The iron and composite clippers introduced watertight plate bulkheads at the bow and stern, the foremost one, the collision bulkhead, serving as one side of a chain locker. Ships with very fine fore ends would endeavour to have the weighty chain lockers as far from the bow as convenient.

  The arrangement of the forecastle deck was largely dependent on the position of the windlass, and the width of the windlass drums was in turn dependent on the distance apart of the hawseholes, which varied according to the bow being full or fine lined. Contemporary builders' drawings can sometimes be at fault here, as being drawn before the ship was built any necessary modifications were made on the ship during the building and not necessarily altered on the drawings. Reproduction of plans by blueprinting was unknown until the last quarter of the 19th century. An original would be made on white paper and any copies had to be hand-traced on transparent linen. Naval dockyards could afford this sort of work but it is not likely that smaller shipyards could. One shipyard in which my father worked in the 1890s producing steel-hulled fourmasters and smaller steam vessels, had one man who constituted designer, estimator, and draughtsman, and so much for inherited skill, he was Swiss. Within the outline of the basic general arrangement that he produced, each foreman or tradesman in the yard used his own initiative and experience to produce a workable ship, but it was seldom that the plan was brought up to date with the final solutions. The larger yards producing ocean-going steamships would have more drawing office personnel of course, although even here one comes across builders' drawings which do not tally entirely with contemporary photographs, even allowing for later alterations.

  To revert to the arrangement of the windlass and the forecastle, the conditions to be satisfied were that there should be sufficient space to walk around the capstan, and to stand each side of the hand levers for the windlass, which resulted in some odd shapes for the anchor deck. The arrangement on the Vision, for instance, gave a semicircular convex end to the deck, the capstan being on the forecastle deck and the windlass operating from the upper deck, the centre pawl bitt being short in consequence (22). Other ships had the reverse, whereby a concave shaped end to the forecastle deck and a longer centre pawl bitt.enabled both windlass and capstan to be operated from the forecastle deck.

  Some of these short anchor decks were only three or four feet high being little more than a platform with barely enough space to crawl under , and with this arrangement the body of the windlass barrel was exposed  so that it could be attended to, either completely clear of the deck or with the three bitts built as support into the end of the deck.