The S. S. "CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS."

MANY of the most interesting exhibits at the World’s Fair will serve very useful purposes in assisting the fair to a successful consummation. Some of these, like the great engines and boilers in Machinery Hall, are regularly entered for competition, and juries will decide upon their merits. Others are entered not for competition, and still others will be run in connection with the exhibition while not having been entered in any way. But some of these are none the less exhibits. Notable among such will be the great whaleback steamship Christopher Columbus, the first ship of this type to be used for passenger traffic. In a previous lucid article in the WEEKLY the virtues and the merits of this type of vessel were fully explained. But heretofore these vessels have been used solely for freight boats. It is the intention of those controlling the patents to ultimately use them for passenger-boats also, and for such use it is claimed that they are particularly well adapted on account of their roominess, buoyancy, and general seaworthiness. This new ship will be used in taking passengers from Chicago to Jackson Park, and on excursions out into the lake, so as to show the visitors the merits of the type.

The World’s Fair Steamship Company, composed of persons interested in the whaleback type of vessel, have been awarded the privilege of landing passengers at the World’s Fair wharfs. The only whaleback boat that they will use in the service will the Christopher Columbus. A fleet of twenty-five ordinary lake passenger boats will have facilities for taking 15,000 passengers an hour to Jackson Park, and bringing the same number back again. This large whaleback boat will make four trips to the park every day, and on each trip she will be entitled by her license to take 5000 persons. That is certainly a very large excursion boat. Her fittings of the three decks, as shown in the picture in this paper, will be magnificent with mahogany and brass finishings. Her speed will be at twenty miles an hour, and as the distance from the main landing in Chicago, at the foot of Van Buren Street, to the dock at Jackson Park is only eight miles, it will readily be seen that the journey will be short, and should be very pleasant.

During the building of the fair the means of getting to the grounds have been sadly inadequate, and many have wondered whether this transportation problem would ever be satisfactorily solved. Without these boats it would probably always be sadly inadequate. With the elevated road finished and the cable lines running through trains, and, above all, with this line of steamers, it does not seem impossible that the 200,000 visitors expected every day may be carried back and forth with some measure of comfort. The difficulty will be – and such difficulties cannot be provided against—that nearly all may wish to go out and return at the same hour. Under such circumstances, even though there were a fleet of ten boats, each as large as this Christopher Columbus. There would be crowding and discomfort.

The hope of those who are managing the fair is that by keeping the buildings and grounds open at night the arrivals will extend through the whole day and until the evening, and that those tired out with a daytime visit will return home before nightfall. If arrivals and departures can be thus distributed over the day and evening, a trip to Jackson Park and back will not be unreasonably uncomfortable, except on those days when abnormally large crowds will attend. The fare on boats and railroads will be twenty-five cents for the round trip; when the Christopher Columbus takes a lake excursion the fare will be fifty cents. Few visitors, whether from the Atlantic or Pacific seaboards, or from those fertile fields once thought to be arid deserts, will care to miss so good a chance to see something of this inland sea, which has ways and manners of its own, strange alike to salt-water mariners and to plainsmen of the West.

JNO. GILMER SPEED.