I have space here for but one more thing. The Dutch, as I have said, were responsible for the origin of the fore-and-aft rig, and Europeans largely developed the yawl, the ketch, the brig, and several other forms that use fore-and-aft sails. But schooners are the most numerous of these and they originated, as their name did, in a New England shipyard. The story is an old one and well known, but I shall include it here, for it is the only case of which I know in which a new ship form together with its name appeared so abruptly.
It was in Gloucester, Massachusetts, that port now famous for the ablest schooners that sail the seas, that the schooner originated. In 1713 an ingenious builder built a boat and placed in her two masts bearing fore-and-aft sails. For a head sail he spread that triangular canvas now so common, but this was the first time that these sails, all long familiar, had been arranged according to the now common plan.
She left the stocks and floated lightly on the water, and an interested spectator cried, “Look! See how she scoons!”
The owner must have been a man of wit as well as originality for he replied: “Very well. A scooner let her be.” And schooner she still is, but in the two centuries since that time her form has impressed itself on many thousand ships, and the port that gave her birth has gained a reputation that is world-wide as the port of the ablest schooners and the ablest sailors that ever graced the great expanse of ocean.
CHAPTER IV
THE DEVELOPMENT OF STEAMSHIPS
From the day a really successful steam-driven vessel first moved herself awkwardly in the water until the Majestic slid from her German ways was not much more than a hundred years. But that hundred years shows more of progress in the development of ships than the preceding thousand. So breathlessly rapid has been the development of steamships that there are men still alive who remember them as frail experimental craft upon which little dependence could be placed. “Sail,” said the citizen of a hundred years ago, “is a dependable mode of propulsion. Steam is a ridiculous power, or at best a dangerous and highly experimental one.”
“Steam,” says the “landlubber” of to-day, “is satisfactory for me. Sailing is a foolhardy business.”
And neither the century-old viewpoint nor the new one is entirely right.
Steam was vaguely recognized as a source of power even in early Egyptian history, and several times before the birth of Watt inconsequential experiments were made with it.