No More Holystone

Six days shalt thou labor and do all thou art able, And on the seventh--holystone the decks and scrape the cable. --Richard Henry Dana Celebrated in song and story of the English-speaking navies and merchant marine is the holystone, a porous slab of sandstone used as an abrasive for keeping wooden decks snow-white.* In the U. S. Navy the holystone has been used since the Government first built ships. Formerly applied by seamen on hands and knees, holystoning is now performed with long-handled implements, mopwise. Nevertheless, there were always corners where the holystone had to be applied by hand. Petty officers sentenced flip seamen to this tedious work as a disciplinary measure. But last week the holystone passed out of U. S. Naval tradition. The new 10,000-ton treaty cruisers are being built as lightly as possible to carry the heaviest possible armament. Even the aluminum beams are whittled away wherever safety permits. The decks, made of expensive teakwood, are only 2 in. thick (compared to the 4-2-in. pine decks of U. S. Liners). Announced Secretary of the Navy Adams: "The use of holystones wears down the decks so rapidly that their repair or re-placement has become an item of expense [cost of replacing a cruiser deck: $50,000] which cannot be met under limited appropriations. The wooden decks of the new 10,000-ton cruisers . . . may be made unserviceable very rapidly by the use of holystones."

* Derivation unknown. One school of thought surmises that the name came from the fact that decks were cleansed before Sunday services; others hold that the holystone was so called because of its perforations. Sailors call slabs of holystone "bibles."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.