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 are superior to those provided on most of the ocean liners, and vastly better than anything offered by the “ocean tramps.”  Many of the ships have special guest-cabins fitted up for their owners, rivalling the cabins de luxe of the ocean greyhounds.  The speed of the newer ships will average from fourteen to sixteen knots, and one of them in a season will make as many as twenty round trips between Duluth and Cleveland.  Often one will tow two great steel barges almost as large as herself, great ore tanks without machinery of any kind and mounting two slender masts chiefly for signaling purposes, but also for use in case of being cut adrift.  For a time, the use of these barges, with their great stowage capacity in proportion to their total displacement, was thought to offer the cheapest way of carrying ore.  One mining company went very heavily into building these craft, figuring that every steamer could tow two or three of them, giving thus for each engine and crew a load of perhaps twenty-four thousand tons.  But, seemingly, this expectation has been disappointed, for while the barges already constructed are in active use, most of the companies have discontinued building them.  Indeed, at the moment of the preparation of this book, there were but two steel barges building in all the shipyards of the great lakes.

Another form of lake vessel of which great things were expected, but which disappointed its promotors, is the “whaleback,” commonly called by the sailors “pigs.”  These are cigar-shaped craft, built of steel, their decks, from the bridge aft to the engine-house, rounded like the back of a whale, and carried only a few feet above the water.  In a sea, the greater part of the deck is all awash,