598 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 3 8 



illuminate the banks while young officers called "Alligator on the 

 left," "Alligator on the right," or "Low trees!" for the entertainment 

 and safety of the passengers on the cabin roof. 



The survey personnel working from Hampton, Baltimore, and 

 Wilmington turned in excellent surveys of the Chesapeake Bay and 

 Delaware Bay types as well as of the large wooden ships built in 

 great numbers in the j^aids about Wilmington. The surveys of 

 Chesapeake Bay log canoes of many types from both ends of the Bay 

 provide the first complete collection of data for a comprehensive 

 study of this craft. A number of the drawings were reproduced 

 even before the completion of the Survey in Chesapeake Bay Log 

 Canoes, in 2 volumes, by M. V. Brewington (Mariners' Museum, 

 Newport News, Va., 1937). 



The New York office served principally as a draughting office and 

 did good work in finishing drawings from data fed to it by other 

 offices not so well staffed with draughtsmen. An outstanding original 

 contribution was made in the drawings of the lines of the famous 

 clipper ship Sea Witch, designed by John W. Griffiths in 1846. It 

 is the first time that these lines made from an original drawing in the 

 possession of the granddaughter of Griffiths have been available for 

 study. 



New England, as might be expected, was a fertile field where the 

 problem was not to find subjects to survey but to select the most 

 useful evidence to preserve. Two different undertakings there will 

 indicate the scope and caliber of the work. Permission was obtained 

 to secure the fines of half models in a little-known and not readily 

 accessible private collection representing the vessels operated by one 

 family firm during the larger part of the nineteenth century. This 

 collection includes half models of vessels built from 1849 to 1872, 

 represents the work of some 26 different builders, and illustrates the 

 development of the American merchant ship by some of the finest 

 examples of marine architecture of the period. The period was one 

 of the most active and interesting of American merchant marine 

 history and the collection represents vessels of the preclipper or packet 

 types, clippers, and modified clippers, and the later so-called down- 

 easters. 



Contrasted with this was the survey of the Piscataqua River gunda- 

 low, descendant of colonial hay barges and distantly related to the 

 river and lake gun-boats of the Revolutionary War. Alluded to as 

 early as 1650, scowlike vessels propelled by poles were used in the 

 bays and rivers of New England to transport salt, lumber, marsh 

 grass, etc. In the Piscataqua region these barges developed into 

 fully decked, spoon-bow vessels, with lateen sails and leeboards. Of 

 exceedingly shoal draft to go into the shallowest tributaries, they 

 could carry more than 30 tons of cargo, and in the strong tideways of 



