Niven wriggled a little. "Oh, shut up! That's not what we want to know," he said.
"No?" said Lawson. "Then we'll get on to the healthful art and practice of seamanship. Am I to commence at the end, or half-way through? The beginning will not be much use to you."
"I'll climb down," said Niven. "Made an ass of myself, as usual. Now, do you want me to lick your boots for you? Begin at the beginning, and make it simple."
Lawson chuckled. "You'll get on while you're in that frame of mind, my son," he said. "Well, now, there are, generally speaking, two kinds of sailing ships—first the fore-and-afters, examples, cutter, ketch, and schooner, with their canvas on one side only of the mast. They're to be described as tricky, especially when you jibe them going free, but when you jam them on the wind they'll beat anything."
"Jam them on the wind?" said Appleby.
Lawson nodded. "Close-hauled sailing. That's what I'm coming to," he said. "In the meanwhile there's the other kind, the one the Britisher holds to, while the Yankee who knows how to run cheap ships smiles, the square-riggers, examples, the ship and brig. Their sails are bent to yards which cross the masts, and, as you have found out, you've got to go aloft in all weathers to handle them, which is not one of their advantages. Then we come to the modifications or crosses between them, the barque, two masts square-rigged, fore-and-aft on mizzen, of which the Aldebaran is a tolerably poor example, topsail schooner, brigantine, which has yards on her foremast and fore-and-aft main, and barquentine with foremast square-rigged and two mainmasts carrying fore-and-aft canvas, though they call the last of them the mizzen. The other kind I didn't mention is the one that makes the money, and sails with a screw. Got that into you?"
"Oh, yes," said Niven, yawning. "Can't you get on? I knew it all years ago."
Lawson grinned. "Of course!" he said. "Well, I'll leave the mate to talk to you."
He went into the deckhouse, and returned with a sheet of paper and a little, beautifully-constructed model of a full-rigged ship. "I made it last trip to work out questions for my examination with," he said, but the deprecation in his bronzed face betrayed his pride, and Appleby, who saw how tenderly he handled the model, understood. "Now we come to the one and universal practice of sailing. I make this ring on the paper, and you can consider it the compass, or, and it's the same thing, one-half the globe. Here I draw two lines across it crossing each other, and we'll mark the ends of them North, South, East, and West. That divides the circle into four quarters, and the corners where the lines intersect are right angles, each containing ninety degrees, or eight points of the compass which has thirty-two in all."
He laid the paper on the deck, and when he had turned it so that the first line run from North to South, placed the model at the upper end of it, and twisted the yards and sails, which moved, square across the hull. "The wind's blowing from Greenland to the South pole, and she's going before it," he said. "Anything would sail that way—it's called running—even a haystack, and you trim the vessel's sails whether she's fore-and-aft or square-rigged at right angles to a line drawn down the middle of her hull. Well, we've reached the south end of the line—we'll say it's the south pole, and want to get back north again, but the wind is right against us now."