Mat Taylor built on this principle. Detractors used to laugh sometimes to see him chalk off his seats, and say, ‘A rowlock here—a seat there.’ The fact was, Mat Taylor placed his men, man for man, over the section of vessel built to carry them, allowing the minimum distance for reach in all cases, but by no means tying himself down to that distance where in his opinion the boat required elongating aft. They said he built by rule of thumb; so, perhaps, he did, but his builds have never been surpassed. Modern eights travel faster than of old, thanks to sliding seats and good oarsmanship, but if some of the old lost lines could be now reproduced, the speedy crews of modern days would be speedier still.
We offer one more illustration to show the effect of having too sudden a termination to a boat aft of her greatest beam, or of a certain amount of beam. Let anyone construct two models of racing boat hulls; probably he will not succeed in making two of equal speed, but such as they are he can handicap the speedier in his experiment. Let him place the two models to race, each towed by a line carried over a pulley, with a weight at the end of the line. The weights which tow the two models can be adjusted till the two run dead heats.
Then cut off the stern of one of the models, and bulkhead her, say about coxswain’s seat, and let them race once more with the forces which previously produced a dead heat. The model with a docked stern will have become the smaller vessel, and will now weigh less. Nevertheless, she will become decidedly slower than she was before, and will be beaten by her late duplicate.
In order to do justice to this experiment, the weights should tow at a pace equivalent to about four miles or more an hour. It will then be seen that this docked model leaves a whirlpool behind her stern, which is retarding her. This experiment of course exaggerates the principle of full afterlines, and their evil, but it may none the less serve to illustrate the importance of a finer run aft from a point further forward than amidships. En passant, the boat built by Salter of Oxford for the O.U.B.C. in 1865 may be mentioned; her dimensions are not to be traced, but she was specially designed to carry the heaviest man (E. F. Henley) at bow. She was certainly never surpassed by any other boat which Salter built. She won in 1865. In 1866 a heavier crew were in training, and the 1865 boat was supposed to be too small. She was not tried at all at Oxford with the crew. A new boat was built, this time to carry E. F. Henley at 5. When the crew reached Putney the writer felt dissatisfied with the movement of the new boat, and persuaded the crew to try the old one, even though she would be rather too small for them. They sent for her, and launched for a trial paddle the Monday before the race; so soon as they had rowed a dozen strokes in her they stopped, and declared she was the only light boat they had felt that season. They rowed the race in her, and won, and never took the trouble to set foot again in the new and rejected boat.
This victorious boat was then bought by the Oxford Etonians. They won the Grand Challenge of 1866 and 1867 in her, took her to Paris, and there won the eight-oared race at the International Regatta. She was sold and left behind in Paris. The writer suspects that her undeniable speed was mainly owing to the fact that Salter designed some extra displacement at No. 3, in order to carry E. F. Henley at that seat.
‘POETRY.’