All these busy figures between
decks, dimly seen bending at their work in smoke and fire, are as nothing to the figures that shall do work here of another
kind in smoke and fire, that day. These steam-worked engines alongside, helping the ship by travelling to and fro, and wafting
tons of iron plates about, as though they were so many leaves of 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 sledge-hammers, 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 isdone. ‘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 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. Theyare large enough for the eye, I find, and so are all her other appliances. I wonder why only her anchors look small.
I have no present time to think about it, for I am going to see the workshops where they make all the oars used in the British Navy.