trees, would be rent limb from limb if they stood by her for a
minute then. To think that this Achilles, monstrous compound of
iron tank and oaken chest, can ever swim or roll! To think that
any force of wind and wave could ever break her! To think that
wherever I see a glowing red-hot iron point thrust out of her side
from within – as I do now, there, and there, and there! – and two
watching men on a stage without, with bared arms and sledgehammers,
strike at it fiercely, and repeat their blows until it is
black and flat, I see a rivet being driven home, of which there are
many in every iron plate, and thousands upon thousands in the ship!
To think that the difficulty I experience in appreciating the
ship’s size when I am on board, arises from her being a series of
iron tanks and oaken chests, so that internally she is ever
finishing and ever beginning, and half of her might be smashed, and
yet the remaining half suffice and be sound. Then, to go over the
side again and down among the ooze and wet to the bottom of the
dock, in the depths of the subterranean forest of dog-shores and
stays that hold her up, and to see the immense mass bulging out
against the upper light, and tapering down towards me, is, with
great pains and much clambering, to arrive at an impossibility of
realising that this is a ship at all, and to become possessed by
the fancy that it is an enormous immovable edifice set up in an
ancient amphitheatre (say, that at Verona), and almost filling it!
Yet what would even these things be, without the tributary
workshops and the mechanical powers for piercing the iron plates –
four inches and a half thick – for rivets, shaping them under
hydraulic pressure to the finest tapering turns of the ship’s
lines, and paring them away, with knives shaped like the beaks of
strong and cruel birds, to the nicest requirements of the design!
These machines of tremendous force, so easily directed by one
attentive face and presiding hand, seem to me to have in them
something of the retiring character of the Yard. ‘Obedient
monster, please to bite this mass of iron through and through, at
equal distances, where these regular chalk-marks are, all round.’
Monster looks at its work, and lifting its ponderous head, replies,
‘I don’t particularly want to do it; but if it must be done – !’
The solid metal wriggles out, hot from the monster’s crunching
tooth, and it IS done. ‘Dutiful monster, observe this other mass
of iron. It is required to be pared away, according to this
delicately lessening and arbitrary line, which please to look at.’
Monster (who has been in a reverie) brings down its blunt head,
and, much in the manner of Doctor Johnson, closely looks along the
line – very closely, being somewhat near-sighted. ‘I don’t
particularly want to do it; but if it must be done – !’ Monster
takes another near-sighted look, takes aim, and the tortured piece
writhes off, and falls, a hot, tight-twisted snake, among the
ashes. The making of the rivets is merely a pretty round game,
played by a man and a boy, who put red-hot barley sugar in a Pope
Page 165
Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller
Joan board, and immediately rivets fall out of window; but the tone
of the great machines is the tone of the great Yard and the great
country: ‘We don’t particularly want to do it; but if it must be
done – !’
How such a prodigious mass as the Achilles can ever be held by such
comparatively little anchors as those intended for her and lying
near her here, is a mystery of seamanship which I will refer to the
wise boy. For my own part, I should as soon have thought of
tethering an elephant to a tent-peg, or the larger hippopotamus in
the Zoological Gardens to my shirt-pin. Yonder in the river,
alongside a hulk, lie two of this ship’s hollow iron masts. THEY
are large enough for the eye, I find, and so are all her other