave-labour, Mr Van Loon insists, still holds in the forecastles of many a dirty modern ship. There were open viking ships, propelled by stout freemen, in the North; but the big ships of Rome, like the big ships of the Crusades, were slave-manned. For centuries the ships of the world were moved by galley-slaves who were chained to their oars night and day. When the supplies of hostile slaves gave out, the rulers of Europe put their native convicts in the galleys.

Protestant States used Catholics at the oars; Catholic States, such as Prance after 1685. used Protestants; and a mere groaning was enough to earn a flogging. It was the invention of gunpowder which doomed the galleys. There was no room on them for big guns. So ship-building underwent its second great transformation. The high, deck-ed-over gun-carriers of Elizabethan days §uperceded the low ships of the Middle Ages. These seemed big ships to their contemporaries, but the 132 ships of the great Spanish Armada which once set out to conquer the world could barely make the equivalent of the modem Bremen. Brief Century of Steam Steam forced the third great change. Its first obvious advantage was its regularity. The first steamships actually were slower than the clippers, but their passengers at least knew when they would land. The clipper-riders could only guess. Those early steamers had to carry so much coal that their passengers actually were more cramped than those aboard the clipper-ships; but with the increased efficiency of steamengines, and the size made possible by the use of steel, the steamships proved their worth. And now Van Loon predicts the passing of the steam ship!