Y A CANAL AT SEA BY ARTHUR HEWITT WITH PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE AUTHOR EARS ago, as far back as 1899, army engineers began to realize that the approaches to New York Harbor were inadequate. The old channels were not deep enough to accommodate safely the larger vessels. The regular entrance up the Bay by the Gedney, Bayside, and Main Ship channels was shallow and tortuous, and therefore dangerous. for the carrying into execution of this gigantic harbor improvement. A great sea canal, called the Ambrose Channel, taking an entirely different route from the waterway then in use, was decided upon. The specifications for this work provided for excavating about forty million cubic yards of mud, sand, and similar material, work to be begun within twelve months and to be prosecuted thereafter at an average monthly rate of 400,000 yards for the eight working months of the first year, and 1,200,000 yards for each of the eight working months of each succeeding year; material dredged from below the required depth of forty feet not to be paid for. But one bid was received, and in accordance therewith a contract was entered into in 1899, for 42,500,000 cubic With wise foresight the Government decided that a new channel of a greater width and depth than any before attempted should be dug. Ships were growing in size and draught each year, although a decade ago few would have expected that such mammoth liners as we now have would be an actual fact so soon. Early in 1899 the War Department was prepared to let out a contract to private enterprise yards excavation, measured in scows or other vessels, at the rate of nine cents per authorities in New York, gave me permiscubic yard. The contract was let on these terms, and after long and wearisome experimentation the work was a failure. The men engaged in it had first gone over to Liverpool to study the methods of dredging then successfully in operation there. The contractors returned and built two very large dredges similar in type to those in use in England. The plan adopted was to dig very deep holes in the channel which would permit the surrounding bottom to fall into them. This worked well enough in Liverpool, but here, where the material was of a different character-more like clay-it was not successful. From one cause or another the work was abandoned, the Government annulling the contract. Five years passed with the channel still far from complete, and with the need of a deep-water entrance to New York Harbor becoming more and more imperative. In 1904 the Government itself decided to do the work, and it immediately built two immense dredges, the Manhattan and the Atlantic, using the knowledge acquired from all the mistakes that had been made. In 1907 two more ships to dig the channel were ordered built, namely, the Navesink and the Raritan, the cost of the two being nearly a million dollars. Prompt action of this kind saved New York from the shame of not being able to accommodate the Lusitania and the Mauretania and vessels of a like type coming to our port. Such ships would have been obliged to coal at sea had not one-half the Ambrose Channel been a sufficiently deep waterway for at least their outgoing, when, with the added weight of their full home-going coal supply, they need an extreme depth of water. Those who know New York Harbor are accustomed to the familiar sight of four very large, perhaps rather ungainly craft, cruising in and out the Bay. Heavily built, with sides of iron painted a dull gray-stanch and severe-they might easily be mistaken for war-ships. These are the United States Dredges, called by sea-going proletarians “the sand-suckers." A memorandum from the Secretary of War, with detailed instructions from the sion to visit the fleet of diggers. Captain Ward, U. S. N., Supervisor of the Port, kindly gave me passage on one of his police boats down the Bay, and thus I boarded the Atlantic. A United States Inspector (for there is one in supervisional charge of each dredge) received me, and entertained me in his quarters. I stayed many days and nights and saw many things, for although the weather when we went to sea had all the warmth and charm of the Mediterranean, before many hours storm, fog, and rain gathered us in. The work on these dredges is relentless. There is no rest when darkness falls. In only the severest weather is there any letup. The clash and clang of machinery is continuous, subdued somewhat by the gentler swish-swash of the suction-pipe sluices, and varied only by the heavy rattle of the stones as they are sucked up by the centrifugal pumps. Night brought little sleep; the din was trying to unaccustomed ears. In dredging, two eighty-foot-long, twenty-inch-wide suction pipes connected with centrifugal pumps are lowered by steam hoisters to the bottom, one from each side of the ship. A grating or drag at the ends of the pipes prevents the larger rocks and stones from being sucked up. The dredge steams slowly ahead, trailing at the bottom her two suction-tubes, and the centrifugal pumps do the rest. Thirty cubic yards of solid material, or 190 cubic yards of water, can be sucked per minute through each pipe. In the engine-room, confined in a steel shell ten feet in diameter, is a runner (similar in form to the screw of a steamship) which revolves 150 times a minute, carrying with it all the mud and débris that comes from the sea's bottom and hurling it upwards to the decks above, where it finds its way to the steel bins. Once one of these shells burst and made sad havoc with the surrounding machinery, scattering a mass of stones and sand in all directions before the pumps could be stopped. The water runs off, and in two hours 2,400 cubic yards of material have collected aboard, so solid that it can be walked on. The dredge has now sunk almost to the water's level with her load; |