heart was torn by the suffering of the sailor-captives. English prisons of the eighteenth century were harsh places at best, but an especial malignity seemed to be manifested by guards and attendants toward those unfortunates who happened to be Americans. Some of them were even transported, as if they had been felons, to the poisonous coast of Africa and the remote East Indies. Many others were impressed into British ships-of-war and compelled to fight against their country. To whalemen the alternatives were offered of entering men-of-war or joining British whaleships, and there were several British vessels in the South Seas manned entirely by Americans who had thus escaped the grim necessity of training guns on their brethren.

On the other hand, the French ports were full of English sailors captured by American privateers or cruisers. Franklin endeavored to arrange a regular system of exchange, which would set both Americans and Britons at liberty. He sent a communication to Lord Stormont inquiring whether a hundred prisoners of the sloop-of-war "Reprisal "could not be exchanged for a hundred American captives in the dungeons of Plymouth or Portsmouth. The question was ignored. Franklin sent a second letter. The answer came, "The King's ambassador receives no applications from rebels unless they come to implore His Majesty's mercy." 1 Such was the spirit, a fit heritage of the harsh navigation acts, with which England waged this war on American ships and American seamen. Technically the British position was that the Americans were not ordinary prisoners of war but traitors. That was why the men from our captured ships were kept penniless in their English prisons, hungry and cold, why they were abused by petty tyrants, and denied the privilege of writing letters to acquaint their friends at home of their misfortune.

1 " Benjamin Franklin." By John T. Morse, Jr., in American Statesmen Series.

Franklin's efforts to relieve them were persistent but unsuccessful, although he was aided by several humane Englishmen. Even when Franklin released five hundred British sailors who gave a solemn pledge in writing to free, each, one American prisoner in return, nothing came of it. Hundreds of our sailors died in prison, and others survived with a bitter memory of wrong that gave a keen edge to the subsequent rivalry between the British marine and the ships of the new republic.

"

CHAPTER II

OLD RIGS AND MODELS

The Mayflower" a Typical Seventeenth-Century MerchantmanHer Rig and Dimensions — The Incoming of the Yankee Schooner - Brig, Snow, Brigantine, and Ketch Crude Gear and Cumbering Artillery Skilful Shipwrights of the New World

SAVE for vague tradition and a few rude engravings, there is little knowledge now obtainable as to the models or rigs of the American merchant craft of the years before the Revolution. It is not at all necessary to assume that the vessels in which the trade with Europe or alongshore was conducted a hundred and fifty or two hundred years ago were the misshapen, even grotesque, hulks that have come down to us in the scanty marine pictures of the period. The best artistic genius of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not look to the sea for its inspiration. As for the book illustrators of the old time, if they were as clumsy in drawing ships as they were in portraying men, houses, and other familiar objects, it is not surprising that there is a popular delusion that the art of naval architecture made very little progress between Noah's ark and the "Mayflower."

As a matter of fact, when the Dutch and English settlers first came to the shores of the New World, shipbuilding in the Old World was already a respectable science. It was very quickly and successfully transplanted to America. Out of the vast mass of Pilgrim literature a recent writer, Dr. Azel Ames, in "The Mayflower and her Log," has managed to compile a volume which gives a very good idea of the hull, spars, sails,

equipment, and crew of a typical merchant ship of the early part of the seventeenth century. The "Mayflower" was not technically an American vessel. She was English-built, but her voyages to Plymouth and to Salem have identified her with the American colonies, and she was doubtless just such a ship as the earliest settlers constructed when they came to launch vessels of their own.

The "Mayflower" is known from Bradford's diary to have been of about one hundred and eighty tons' burden, or less than one-half of the tonnage of an ordinary threemasted coasting schooner of the present day. She was undoubtedly from ninety to one hundred feet long, and twenty-four or twenty-five feet wide. Her three masts carried, on the fore and main, two square sails, one above another, a lower sail, or course, and a topsail, and on the mizzen a triangular lateen sail, instead of the gaff-spanker and square topsail, which did not come into general use on a ship's third and smallest mast for more than a century afterward. On her steep bowsprit the " Mayflower" spread not the familiar jibs, but probably a spritsail, hung from a spritsail yard. The spritsail and the lateen sail were crude contrivances, but in other respects the "Mayflower" was rigged substantially as is a ship or bark of to-day, save that the square canvas on each mast was divided into only two great and rather unwieldy sails, instead of being split up into lower sail, topsail, topgallantsail and royal. The old mariners had not learned that this subdivision meant a lessened weight aloft and a gain in time and safety.

As to her hull, the "Mayflower" must have been undeniably an awkward craft, judged by our modern standards. And yet it must not be forgotten that she made her return passage from Plymouth to London in ballast, urged by the "brave west winds" in thirty-one days, which would be a satisfactory voyage now for a steel two-thousand-ton skysail-yarder. It is clear that how

ever ungainly the "Mayflower" may have seemed above the water-line, her under-water body was draughted by a man who knew his trade. One vicious characteristic of these old vessels was the proneness of their builders to erect a steep cabin at one end and an almost equally steep forecastlewell named - at the other, to the impairment always of the symmetry of the ship and often of her strength and seaworthiness. In order to avoid lifting the centre of gravity and thus making a vessel "crank," these towering upper works were constructed of flimsy material, which strained and opened in a seaway, and made cabin and forecastle uninhabitable, even if the stout body of the ship held well together. Thus Bradford writes of the "Mayflower": "They met with many contrary winds and fierce storms, with which their ship was shrewdly shaken and her upper works made very leaky." It was these upper works which gave the hundred-and-eighty-ton "Mayflower" the height above water of a modern ship of a thousand tons. It was the lofty range of cabins which explains how so small a craft could carry a hundred passengers.

But of course the height of the old-fashioned cabins and forecastle and the resistance which they offered proved a great drag in strong, contrary winds. Thus the "Mayflower," sailing from England on Sept. 6, 1620, made such wretched work of beating against the prevalent westerly gales that she did not sight Cape Cod until November 10, a weary nine weeks' passage. The practical wit of Yankee builders very early began to scale down the unsightly upper works with which oldtime ships were overloaded. Such things as state cabins and storied forecastles did not accord with the shrewd spirit of a pioneer democracy. It was very soon discovered that the colonial ship, stripped of this tophamper, not only sailed faster but carried sail more stiffly and kept cargo and passengers drier than the tall-pooped vessels of Europe.