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private residents; and thus it arises that the suburbs | first importance as a naval station; and in this view of

(of which we shall speak by-and-by) present long rows of good-looking private houses. The private society has, of course, a considerable sprinkling of the military and the maritime about it.

THE DOCKYARD.

Sir John Barrow makes an observation, which is useful, as illustrating and explaining the somewhat scattered arrangement of all our dockyards: " From the first establishment of the King's dockyards to the present time, most of them have gradually been enlarged and improved by a succession of expedients and makeshifts which answered the purposes of the moment; but the best of them possess not those conveniences and advantages which might be obtained from a dockyard systematically laid out on a uniform and consistent plan, with its wharfs, basins, docks, ships, magazines, and workshops, arranged according to certain fixed principles calculated to produce convenience, economy, and despatch. Neither at the time when our dockyards were first established, nor at any subsequent period of their enlargement as the necessities of the service demanded, could it have been foreseen what incalculable advantages would one day be derived from the substitution of machinery for human labour; and without a reference to this vast improvement in all mechanical operations, it could not be expected that any provision would be made for its future introduction; on the contrary, the docks and slips, the workshops and store-houses were successively built at random, and placed wherever a vacant space would most conveniently admit them, and in such a manner as in most cases to render the subsequent introduction of machinery and iron railways, and those various contrivances found in the large manufacturing establishments of private individuals, quite impossible, even in the most commodious and roomy of the royal dockyards." (Encyclop. Brit.)

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If we look at the form and position of Portsmouth Harbour, we find that, after having passed the entrance between Portsmouth and Gosport, the width greatly expands, and a jutting point of land has the sea both on the north and the west of it. At this point is the dock yard situated, occupying the north-west corner of Portsea, which is itself northward of Portsmouth. the land sides a wall hounds the yard, so that the dockyard in reality forms a town of itself, wholly separated from Portsea and Portsmouth. It is a town too of no mean dimensions. Sir John Barrow remarks, that "Portsmouth Dockyard will always be considered as the grand Naval Arsenal of England, and the headquarters or general rendezvous of the British fleet. The dock yard, accordingly, is by far the most capacious; and the safe and extensive harbour, the noble anchorage at Spithead, the central situation with respect to the English Channel, and the opposite coast of France, and particularly with regard to the naval arsenal at Cherbourg, render Portsmouth of the very

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it every possible attention appears to have been paid to the extension and improvement of its dockyard.

We apply at the gate for admission: we are shown into a little ante-room, where others join us, until a tolerably numerous party is made up. A dock policeofficer then causes each visitor to inscribe his name and residence in a book-(if either his looks or his name indicate him to be a foreigner, he will find admission a much more difficult matter). We move on, and logs of timber, and heaps of stone, and smoky smitheries, and draw-bridges, call for a little circumspection in picking our steps. We form a little party, with the officer as a cicerone; and he takes us round to all those parts of the establishment which the Admiralty thinks proper to make generally public. The points of exclusion are not many; and the visitor will find abundant food for observation during the time of his visit.

The different portions of this establishment are, indeed, very extensive. Near the entrance-gate are the Port Admiral's house, the Admiral Superintendent's house, the Guard-house, and Pay-office, and the Mastpond. On the left of these are mast-houses, storehouses, rigging-houses, and sail-lofts. Farther north are the chapel, another range of store-houses, and the rope-house. Then we come to the central part of the yard, having a statue of William III., and around it various officers' houses, carvers' shops, mould-lofts, saw-pits, and joiners' shops. Westward of these, near the water's edge, are a large basin, two jetties, and seven vast docks for ships. Farther north, again, we come to the building where the exquisite block machinery is deposited, the foundry, the blacksmith's shop, the boat houses, the boat-house pound, and the numerous slips' where new ships are built. Many of these buildings present scenes and operations which, once witnessed, will not soon be forgotten. In the mast-houses we see the immensely long pieces of timber destined to be built up into the form of a mast; or in some, which are mast store-houses, the masts of the ships in ordinary are laid up, each one carefully marked to indicate the ship to which it belongs. Never does a Portsmouth seaman or dockyard officer fail to draw your attention to Nelson's 'Victory' whenever a fair opportunity occurs for doing so; the 'Victory's' masts are carefully laid up in one of the store-houses; and these, as well as every bit and scrap of that old ship, are carefully treasured up. The whole assemblage of pieces comprising the main-mast of a firstrate, are about 212 feet in height-higher than the Monument. As the main-mast is far too thick to be furnished by any tree of sufficient height, the thickness is made out in a curious way, by a succession of exterior pieces; the mast is truly built up,' and all the pieces bound together by iron hoops. When we consider that the lower main-mast alone of an East Indiaman, about ninety feet long, weighs upwards of six tons, we may form some guess of the enormous weight of the complete suite of masts for a first-rate man-of-war,

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The rope-house, about twelve hundred feet in length, gives us some idea of the mode in which the almost interminable cordage and rigging of a ship are made. How the spinner wraps a bundle of hemp round his waist; and how, by fastening the hemp to hooks, which are made to revolve, and by walking backward and drawing out the hemp, he causes the latter to assume the form of yarn; are matters which a little close attention will render clear to every intelligent observer. Then the further stages in the process: the spinning of many yarns into a strand,' the twisting of three of these strands into a 'rope,' and the ultimate twisting or 'laying' of three ropes into a 'cable-all are interesting. Captain Huddart's rope machinery has been now brought so much into use, that the handwrought rope is not now made in such large quantities as in former days; while the adoption of iron cables instead of hempen cables in large ships, has further reduced the manufacture of the latter. Some of the largest hempen cables used to contain upwards of fifteen thousand pounds weight of hemp! From the causes above alluded to, the rope-house is shorn of some of the interest that once attached to it. In the Tarring-house, we see the means whereby the hemp is so saturated with tar as to render the ropes better able to resist the action of sea-water. The cauldrons of boiling tar are so placed, that the hanks of hempen yarn, after unwinding from a beam or heap, are made to dip into the melted tar, and then to pass between two rollers, the pressure of which forces the tar into the innermost fibres of the yarn, and expels the remainder. This house is as little of a holidayplace as any of the buildings in the yard; and the visitor is very likely to become 'tarred,' though not 'feathered.'

The anchors which are lying about in well arranged heaps between the store-houses, every anchor painted to protect it from rust, are astonishing for their vastness, and from the labour required in their fabrication. The largest anchor for a first-rate man-of-war weighs somewhere about 90 cwt., or ten thousand pounds, and used to cost from three to four hundred pounds sterling; it is upwards of twenty feet in length, and the main part of the shank varies from eight to twelve inches in thickness. Most picturesque used formerly to be the scene of anchor-making-the glowing mass of iron as taken from the forge-fire; the six or eight men ranged in a circle around it, each with his hammer of sixteen or eighteen pounds weight; and the successive descent of their hammers, as each man in his turn struck his blow-all formed a scene which Rembrandt would have loved to study. Science sometimes spoils the picturesque. When the steam blowing-machine superseded the smith's bellows, and when Nasmyth's steam-hammer did the duty of the hand-worked hammers, the deep lights and shadows, the animated groups of the old forge, cease to form a picture. This steam-hammer of Nasmyth's is indeed a wonderful worker. It is a complete steam-engine which hovers over the article to be struck. There is a cylinder, and

a piston within it, and when steam is conveyed up through a flexible pipe to this cylinder, the alternate ascent and descent of the piston causes the alternate ascent and descent of a hammer-a hammer so enormous, that it could give a blow more forcible than that of all the smiths who could stand round an anchor. And yet so delicately is this monster adjusted, that it can be made to fall so gently as to crack a nut without crushing the kernel within! The use of this steamhammer in anchor-making, in forging large masses of iron generally, and especially in driving piles for hydraulic engineering, is almost beyond price, on account of the saving of time which it effects. Anchor making is, we believe not carried on so largely at Portsmouth as at some of the other dockyards; but the steam-hammer can be seen at work in the large, dark, sooty, smoky, and fiery-looking smithery, where many large masses of iron are forged.

Brunel's block-making machinery is one of the finest exhibitions of art in the dockyard. A ship's block, as most persons may perhaps be aware, is an oval mass of wood, with one or more grooves running round the edge; holes perforating it in various directions; and sheaves or wheels fixed on axles so as to revolve: the case, or 'shell,' of the block is made of elm or ash, and the sheaves of lignum vitæ. The object of these blocks is to serve as pulleys, for hauling-up and drawing-in the various ropes, sails, yards, &c., on shipboard. These blocks were made by hand wholly (with the exception of a short period in the last century, when water-worked machines were invented to do some of the work). But in 1802, Mr. (now Sir Mark Isambard) Brunel invented and patented a complete series of machines, by which the entire block is made; and the Government soon availed themselves of the invention, which has ever since been one of the triumphs of Portsmouth dockyard. There is an oblong square building, filled with machines from end to end; and these machines can be so connected with a steam-engine as to put them into or out of work in an instant. A great beam or log of elm is presented to one machine; it presently cuts it up into cubical masses. One of these masses is presented to another saw; it is speedily cut into pieces of the proper thickness. One of these pieces is pressed for a few seconds against a boringmachine, and holes are bored through a thick piece of elm, as easily as a carpenter would bore into soft deal with a brad-awl. So the operations go on; the sawing, boring, morticeing, and external rounding; all are done by the machines-for it must be borne in mind that this is not one machine, but a family of machines, all related one to another, and all working to one common end.

It would be difficult to conceive a system of machinery more complete and efficient than the blockmachinery at Portsmouth. It is said that if this were worked to its full limit, it might supply the whole of the blocks required for the Royal Navy, the Board of Ordnance, and the Transport service. During the war, a hundred and thirty thousand blocks was the average

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annual demand for the public service; and as ten men can, with the machine, make as many blocks as a hundred and ten men can without it, it will be seen how great has been the saving of time effected. There are two hundred sorts and sizes of blocks used in the royal navy, all of which can be made by machinery. A seventy-four-gun man of war has more than fourteen hundred blocks. It is said that the whole cost of erecting the buildings and machinery, and paying Brunel a satisfactory sum for six year's unremitting attention to the details of this extraordinary system of mechanism, was defrayed by the savings of four years, as compared with the cost of the blocks if produced under the old method. Sir John Barrow states, that the original purpose of the building, in which the machinery is deposited, was that of a wood-mill, in which all manner of sawing, turning, boring, rabbeting, and the like, were to be performed; and that the block machinery was superadded to the first design, with which, however, it has interfered so little, that in addition to the immense number of blocks manufactured at the mill, upwards of a hundred different articles of wood-work are made by other machines, put in motion by the same steam-engine, from the boring of a pump of forty feet in length, to the turning of a button for the knob or handle of a drawer!"

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The visitor, perhaps, cannot persuade his cicerone to stay long enough to permit a minute examination of this beautiful machinery; but if his eyes are open, he will see enough to pay him well for the visit.

. The docks and building-slips (as the places are called where the ships are built) are all open to the visitor, so far as there is time to devote to them. Here we may gather some crumbs of information as to the vastness of these floating masses, and the countless pieces of timber of which they are composed. Consider that a first-rate man of war contains three thousand

loads of timber; being as much as can be grown on forty acres of land in a century. Just reflect that this monster fabric is to afford a home for nearly a thousand human beings, floating on the waters for many months

and you cannot fail to see an all-sufficient reason why it should be made strong enough to resist a mighty array of accidents and hard blows. There are at the present time ships of the very first class building at Portsmouth; and the different stages of completeness at which these ships have arrived, afford an instructive means of observing the order in which the building processes are conducted.

The storehouses are, for the most part, not open to inspection without a special order; but some judgment may easily be formed of their vast extent. The storehouses on the north east side are six hundred feet in length; the rigging-house and the sail-loft are four hundred; the hemp-houses, and the sea-store-houses, present a range nearly eight hundred feet in length. Thus it is on all sides; wherever we turn, there do gigantic buildings meet the view. The whole yard is about 3500 feet in length from north to south, and 2000 in width from east to west, covering upwards of a hundred acres; and there is not an acre of this space but is applied to some useful purpose.

The dock-yard is an establishment distinct from the other government establishments. It has its own entrance-gates, its own officers, its own hours and condition of admission; so that a visitor, wishing to see all that can be and ought to be seen, must move about in different directions, and carve out his time in the most efficient way he can.

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large area of ground may be considered to be partly in Portsea, and partly in Portsmouth, for it fronts the harbour opposite the junction of those towns. Here we come to the Ordnance department of the navy-the guns and other weapons, offensive and defensive, employed on ship-board. Field-pieces and military artillery are not here deposited; for the navy, not the army, is the service to be supplied. That the supply of guns for the navy is an important matter, may be made clear by the following enumeration of guns for a first-rate. On the gun-deck thirty-two guns, each 32-pounders, that is, capable of throwing a ball weighing thirty-two pounds; on the middle deck, thirty-four 24-pounders; on the upper deck, thirty-four 24-pounders; on the quarter-deck, ten 32-pounders and six 12-pounders; on the forecastle, two 32-pounders and two 12-pounders; making 120 guns in all.

The numbers of these cannon and cannon-ball in the gun-wharf is truly astonishing. Range after range meet the eye; every gun placed in exact parallelism with the rest-instruments of death in holiday array. These guns comprise not only new ones for ships yet to be built, but the guns belonging to ships now lying up in ordinary. In the latter case, each ship's guns are ranged by themselves, with the name of the ship painted on the first gun of each parcel. Some of these guns are of such vast size and thickness as to weigh sixty hundred-weights each.

Then the cannon-balls; what countless masses of these! They are all piled up in pyramids, having either a square or an oblong base, and some of these pyramids contain thirty or forty thousand cannon-balls each. Each size of ball forms a pyramid of its own; the 42-pounders being by themselves, the 32-pounders by themselves, the bomb-shells by themselves, and so on. The small Armoury is a distinct and more ornamental building belonging to the same establishment. In front of it, in an open court, are a few curious specimens of guns brought from foreign countries. Within is a magnificent apartment, very similar to the small armoury which existed in the Tower of London, before the late fire. There are upwards of twenty thousand stand of arms, all intended for sea service; muskets, bayonets, halberds, boarding-pikes, cutlasses, &c., all are arranged in fanciful forms, and seeming to mock the destructive purposes for which they are intended. Here, too, the visitor is called upon by his guide to look at the mail-armour and plate-armour of former days, the armed buff-leather coats of the seventeenth century, the helmet and gauntlet of Cromwell's time, the Dutch boarding-pikes, and the innumerable specimens of small arms which have from time to time been accumulated from various quarters.

THE FLOATING-BRIDGE TO GOSPORT. As a means of extending our ramble to the various establishments on the Gosport side of the harbour, we will cross by the floating bridge; concerning which we may have a little semi-scientific gossip.

The harbours at Plymouth and Portsmouth are

similar in this respect; that there is a narrow entrance between two points of land, which afterwards expand into a magnificent harbour for shipping; indeed, the narrowness of the entrance is one cause of the safety of the harbour. In both cases it happens that there is a good deal of intercourse with the opposite side of the entrance to the harbour. At Plymouth the passage is from Torpoint to the Cornwall shore; at Portsmouth it is from Portsea and Portsmouth to Gosport. Before the adoption of the modern contrivances, the only mode of carrying on the cross traffic was by wherries or other row-boats; for the construction of a fixed bridge was out of the question.

In this state of things, Mr. Rendel, the engineer, was called upon to devise some sort of boat, or bridge, or boat-bridge, which might afford a more efficient transit. A steam ferry-boat was established at Plymouth in 1825, to effect the passage; but the current was found to be too strong, and the scheme was abandoned. Mr. Rendel then set about a plan which came to a practical result, and which has proved remarkably successful. It was for a steam floating-bridge, which should pass to and fro across the entrance to the harbour, without any fear of being driven out of its course by winds and currents. The scheme was so efficient, that similar bridges have since been built at Dartmouth, at Portsmouth, and at Southampton; since it is so managed as not to interrupt the entrance of vessels into the harbour. (Cut, No. 3.)

Let us suppose that, on our jaunt towards the Victualling Establishment, we are about to cross the harbour. We proceed to the station, at a projecting spot called the Point,' a little northward of the Gun Wharf. We pay our penny at a toll-house, and descend a sloping beach to the edge of the water. Here we see before us a strange sort of structure, neither boat nor bridge, and yet being something of both. It is very broad, and has a sort of platform stretching out to the dry beach. Presently, to our surprise, we see a laden omnibus, fully supplied with its 'insides' and outsides,' descend the beach and pass along the platform to the floating fabric itself. Then another

come perhaps from the Brighton station, and going to the Southampton station. Then a cart or a wagon, a wheelbarrow, or Punch's theatre, saddle-horses, cattle, sheep, men and women,-all get aboard this oddlooking boat! Presently a signal is given, gates are closed at the two ends of the vessel, and we find ourselves gliding over the water to the other side of the harbour: very little sound being heard, and very little seen to indicate how we are propelled. A few minutes suffice for the transit, and then another platform is let down from the other end of the vessel on the Gosport beach: the gates are opened, and away we depart— omnibuses, costermongers, Punch's theatre, people, and all. Another cargo is received, and without any distinction between stem and stern, back the vessel goes-very probably carrying a good sprinkling of passengers from the Gosport (Southampton) Railway station to that at Portsmouth (Brighton).

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