130 : The Atlantic 



with ships that could be maneuvered in canals and inland waterways. 

 The Dutch, therefore, developed many different types of hulls and 

 also of sail plans, including the extensive use of fore-and-aft sails. 



The ports of England began to develop trade with the continent 

 including not only the French ports that lay across the Channel on 

 the peninsulas of Normandy and Brittany, but also Bordeaux and the 

 other Biscay ports. In times of peace, English vessels also went to 

 Spain and Portugal. England has never been a wine-producing coun- 

 try and so an important part of the trade with the continent was the 

 carrying of wines to the English ports. In fact, this trade accounted 

 for the first practical measurement of the capacity of a ship. The large 

 barrels in which wine was stored and shipped were called tuns. The 

 vessels were rated according to the number of "tuns" they could 

 carry. At first this was just the number of casks that could be stowed 

 away in the hull of the vessel. Later, there were both "tuns" and "tun- 

 nage" — the latter term being used to describe cargo capacity. After 

 many changes in the use of terms, the word "ton" emerged as a meas- 

 ure of the amount of enclosed space in a vessel that could be used for 

 stowage and a ton was described as sixty cubic feet of space. 



Wooden vessels have a short life and encounter many griefs and 

 accidents. Even in the nineteenth century a vessel that was in opera- 

 tion twenty years after it was built could be regarded as having 

 reached a ripe old age and the life of medieval and Renaissance ves- 

 sels was shorter still. Occasionally an old ship has been found embed- 

 ded in the mud of some harbor and thus preserved, but we should 

 know very little about the history of these ships were it not for the 

 fact that drawings of ships have appeared in the old illuminated man- 

 uscripts, in tapestries, paintings, coins and the seals of governments. 



The local government of a port city was strong and important in 

 the days when national governments were relatively weak and 

 changeable. Each city had its own seal and these seals usually con- 

 sisted of a picture of the ship that was characteristic of that harbor. 

 Thus a twelfth-century seal of the port of La Rochelle on the French 

 coast illustrates the first use of permanent reef points for shortening 

 the area of a sail. There is a seal of 1244 of the city of Elbing in north- 

 ern Germany which shows an early — possibly the first — use of a per- 

 manent rudder hung from the stern of the vessel. The early trading 

 vessels had two masts but in the year 1400 a vessel of the Hanseatic 

 League named the Brindle Cow was built with three masts. 



At all periods of history exploration and colonization have been 

 regarded as marginal and risky enterprises. There have been a few 



