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1903.] MARINE REVIEW AND MARINE RECORD. a waters during the civil war. A war ship will fire minute guns during the ceremonies. As a great deal of the metal work on the vessels at the Cramp ship yards are nearing completion, a large number of the men were laid off during the past week. These employes, as a rule, secured work almost immediately at the yard of the New York Ship Building Co. in Camden, on the opposite shore of the Delaware river. Supervising Inspector-General Geo. Uhler of the United States steamboat inspection service, will this week issue instruc- tions for the appointment of an assistant inspector of hulls and an assistant inspector of boilers for the port of Philadelphia. Increase in the commerce of Philadelphia makes the appoint- ments necessary. President J. W. Tierney of the Philadelphia Pneumatic 'ube Co. returned' from a western visit last Saturday. He states that the company established branch houses at Denver and Salt Lake City. He has orders from the Mare Island navy yard, San Francisco, for riveters, clippers, drills and other tools. The immense power plant of the York Haven Water & Power Co., at York Haven, is nearing completion. The great "sea wall" of the dam is more than a mile long and is founded on the solid rock bed of the river. It is 24 ft. wide at the bottom and 6 ft. at the top. Its height is 30 ft. in places. The annual meeting of stockholders of the Philadelphia bourse will be held 'Tuesday, May 12, at 3 p.m. An election for seven directors to serve for a term of three years will be held at the office of the company on the same date. Capt. Charles D. Sigsbee of "Remember the Maine" fame, took formal charge as commandant of the League Island navy ~ yard,-May 1, vice Rear Admiral Sands, who takes command of the Atlantic squadron. A handsome loving cup was presented Gen. Jared A. Smith of the United States engineer corps upon his retirement, last week, at the Wilmington office. The cup was presented by employes of the office. q Capt. William Holdzkorn, keeper of the South. Brigantine life saving station for thirty-one years, died at Atlantic City April.25, aged 69. He rescued fifty persons from watery graves during his career. Civil service examinations will be held at the Federal Build- ing, Philadelphia, May 26, for the positions of nautical expert and nautical draftsman and designer for government service. Twenty-two thousand bags of nitrate of soda, the largest shipment ever made -.to Philadelphia, arrived last week on the British steamer Crireveth Castle from Iquique, Peru. David C. C. Mink died last week at his home in this city. He was general manager-of the Clyde Steamship Co. and pres- ident of the American Steamship Association. James McCauley purchased the schooner William H. David- son at U. S. marshal's sale last week for $5,500. The vessel was sold to pay salvage-claims. HOW JACK IS FED. The '250,000 Ibs. of tobacco which the navy department has just bought for the sailors and marines, like ncost things fur- nished to the navy, is good enough for anybody. Jack, in fact, is critical about his tobacco and has long been used to an excel- lent article.' Nearly all sailormen smoke, and most of them chew. The plug tobacco served out to the men at cost is used for this purpose. Cut up into chips of suitable size, or crumbled between the fingers, it makes a sweet smoke for a pipe. Many officers buy it for such use. Jack does not double on the tobacco tub as he used to double ou the grog tub in the days when grog was furnished free at the foot of the mast to the men lined up in order, and each holding out his tin cup. Jack does, however, sometimes save his tobacco and resell it at a profit, for he buys at the lowest wholesale rate, and by a little self-denial can easily save a fair proportion of his share. He takes a great satisfaction in the fact that what is good enough for him is good enough for his superiors in rank. Some officers suspect that the excel- lence of all articles furnished to the enlisted men of the navy has a good deal to do with their effectiveness as fighting ma- chines. Jack's food and drink are just as good as his tobacco. No hard liquors are sold to him, but he has the privilege of buying a moderate quantity of bottled beer aboard ship. Here again he cannot "double on the tub," but occasionally a hard drinker will by dint of almost superhuman self-denial accumulate enough beer in the course of two or three weeks to give him something like a spree, and perhaps get him a sentence of ten days on bread and water. : Nothing strikes the stranger aboard ship more favorably than the abundance and excellence of J+ck's food. Karly in the morn- ing he has bread and coffee. Liter comes a hearty breakfast. This meal, like every meal served to the man-o'-war's man, must be tasted by the officer of the ceck before it is given to the sailor. It is a bit of a ceremouy. that tasting of Jack's food by his superior officer. As the officer paces the deck in the early morning a boy from the couk's galley solemnly approaches with a steaming bow! of whatever is the breakfast of the day. A portion is served out in a prover dish, and the officer, with a judicial air, takes a mouthful. It is often so good that he makes a pretty good meal as h» stands there on deck. If the food is in any way what it should not. be he looks into the matter at once, and Jack's wrong is, 1f possible, instantly re- dressed. Since the days of the old-fashioned sailing craft or the slow steaming craft the food of everybody aboard the ships of the United States navy has greatly improved. No voyage is now really very long--that is, no ship of the navy is ever more than three weeks without touching at some por' where fresh food may be had. Jack gets his share of the good things, and if he wants more he can buy ashore for himself. Even the eggs of the navy are no longer the dreadfu: things they once were, when the cleverest shifts of the ablest cook could not disguise the fact that the omelette ought to have been eaten weeks or perhaps months before. Even on the voyege across the Pacific the food seldom reaches a condition to drive away appetite. In fact, a man-of-war crossing from the Fhilippines to Sar Francisco is likely to have no worse table, whether in wardroom or in fore- castle, than the winter table of many well-to-do families in New. York. Fresh food taken aboard at the beginning of the voyage will last part way to Guam, and if the ship is not in too much of a hurry to touch there more may be had. Again fresh food of great variety can be had at Honolulu, and thence the run to San Francisco is only a few days. When a ship is on a press- ing errand she may be too much hurried to stop for fresh sup- plies, and in such case everybody gets pretty tired of "salt horse," canned vegetables, and ship's biscuit. But men and officers never suffer the discomforts of those who went on the sailing ships of the old navy from Cape Town to Montevideo, when the gréen- ery and charm of "the Mount" seemed to the sea-tifed eyes of all on board beautiful beyond belief. a ADMIRAL MELVILLE ON WARSHIP CONSTRUCTION. Rear-Admiral George Wallace Melville, chief of the bureau of steam engineering, navy department, has written an article © for the Philadelphia Ledger on the tendency in warship con- struction. Among other things he says: "When will the limit of size be reached, if each increase in displacement has made the ship a better fighting machine? 'The limit of size will not be reached until the demand of the engineer for space and weight for machinery is given the same recogni- tion that is accorded the ordnance and hull experts. It is cer- tain that warships must be made even larger, and in accordance with this belief the British admiralty has projected battleships of 18,000 tons displacement. Boilers are still made too frail, since their tubes are too thin, their casings too light and their drums too small. This shaving in weight of important parts also ex- tends to the engine-rooms, for engine frames are not as strong as they should be. 'The tubes of condensers are too contracted ; the piping is too complex by reason of the crowding of auxilia- ries, and altogether there is a forcing of appliance into con- tracted spaces beneath the protective deck that results in exces- sive repair bills and long stays in port. An increase in weight would keep the ships longer at sea,andit would seem that this reason alone would correct the evil of installing light machinery. Against the vigorous and determined protest of the engineer, the ships seem to be built for the hour of the contractors' trial, rather than for the day of battle. From the standpoint of the quarterdeck, the modern battleship may seem to possess endur- ance and strength, but from the view of those beneath the protective deck this strength is more apparent than real. It will be found in the next naval- war that in the distribution of weights allowed in the construction of a modern war vessel, there has been too great a tendency to sacrifice the efficiency of the machines that are not within sight of the inspection officer, in order that the appliances above the protective deck may be made more efficient and that even luxuries may be secured. "Tt requires a resourceful and intelligent man to stand behind the modern gun, but it requires equal intelligence and skill to stand in front of the modern boiler or operate a high-speed 'marine engine. It will neither promote naval efficiency nor inspire confidence for either the man behind the gun or the man at the throttle to know that the weak line in the naval chain is contained within the engine room, where the smallest factor of safety has been assigned to the working parts, and where the appliances must be subjected to the severest and most continuous strain. "Tt is by reason of the condition of affairs existing beneath the protective deck that the modern battleship will do only a small measure of work that will be expected of her when the ship is assigned for distant operations. The larger the size of the battleship, however, the more satisfactory will be her per- formance, for every increase in displacement means a propor- tionate and relative increase in engineering efficiency." Showing the effects of a tremendous batterine from the sea, the Deutschland of the Hamburg-American Line arrived in New York last Saturday, 6 days, 19 hours and 28 minutes out of Cherbourg. One of her ventilators was torn away, a good chunk of the starboard rail of the urricane deck *as ripped out, a life boat was smashed and mast and funnel ropes were badly strained. 'Tons of water constantly piled over the steamer; the storm was, in the opinion of the ship's officers, the worst they had ever encountered on the ocean; and ;et the Deutschland's average speed for the trip was 19.33 knots. 'Ten years ago there was not a steamer afloat that could average 19 knots in even a smooth sea. Such is the triumph of the navai architect and marine engineer. I era ] 4 4 4 } 4 5 Ge eae Nal i