"Okay, fair enough. But enough theorizing and analysis: what the hell does this have to do with a woman being a soldier?"
North nodded soberly. "A fair question. Hard to answer. Or at least hard to say. Can we agree on this, at least: that soldiering is a dirty, nasty job?"
"No debate. None whatsoever."
"And do we not find ourselves in situations where we give orders that we know—know—will lead to the demise of those so ordered?"
Ah, I think I see where we're going, now. "Unfortunately, yes."
"And does war not scar us, damage us inside as well as out?"
"Unless you're a sociopath, you bet it does."
"So, here I am, a man of my origins who has no use for fainting damsels. Rather, I aspire to the hand of what is an impossible creature in my world: a Lady who is also a fully capable Woman. A Lady who does not need my assistance, but chooses it, and is able to rely on my being her devoted help-meet and friend, who would neither do her ill, nor suffer it to be done to her."
Sherrilyn nodded: yep, now North's quandary was clear.
"So now let us consider my relationship with such an impossible creature, who might indeed be a woman soldier. She is indeed the very antithesis of a frail damsel in distress. But maybe too much so. If a woman soldier must be fully divested of the right to any special treatment, a Gentleman—a man who was taught that he should protect her, regardless of any other social niceties—might have to order her to her doom. Order her into the mud and filth and blood of an enemy trench. Order her to euthanize the mortally-wounded, both friend and foe."
Thomas North looked out at the ships. "Where does it end? Does the woman soldier continue on through her motherhood? Does she train her own son—or daughter—in the fine art of how to disembowel an enemy with a single sweep of the blade? Will she be tasked to euthanize her own mortally-wounded children?" He turned to Sherrilyn; his eyes were clearly frustrated, slightly worried, and just a little desperate. "Tell me, Miss Maddox: where does it end? How does the principle of being a Lady—even a strong, resourceful one—remain intact once touched by war? Are we to be all the same, except for our genitalia? Is that truly what we want? Is that truly something one can, or should, achieve?"
Sherrilyn was silent, staring at him. "Wow," she said. "You think too much."
North's mouth quirked. "Now that is a criticism that has not been leveled at me before this moment."
"Well, it is truly said that I'm an original. Thomas, fact is, we up-timers never answered all these questions, either. But I guess it was easier for us: the notion of a lady had undergone a lot of change by the time we started grappling with these issues of women soldiers. And we were still feeling our way in the dark. But sometimes, that's half the fun. Some folks need all the answers laid out ahead of time. Me, I'm not one of them. And I didn't figure you for one of them either."
"I'm not, and that's what's so surprising about this, to me. Customarily, I have largely accepted my life as it unfolds. Indeed, my combat tactics are often rather based on—well, let us call it situational inspiration, rather than advanced planning." He smiled. "Much to the frustration of my associates. I remember one time in the Lowlands, when I convinced Liam to—"
The moment after Thomas North uttered the name ‘Liam', he stopped. Sherrilyn swore silently: the moment was gone. The conversation was past. He'd inadvertently summoned the shade of Liam Donovan and a black pall fell over the glimmering possibility of reaching an understanding, or at least a—
"Hey, get jur lay-zee asses to standing up, guyz!" It was Gerd, shouting from the corner the Crew had disappeared around a few minutes—or was that a few years?—ago. "Juliet haff found mounts and a wagon. I will help you mit your bags now."
Thomas was on his feet, offered a hand to Sherrilyn. Who stared up at him, wondered if she should accept the assistance, given the substance of their talk.
North smiled. "Do allow me to be a gentleman, this time."
Instead, Sherrilyn hoisted herself upright without taking his hand. "Next time. Maybe," she explained in response to his quizzical stare, and stooped to start picking up the Wrecking Crew's gear.
—and that is where the uncertain story of Thomas and Sherrilyn ended. As the desperate actions of the Wrecking Crew and its allies grew increasingly more rushed and desperate, events conspired to keep the two of them apart—during which time they both realized that although they were well-suited as friends and comrades, the passion and longing of lovers did not exist between them.
Which, of course, ultimately freed them for more interesting intimate escapades in later books!
Life at Sea in the Old and New Time Lines: Part 2, Keeping Dry (and Afloat)
By Iver Cooper
In Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo, the sailor Penelon tells the story of a crisis at sea he had survived. His ship had pitched heavily for twelve hours, scudding under bare poles in a gale, and finally sprung a leak. Penelon continues:
"All hands to the pumps," I shouted; but it was too late, and it seemed the more we pumped the more came in. "Ah," said I, after four hours' work, "since we are sinking, let us sink; we can die but once."
Hearing this, Penelon's captain fetched a brace of pistols, and said, "I will blow the brains out of the first man who leaves the pump."
Plainly, there is dramatic potential when a ship is in danger of foundering. And, inevitably, a ship takes on water. Waves crash over the bulwarks or surge through open gunports, rain falls on deck, enemy gunfire, icebergs or submerged rocks may pierce the hull, and the hull itself leaks. The increased weight of the ship, attributable to the unwanted water, reduces the reserve (net) buoyancy and, if the process is not arrested, ultimately the ship sinks.
The risk of foundering can be reduced by good ship design, but the time will come when the ship needs a good pump. Or more than one. Let us see how these concerns were addressed in the 17th century, and thereafter.
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Ship Design
Freeboard. The ship's vulnerability to taking on water by wave action depends in part on its freeboard. That's the distance from the waterline to the height of the uppermost continuous deck exposed to the weather and sea, which has permanent means of closing (i.e., hatches), and below which the sides of the ship are fitted with permanent means of watertight closure (assuming that all lower decks are fully enclosed). If that deck varies in height (a ship which is higher at the ends than at the middle is said to have sheer), then it's the lowest point that counts.
Freeboard is measured assuming the ship is upright, but in fact the ship will pitch and roll, lowering the distance to the waterline here and raising it there. How much it does so will depend on the ship's initial stability and the conditions to which it is exposed.
Lloyd's at one time required that insured ships have three inches in freeboard for each foot of depth of hold (Taylor, Muckle's Naval Architecture (2013) 46). Later, complex tables were introduced which considered ship type, length, depth of hold, the coefficient of fineness, the sheer, and enclosed superstructures. An iron or steel sailing vessel with a length of 300 feet, depth of 30 feet, normal sheer, no enclosed superstructures and a coefficient of fineness of 0.68 would have a required freeboard in the summer North Atlantic of seven feet (Owen, The Tonnage and Freeboard of Merchant Ships (1906) 21-48).
After WW II, it was recommended that freeboard for warships equal 1.1 times the square root of the length in feet (Brown, The Tonnage and Freeboard of Merchant Ships (1906) 214; see also Brown, The Grand Fleet: Warship Design and Development 1906-1922), probably taking into account the relationship of maximum speed to length and the resulting chance of taking green sea over the bow, but that high a freeboard is probably appropriate only with engine-powered ships and steel construction.
When a warship opens its gunports, water may surge in through the open ports. Insufficient gunport freeboard (16 inches!) paved the way for the loss of the Mary Rose in 1545 (Sephton, Sovereign of the Seas). Reviewing the original 1664 plan of
the Warspite, Charles II insisted that the freeboard of the lower deck gunports (i.e., the distance from the waterline to the lower sill) be increased to 4.5 feet (Winfeld, British Warships in the Age of Sail 1603-1714 (2010) 54).
Heavy seas could reduce the disparity in fighting power between an eighteenth-century frigate and a two-decker, as the frigate didn't have guns on its enclosed decks and the freeboard of its main open deck was likely to be greater than that of the larger ship’s lower deck gunports. For example, the mid-century French Embuscade had a freeboard of about eight feet (Sadler, Blood on the Wave: Scottish Sea Battles (2012)). Freeboard on early nineteenth-century British frigates was usually six to nine feet (Gardiner, Frigates of the Napoleonic Wars (2006) 143).
Stability. A ship with low stability will tend to pitch and roll to a greater extent, and thus is more likely to take on water. Stability is actually a complex concept. For example, while increasing freeboard increases reserve buoyancy, it also raises the center of gravity (all else being equal) and thus reduces initial stability. And if freeboard is increased at the expense of beam (to keep underdeck volume constant), that, too, reduces initial stability.
One of the important parameters of stability is the metacentric height (GM), the distance between the center of gravity (G) and the metacenter (M), the point where the vertical line through the center of buoyancy (B) on a heeled ship crosses the vertical line through B on the unheeled ship. While an increase in GM increases the righting moment (the moment acting to correct the heel), it also reduces the natural period of roll, and a ship with too short a roll period can be uncomfortable to ride and also vulnerable to dismasting.
A more detailed discussion of ship design relative to stability is outside the scope of this article.
Bulwarks. A further defense against wave action is the bulwark, essentially a wall on an open deck. Magoun (The Frigate Constitution and Other Historic Ships 51) says that the Mayflower, already an old ship when chartered in 1620, had solid bulwarks. Despite those bulwarks, it was a wet ship.
Contemporary illustrations show that many ships in period didn't have a solid bulwark, just a rail supported with stanchions; this might give a crewman something to hang on to but wouldn't keep out water. While sometimes canvas was hung over the rails, this would just keep out sea spray and not green water.
Even if the ship had a bulwark, if it were armed, it might either have a relatively low bulwark so the open deck guns could fire over it, or gunports cut into a higher bulwark. Normally, these open deck gunports lacked lids, so the effective height of the bulwark in terms of watertightness was the height of the lower sill.
A 1918 text states that the average height of the bulwark is 4.5 feet in sailing ships and 2.5 feet in steamers (which are not heeled over by the action of a beam wind on sails). By that time, ships had metal hulls and the bulwarks were thick plating (Holms 345).
Camber. A ship's deck is cambered—curved so it's higher at the centerline than at the sides—so any water runs off to the sides. Of course, one must still get the water off the deck.
Thomas Harriot's Notes on Shipbuilding (1608) suggested that the camber (center-side height difference) should be about one-half inch for every foot of half-breadth, a 1:48 ratio (Lavery, The Colonial Merchantman: Susan Constant, 1605 (1988) 16). On the mid-seventeenth-century fluyt Zeehaen, the hull breadth was twenty-two feet but the camber on the upper and lower deck beams was ten inches, almost double the relative height. (Hoving, The Ships of Abel Tasman 127-8). Nicolaes Witsen taught that the camber of the lower deck beams should be one inch for ten feet of length (and the length was supposed to be four times the breadth) (Hoving, Nicolaes Witsen and Shipbuilding in the Dutch Golden Age 74, 250). On the Bellerophon, "the camber was six inches on the gun deck and an inch less for each deck above" (Pope, Life in Nelson’s Navy 39).
Scuppers. The bulwarks that keep the smaller waves out also trap the water left behind by waves that crested the bulwark Hence ships are equipped with scuppers, deck level openings through which the water can drain off. The scuppers are usually on the main open deck (the weather deck), which is above the waterline. However, they can be lower, and channels conduct the water from the higher deck to the one the scuppers are on.
That of course leads logically to the question, what keeps the water from entering by way of the scuppers? On the Mary Rose, a leather flap was nailed over the scupper hole. This acted as a one-way valve (McElvogue, Tudor Warship Mary Rose 21).
The scuppers must be dimensioned to take into account the volume of water that can be trapped by the bulwarks. Holms (345) advises that the combined area of these freeing ports should not be smaller than 10% of the area of the bulwarks.
Bulkheads. These divide the ship into watertight compartments. Thus, if there is water leakage into one of them, the maximum loss of buoyancy is the volume of the affected compartment. Bulkheads may be transverse or longitudinal, and made of wood or iron.
At the time of the Ring of Fire, bulkheads had been used on Chinese and Japanese junks for centuries. There is some dispute as to whether these bulkheads were in fact intended to be watertight, as they had limber holes at the bottom, but I agree with Chinese scholars that these were intended to facilitate washing cabins (the boat could be trimmed by the stern, so the water would drain sternward and there be pumped out) and at sea the limber holes would be plugged (Cai Wei, et al., "Watertight bulkheads and limber holes in Ancient Chinese Boats" in Jun Kimura, Thematic Studies in East Asian Maritime Archeology, 2010, www.shipwreckasia.org/wp-content/uploads/Chapter2.pdf).
In 1787, Franklin proposed that the holds of packet ships be "divided into separate apartments, after the Chinese manner, and each of these apartments caulked tight so as to keep out water." In 1795, Bentham likewise advocated "partitions contributing to strength, and securing the ship against foundering, as practiced by the Chinese of the present day."
Watertight bulkheads remained uncommon in the West. Most nineteenth-century sailing ships had merely a collision bulkhead. Those that had more were mostly steamers converted into windships, and the most bulkheads on any unconverted ship was four. Even steamers weren't necessarily compartmented. In 1881-3, one hundred twenty British iron steamships were lost that "had a single compartment the filling of which would have caused the ship to founder" (Barnaby, The Protection of Iron and Steel Ships against Foundering from Injury to their Shells, including the Use of Armour, J. Iron & Steel Institute 37: 438 (1890) 445).
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Leaks
The rate of inflow from a hole below the waterline is usually proportional to (1) the size of the hole and (2) the square root of the depth of the hole below the waterline. If the water rises inside the hold enough to cover it, the rate of flow is proportional to the square root of the distance between the water level inside the hull and the waterline outside (Oertling n4).
It follows that as the boat fills with water, the rate of water entry slows down (assuming the water doesn't create new holes). Thus, a point can be reached at which the rate of water removal (by bailing or pumping) equals the rate of water ingress—the ships stays afloat even though it is waterlogged. A leak in the bow was more dangerous than one in the stern because the forward movement increases water pressure at the bow.
While a cannonball could certainly create a large hole, it wasn't that easy for enemy fire to hit a ship below the waterline. The most common leak was the result of a planking seam which had lost its caulking. The leak could be located by listening for it with an ear trumpet.
Leaks could be plugged from the inside or outside. On the inside, one could use some sort of gelatinous mixture (like tallow and coals), pieces of raw beef, oatmeal bags, sheet lead, or canvas or leather backed with oakum. On the outside, one lowered a bag or net of oakum down over the leak, which then sucked in the oakum. Shot holes were usually closed by driving a canvas covered wooden plug into the hole (Oertling 7).
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Bailing and Scooping
With ten-lite
r buckets, "one man can lift about 15 buckets per minute or 300 cfh to a height of 3.3 feet" (Wood, Pumps and Water Lifters for Rural Development (1977) 29). Water may also be thrown by using a semi-enclosed shovel, with about the same rate of water transfer (41). A trick that increases the rate of scooping is to attach the shovel by a rope to a tripod so you get a "pendulum assist."
Ship Pumps
If the deck water doesn't escape by way of the scuppers, then it will eventually drain down to the bilge. Water entering by way of leaks or shot holes will do the same.
It was not very practical to use a bucket brigade to carry water all the way up to the weather deck in order to dump it out. In theory, it would have been possible to place a bucket on a rope and use a pulley to pull it up a great height. Moreover, one could use two buckets, attach to opposite ends of the same rope, and replace the simple pulley with a cranked roller for increased mechanical advantage. However, I am not aware of the use of this ancient device on shipboard. Instead, pumps were used.
The pump drew water up through a pump tube, whose length was dictated by the depth of the hull. The pump and pump tube were inside a compartment called the pump well.
Encyclopedia Britannica 11th Edition (EB11) /"Pump" says that the simplest type of pump used to move a liquid is a plunger pump, characterized by a piston moving in a cylinder, and various valves. The plunger pump type is subdivided into suction pumps and force pumps. Suction pumps will be discussed in more detail shortly.
Force pumps have a solid piston (there is a valve inside the piston of a suction pump) and the outlet is below the piston (rather than above it as on the suction pump). Liquid rises on the upstroke, and is forced into the outlet by the downstroke (with the inlet closed by a check valve).
Grantville Gazette, Volume 65 Page 15