or the single
purpose of carrying the ore are crowded with rumbling cars day and night,
and at the wharves during the eight or nine months of the year when
navigation is open lie great steel ships, five hundred feet long, with a
capacity of from six thousand to nine thousand tons of ore. Perhaps in no
branch of marine architecture has the type best fitted to the need been so
scientifically determined as in planning these ore boats. They are cargo
carriers only, and all considerations of grace or beauty are rigidly
eliminated from their design. The bows are high to meet and part the heavy
billows of the tempestuous lakes, for they are run as late into the stormy
fall and early winter season as the ice will permit. From the forward
quarter the bulwarks are cut away, the high bow sheltering the forecastle
with the crews, while back of it rises a deck-house of steel, containing
the officers' rooms, and bearing aloft the bridge and wheel-house. Three
hundred feet further aft rises another steel deck-house, above the engine,
and between extends the long, flat deck, broken only by hatches every few
feet, battened down almost level with the deck floor. During the summer,
all too short for the work the busy iron carriers have to do, these boats
are run at the top of their speed, and on schedules that make the economy
of each minute essential. So they are built in such fashion as to make
loading as easy and as rapid as possible. Sometimes there are as many as
fourteen or sixteen hatches in one of these great ships, into each of
which while loading the ore chutes will be pouring their red flood, and
out of each of which the automatic unloaders at Cleveland or Erie will
take ten-ton bites of the cargo, until six or seven thousand tons of iron
ore may be unloaded in eight hours. The hold is all one great store-room,
no deck above the vessel's floor except the main deck. No water-tight
compartments or bulkheads divide it as in ocean ships, and all the
machinery is placed far in the stern. The vessel is simply a great steel
packing-box, with rounded ends, made strong to resist the shock of waves
and the impact of thousands of tons of iron poured in from a bin as high
above the floor as the roof of a three-story building. With vessels such
as these, the cost of carrying ore has been reduced below the level of
freight charges in any part of the world.

Yet comfort and speed are by no means overlooked. The quarters of the
officers and men