ad arrow of the King was marked on all white pines,
twenty-four inches in diameter, three feet from the ground. Big ships
and little ships swarmed into existence, and every South Shore town made
shipbuilding history. The ketch, a two-masted vessel carrying from
fifteen to twenty tons, carried on most of the coasting traffic, and
occasionally ventured on a foreign voyage. When we recall that the best
and cheapest ships of the latter half of the seventeenth century were
built here in the new country, we realize that shipyards, ports, docks,
proper laws and regulations, and the invigorating progress which marks
any thriving industry flourished bravely up and down the whole New
England coast.

It is rather inspiring to stand here on the bridge which spans the Fore
River, and picture that first crude dugout being paddled along by the
steady stroke of the red man, and then to look at the river to-day.
Every traveler through Quincy is familiar with the aerial network of
steel scaffolding criss-crossing the sky, with the roofs of shops and
offices and glimpses of vessels visible along the water-front. But few
travelers realize that these are merely the superficial features of a
shipyard which under the urge of the Great War delivered to the Navy, in
1918, eighteen completed destroyers, which was as many as all the other
yards in the country put together delivered during this time. A shipyard
which cut the time of building destroyers from anywhere between eighteen
and thirty-two months to an average of six months and a half; a shipyard
which made the world's record of one hundred and seventy-four days from
the laying of the keel to the delivering of a destroyer.

It is difficult to grasp the meaning of these figures. Difficult, even
after one has obtained entrance into this city within a city, and seen
with his own eyes twenty thousand men toiling like Trojans. Seen a
riveting crew which can drive more than twenty-eight hundred rivets in
nine hours; battleships that weigh thirty thousand tons; a plate yard
piled with steel plates and steel bars worth two million dollars; cranes
that can lift from five tons up to others of one hundred tons capacity;
single buildings a thousand feet long and eighty feet high.

Perhaps the enormousness of the plant is best comprehended, not when we
mechanically repeat that it covers eighty acres and comprises eighty
buildings, and that four full-sized steam locomotives run up and down
its yard, b