crews of trained artisans. Hard by the huddled hamlet of log
houses was the row of keel-blocks sloping to the tide. In winter
weather too rough for fishing, when the little farms lay idle,
this Yankee Jack-of-all-trades plied his axe and adze to shape
the timbers, and it was a routine task to peg together a sloop, a
ketch, or a brig, mere cockleshells, in which to fare forth to
London, or Cadiz, or the Windward Islands--some of them not much
larger and far less seaworthy than the lifeboat which hangs at a
liner's davits. Pinching poverty forced him to dispense with the
ornate, top-heavy cabins and forecastles of the foreign
merchantmen, while invention, bred of necessity, molded finer
lines and less clumsy models to weather the risks of a stormy
coast and channels beset with shoals and ledges. The square-rig
did well enough for deepwater voyages, but it was an awkward,
lubberly contrivance for working along shore, and the colonial
Yankee therefore evolved the schooner with her flat fore-and-aft
sails which enabled her to beat to windward and which required
fewer men in the handling.

Dimly but unmistakably these canny seafarers in their rude
beginnings foreshadowed the creation of a merchant marine which
should one day comprise the noblest, swiftest ships driven by the
wind and the finest sailors that ever trod a deck. Even then
these early vessels were conspicuously efficient, carrying
smaller crews than the Dutch or English, paring expenses to a
closer margin, daring to go wherever commerce beckoned in order
to gain a dollar at peril of their skins.

By the end of the seventeenth century more than a thousand
vessels were registered as built in the New England colonies, and