Democratic Sentinel, Volume 15, Number 45, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 November 1891 — An Extraordinary Boat. [ARTICLE]

An Extraordinary Boat.

One of the most extraordinary boats on the great lakes is not a whaleback, but is a passenger car transfer operated in the Straits of Mackinac by the Duluth, South Shore & Atlantic Railroad. It has an enormous capacity for carrying cars, but its peculiarities are its strength, its shape and the number of its steam engines. It carries twenty-four stenin eti gines for the performance of the variouZ requirements of the business it is in. The hull or the boat is as solid as the walls of an old-time blockhouse. The bow rises up and away from the water so as to hang or slant over it as if it were a hammer, and that is what it was built to bo. This is because the boat is an icebreaker, intended to keep a channel open in the straits all winter, or to make one whenever she is pushed into the massive ice that forms in that cold region. The big boat advances toward the ice, and shoving her nose upon its edge, lifts herself upon it. Then a screw propeller under the overhanging bow performs the work of sucking the water from under the ice to enable the boat’s weight to crush it down the more easily. Thus the destructive monster makes her way steadily through the worst ice of the semi-pedar winters of that region, climbing up on the ice, crushing it down, scattering it on either side, and making no more of it than if it were so much slush. —[Boston Transcript.