of a certain length without a licence, but the distinction between a
sloop and a cutter should not be looked for in the rigging but in the
build and form of the hull, and, therefore, when a carvel-built vessel
corresponds as to her hull with the usual form of a sloop, she will
not merely, by having a running bowsprit, become a cutter within the
meaning of the Act of the 24 Geo. III. cap. 47, and consequently will
not be liable to forfeiture for want of a licence." From this it will
be seen that whereas Falconer and other nautical authorities relied on
the fixing of the bowsprit to determine the difference, the legal
authorities relied on a difference in hull. The point is one of great
interest, and I believe the matter has never been raised before by
any modern nautical writer.[10]

As to what a Revenue cutter looked like, the illustrations which have
been here reproduced will afford the reader a very good idea. And
these can be supplemented by the following description which Marryat
gives in _The Three Cutters_. It should be mentioned that the period
of which he is speaking is that which we have been contemplating, the
end of the eighteenth century.

"She is a cutter," he writes, "and you may know that she belongs to
the Preventive Service by the number of gigs and galleys which she has
hoisted up all round her. She looks like a vessel that was about to
sail with a cargo of boats: two on deck, one astern, one on each side
of her. You observe that she is painted black, and all her boats are
white. She is not such an elegant vessel as the yacht, and she is much
more lumbered up.... Let us go on board. You observe the guns are
iron, and painted black, and her bulwarks are painted red; it is not a
very becoming colour, but then it lasts a long while, and the dockyard
is not very generous on the score of paint--or lieutenants of the navy