SHIPS
OF THE SEVEN
SEAS

The Santa Maria, the Niña and
the Pinta

The most famous ships that ever sailed the seas

The Niña, shown in the foreground, was the smallest of the three, but in her Columbus returned to Spain after the Santa Maria was wrecked, and the captain of the Pinta seemed tempted to prove unfaithful.

SHIPS
OF THE SEVEN SEAS
BY
HAWTHORNE DANIEL
AUTHOR OF
“IN THE FAVOUR OF THE KING”
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT

DRAWINGS BY
FRANCIS J. RIGNEY

GARDEN CITY

NEW YORK

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1925

COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
AT
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
First Edition

TO
NELLE R. DANIEL
MY WIFE
WITHOUT WHOSE ENCOURAGEMENT AND
ASSISTANCE THIS BOOK WOULD PROBABLY
HAVE BEEN BEGUN, BUT MOST CERTAINLY
WOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN COMPLETED

FOREWORD

In gathering material for a book of this kind one’s sources of information are likely to be so numerous and so diverse as to defy classification. Some of the information I have gotten first hand on ships in which I have served or voyaged. Much more of it has been picked up from countless scattered sources during twenty years or more in which ships have been my hobby. More still, however, has been consciously taken from books on ships and shipping that I have gathered together or referred to during the time I spent actually in preparing the manuscript.

Those books to which I have most often referred, and to the authors and publishers of which I am particularly indebted, are as follows:

“Ancient and Modern Ships,” by Sir G. C. V. Holmes

“The Clipper Ship Era,” by Arthur H. Clark

“Dictionary of Sea Terms,” by A. Ansted

“Elements of Navigation,” by W. J. Henderson, A. M.

“The Frigate Constitution,” by Ira N. Hollis

“Lightships and Lighthouses,” by F. A. Talbot

“The Lookout Man,” by David W. Bone

“Mercantile Marine,” by E. Keble Chatterton

“Modern Seamanship,” by Austin M. Knight

“Sailing Ships and Their Story,” by E. Keble Chatterton

In addition to these I have received much assistance from the New York Public Library, the American Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the U. S. Congressional Library, the Marine Museum at the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, and a number of friends, who, knowing of my interest in ships, have brought me some of the most interesting of the facts that I have used.

H. D.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

INTRODUCTION

I remember well being thrilled as a boy by the tales of various members of my family who had been engaged in the old “China Trade” and in the operation of clipper ships and in whaling. These stories related to a bygone age—a day when the American flag was seen in every part of the globe.

Even in my own boyhood America had no merchant marine except for the coasting trade and the freighters upon the Great Lakes. American seamen had ceased to exist and the calling of an officer in the Merchant Marine was no longer one that offered an attractive career to the American boy. It is unnecessary here to go into the reasons for the decline and fall of our nation upon the sea. The Civil War, the introduction of steam propulsion, the development of the West, and in addition a great number of economic changes, were some of the causes of the disappearance of the American flag from the Seven Seas.

It was not until the outbreak of the World War that American business men as a whole began to think seriously of the possibility of reviving American shipping; it was not until 1916 that the Congress took definite action to aid with constructive legislation; it was not until our own country entered into the war that large results appeared. In the past few years there has been an extraordinary revival of interest in everything that pertains to the sea—the novels of Melville written three quarters of a century ago have been revived in dozens of editions and the sea stories of Conrad are among the best sellers. In the same way, old books, old engravings, and crude old lithographs and woodcuts relating to almost every form of ships and shipping have been sought out and prized by an ever-growing circle of enthusiasts. This is not a passing fancy; there is something more solid behind it. I hope I am right in believing that the people of the United States are again turning their faces to the sea. Over the sea our ancestors or we ourselves have all come. We have filled the vacant spaces from the original colonies on the Atlantic Coast to the new and splendid civilization of the Pacific. No longer can we say “America is sufficient for us; our thought and lives must stay at home.” We are part of the world now, very dependent on the rest of the peoples of the world for our own progress, and our own success, and even for our own safety. This is shown by the fact that every school and every college throughout the land is, in its teaching, paying more and more attention to the affairs of mankind beyond our own borders. The study of languages, the study of geography, the study of economics, of international laws—all receive increased attention.

Mr. Hawthorne Daniel has rendered a conspicuous service in writing a book which can be understood and appreciated by the average citizen. Most of us are just “average citizens” and whether we live a thousand miles from the nearest ocean or not, whether we have ever smelled salt water or not, it will be a good thing for us to have some knowledge of the great epic of ships and the men who have made them and sailed them.

Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Hyde Park, N. Y.,
June 4, 1924.

SHIPS
OF THE SEVEN
SEAS

SHIPS
OF THE SEVEN SEAS

CHAPTER I
THE DEVELOPMENT OF SHIPS

Imagine the world without ships. Mighty empires that now exist and have existed in the past would never have developed. Every continent—every island—would be a world alone. Europe, Asia, and Africa could have known each other, it is true, in time. North and South America might ultimately have become acquainted by means of the narrow isthmus that joins them. But without ships, Australia and all the islands of all the seas would still remain unknown to others, each supporting peoples whose limited opportunities for development would have prevented advanced civilization. Without ships the world at large would still be a backward, savage place, brightened here and there with tiny civilizations, perhaps, but limited in knowledge, limited in development and in opportunity. Without ships white men could never have found America. Without ships the British Empire could never have existed. Holland, Spain, Rome, Carthage, Greece, Phœnicia—none of them could ever have filled their places in world history without ships. Without ships the Bosphorus would still be impassable and the threat of Xerxes to Western civilization would never have been known. Greater still—far greater—without ships the Christian religion would have been limited to Palestine or would have worked its way slowly across the deserts and mountains to the South and East, to impress with its teachings the Arabs, the Assyrians, the Hindoos, and the Chinese.

Ships have made the modern world—ships have given the white man world supremacy, and ships, again, have made the English-speaking peoples the colonizers and the merchants whose manufactures are known in every land, whose flags are respected all around the globe, and whose citizens are now the most fortunate of all the people of the earth.

All of this we owe to ships.

Far back before the beginnings of history lived the first sailor. Who he was we do not know. Where he first found himself water-borne we cannot even guess. Probably in a thousand different places at a thousand different times a thousand different savage men found that by sitting astride floating logs they could ride on the surface of the water.

In time they learned to bind together logs or reeds and to make crude rafts on which they could carry themselves and some of their belongings. They learned to propel these rafts by thrusting poles to the bottoms of the lakes or rivers on which they floated. They learned, in time, how to make and how to use paddles, and as prehistoric ages gave way to later ages groping savages learned to construct rafts more easily propelled, on which platforms were built, to keep their belongings up above the wash of the waves that foamed about the logs.

And ultimately some long-forgotten genius hollowed out a log with fire, perhaps, and crude stone tools, and made himself a heavy, unwieldy canoe, which, heavy as it was and awkward, could still be handled much more readily than could the rafts that had served his forbears for perhaps a hundred centuries.

And with this early step forward in the art of ship-building came a little of the light that heralded the approaching dawn of civilization.

AN EGYPTIAN BOAT OF 6000 B. C.

This drawing was made from what is probably the most ancient known record of a ship. The high bow and stern seem somewhat overdone, and it is likely that they were less elevated than this picture shows them. The carving from which this was taken, however, exaggerates them still more.

The very first pages of recorded history tell us of ships, and we know that many prehistoric men were adept at building such boats as dugout canoes. In Switzerland many signs have been found of a people who dwelt there in the Stone Age, and among the simple belongings of this people of great antiquity have been found canoes hollowed from single logs. In the bogs of Ireland, and in England and Scotland similar dugouts have been occasionally found, which had been buried in the course of time far below the surface of the ground.

By the time the Stone Age came the dugout was perfected, and still later other types of boats appeared. Perhaps the hollowed log suggested the use of the curved bark of the tree as a canoe, and ultimately a framework of wood was developed to hold the weight of the occupant while a covering of bark kept out the water. The framework was necessary for two reasons—first, to give the structure the necessary strength to keep its shape; and second, to bear the weight of the builder and his belongings. Other coverings, such as skins and woven fabrics covered with pitch, came into use in parts of the world where suitable bark was scarce.

The next step in the building of boats was a method of fastening pieces of wood together in suitable form. This probably came from a desire for boats of larger size, which required greater strength, for man early became a trader and wished to transport goods. Bark could not support a heavy hull, and dugouts are necessarily limited in size, being constructed of the trunks of single trees, although dugouts fifty or sixty feet in length, or even longer, are not unknown. Probably the earliest boats of this new type were tied together by thongs or cords. Even to-day the natives of Madras, in India, build boats by this method, and similar types are to be found on the Strait of Magellan, on Lake Victoria Nyanza in Central Africa, and in the East Indies. Many of these have been very highly developed until now they are built of heavy hand-hewn boards fitted together with ridges on their inner sides, through which holes are bored for the thongs that lash them together. The boards are fastened together first, and later a frame is attached to the interior. This construction makes a very “elastic” boat which bends and twists in a seaway, but which, because of this “elasticity,” is able to navigate waters that would prove fatal to the more rigid types of crudely constructed boats. The Hindoos often use them in the heavy surf that drives in upon the beaches from the Bay of Bengal.

A LARGE EGYPTIAN SHIP OF THE 18TH DYNASTY

The overhanging bow and stern were common on most early Egyptian ships, and the heavy cable, stretched from one end of the hull to the other and supported on two crutches, was used to strengthen these overhanging ends.

The introduction of this construction made boats of considerable size possible, and for the first time boats larger than anything that could possibly be called a canoe were successfully floated.

From this form a further step was ultimately made in which the various parts were fastened together by the use of wooden pegs, and this was the most advanced type long centuries after the dawn of history. The Nile was navigated by such boats at the height of Egypt’s civilization, and Homer describes this type of boat as the one in which Ulysses wandered on his long and wearisome journey home.

While the art of boat-building had been travelling this long, slow way, the art of propulsion had not been idle. Long since, the simple pole of the early savage had lost its usefulness, for men soon learned to navigate waters too deep for poles. The paddle followed, and was perfected to a very high point, as its use in all parts of the world still testifies.

But further means were still to come, and by the time Ulysses started on his journey from the fallen city of Troy, both the sail and the oar, which for three thousand years were to be supreme as propelling forces, had come into use.

In Ulysses’s boat, therefore, we see for the first time a combination of structural features and propelling agents that compare, remotely though it may be, with ships as they are to-day. A built-up structure with a framework, propelled by sails—it was an early counterpart of the ships of the present time.

Naturally enough this development did not take place simultaneously in all parts of the world. The most advanced civilizations such as those of Phœnicia, Greece, and China developed the most advanced ship-building methods, just as they developed the most advanced arts and sciences and thought and religion.

For instance, when Columbus discovered America a vital factor in the development of ships was entirely unknown to the natives that he found. No Indian tribe with which he or later explorers came in contact had learned the use of sails to propel the canoes they almost universally used. Civilizations of surprising worth, with art and architecture in high stages of advancement, had existed and had practically disappeared in Yucatan and Central America, and other civilizations of genuine attainment were later found, by Cortes and Pizarro, in Mexico and Peru, yet none of them knew the uses of the sail.

On the other hand, the Egyptians and the Phœnicians used the sail, and twenty-five centuries before the discovery of America the Phœnicians are thought to have sailed their ships around the continent of Africa from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean.

But while the art of ship-building progressed more rapidly after the development of the use of wooden pegs for fastenings, and the use of sails and oars made possible more extended sea journeys, still the development was slow, and until the discovery of the power of steam in the latter part of the 18th Century no revolutionary changes in ships took place.

Just when the method originated of first constructing the frame of the ship and of covering this frame with planks, we do not know, but the transition from the method in use at the time of Homer was simple and the change was probably gradual.

A PERUVIAN BALSA

These “boats” are really rafts made of reeds.

It seems possible that the built-up boat may have had its origin in the attempt of some savage to raise the sides of his dugout canoe by the addition of boards in order to keep the water from harming his goods.

But all of the history of boats up to the time of written history is necessarily mostly surmise.

It is interesting to note, however, that every one of these basic types is still to be found in use. In Australia, for instance, are to be found savages whose boats are nothing but floating logs, sharpened at the ends, astride of which the owner sits. Rafts, of course, are common everywhere. Dugout canoes are to be found in many lands, among which are the islands of the Pacific and the western coast of Canada and Alaska. The birch-bark canoe is still common among the Indians of America—particularly of Canada; the skin-covered boat is still used commonly by the Eskimos, two types, the kayak, or decked canoe, and the umiak, or open boat being the most common. I have seen the latter type used also by the Indians who live on Great Bear Lake in northern Canada.

Boats fastened together with thongs or lashings are numerous in parts of India and elsewhere, the Madras surfboats being, perhaps, the best examples.

Boats built up of planks fastened together by pegs are to be found in many parts of the world. I learned to sail in a boat of this type, but very much modernized, on Chesapeake Bay. The other methods, very much perfected, are still in everyday use among boat- and ship-builders.

Thus it will be seen that some knowledge of all these various types may still serve some useful purpose, for one may find in everyday use all the fundamental types of construction that have ever existed.

AN AFRICAN DUGOUT

In this boat the builders have hollowed out the log but have not otherwise changed it. It is a present-day counterpart of boats known and used long before the dawn of history.

One type of boat I have not mentioned, yet it is of time-honoured ancestry and is still in daily use among thousands of people. This is the outrigger canoe. In different parts of the world it has different names. In the Philippines, for instance, it is called, in two of its forms, vinta and prau. These boats have one thing in common, and that is an outrigger. An outrigger is a pole made of bamboo or some other light wood, floating in the water at a distance of a few feet from the boat itself. It is held rigid and parallel to the hull by two or more cross bars. Sometimes there is an outrigger on each side but often there is only one. On the smaller boats the outrigger consists of a single pole. On larger boats, or those which are inclined to be particularly topheavy because of the load they are intended to carry, the size of the sail, or for some other cause, several poles may make up each outrigger. The use of this addition is to secure stability, for the boats to which they are attached are usually extremely narrow and alone could not remain upright in the water, or at best could not carry sail in a seaway, where the combination of wind and wave would quickly capsize them. These outrigger canoes—and some of them are capable of carrying forty or fifty passengers—are extremely seaworthy, and the native sailors do not hesitate to take them for hundreds of miles across seas often given to heavy storms. In the development of ships, however, they play no part, for their only unique characteristic has never been incorporated into ships of higher design.

It is interesting that while all the cruder types of boats are still to be found in daily use in various parts of the world, the more highly developed designs, up to those of the 17th Century, have disappeared. Many of them, it is true, have influenced later designs, but most of the marks they left can be traced only with great difficulty.

The earliest boats of which we have definite records are those that were in use in Egypt about 3000 B. C. Some of these were of considerable size, for carvings on tombs and temples show them carrying cargoes of cattle and other goods, and show, too, on one side, as many as twenty-one or twenty-two, and in one case twenty-six, oars, besides several used for steering. Many of these boats were fitted with a strange sort of double mast, made, apparently, of two poles fastened together at the top and spread apart at the bottom. These masts could be lowered and laid on high supports when they were not needed to carry sail.

The boats themselves seem to have been straight-sided affairs with both ends highly raised, ending, sometimes, in a point and sometimes being carried up into highly decorated designs that at the bow occasionally curved backward and then forward like a swan’s neck. The end of this was often a carved head of some beast or bird or Egyptian god. On the boats intended for use as war galleys the bow was often armed with a heavy metal ram.

AN ESKIMO UMIAK

This boat is structurally similar to the kayak except that it has no deck. It is a larger boat, and will carry heavy loads and perhaps as many as a dozen people. It is made by covering a frame with skins.

These ships—for they had by this time grown to such size that they are more than canoes or boats—often extended far out over the water both forward and aft, and any concentration of weight on these overhanging extremities had a tendency to strain the hull amidships. This was offset, as it sometimes is to-day on shallow draft river boats, by running cables from bow to stern over crutches set amidships.

While the Egyptians were the first to picture their ships, it is not certain that they were the first to have ships of real size and sea-going ability, for the very temples and tombs on the walls of which are shown the ships that I have described have also the records of naval victories over raiders from other lands who must have made the voyage to the Egyptian coast in order to plunder the wealth of that old centre of civilization.

The Egyptians, however, were never a sea-going people in the sense that the Phœnicians were. But strange as it may be, the Phœnicians, despite the fact that they probably invented the alphabet, did not make the first record, or, as a matter of fact, any very important records, of their great development in the ship-building art. The earliest picture of which we know of Phœnician ships is on the wall of an Assyrian palace and dates back only to about 700 B. C. which was after the Assyrians had conquered the Phœnicians and had for the first time (for the Assyrians were an inland people) come in contact with sea-going ships.

By this time the Phœnicians had had many years of experience on the sea, and the Assyrian representation shows a ship of more advanced design than the Egyptians had had.

There are few records, however, from which we can gain much knowledge of Phœnician ships, although we know they ventured out of the Mediterranean and were familiar with the coasts of Spain, Portugal, France, and even England, where they went to secure tin. And as I mentioned earlier, they may even have circumnavigated Africa, and it seems likely that they invented the bireme and the trireme, thus solving the question of more power for propulsion.

A bireme is a boat propelled by oars which has the rowers so arranged that the oars overlap and form two banks or rows, one above the other. A trireme is similar except that there are three banks. With this arrangement a boat may have twice or three times as many rowers (in these old boats there was never more than one man to an oar) without lengthening the hull.

To the Greeks we owe the first detailed accounts of the art of ship-building and of ship construction. In early Greek history the vessels were small and were usually without decks, although some of them had decks that extended for part of their length. They carried crews that ranged up to a hundred or more, and, in the democratic fashion of the early Greeks, they all took part in the rowing of the ship, with the possible exception of the commander. At this early period great seaworthiness had not been developed, and there are many accounts of the loss of ships in storms and of the difficulty of navigating past headlands and along rocky coasts. Later, Greek ships cruised the Mediterranean almost at will, but ship design and construction had first to develop and the development took centuries.

Even in those days there was a marked difference between the ships intended for commerce and those intended for war. The war vessels—and the pirate vessels, which of course were ships of war—were narrow and swift, while the ships of commerce were broad and slow: broad because of the merchant’s desire to carry large cargoes, and slow because the great beam and the heavy burdens prevented speed.

AN ESKIMO KAYAK

These small canoes are made of a light frame covered with skins.

During the period at which Athens reached her prime the trireme, or three-banked ship, was the most popular. As a matter of fact, its popularity was so great that its name was often given to all ships of the same general type whether they were designed with two, three, four, five, or even more banks of oars.

These many-oared ships reached a very high state of perfection during the supremacy of Greece, and the most careful calculations were made in order to utilize every available inch by packing the rowers as closely together as was possible without preventing them from properly performing their tasks.

The rowers, as I have suggested, sat in tiers, those on each side usually being all in the same vertical plane, and the benches they used ran from the inner side of the hull to upright timbers which were erected between decks, slanting toward the stern. That is, in a ship with three banks of oars, three seats were attached to each of these slanting timbers and the footrests of the rower occupying the topmost seat were on either side of the man who occupied the second seat in the next group of three. The vertical distance between these seats was two feet. The horizontal distance was one foot. The distance between seats in the same bank was three feet.

I have gone into some detail in describing this arrangement, for rowers—and from the later days of Greece on they were generally slave rowers—were the motive power of ships for three thousand years or more, and for more than a thousand years the many-banked ship was supreme.

A BIRCH-BARK CANOE

In many parts of the world savage people have learned to build light frames over which they have stretched the best material available to them. The Indians of North America commonly utilize birch bark.

Imagine these toiling galley slaves, chained in hundreds to the crowded rowing benches, straining at the heavy oars. Tossed by the seas, they labour unceasingly, stroke on stroke, to the sound of a mallet falling in never-changing cadence on a block of wood. Hour on hour they strain, heartened occasionally by a few minutes’ rest. Their eyes are all but blinded by the sweat from their grimy brows. Their hands are calloused, their bodies misshapen from long toil on the rowers’ benches. Above them, on the wind-swept deck, they hear the clank of armed men, the slap of sandalled feet. A lookout calls to the officer in command—hurried steps—momentary silence—shouts and the sound of feet. A messenger appears in the stifling space below. The sharp clap of the mallet on the block increases its cadence. Faster and faster swing the oars. Furious and more furious is the pace. A whip in the hands of a brutal guard falls here and there on the naked backs of the helpless, straining forms. Their strength is waning, their breath is coming fast. A man collapses from the strain and pitches from his elevated seat, half suspended by the chain around his leg, his oar trailing and useless. From beyond their wooden walls they hear the muffled clank of the oars of the approaching enemy.

Cries from on deck, and suddenly a crash. Broken oars are driven here and there. Screams and oaths and orders and a great upheaval. Water enters in a score of places. More screams—more oaths—cries for help to a score of pagan gods—the water covers all. A great last sigh and one more ship is gone: it is just a tiny incident in the history of ships.

As I have said, the Greeks developed marine architecture to a very high point, and the bireme and trireme with which they began were the first of a long series of developments until ultimately ships of five, of eight, of even sixteen banks of oars are said to have been in use, and there is a story, which probably was a figment of someone’s imagination, of a vessel of forty banks! Such a ship may possibly have been suggested—may conceivably have been built—but it seems certain that she could never have been successful or practical.

Carthage, that great enemy of Rome, was a city of traders—a city that depended on the sea for its wealth and, to a large extent, even for its sustenance. Rome, on the other hand, grew to considerable size without venturing on the sea. When she did first turn her attention to the water, as her continued expansion forced her to do, she found that Carthage crossed her course whichever way she turned. The result was war.

But war between two cities separated by the width of the Mediterranean had to be fought largely on the sea, and Rome, inexperienced as a sea-going nation, was put to a severe test.

By chance, however, a Carthaginian quinquireme—that is, a five-banked ship—battered by storm and abandoned by her crew, drifted ashore on the sunny coast of Italy, and the Romans, quick to see the importance of the happening, hauled her high and dry, measured her, and learned from her battered hull the lessons they needed to know of ship construction.

AN OUTRIGGER CANOE

Sometimes these canoes have an outrigger on each side, and sometimes they carry sails.

They built on dry land sets of rowers’ seats, and while they taught rowers to pull their oars in unison in these unique training benches, they set to work with the energy that marked Rome out for great success. Sixty days after they had felled the trees, they had a fleet of quinquiremes afloat and manned.

Promptly they turned the prows of this new fleet toward the Carthaginians—and were defeated.

But with the indomitable will that characterized the Romans for two thousand years, they went to work again, and built a new fleet and a more powerful one. This time some inventive Roman devised a kind of hinged gangplank, which could be dropped upon the deck of an enemy ship, maintaining its hold by a heavy metal barb which would penetrate the decks. Across this bridge the Roman soldiers could rush, and by this means could turn a naval battle into what was very nearly the same to these land-trained soldiers as a battle on dry land, where hard blows with sword and spear determined the result.

With this new apparatus the Romans, under Duilius, in 260 B. C., gained a victory at Mylæ, off the coast of Sicily, and after three wars, covering, with intervals between, 118 years, drove the Carthaginians from the sea and razed their beautiful city to the ground.

It is not my purpose, in this chapter, to go into great detail in telling of the development of ships from this time on, for the designs were infinitely great, the variations numerous, and there were, until the 19th Century, but two vital improvements—the compass and a considerable improvement in the ability of sailing ships to make headway against the wind.

Rome, during most of the centuries of her supremacy, controlled every sea within her reach. The Mediterranean was entirely hers, and her galleys and her soldiers ventured into the Atlantic and visited parts of the world that seemed to stay-at-home Romans to be the very fringes of the earth. The ships they built grew in size: the corn-ships, which brought food to the capital from Egypt, are thought to have been as much as 200 feet long, 45 feet broad, and 43 feet deep. When St. Paul was shipwrecked he was in company with 276 others, and the ship they were on carried a cargo besides. These ships carried three masts, each having huge square sails, and on one mast was spread a square topsail as well.

Roman ships that voyaged to Britain probably gave to the wild men of the North—including those who later became the Vikings—the idea of the sail, and probably all the people of northern Europe learned the use of sails, directly or indirectly, from the Romans.

Ultimately Rome fell beneath the onslaughts of the Barbarians, and the Mediterranean seat of power (although still called the Roman Empire) moved to Byzantium, now called Constantinople.

Here Western civilization resisted for centuries the attacks of the Mohammedans, until the great city on the Bosphorus fell before the armies of Mohammed in 1453.

A PHŒNICIAN BIREME

Despite the fact that the Phœnicians did more with ships than any other ancient peoples before the Greeks and Romans, little is known of Phœnician ships. They developed the bireme, an oar- and sail-driven ship with two “banks” of oars, and circumnavigated Africa.

During all of the centuries that Constantinople had been holding out against the growing power of the Mohammedans, the west and north of Europe were being remade. For a time Western civilization seemed doomed, for the Moorish Empire in North Africa had pushed across the Strait of Gibraltar, had subjugated Spain, and had crossed the Pyrenees into France, where, fortunately, their great army was put to rout at the battle of Tours in 732. But although they were driven from France they maintained their hold upon Spain, and not until the Granada Moors were defeated by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492 was Spain again free of them. They controlled North Africa from Suez to Gibraltar and introduced many Eastern ideas. It is probable that the lateen sail, which originated in Egypt and is still in common use in the Mediterranean, owes at least some credit to the Moors for its introduction to western Europe.

In addition to the influx of Mohammedans, civilized Europe had to contend with the hordes of barbarians that descended from the wild country to the north of the Alps, for the most of Europe except its Mediterranean fringe was a dark and barbarous land. But the centuries that we call the Middle Ages saw a growth of culture, a growth of learning, a growth of nationalism that were to make the modern world. In all of this ships played a vital part.

The Vikings, with their open boats, propelled by oars and sometimes aided by great square sails, terrorized Britain and northern Europe for a time, even driving their boats up the Seine to the walls of the city of Paris, which was then built on a tiny island in the river. But at last the Saxons, under Alfred the Great, with the first ships of the long series of ships that were built to protect England, drove the wild sailor warriors away, and a new epoch had begun.

During this time Venice and Genoa had developed, and the ships that sailed from those two cities were for a time the proudest of the world.

But their development was so largely commercial that it was only with difficulty that they could maintain navies capable of protecting their vast fleets, which were attacked by pirates, by the ships of other cities, and by each other so constantly that sea-going was a hazardous occupation, and ships perforce sailed always in convoys, or at least in the company of other ships, for protection. Then in the north William the Conqueror crossed the English Channel, defeated the Saxons at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, and the foundations for the present British Empire were laid. If the Saxons had developed a navy with which they could have met and defeated the Norman conqueror on the sea, think of the enormous difference it would have made in the history of Britain.

A GREEK TRIREME

These warships were about 120 feet in length, and the sails and spars were taken down and sent ashore if battle was expected. The oars were operated by slaves.

During the Middle Ages following the conquest of Britain, an association of northern European cities, called the Hanseatic League, was formed in order to protect their trade, and for a time proved to be a very important factor in the maritime development of the north of Europe. Had Venice and Genoa formed such a coöperative association instead of frittering away their strength, bickering and fighting, another story would have been written in the Mediterranean.

During all this time ships had been changing gradually in design. Oars still drove the fastest ships of war in the Mediterranean, but sails had taken a more important place, and now whole voyages were made by means of sails alone.

The 15th Century came, and with it the fall of Constantinople; and with it, too, in Genoa, that nautical city of Italy, the birth of a child named Christopher Columbus. He grew to manhood and became a sailor, and sailed on voyages here and there, and was wrecked finally on the coast of Portugal. But here was no ordinary man. Thousands of other sailors had had his opportunities, but none of them took so seriously the idea that the world was round. The idea, of course, was not Columbus’s own. It had received some attention for centuries among a few great minds. But Columbus, not content with accepting the shape of the world as a theory, wanted to make the voyage that would prove it. Already, in the previous century, a great stride had been made in seamanship by the introduction of the compass. This appeared mysteriously in Mediterranean waters, from no definitely known direction, but it seems probable that it came, by a very indirect route, from China, where it had been known and used for many years. Probably this introduction of the compass to the Western world was made by the Mohammedans, for they traded as far east as the Persian Gulf—perhaps farther—and natives of India, with whom the Chinese came into occasional contact, often made the voyage from India to Muscat, so that it seems likely that the compass came to Europe by this route.

But to return to Columbus. He took his idea to the King of Portugal, and was turned away. From Portugal the penniless sailor turned to Spain, and many times was refused by the monarchs of that country, for they were busy at the time with the final expulsion of the Moors. After several years of unsuccessful petitioning at the Spanish Court, Columbus gave up and started on his weary way to France. But Queen Isabella sent a messenger after him, and he was recalled and told that he could make the attempt to discover the westward route to India with the aid and under the flag of Spain.

On August 3, 1492, he sailed from Palos in command of three little ships—three ships that are now more famous than any others that ever sailed the seas; and with these ships—the Santa Maria, the Niña, and the Pinta—he discovered a new world and opened new seas that now are crossed and recrossed constantly by such a fleet of ships as Columbus could never have imagined.

By the end of the 15th Century, as I have suggested, ships had gone through a series of developments that had made them more seaworthy and more reliable, but still, from the viewpoint of to-day, they were crude and inefficient craft in which the modern sailor would hesitate to venture on the smoothest of summer seas. The ships of war, so far as the Mediterranean was concerned, still favoured the oar, and still used sails as auxiliary power, although England and France, and the other newer nations of the north of Europe, were developing sturdy ships that depended almost solely upon sails, although they often carried great overgrown oars called sweeps, with which the ships could be moved slowly in the absence of the wind.

The galleys of the Mediterranean were no longer the many-banked ships of Greece and Rome, but were, instead, low, narrow vessels with huge oars from thirty to fifty feet long, to each of which several men were assigned, thus securing the man power that the many-banked ships had utilized with more numerous oars. In order to manage these ungainly oars a framework was built out from each side of the ship, and attached to this framework were the oarlocks. This arrangement has its present-day counterpart in racing shells which, being barely wide enough for the rowers, cannot balance its oars in locks attached directly to its sides. Therefore a framework of steel rods is built opposite each seat in order that the oarlock may be at such a distance from the rower that he may get the necessary leverage to make each stroke effective.

The Crusades, which began in the 12th Century, had acquainted western Europe with many luxuries of the East hitherto unknown to the rougher people of the West, and as a result, trade increased greatly, necessitating the building of many ships, and as is always the case, progress was made because new minds were put to work. In this case ships improved. Metal nails, expensive as they were, for they were made, of course, by hand, had come into use, and new designs took the place of old.

The ship that, at the time of Columbus, was the most popular was the caravel. To our eyes she was ungainly, crude, and unseaworthy, yet these clumsy vessels, with their high sterns and overhanging bows, made most of the early voyages of discovery—voyages that for romance, for adventure, for danger, and for importance, rank higher than any others that were ever made.

Two of Columbus’s three ships were caravels. The Niña, however, was but a tiny cockleshell, only partially decked, that proved, by chance, the most valuable of the three, for in her Columbus was forced by circumstances to return to Spain after the Santa Maria had been wrecked by a careless helmsman on a far-off island in the world that she had found, and the Pinta had wandered away, the Discoverer knew not where, in the hands of men tempted to be unfaithful to their great commander.

SEATING ARRANGEMENT OF ROWERS IN A GREEK TRIREME

While there were other arrangements that were sometimes used, this seems to have been much the most common. The slaves who operated the oars were chained in place, and in case of shipwreck or disaster were usually left to their fate.

So important was the work done by the Santa Maria and the other caravels of her day that were sailed by Vasco da Gama around the Cape of Good Hope, by Americus Vespucius to the South American mainland, by the Cabots to Nova Scotia and New England, and by other great discoverers on other great voyages, that they warrant closer attention than has been given to other passing types. With a fleet of caravels Magellan sailed from Spain, crossed the Atlantic, skirted the South American coast, discovered the land we now call Argentina, where he found a people he named the “Patagonians” because they had big feet. In subsequent accounts by a member of his crew these people were said to be giants, although they are merely men of good height and strength. From Patagonia, Magellan sailed south and entered a channel on each side of which lay mighty mountains rising precipitately from the water. The land to the south he named Tierra del Fuego—the Land of Fire—either because of the glow of now extinct volcanic fires that he saw, or of distant camp-fires of the natives which he sighted as he made the passage, and this land for many years was supposed to be a great continent that stretched from the Strait of Magellan, as the passage Magellan found was later called, to the south polar regions.

From the western end of the Strait, Magellan steered to the north and west, diagonally across the greatest expanse of water on the globe—an ocean discovered only a few years earlier by Balboa when he crossed the Isthmus of Panama, and named by him the Great South Sea, but renamed by Magellan, because of the gentle weather he encountered, the Pacific. In all the voyage across the Pacific he discovered but two islands, although he sailed through the section occupied by the numerous archipelagoes that we call the South Sea Islands.

AN EARLY 16TH-CENTURY SHIP

This ship, while similar in many respects to Columbus’s Santa Maria, has made some advances over that famous vessel. The foremast is fitted to carry a topsail in addition to the large foresail shown set in this picture. On ships somewhat later than this one a small spar was sometimes erected perpendicularly at the end of the bowsprit, and a sprit topsail was set above the spritsail which is shown below the bowsprit here.

After terrible suffering from scurvy, from lack of water, almost from starvation, the little fleet of four ships (one had deserted just after the Pacific was reached) finally reached the Philippines. Already Magellan had sailed under the Portuguese flag around the Cape of Good Hope to a point in the East Indies farther east than the Philippines, so he was, actually, the first man ever to circumnavigate the globe. In the Philippines, however, he was inveigled into an alliance with a perfidious chief named Cebu, who, after witnessing Magellan’s death at the hands of the natives of a neighbouring island (he was pierced in the back by a spear), captured and murdered two of Magellan’s chief officers, after which the dwindling band of adventurers burned one of their ships, for they were short-handed, and sailed to the south and west with the remaining three. Two more ships were lost ere the Atlantic was again reached, and at last the Vittoria, the only ship remaining of the original five, reached the Canaries, where thirteen men out of the forty-four who still remained were thrown into prison by the Portuguese governor, and only thirty-one of the original two hundred and eighty returned to Spain to tell their wondering countrymen the story of their travels. That voyage, saving only the first voyage made by Columbus, was the greatest in the history of men upon the sea.

These voyages, as I have said, were mostly made in caravels. None of the ships was large, and Columbus’s flagship, the Santa Maria, was below rather than above the average. Vasco da Gama’s ships were larger, as were many others. But no other ship in history is so widely known as that little vessel of Columbus’s, and a description of her, being a description of caravels in general, is of double interest.

From bow to stern she measured but ninety feet, and she displaced about one hundred tons. But more than that is needed to give one an adequate idea of her limitations. The bow was high and awkwardly overhung the water by twelve feet, not being carried gradually out as are the bows of sailing ships to-day, but jutting ponderously forward from an almost vertical stem. Amidships the deck was low, dropping down abruptly about one fourth of the way aft. This midship deck (it was called the waist) was unbroken for another fourth of the vessel’s length, and then another deck was built at about the level of the forward deck, behind which a high sterncastle reared itself aloft until it surpassed the altitude of the forward deck, but fortunately did not jut out over the water aft as the bow did forward.

These two raised sections at the opposite ends of the ship were originally built with the idea of defense in mind. Ships for many centuries had had raised platforms fore and aft, on which the men who defended them could congregate in order to rain their arrows upon the decks of enemy ships. So useful were these “castles” that often enemy boarders were able to penetrate to the waist only to be driven off by the rain of missiles on their heads. When gunpowder came into general use tiny cannon were mounted in swivels attached to the bulwarks of these “castles,” but old ideas were not easily got rid of, and for a long time ships continued to be built with raised bows and sterns.

So it was that the Santa Maria had her forecastle and her sterncastle. The former term is still in use on ships, and signifies the quarters of the crew, which still are often placed in the bows of ships. The sterncastle has no present-day counterpart, and the name, too, has long since disappeared from ships.

The cabin of the great Admiral was aft, in the topmost section of the sterncastle and was, from our point of view, not exactly palatial. It had a bed, which looked more like a chest except that it had highly raised head and foot boards of carved wood. There was a table, and there was little else. A door opened on to the high narrow deck, and windows (ports such as ships now use were not then thought of) opened in the narrow stern high above the water.

The crews’ quarters were almost non-existent. Generally they slept on deck, although there was room between decks for some of them. This space, however, was not ventilated (that, of course, had little effect on a 15th-Century Spaniard. Even the Spaniards of the lower classes to-day seem somewhat averse to ventilation) and was devoted to cargo and supplies. Below this space was the “bilge” which was filled with stone for ballast. The raised forward deck was in reality just a platform that incidentally formed a roof over the forward section of the main deck—the deck, that is, that formed the waist—and beneath this forecastle deck were protected spots where the crew could secure some shelter from the weather. They cooked, when they cooked at all, on a box of small stones that sat on the main deck just under the edge of the raised forecastle. This crude fireplace was decorated by a large square plate of zinc that stood upright, attached to one side of the box, to serve as a windbreak.

Below, swishing around among the stone that formed the ballast, was the ever-present bilge water that was always a serious problem in these ill-built hulls. It was a never-ending annoyance, even in fair weather, and had constantly to be pumped out or bailed out. And when these ungainly craft met with heavy weather their situation was serious, for the strains caused by the waves opened seams here and there, and often allowed so much water to enter that foundering resulted. Even when Spain, ninety years after Columbus, sent her vast Armada to threaten England, only to have it defeated by Drake and his companions, and scattered by the North Atlantic storms after it had rounded Scotland in its attempt to return to Spain, ship after ship, tossed by the boisterous seas, twisted and groaned and opened her seams, and sank in the cold black water or drove head on to the rocky coast of Ireland. The great storm they encountered sank twenty times as many ships as did the fleet that so ably defended England.

And in such ships as these the hardy men of bygone times searched out the unknown lands of earth, braved the storms of great uncharted seas, braved, too, the unknown dangers which, exaggerated by their imaginations, grew to such size as might have made the bravest quail. And when their ships were dashed to wreckage on some uncharted rock, or filled with water when their seams were spread, those who saved their lives and managed to return to port, shipped again and faced the same threatening dangers.

In the adventurous days that followed Columbus, ship design and ship construction developed rapidly. The desire to carry heavy guns led to placing them on the main deck where they fired over the low bulwarks or wales which since then have been called gunwales. Then the desire to carry more guns led to placing them between decks where ports were cut in the sides of the ship for them to fire through. The British and the French led in both design and construction, the British having built ships of 1,000 tons as early as the reign of Henry V in 1413. But so far as size was concerned, other nations followed suit, and when Medina Sedonia came driving up the English Channel with the 132 ships of the Spanish Armada stretched in its vast crescent, at least one ship was of 1,300 tons.

A MEDITERRANEAN GALLEY

This ship is of the type used long after the Middle Ages. Several men pulled each oar and all the oars were in one bank.

But the oaken fleet of England, while it had no ship quite to equal in size this giant Spaniard, was more than a match for the Don, and Drake, that master of seamanship, refused to drive alongside the clumsy Spaniards, but lay off, instead, and peppered them with gunfire, and following them up the English Channel, fell upon those that dropped behind.

The opening of the Americas and the East to trade and colonization resulted in an expansion of ship-building such as the world had never before known, an opportunity of which an oar-driven ship could never have taken advantage.

Portugal, for a time—owing to her many colonial possessions, which now have largely faded away—became a great sea power, which, however, shortly suffered eclipse. Spain, despite the terrible catastrophe that befell her great Armada, remained a power of real strength for a century longer. The Dutch, those hardy sailors from the low countries, for many a year sailed to and from their East Indian possessions, proudly conscious of the fact that they were supreme upon the seas. And the French, although their strength at sea was never clearly supreme, nevertheless built navies and sailed ships second to none, or at the least, to none but Britain.

But one by one these sovereigns of the seas gave up the place to another, and the 18th Century saw a new ruler of the waves, when Great Britain at last bested Napoleonic France at the Nile, at Aboukir, and at Trafalgar.

By this time ships had grown greatly in size, and by the opening of the 19th Century the great three-decked line-of-battle ships were more than 200 feet in length, were 55 feet broad, and displaced 3,000 tons or more. Such a ship could not be termed small even in the light of ships of a century later.

But the opening years of the 19th Century brought forward an invention which, laughed at and disdained by “wind-jammers” for half a century, proved, at last, despite their jeers, the force that swept from the sea all but a handful of the proud vessels that for nearly five thousand years had spread their sails to the winds of Heaven and had gone to the uttermost parts of the earth.

A hundred years after the Charlotte Dundas had churned the waters of the Forth and Clyde Canal and the Clermont had splashed with her paddle-wheels the waters of the Hudson, sailing ships had become rare, romantic links to connect the modern world with that adventurous period that lay before the era of invention and machinery.

With slow steps the 19th Century ushered in the recognition of the power of steam—a new departure in the history of the world. But ere five score years had passed, the wheels of factories whirred in deafening array, electric motors whined with endless energy, and huge propellers, spiralling through the deep green sea, drove great ocean-going palaces from continent to continent, careless of winter’s winds or summer’s sultry calms, all but thoughtless of the powers of nature which, since the dawn of history, had been the ruling thought of all of those who have ventured on the surface of the deep.

CHAPTER II
THE DEVELOPMENT OF SAILS

The origin of sails is buried in the darkness of prehistoric days. Perhaps some hunter, paddling his dugout canoe before the breeze, had his loose skin cape distended by the wind which continued to propel him even when he stopped paddling in order to fasten his garment more closely about him. No doubt something of this kind occurred many times before some prehistoric observer noticed the cause and related to it the effect. Perhaps, then, he held the skin up on his paddle or on his staff, and sat back in comparative comfort while the breeze did his work for him. Certainly such an origin is possible, and man’s desire to accomplish certain ends without expending his energy unnecessarily may, in this as in many other things, have led him to take so important a step toward civilization. From using a skin held on his staff to spreading the skin on a stick which in turn was held up by another stick was but a step, and an excellent means of propelling his canoe had been developed. The perfection of this method of propulsion, however, was slow. How many years before the dawn of written history such sails were in common use we do not know, nor can we guess with any accuracy. It is probable, however, that the time was long, for the very first accounts we have of ships tell us, too, of sails.

I have already traced the development of ships from this early time, and it is not my desire to retrace my steps more than is necessary, for ships have always progressed as their propulsion progressed, and consequently the story of ships is also the story of propulsion. But sails, it would almost seem, had less to do with the early development of ships than oars, which for many thousand years after the dawn of history were apparently more important in the eyes of men of the sea than sails.

Because of this attitude toward oars, and perhaps, too, because of the comparatively restricted waters in which ships originated, the inventive genius of early designers seems to have been expended almost wholly upon the perfection of the use of oars, until, as I have explained, truly great ships were built in which much thought was given to the proper seating of hundreds of oarsmen.

AN EGYPTIAN BOAT OF THE 5TH DYNASTY

The double mast, shown in this drawing, was in common use in Egypt about 3000 B. C. It is occasionally to be seen on native boats in the Orient to-day.

Sails, then, progressed little, save in size, beyond the skin that first was stretched before the breeze in some remote savage genius’s canoe, and, until the Crusades began at the end of the 11th Century, sails and spars remained simple and, from the viewpoint of to-day, comparatively inefficient. With a favouring wind ships could hoist their sails and proceed merrily enough, but with a wind even mildly unfavourable sailors sometimes lay in sheltered harbours for weeks or got out their oars and proceeded on their way with strenuous labour.

When ships first began to utilize sails to go in directions other than approximately that in which the wind blew is unknown. Certainly ships propelled by even the crudest sails could do more than drift before the wind, and as hulls became longer and deeper, they were, of course, able to sail more and more to the right and left. When, however, ships first were able to make headway against the wind is problematical. Certain it is that for many thousand years after sails were known there seems to have been no connection in the minds of ship-builders between the use of sails and the construction of the underbodies of their ships so as to interpose any especial obstacle to the water in order to prevent the undue motion of their hulls sideways. Naturally enough, the very earliest of ships was constructed with the idea of ease of propulsion forward, but, so long as that object was gained, the shape of the hull, apparently, gave them little thought save in so far as space was needed for crew and cargo. Designs were brought out, of course, that were increasingly sturdy and seaworthy, but fin keels, or similar contrivances, are a development of recent times.

Ships there were, of course, even in ancient times, that were driven exclusively, or almost exclusively, by sails, but the fact that these ships, and many that depended largely on oars, were hauled high and dry and carefully laid up during the less favourable seasons would seem to prove that except under ideal conditions sails, as they were then, were highly impractical affairs.

The earliest sails of which there is definite record are those shown in carvings of ships on ancient Egyptian temples. These were hardly more complicated than the skins of the theoretical savage who first utilized the energy of the wind. They were made of cloth and were rectangular and were stretched between two spars—one at the top and one at the bottom—and these spars were raised and lowered in the process of making or taking in sail.

AN EGYPTIAN SHIP OF THE 12TH DYNASTY

It is possible that ships of this type were able, under ideal conditions, to make a little headway, while under sail, against the wind. It was not for many, many centuries, however, that sailing ships were able definitely to make much headway in that direction.

Now this method of stretching a sail is not inefficient. The cloth can be held more or less flat, and such a sail could, if the hull of the ship were so constructed as almost to prevent lateral motion, propel the hull in the direction it was pointed, even though that direction were at right angles to the wind. If the hull were properly designed, such a sail might readily be made to propel the hull at a little less than at right angles, and, once that were done, the ship would actually be making headway against the wind. It is quite conceivable that the Egyptians had perfected this art—not, perhaps, with the sail I have mentioned, but with a later development of this sail when the lower spar had disappeared and the upper spar had become greatly elongated and was set at an angle to the mast, so that from it depended a great triangular sail, called, now, a lateen sail.

But authorities differ, and although there has been much argument as to whether Roman ships of a much later date—for instance, the one in which St. Paul was shipwrecked—could sail so as to make good a course even slightly against the wind, the argument has still remained only an argument, with neither side definitely able to make its case. And this, it seems to me, proves that while perhaps under ideal conditions and with some ships this highly important end was sometimes gained, nevertheless, the ancients were not, by and large, able to sail any course save when the wind was blowing from some angle of the half circle toward the centre of which the ship’s stern was pointed, or, in the language of the sea, when the wind was “abeam” or “abaft the beam.”

A ROMAN SHIP

Although this ship was small the Romans built many that were not surpassed for 1,700 years, and it was not until the 19th Century was well advanced that the larger Roman ships were greatly surpassed in size.

But while sails were not perfected, and consequently were of particular use only when the wind was more or less astern, ships grew in size, and consequently more sail area was required to propel them. This resulted in the enlarging of the single sail until it grew clumsy and finally resulted in the use of more than one sail, each spread from a mast of its own. Later still, in these ships carrying several masts, one would sometimes carry two sails, one above the other. Occasionally, ships with but one mast similarly subdivided their great square sails. Roman ships of the larger sizes—notably the corn-ships that brought food to the capital from Egypt—developed this subdivision of sails, but it was hardly more than a subdivision for more than a thousand years after the time of Christ—in reality, not for 1,500 years, for even the caravels of the time of Columbus had few actual improvements over the earliest ships of the Christian Era. It is true that the lateen sail had been adopted largely for use on the mizzenmast—or third mast from the bow—and that that sail has more driving power than a square sail when the ship is heading into the wind. But still ships were weak in “going to windward”—that is, in making any headway in sailing into that half of the compass’s circle that is marked by ninety degrees to the right and to the left of the point directly toward the wind. This is borne out by the complaints of Columbus’s men, who, when they found themselves being driven westward day after day with the steady Trade Winds from behind them, expressed their fear of never again being able to return to Spain.

But, clumsy as these old sailing ships were, they came and went, searching farther and farther into the unknown world, proving, beyond doubt, that men have always been able to get along, even with crude instruments, and that, in the last analysis, men are more important than equipment.

So awkward in our eyes were the ships of Columbus’s time that when replicas of his original ships were built in 1893, for the World’s Fair at Chicago, and were sailed by Capt. D. U. Concas, an experienced modern seaman, over the course Columbus took, the feat was looked upon as extraordinary, despite the fact that Captain Concas’s knowledge of winds, currents, and navigation was infinitely superior to the great discoverer’s. So great were the steps taken in 400 years of ship-building that this feat, far simpler than scores that are recorded in the stories of the old adventurers, was hailed as heroic. But we have accustomed ourselves to sailing ships that can be handled with such marvellous ease that it would take an exceptionally able and fearless sailor to handle even that replica of the Santa Maria that still is to be seen anchored in a park lake at Chicago. He would be a truly fearless or a truly foolish man who would attempt to take her across Lake Michigan in anything more than the mildest of summer zephyrs.

But once the voyage of Columbus had taught Europe how little it really knew of the world there came the insistent demand for better ships, and as ships had by this time reached the point where far the greater part were propelled by sails alone, the demand for the perfection of ships resulted in the perfection of sails as well as the perfection of hulls. England and Holland, together with the other northern European countries, are largely responsible for this improvement, although France for many years built the finest ships that sailed the seas.

Down to the 14th Century the ships of northern Europe showed strongly the Scandinavian influence. The Vikings had developed ships similar in shape to the whaleboats of to-day. They were double-ended affairs, long, low, narrow, and fast, propelled largely by oars, but carrying, generally, one large square sail set about amidships on a sturdy mast.

A VIKING SHIP

These ships were developed by the Norse sea rovers for use in war, and as the seas they sailed were generally rough their ships had to be seaworthy. The result was a type that still leaves its mark. The seaworthy whaleboats of to-day are very similar in shape.

In these ships the Norsemen regularly sailed the Baltic and the North seas, where the elements give even the ships of to-day many a vicious shaking. Yet these sturdy old pirates, for they were hardly more, ploughed their way through storm and fog, without compasses, without any method of determining their positions at sea except their instinct and what guesses they could make—measuring voyages not by miles but by days—coming, going, bent only on conquest and on pillage. Nor did they confine themselves to the more or less landlocked seas. They launched their sturdy boats from the narrow beaches of Norwegian fjords, and with sturdy backs bent to sturdy oars, and great, colourful square sails set when the wind was right, drove their ships to Scotland, to the Orkneys, the Faroes, and to Iceland, and not content with that drove on to Greenland, to Labrador, to Nova Scotia, and probably drew up their ships on the shores of the very bay that waited yet another half a thousand years ere the Pilgrims saw it from the unsteady deck of the Mayflower.

In their open boats that tossed like flotsam among the angry waves, these hardy mariners lived. Their food must often have been hardly edible, their supplies of water hardly fit to drink, and comfort there never could have been. Wet through by boarding seas, all but unprotected from the cold of long sub-Arctic nights, or scorched by the sun in breathless summer calms, their beards caked with salt from the driving spray, or dripping moisture left there by the fogs, these heroes of the sea swung their oars for days, for weeks, perhaps for months, and feared the great Atlantic not at all.

They built these ships of theirs from the lumber that covered Norway’s mountain-sides. They hewed the timbers, and fashioned them, and made their ships as artists paint their canvases, not by the aid of mathematics but by the aid of the innate art that was theirs and the experience of generations of forefathers bred to the sea. They launched their ships into the slate-gray waters of the stormy north, and stocked them with rough food and rough implements. They shoved off from the rocky coast of the land that had bred them and swung their great oars over the crests of the surging sea, and clear of the land hoisted their sails and were gone to new worlds far across the ocean.

A 13TH-CENTURY ENGLISH SHIP

The Viking influence is still easily traceable in this ship, but the forecastle and the sterncastle have put in their appearance. Also the hull is heavier than and not so sharp as in the earlier Viking ships.

To us who live in a world so supercivilized that the Norseman’s wildest dreams could not have approached the commonplaces of modern life, it is difficult to imagine a crew of these stern and brawny men, fifty or sixty strong, perhaps, with their barbaric helmets temporarily laid aside, with their shields hung along the gunwales, and with their great backs bending in unison to the oars. Seated on the heavy thwarts, their supplies below their feet, their swords and battle-axes strewn about carelessly, but handy to each calloused palm, they pulled for hours, chanting their songs of war, roaring their choruses. Pausing now and then to rest or to fill horn flagons from some supply of ale; tearing with their teeth at salted fish or haunch of tough dried meat; changing their positions now and then, perhaps, to keep their hardened muscles from growing stiff; sleeping in the bow or stern, or down among the bales and bundles that lined the long, low hull; wrapped in homespun capes in rain or fog or driving spray—thus did these hardy mariners sail to the west and home again. Leaving a land where life was hard, they journeyed far to other lands at least as bleak as theirs, and journeyed back again, not looking for the land of spice, or summer seas, or far, romantic Cathay. Of such climes they knew nothing, nor did they care.

As time passed these ships became heavier and broader, with more draft and with higher sides, although they still retained the sharp stern which was somewhat similar to the bow. The sails, however, developed little and about the only complication was an additional strip of canvas that could be laced to the foot of the sail, increasing its area considerably. In light winds this was attached. In heavy winds it was unlaced. This, by the way, was a common feature before the later methods of reefing sails came into use.

But now we come to a time when ship designers began consciously to refine the crude ships with which they were familiar. As a result, sails from 1450 to 1850 went through a process of development far exceeding the development that had taken place during those unnumbered centuries from the time of the first sail up to 1450.

So complicated is the story of this development and so limited is the space in a single book that I must content myself with utilizing only the remainder of this chapter for the story of the development of sails during the first 350 of these 400 memorable years, leaving for the following chapter the story of the final perfection of sailing ships which took place in the first half of the 19th Century.

A GALLEON OF THE TIME OF ELIZABETH

The extremely high stern and the low bow shown in this drawing are about as extreme as any in use during the period when high bows and low sterns were thought to be good design.

It is not difficult to see what happened to make the development of sails so slow a process. Not only sails, but also practically every art and interest of mankind had received a serious setback with the decay of Rome. The Dark Ages followed with their woeful ignorance, and it was not until after the Crusades had been followed by the Renaissance, which brought with it a renewed interest in every subject the people of Europe knew anything about, that ships—and practically everything else—began to recover from the fearful retrogression that had taken place during the better part of ten centuries.

It was not, for instance, until the latter part of the 15th Century that the bowsprit appeared in common use in northern Europe, although this feature had, fifteen hundred or more years before, been in common use on Roman ships, where it was used to carry a small square sail called the “artemon.” The bowsprit seems to have originated as a sort of mast that was set far forward in the bow, in order that a sail spread from it would be in the best position to aid in swinging a ship from one side to the other. In order to make this sail still more effective by giving it greater leverage on the hull the mast was tilted more and more forward until it projected far over the bow. From this bowsprit a small square sail was spread, called, later, a spritsail, and this development began to make real sailing ships of ships that formerly had used sails for little more than auxiliary work.

But the Dark Ages ruined everything, and it was not until the Crusades later re-introduced the people of northern Europe to those of the Mediterranean that the northerners, who later became the greatest seamen the world has ever seen, began to get away from the Viking influence in the building of ships.

But once the shipwrights of England and Holland and France began to see the advantages of even the crude ships that were occasionally sailed by the Venetians and the Genoese to the bleak northern waters, the improvement in northern ships began.

The single mast with its simple square sail was supplemented by another mast and by the slanting mast at the bow that became the bowsprit, and it became the custom in northern waters, as it already was the custom in southern, to use two or three masts carrying square sails and one mast carrying the triangular lateen sail.

The bowsprit was a crude affair but was highly important, which was the reason for its continued use despite the fact that even in ordinary weather in the open sea the pitching of the dumpy hulls often drove the spritsail into the waves. Perhaps this troublesome feature of the spritsail was partially responsible, as the desire for more head sails certainly was, for the addition at the end of the bowsprit of a short, vertical spar on which a new sail called the “sprit topsail” was spread. In heavy weather this sail could be carried without plunging it into the sea long after the spritsail, which was spread on a spar mounted below the bowsprit, had to be taken in.

And now the masts of these ships began to undergo an important change. Hitherto a mast was simply a long sturdy spar made of a single tree, with a single square sail mounted on a single yard. The desire for more canvas led at first to the setting of a triangular sail above the square sail. This new sail was set with its lower corners made fast to the extremities of the yard and with its apex at the apex of the mast. Soon, however, a short yard appeared at the top of this sail, which in the course of later developments became more and more rectangular until finally it became the highly important topsail of the square-rigged ships of to-day. As still other sails were added this topsail became the sail that is carried for a greater part of the time than any other of the square sails, for in heavy weather it is the last to be taken in, and continues to hold its place long after its predecessor, the great square sail below it, has been furled.

So successful was this topsail that ship-builders and sailors began to think of ways of making it larger. Its size was limited to the height of the mast above the great square mainsail. At first masts were cut from taller trees, but soon a practical limit to this method of securing additional height was reached, because of the limited size of trees. Then it was that the topmast was invented. Another mast, only slightly smaller than the first, was lashed with its base overlapping the top of the mainmast, which, because the upper part was now of no use, was again shortened. This proved satisfactory, and later another section and another still was added until the mast had grown from one simple spar into a structure made up of three or four or even five rising one above the other until, in the greatest of all square-rigged ships—the Great Republic, built in 1853—the mainmast, surmounted by the topmast, the topgallant, the royal, and the skysailmasts, towered almost half as high above her keel as the summit of Washington Monument stands above its concrete base. But that was long years after the times we are discussing, and such a ship was far beyond even the imaginations of the shipwrights and sailors of 1500.

Years before this time, as I have already explained, ships had developed raised structures at bow and stern, called forecastles and sterncastles, and by now these had become integral parts of the hull. But the hulls! It can be said with little fear of contradiction that they had become the most ridiculous ships, in appearance at least, that ever sailed the seas. Their sterns were built up and up into huge structures that contained many decks and many cabins. Forward these ships, more often than not, ran their ridiculous noses down until it sometimes seemed as if they were inquisitive to learn what was beneath the surface of the water. Above these weird hulls were three or four towering masts, and forward was a long bowsprit that reared itself up at so steep an angle as to suggest that it feared that the bow, at the very next moment, would surely go completely beneath the sea.

The mast farthest astern—which in a three-masted northern ship was then and still is called the mizzenmast—for many years carried only a lateen sail. Finally, however, the part of this triangular sail that ran forward of the mast was eliminated, although the spar itself was still the same. But finally this long spar was cut off where it met the mast, and it became the gaff of the sail that now is called, on square-rigged ships, the spanker. On this mast, too, above this lateen sail that, pollywog-like, was losing its tail in its growth into a spanker, it slowly became the custom to set sails similar to those which on the other masts had come into common use above the great square sails that were set nearest to the deck.

THE AMARANTHE

A British warship of 1654. This ship is an excellent example of the ships that were in use just before the jib began to put in its appearance. The lateen sail on the mizzenmast is similar to the one used on the caravels, but both the rigging and the hull are greatly refined as compared with the ships of the time of Columbus.

This growth, of course, was slow. The life of a single sailor was not enough to see the general acceptance of more than one or two of these steps, for seamen are conservative when it comes to changes in their ships, and are not given to the rapid acceptance of revolutionary improvements. But by comparison with the slow development of the preceding thousand years changes were coming with almost breathless speed.

It was during this period that another important improvement was introduced. I have explained how, on cruder ships, it was the custom, when more sail area was needed, to lace a separate strip of cloth to the foot of the great square sail. This extra piece of sail was called the “bonnet” and sometimes another similar piece called the “drabbler” was laced to the foot of the bonnet. If the wind increased until less sail was desired these two extra sections of the sail were unlaced and the sail area was reduced by that much. In earlier times the sail was sometimes puckered up by passing lines over the spar and tying them so as to make the sail into a bundle more or less loosely tied, depending on how much or how little the sail area was to be reduced. But now came the introduction of “reef points” which, down to the present day, are still the accepted method of reducing sail.

Reef points are short pieces of rope passing through the sail. The ends are allowed to hang free on opposite sides of the canvas. On square sails there are two or three rows of these running across the upper part of the sail. When the captain orders sail reduced the men go into the rigging, lie out along the yard supporting the sail to be reefed and pulling the sail up until they reach the first row of reef points, proceed to tie the two ends of the points together over the top of the sail. This ties a part of the sail into a small space, reducing by that much the area spread to the wind.

This great improvement, together with the new arrangement of sails, began to make sailing ships into structures that, more or less, were reaching out toward the perfection that led ultimately to such speed and ease of handling as never before was thought possible.

A 16TH-CENTURY DUTCH BOAT

It was on boats of this type that the jib seems first to have been used. To-day in Holland one sees a similar boat, called a schuyl, which is almost identical with this, except that it utilizes a curved gaff at the top of the mainsail.

The topmasts, topgallantmasts, and others, too, by this time were no longer being lashed rigidly in place but were being arranged so that they could be partly lowered by sliding them lengthwise through their supports.

All this time hulls were improving, and the ridiculous sterncastles finally reached their climax and began to recede. And then came a new development that gave the builder of ships the final thing they needed, so far as the sails themselves were concerned, to make possible the ultimate perfection of sailing ships. This was the adoption, in place of the awkward spritsails and sprit topsails, of the triangular “jibs” and staysails that are a conspicuous part of most modern sailing vessels.

Perhaps this highly efficient triangular sail did not spring, Minerva-like, fully formed, from the head of any mediæval ship-designer. It first appeared in use on small boats, and perhaps appeared there in triangular form because of the impracticability of mounting a bowsprit capable of carrying the common but awkward spritsail. Another reason, perhaps, for its triangular form, was the fact that the stay leading from the bow to the masthead, while it lent itself to holding a sail, caused any such sail to be triangular in shape because of the angle at which the stay was stretched.

Nor was a triangular sail in itself a change from the old order of things. For more than two thousand years the lateen sail had been in use, and a lateen sail is much the same shape as a jib or a staysail. Its principal difference lies in the fact that its direct support is a spar, while the support of a jib is a rope which serves also as a support for the mast. And so it is easy to imagine some old Dutch sailor—for the jib appeared first in Holland—rigging up a kind of makeshift sail on his fore stay, seeing that, because a lateen sail worked astern, another sail so similar in shape might work at the bow. Perhaps he was laughed at for his pains, for sailors are sensitive to appearances and a triangular sail at the bow of a boat in the early 16th Century was different from anything to which sailors were accustomed, and consequently, in their eyes, was, no doubt, ridiculous. But the “ridiculous” sail proved efficient, as sometimes happens in other things, and because of its efficiency and its simplicity it began to take its place as an accepted form.

A CORVETTE OF 1780

This ship shows the new sail plan overcoming the old. The masts carry topsails, topgallantsails, and royals, and what was formerly a lateen sail on the mizzenmast has become a spanker. Furthermore, while the ship carries jibs, she has not yet parted with her spritsails.

All this description of its origin is, of course, purely imaginary. I have no information as to how it originated, but I offer the explanation I have given as a plausible surmise. The earliest actual representation of a ship using this sail is, so far as I can learn, on a map sent in 1527 from Seville by one M. Robert Thorne to a Doctor Ley. On this map, like so many of its time, there are numerous decorations and pictures. One of these is a small craft, Dutch in appearance, which carries a combination of sails not unlike those of a simple sloop of to-day. It is somewhat as if a lateen sail had been cut in two vertically a third of the way back from the forward end, and the two pieces mounted separately—the triangular section depending from the fore stay, and the remainder from a spar similar to what we now call the gaff. This interesting old map was called to my attention by a mention of it made by E. Keble Chatterton in his “Sailing Ships and Their Story.”

But this triangular sail, while it was in common use from so early a date on small boats, did not appear on ships of the larger sizes until the latter part of the 17th Century and the first part of the 18th. At this time the lateen sail was still in evidence although it was beginning to undergo the first of the changes I have mentioned, while the fore and mainmasts now commonly spread two square sails, and sometimes three; and sometimes, too, this third sail, instead of being square, was triangular, as the earliest topsails had been.

But the latter part of the 17th Century brought the first real steps in scientific design. Men began to study the disturbances set up by the passage through the water of various shaped hulls, and began to replace rule-of-thumb methods of design with designs based on more or less scientific conclusions. This also began to show itself in the design of masts and spars and sails. Long since, the steering oar, which for centuries was mounted on the starboard or right-hand side of the ship near the stern, had given way to the rudder, hung astern as rudders are still hung, and now the science of ship design began the steps that ultimately resulted in the Flying Cloud and the Great Republic and those other clipper ships that in the 19th Century set records for speed that many of our steamships of to-day cannot equal.

Throughout the 18th Century ships were gradually improved along these scientific lines until, in the merchant service, the beautiful ships of the British East India Company, with their piles of snowy canvas, their shining teakwood rails, and their graceful spars, were the proudest ships that had ever sailed the seas. In the naval services the greater ships had taken a less beautiful form but had grown into the impressive if awkward line-of-battle ships of which an excellent example is still to be seen in the Victory, Nelson’s famous flagship, which the British still proudly, and properly, maintain at Portsmouth.

But now begins the super-perfection of sailing ships—the development of the clippers, those beautiful structures of wood and iron and canvas that for a brief time so surpassed every other ship on every sea as to set them apart in an era of their own. These were ships of such beauty and speed and spirit that they stand clearly separate and alone.

CHAPTER III
THE PERFECTION OF SAILS—THE CLIPPER SHIPS

In the 17th Century a new people began to make their mark in the world of the sea. Formerly the development of ships had been almost exclusively, at least for two thousand years, in the hands of Europeans—the Mediterranean peoples first, and later, the peoples of northern Europe.

One of the important reasons for the north European interest in ships had come about as a result of the discovery of the New World and, with that, the discovery that the world was actually round. That dynamic age now often called the age of discovery opened up new lands that lent themselves to colonization, and because Europe was filled with energy and was in a proper frame of mind to take advantage of the opportunity, important colonies sprang up in the Americas, in the Pacific, and in Africa.

From the point of view, however, of influences on the development of ships these colonies, in themselves, had, with one exception, little effect. This one exception was the row of British colonies that lined the Atlantic Coast of North America from the Bay of Fundy to Florida. Here there began to grow up a people whose forebears had known the boisterous seas of northern Europe, and who were scattered along a narrow coastline where they found ready and at hand the best timber in the world from which to build ships. Furthermore, the fisheries of this coast were rich, and, too, traffic between these colonies soon sprang up and demanded ships to carry it, for roads were either bad or were non-existent and the great boulevard of the sea lay outside the entrances to the numerous fine harbours that indented the coast.

A BRITISH EAST INDIAMAN

These merchant ships, which sailed from England to the Far East, were almost as much like warships as they were like merchantmen. They were finely built, but they took their time on their voyages out and back.

At first, naturally enough, the ships that were built were small, but by the beginning of the 18th Century the business of building ships was an important one, particularly in New England. So important was it, and so well and so cheaply were ships built in this new part of the world, that Europeans found it to their interest to buy ships from the many yards that dotted this coast. This business continued to increase in the American colonies until, in 1769, according to Arthur H. Clark, in “The Clipper Ship Era,” 389 vessels, of which 113 were square-rigged, were built. All of these, it is true, were small, none of them being over 200 tons, but the business was flourishing and valuable experience that later proved of great importance was being secured.

During this same time “The United Company of Merchant Venturers of England Trading to the East Indies,” or, as it was later generally called, the East India Company, was gradually developing, for the long voyages from England to the East, those magnificent ships that now are universally referred to as East Indiamen.

So lucrative was the trade that these ships were engaged in, for it was a carefully controlled and legalized monopoly, that truly great amounts of money were made for the stockholders of the company and for the officers of the ships. And because the trade was exceptionally profitable these ships were wonderfully built and cost sums that, for those days, were huge. The ships, because they were navigating waters frequented by pirates and might be called upon to fight their way both out and back, were almost ships of war, and the discipline on board was more like the discipline of ships of the British Navy than like that of ordinary merchant ships. The crews were spick and span in neat uniforms. The men were drilled as carefully as man-of-war’s-men, and the crews were large, and consequently their work was not hard.

The ships themselves were built in the finest possible manner, and the cost of one 1,325-ton ship built for this service is said to have been more than a quarter of a million dollars—£53,000 to be exact—a sum truly huge for those days, and one not exactly to be sneezed at to-day.

This great company, with its monopoly that sometimes made it possible for a ship to earn 300 per cent. on her entire cost in a single round trip from England to India or China, was organized in 1600. The fact, however, that there was no competition for them to face resulted in a conservative outlook that made for slowness rather than for speed, and little actual advance in the science of design of either hulls or sails came as a result of the building of these costly and sturdy ships.

For two and a third centuries, however, this grand old company continued, and during that time many a fortune was built up for the investors, but finally the people of Britain rebelled at this monopoly, and Parliament, in 1832, withdrew the charter and threw open the trade to the East to other British lines.

A BLACK BALL PACKET

Ships of this type carried the transatlantic passengers of the early part of the 19th Century. Because of the demand of the owners of the Black Ball Line and of its competitors, America, where these lines were owned and where their ships were built, developed the designers who ultimately gave the world the clipper ships.

But the conservatism of the sea is strong, and, while other lines took advantage of the opportunity to send their ships to the East they patterned them more or less after the ships of the East India Company, and little effort was made to secure speed.

But later, in 1849, the Navigation Laws which limited trade between Great Britain and her colonies to British ships, were repealed, and foreign carriers were, for the first time, permitted to enter this lucrative field.

This was the end of one act and the beginning of another, for the repeal of these laws gave the opportunity it needed to that new country, now a nation, that for two hundred years had been teaching itself to build ships of the trees from the rocky soil of New England.

But a little more is needed to understand just why the ship-builders of the United States of America were in a position to leap so suddenly into prominence among the carriers of ocean freight.

For two hundred years, as I have said, Americans had been building ships, and in that time the industry had had its ups and downs. British legislation, in colonial days, had had its adverse effect. The Revolutionary War, and, later, the War of 1812, had dealt disastrous blows at American shipowners, but these people were of sea-going stock, and each time they recovered. Then, after the War of 1812, and particularly after the long Napoleonic struggle was brought to an end in 1815, trade between the new American nation and Europe, and particularly between America and Britain, developed by leaps and bounds.

International commerce grew as it had never grown before, and, shortly, lines of “packets”—that is, passenger ships running regularly between two ports—went into service between Britain and America.

The Black Ball Line was the first of these. Its ships were distinguished by a large black circle on the foretopsail below the close reef-band, where it would be visible as long as the ship carried even a shred of sail. The earlier ships of this line were from three hundred to five hundred tons, and before long more than a dozen were in service. They sailed regularly and for the first ten years of the line’s existence averaged, according to Arthur H. Clark, twenty-three days for the voyage east, and forty days for the return, the discrepancy between these two being due to the prevailing winds of the North Atlantic which, on the route these ships sailed, are from the southwest. The Gulf Stream, too, or rather the continuation of the Gulf Stream, sometimes known as the Gulf Stream Drift, aided them on their eastward voyages.

A WHALING BARK

With a lookout at the masthead these ships cruised all over the earth in the first half of the 19th Century.

During the thirty years following the founding of the Black Ball Line a number of other similar lines were founded, notably the Red Star Line, the Dramatic Line, and the New Orleans Line from New York. All of these, and others, were American owned, and with the opening of the Erie Canal, which gave access to the Great Lakes, and opened a vast new land, trade greatly increased.

These ships were not large at first, but gradually they increased in size until, in 1849, the Albert Gallatin, of 1,435 tons, became the largest of the lot, although a number of others approached her in size.

These ships were in a new kind of service. Before the origin of the Black Ball Line there had been few passenger ships. More often than not ships had accommodations for passengers, as the East Indiamen had, but ships had seldom, prior to the opening of the 19th Century, devoted much space to passengers. In a later chapter I shall discuss the reasons for this. But once ships began to carry passengers to the practical exclusion of freight, speed became desirable, and the North Atlantic packets were designed more and more with speed in mind. This resulted in a demand for really scientific naval architects and because Americans were the ones chiefly interested in building faster ships, and because, too, the packet lines could afford to pay for their services, able men turned their attention to this important problem.

Thus it was that, between 1816 and 1849, a demand on the part of the American packet lines for faster ships produced in America a group of designers who evolved a type of sailing ship that the world has never seen surpassed for speed on the wide stretches of the open sea. And thus it was, too, that with the repeal of the Navigation Laws in England, America was able to put into service between Britain and the Far East such ships as made conservative British seamen gasp for breath ere they, too, set about following, with eminent success, in the footsteps of their transatlantic brothers. Then, instantly, the gigantic rush of gold hunters to California gave added impetus to the demand for faster ships, and almost overnight the era of the clipper ship had begun.

THE RED JACKET

The clipper ship that made the fastest trip across the Atlantic ever made under sail. Her record from Sandy Hook to Rock Light was thirteen days, one hour.

According to Arthur H. Clark’s “The Clipper Ship Era,” which contains a complete and fascinating account of this whole period (and it is actually a story for a book rather than for a mere chapter into which it is impossible adequately to compress it), the first clipper ship ever built was the Ann McKim, a ship built at Baltimore in 1832.

During the War of 1812 a number of Chesapeake Bay ships which came to be called “Baltimore clippers” proved very successful as privateers. These ships were fast, and probably the name “clipper” had some connotation at the time suggesting speed. But these “Baltimore clippers” were not, as the word was later used, clipper ships in the true sense. The Ann McKim, as I have said, was actually the first of these.

This ship was an enlargement to scale of one of the small, fast sailing vessels which two hundred years of ship-building experience had taught American shipwrights to construct. The Ann McKim, then, was a small sailing ship built by the foot, so to speak, while her smaller counterparts had been built by the inch. Her proportions were identical to those of the small fry that skimmed about Chesapeake Bay. Only in size and in the elaborateness of her finish did she differ.

Before the advent of the Ann McKim, no one seems to have thought of building a ship of her size—she was 143 feet long—on any lines but those which for so long had been accepted as proper for a ship, and they were far different from the lines accepted for small boats. But despite her originality the Ann McKim proved to be fast.

It seems to be true that this ship did not directly affect ship design. But in the next nine years a number of fast ships appeared, and then John W. Griffiths, a young naval architect of New York, in a series of lectures on the subject of ship design, laid down the basic rules that brought into being those beautiful ships—of which there were never more than a handful, by comparison with the other ships of the world—that suddenly leaped into world-wide prominence.

To the uninitiated, the changes proposed by Griffiths seem unimportant and perhaps uninteresting, for it resulted only in sharper bows and finer lines, in the movement, farther toward the stern, of the ship’s greatest beam, and of “hollow” water lines—that is, the curve of the hull aft from the bow along the water line was concave before it became convex, as it long had been for its whole length on other ships.

The first ship to be built along these new lines, and therefore the first clipper ship of the new order of things, was the Rainbow, which was launched in 1845. It is interesting, too, to note that, while she was lost—perhaps off Cape Horn—on her fifth voyage, few of the later clippers ever broke the records she set. Griffiths, with the touch of genius that he had, had instantly approached such perfection as mortal man can reach.

THE GREAT REPUBLIC

The greatest clipper ship ever built. Unfortunately, before she made her first voyage she caught fire and had to be sunk. She was refloated and refitted, but never made a voyage in her original rig. When new masts were put in her they were made smaller than the first ones. Still she turned out to be one of the very fastest of the clippers.

And unlike the Ann McKim, the Rainbow did affect ship design. It is true that critics announced that these new ships would capsize from the very weight of their spars, that they could not stand up in a boisterous sea, that they were freakish and ridiculous. But still they were built, and there were races out to China and back again; and sometimes they brought to New York the news of their own arrivals at Canton or Shanghai.

So quickly had Griffiths’s ideas of ship design taken hold that in the four years from the launch of the Rainbow until 1849—when the repeal of the Navigation Laws permitted foreign ships to compete for business between Britain and her colonies and the rush to California opened up another profitable field—a number of these new clipper ships were making regular voyages.

The story of the first American clipper ship to carry a cargo of tea to Britain from China is an interesting one, and I can do no better than quote directly from Mr. Clark’s account of the voyage in “The Clipper Ship Era.”

“The Oriental,” says Mr. Clark, “sailed on her second voyage from New York for China, May 19, 1850 ... and was 25 days to the equator; she passed the meridian of the Cape of Good Hope 45 days out, Java Head 71 days out, and arrived at Hong-kong, August 8th, 81 days from New York. She was at once chartered through Russel & Co. to load a cargo of tea from London at £6 per ton of 40 cubic feet, while British ships were waiting for cargoes for London at £3:10 per ton of 50 cubic feet. She sailed August 28th, and beat down the China Sea against a strong southwest monsoon in 21 days to Anjer, arrived off the Lizard in 91 days, and was moored in the West India Docks, London, 97 days from Hong-kong—a passage from China never before equalled in point of speed, especially against the southwest monsoon, and rarely surpassed since. She delivered 1,600 tons of tea, and her freight from Hong-kong amounted to £9,600 or some $48,000. Her first cost ready for sea was $70,000. From the date of her first sailing from New York, September 14, 1849, to her arrival at London, December 3, 1850, the Oriental had sailed a distance of 67,000 miles, and had, during that time, been at sea 367 days, an average in all weathers of 183 miles per day.”

THE ARIEL, 1866

Which, with the Fiery Cross, Taeping, Serica, and Taitsing, sailed what was, perhaps, the greatest race ever run. After sailing 16,000 miles from Foo-Chow, China, to London, the Ariel, Taeping, and Serica docked in London on the same tide, the Taeping the winner by only a few minutes. The other two were only two days behind, although the first three took 99 days.

Such performances were not rare for these ships, and because they were the rule, rather than the exception, the reputation of clippers grew apace, and interest rapidly grew in their comparative speed. Thus it was that many races were sailed, half around the world, during which every stitch of canvas possible was carried for every mile of the way, and captains studied winds and currents with such care and success that well-matched ships were often in sight of each other off and on during voyages of thousands of miles.

The development of the clipper ship was rapid, and her decline was almost equally fast. Eight years after the Rainbow took the water Donald McKay, an able designer and builder, launched the Great Republic, one of the very largest sailing ships ever built. While this ship has been surpassed in size by several later sailing ships, no other ship ever built was designed to carry so enormous a press of sail.

The mainmast of this great vessel was a huge “stick” 131 feet long and 44 inches in diameter. Above this were the topmast, 76 feet long; the topgallantmast, 28 feet long; the royalmast, 22 feet long; and the skysailmast, 19 feet long. All of this was topped by a 12-foot pole. The great structure of the built-up mainmast towered more than 200 feet above her deck.