The Deckhouse

The deckhouse contained the galley, the carpenter's shop, and quarters for apprentices and the "idlers," including the bosun, sailmaker, carpenter, and cook, who were among the hardest workers of the crew, beginning at six in the morning and, with half an hour off for breakfast and dinner, working until six at night. The rest of the crew called them "idlers" because they did not stand watch and instead had all night in. The deckhouse began to appear on merchant ships about fifty years before the Balclutha was built, replacing the caboose, a tiny portable structure just large enough for the cook and his stove that was lashed wherever convenient on deck and was sometimes lost overboard in heavy weather with its contents, including the cook. A steel deckhouse like this marked Balclutha as an up-to-date windjammer for 1886, though until then such houses were usually built of paneled teak, and even steel was not impregnable, as shown in 1905 when the full-rigged ship Beacon Rock took a sea aboard off the Horn that smashed in the port side of her steel deckhouse, swept the galley clean of everything, and destroyed three of the ship's four boats.

San Francisco, California · United States