watch
the sinking of ships of every type and size; shortly after receiving
their death wound the vessels usually disappear totally beneath the
surface. It takes even big steamers only between four and ten minutes
to sink, after being hit by a torpedo or shell beneath the water line,
and yet occasionally a ship may float several hours before going down
to the bottom of the sea.

It is clearly evident that the slow or rapid sinking of a ship depends
on the distribution of its bulkheads and water-tight compartments. A
man-of-war, built on the latest models, has a great many small
water-tight compartments, for she is meant to be able to continue
fighting even after several of these compartments have been destroyed;
whereas, an ocean steamer is so constructed that she will remain
afloat only a short time after a collision with another ship, or if
she runs into an iceberg or a derelict, she can endure a certain
intake of water, and lists at a moderate angle far more readily than a
warship, whose guns are rendered nearly useless if the ship is heavily
canting. A warship must be built so as to withstand, without sinking,
the injury caused by a number of gun holes even beneath the water
line, where the inner part of the ship must necessarily be subdivided
into many parts. A warship is built at great cost, but so is an ocean
steamer. The sunken "Lusitania" was worth 35,000,000 marks (nearly
$9,000,000) and the mammoth steamers of the Hamburg-American Line, the
"Imperator," the "Vaterland," were still more expensive to build.

The ordinary commercial steamer often has in her inner construction
only athwartship bulkheads through the double bottom that run from one
side to another and form large partitions; and in proportion to her
height a steamer is again subdivided horizontally into several decks.
But these are not usually water-tight, and the cross bulkheads already
mentioned form the only water-tight divisions in the hold. In the big
cargo spaces, these divisions practically do not exist, and the ship,
throughout almost its whole interior, is open from keel to deck. This
arrangement, of course, facilitates the rapid loading and unloading of
the cargo; therefore, in this type of ship the engine rooms and
boilers, surrounded and protected by coal bunkers, are the only really
water-tight portions of the ship. Whoever has gazed down into the
capacious hold of such a steamer will readily understand that if the
water should pour in