Description

As ships go, the Turret Bell was an
ugly duckling. Her unattractiveness
did not lay so much in her dimensions
(2211 gross tons, with a length of
237 feet, and a beam of 40 feet), as in
her appearance. She was, in fact, a
freak of naval architecture, something
called a whaleback steamer.
The whaleback design had evolved
on the Great Lakes in the 1890s. As the
English marine magazine, Shipping
Wonders of the World observes, the
whaleback "was an extremely ugly
ship, and looked as if she really were a
whale as she lifted her almost cylindrical
hull, with its blunt snout bow, out of
the water. It was claimed that this hull
would save forty per cent in fuel costs
and sixty per cent in fuel, but at sea it
was a failure and was scarcely more
successful on the Great Lakes." The
Turret Bell had shared in that failure.
Launched from Newcastle-on-Tyne in
1894, she had been relegated by 1906 to
coastal trading.