W

́ILLIAM H. JOHNSON recently refused one hundred thousand dollars for the steel steamship Carolyn of the Atlantic trade. It was but a year or two ago that he bought her for two hundred dollars. Loaded with a general cargo, mostly paper and potatoes, she had gone ashore, worth four hundred thousand dollars, in a fog, off the Maine coast, and the underwriters could not pry her loose. The The owners abandoned her; the underwriters stripped her of what valuables the vigilant lobster-catchers hadn't taken first. Meanwhile the Carolyn had settled on bottom and practically broken in two, for her plates were cracked from garboard strake to waterways.

Here was when Johnson, a Boston plumber, stepped in. When the wreck was sold at auction he bought it for two hundred dollars. Then he organized a salvage company of his own and set about floating her. With the aid of divers, temporary patches, and pontoons, he accomplished it, after she had been a year on the rocks. Half a dozen tugs towed her to East Boston and she was dry-docked.

Johnson decided that a plumber who couldn't rebuild a twenty-four hundredton steamship wasn't much of a plumber. At any rate, he himself supervised the job of putting thirty-eight new frames and over a hundred new plates in her hull, to say nothing of many bent and dented plates made shipshape. Lloyd's surveyor admitted that Cramp's couldn't have done a better job and gave her his blessing. Now she has stepped back into the coast trade to find the highest freight rates for years, and is reaping the benefit. Johnson can sell the Carolyn today for one hundred thousand dollars if he but says the word.

Salvage, according to the lexicographers, is the act of saving a ship or her cargo at sea. The profession of the

salvor, both organized and incidental, long ago won recognition, and is still getting increased consideration. His Britannic Majesty, King George, who rules the world's greatest merchant fleet, officially sanctions the calling. Officers in the Royal Navy are special agents of the salvage associations maintained by the big English ports. In this country, Congress at its last session passed a bill more clearly defining the rights of salvors of life and property, so the salvor's interests are well looked after. During the past year, awards in the British Admiralty Court totaled about half a million dollars.

The banner salvage feat of recent years was the recovery of bullion and specie to the value of $3,750,000 from the sunken Peninsular and Oriental Line steamship Oceana. The Oceana's manifest read like the bill of lading of a Spanish galleon. She had on board forty-six bags of coin and bar gold valued at $1,017,055, and silver worth $2,841,610. Captain Young of the Liverpool Salvage Association probably will never do a better job, for he recovered all the treasure but two bars of silver valued at $1,375. It was a piece of work that dealt in big figures all around. The Salvage Association got sixty thousand dollars, the five divers who did the actual work a bonus of one thousand dollars apiece, and various tugs and steamers that helped to save passengers and tow the stricken ship into shoal water reaped rewards to the extent of nearly sixty thousand dollars.

The Britisher, Ikalis, from San Francisco for Yokohama with a million-dollar general cargo, ran ashore in a desperate position on the Japanese coast last May. Along the whole length of her bottom she was stabbed through by needle-like pinnacles of rock, and she filled with water to the decks. A Japanese wrecking company took the contract to get her off on the basis of "no cure, no pay."

just one hundred and nine thousand dollars. But they may have considered themselves lucky, for when the Canadian Pacific liner Empress of China stranded in the Pacific the year before, the salvors got one hundred and eighty thousand dollars for their work.

There was a signal victory for the wreckers who lately floated the German steamer Sesostris of the Kosmos Line from the beach near Ocós, on the Pacific coast of Guatemala. She went ashore in 1907 while on a passage from Hamburg to San Francisco. Driven high on the sand, her hull was hardly injured. Her cargo was removed, but the shifting sand half buried her. Various wrecking

Walter McCrea, a deep-sea diver of Seward, Alaska, feels amply justified in having chosen one of the most dangerous of callings. He recently located at Chignik, Alaska, the long-lost wreck of the American full-rigged ship Jabez Howes, and salvaged her entire cargo of block tin, worth thirty-seven thousand dollars. The Howes was bound from the Columbia River to Chignik with a cargo consigned to the salmon canneries. She arrived off the port in April, 1911, in a sinking condition and was run ashore in a last desperate attempt to save her. Later, she slid off the rocks and went down in deep water. In recovering the prize, McCrea earned all he got, for he

had to work at the maximum depth and pressure that man can endure.

The big French barque Jean Bart, sailing from Antwerp with a cargo for Wallaroo, Australia, went ashore last March, only a few miles from the end of her voyage. She promptly filled and settled to bottom. Her discouraged owners, knowing the fickleness of weather in the desolate Antipodes, decided that she could not be saved and gave her up to the underwriters. Then a Wallaroo stevedore did a little investigating on his own account, and, when the vessel was sold at auction, he bought her for eight hundred and forty dollars. He found that the hole in her was much smaller

She was bound from Vancouver to Melbourne when she went ashore three years ago near Nukualofa, in the South Seas. In that remote region there was nothing for her owners but to abandon her, as has happened to many good ships before.

But in the years since her wreck, some freak of old Ocean has landed the Knight square on top of the reef, and high out of water. The contact with the lacerating coral tore her whole bottom. out, but her steel sides kept the cargo in. A million feet of lumber and much of her machinery have been removed by amateur wreckers and sold to Australian dealers. As long as there is anything left of the Knight of St. George they will

continue to dismantle her, and there is no one to say them nay.

It is usage quite in keeping with the other inviolable laws of the sea that lets the salvor take advantage of a man when he is down, and encourages emulation of the shark, which attacks the injured of its own kind. To illustrate in a small way, the writer

DOWN IN SHALLOW WATER The divers went down and put chains under the sunken vessel and she was hauled to the surface and bailed out. The Alice E. Clark.

than suspected; recruited a gang of wreckers, and in due time floated the Jean Bart, and towed her into port. The reward for his enterprise came when he sold the big steel ship and her cargo for sixty thousand dollars.

In the hulk of the British tramp steamer Knight of St. George is a harvest for anyone who cares to reap it.

HIGH AND DRY She was waterlogged: a hopeless and dangerous derelict of the high Seas. They ran her ashore and the tide left her up on the beach. The

SIXTY-MILE SPEEDER

HIS OWN MAKE

ADMIRAL LI CHUNG of the Chinese navy is a good mechanic. He is always working away at something during his leisure and, recently, he turned out an automobile which would do credit to the best of European or American designers. It has but three wheels, yet it will carry four people with its four horsepower. The streets of China are indescribably bad and there was a considerable problem to

solve in finding the sort of machine that would stand up well and still be fairly comfortable. The center of gravity is at the rear axle, very

close to the

ground. All the machinery is also

BUILT BY AN ADMIRAL

In his spare moments Li Chung of the Chinese navy built this machine for his own use.

at the rear axle, and the result is a very comfortable car which can be easily handled even in crowded streets.

Such a machine could not be used under ordinary conditions in American cities, because the power would not be sufficient to carry it under our traffic conditions.