The Invention of Ships
Freak Ships. By Stanley Rogers. (John Lane. 8s. 6d.) The History of American Sailing Ships. By Howard I. Chappelle. (Putnam. 30s.) WHEN will the generation of authors learn and acknowledge this one thing—that " easy writing makes damned hard reading " ? Then, indeed, the lot of the reviewer will be a gentler one. The vast majority of the books with which he is faced - are of a would-be light and popular type. But the lightness, as a rule, is only in the author's mind : it shows in his care-free impudence towards his subject, his careless and slap-dash handling of the tool of language the result is far from light, and most unlikely to be popular. No one ever supposes that a slap-dash technique will make a popular dancer or popular comedian : why should it be expected tb Make a Popular writer ? It requires imthense•pains to carry a feeling of careless joie de viere across the footlights : it requires pains certainly no less considerable to carry it across the typewriter.
• Mr. Stanley Rogers is not exceptional or notorious among such writers there are Many 'worse -offenders than he. • But he is careless and forinleSs'ehough to 'Make his 'boa rather a dreary and difficult task for the reader.- This would call for little comment were it not that the idea explicit in his title is worth fat better treatment. Such a history of the exotic side-shoots from the main stem of ship-design might have been fascinating and important. The material is rich. It includes both ideas that might be again more happily attempted, and specious mistakes into which (without warning) we might again fall. A really careful, A- properly arranged and analysed account of them would be 'aknost as useful as the
histories of more orthodox craft. Alas, that Mr. Rogers should have had the idea, and done no better with it ! Such writers, who have a first-class idea and hurriedly make it their own in a second-class book resemble thirsty cattle, which find a pool in the plain, and in their hurry to drink tread it all to mud with their feet before having time to quench their thirst.
It is noticeable that, fantastic as some of these freaks appear, few of them are wholly absurd. The reason is economic. Shipbuilding has always been a pursuit even more expensive thZin architecture, and few ships have been paid for by a single purse. The designer must convince others as well as himself. So we find that most of the examples in this book are not so much the wild and ridiculous fantasies of mad inventors, as special adaptations of shipbuilding to meet exceptional needs. Even the soup-plate battleships of the Imperial Russian Navy were not so mad as they looked. In conse- quence, the more one studies the strange inventions in Mr. Rogers' pages, the less sure one feels that the majority of them can be called " freaks." Either they are—like the Russian warships, or that floating tube which carried Cleopatra's Needle to London—specially and reasonably designed for special circumstances : or else they are vessels which in their own day marked a wide departure in naval construction, but today have an honourable place in its history. The modern whaler certainly does not resemble a clipper ship, but then she is a floating factory rather than a speedy carrier of cargo ; and it is as ridiculous to class her as a freak as it would be to call a soap-factory a freak for not resembling St. Paul's. Such ships as the Great Eastern ' and ' Great Republic' may have been premature and unfortunate, but there was nothing freakish or absurd about them : they were the precursors of the larger craft of a later age.
Mr. Chappelle's book is of a wholly different character. It is most learned, and immense pains have been taken in its composition. As a result, where Mr. Rogers' light and popular work makes hard readirg, Mr. Chappelle's learned work makes the smoothest and easiest reading. No reader with any natural interest in the history of ships could fail to read it with fascination : the meticulous and lucid drawings are fully worthy of the text : indeed, I cannot find any fault with the book, in its own kind.
There is only one complaint to which it gives rise : that no student of equal calibre has tackled the history of British or other European shipping. That would, of course, be an infinitely harder task : for the period which Mr. Chappelle had to cover was little more than two hundred years. It would be impossible to condense such a history into even the heaviest single volume, if it were treated in such detail as Mr. Chappelle uses. It would, perhaps, be too great a task for any one author. But now that Mr. Chappelle has shown the way, we may hope that someone—or better still, some body of
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