Page:Once a Week Volume 7.djvu/662

654 of Portsmouth, so to speak, although it really lies to the east of that famous port—so close, in fact, that you may throw a biscuit from the common almost into the High Street. There are certain places that every Englishman must see in the course of his lifetime, and the dockyard—the chief cradle of our fleet—is one of them. And it is not only the cradle, but the destined grave of our naval power, as some people will have it; for here we are told the Frenchmen will some day catch us, and smother us in our naval hive like a swarm of hornets, unless we keep a good look-out. For these reasons Portsmouth Dockyard, just at the present moment, is one of the points on which the national eye is fixed.

There is certainly something very charming in the extreme civility with which the total stranger is treated in our great public establishments. He is made to feel that all the treasures that he sees belong to him, in common, it is true, with the Queen and a few millions besides, but still to him, and he feels all the dignity of proprietorship. Indeed I could not help feeling that I possessed more than my ordinary share of those large 120-gun ships, &c., inasmuch as a six-foot policeman was told off especially for my service in surveying all the glories of the premier British arsenal and dockyard.

And first about masts. Those accustomed to seaports and merchantmen only, are struck with the imposing magnitude of all the details belonging to our great ships of war. Milton, when he likens Satan’s spear to the mast of “some tall admiral,” conveys by his similitude only a just idea of their portentous size.

Let us take the main mast of the Duke of Wellington, for instance. Here it lies, stretching its length for many a rood: not a simple spar, for no tree that grows could furnish such a bulk as it presents; but a complex structure, built up of innumerable pieces, with as much care as one of those tall chimney stacks which carry off the fumes of alkali works—rising to a height of upwards of 200 feet, and surmounted on the topmost spar with a truck. We shudder when we see a British tar occasionally stand upon this giddy height, out of bravado; but the feat loses somewhat of its merit, when we find that this same truck, which looks like a mere speck at the mast-head, is in reality as big as a small tea-table.

As one surveys the treasures of the mast-house—sees the spars of the old Victory, of the Duke of Wellington, the Victoria, the Albert, and of the scores of other first-rates, that lie side by side, stacked away with as much ease as though they were mere walking-sticks—one feels a certain melancholy impression that they belong to the past. Never again will these stately masts carry the bulging sail; never again will a fleet of three-deckers put out from our seaports to fight. It is this reflection which gives such an air of sadness to all our naval arsenals. The old fighting ship which towered so majestically over all meaner craft, and which bore some sort of relation, as regards size, to the mighty deep on which it rode, is as much a thing of the past as the Great Harry, or a Roman galley. When Turner, thirty years ago, painted his touching picture of “The Fighting Temeraire towed to her last berth” by the little fizzing tugboat, he but too truly foreshadowed the coming fate of the giant race of ships, which seemed, like Ossian’s heroes, to grow more vast and majestic as they finally disappeared from the scene.

The revolution that is so silently and surely passing over our naval system, seemed to me to have struck with palsy the yard itself. The ropery, where of old those great cables were spun which held our largest ships at anchor, now finds its chief occupation gone, for iron takes the place of hemp. The smaller ropes are yet spun here; and the immense length of the building in which they are made—upwards of a quarter of a mile in length—becomes apparent to the eye as one sees the men at the extreme end advancing, like so many spiders, and scarcely as large, twisting the hempen line from the flax surrounding their waists, just as the insect seems to draw out its delicate web from its own intestines. We looked in vain, however, for the mighty twenty-five inch cables, and we saw the machinery for twisting the various strands that compose them, now standing idle. As a relic of other days, a portion of the great cable of the Royal George, sunk at Spithead, hung up in the Ropery, is doubtlessly looked upon by the hands as a Saurian is viewed by a geologist—marking the gigantic creations of the elder days. But bulk does not necessarily constitute strength, as iron links, only a third the size, are now in common use, and constitute the safeguard of our fleet. As we look upon these links, however, we are reminded of the magnitude of the trust we place in their soundness; on a single loop of iron the fate of a ship with a thousand men is often dependent as she rides at anchor during the fury of a gale blowing on a lee-shore. A slight flaw, which the eye cannot detect, may be pregnant with the fate of this multitude of men; the integrity of each segment of the iron cables issued to the navy, is therefore a necessary preliminary to its being issued; and we must give the government the credit of using every conceivable care in testing their soundness. Every link is subjected to an enormous strain by the application of hydraulic power before it is passed, and thus the instrument of salvation, as well as that of destruction in the shape of the cannon, is thoroughly tried before it is put to practical use. We wish, however, we could say the same of that portion of the men of war’s holding power, which has laid upon it perhaps the greatest strain of all—the anchor. When we gaze upon the accumulation of huge “best-bowers” and “sheet-anchors” in the “rack,” looking like the whitened ribs of countless elephants, we are reminded of the curse that has always attached to the Admiralty—the curse of sacrificing progress to “the system.” The British public have often asked why it is that the British navy is supplied with the old-fashioned and most unscientifically constructed anchors, which have been so often tested and found wanting, in comparison with the patent anchors of Trotman, now used by all our large ships of the mercantile marine; and the answer is