Fore-and-A£t : 285 



With the Mary as a start the British began building a number of 

 pleasure vessels. In a few years the king ordered from Peter Pet,* a 

 member of a great family which enjoyed a great reputation as design- 

 ers and builders of ships, a yacht called the Jenny, while Christopher 

 Pet constructed another vessel called the Anne for the Duke of 

 York. These two ships were sailed by their owners in a royal race 

 won by the king. 



Dutch influence in the design and management of ships reached 

 the American continent through several different channels. Most 

 roundabout and difficult to demonstrate is the fact that by the time 

 the English colonies were well established English ships owed some- 

 thing to the contacts that had grown up between England and Hol- 

 land, both through trade and desire of peace and through warfare. 

 The American colonists, when they began to build vessels, naturally 

 followed English models and utilized all they could of the maritime 

 knowledge of the country. 



One of the first ships of any importance constructed in the present 

 territory of the United States was a Dutch vessel, built by Captain 

 Adrian Block (also spelled Adrien Blok) on the banks of the East 

 River in Manhattan. Captain Block had sailed to America in a ship 

 called the Tyger which had been lost. Onrust, or as we would say, 

 Restless, which he built as a replacement, had a thirty-eight-foot keel, 

 was forty-four feet six inches overall and had an eleven-foot beam. 

 This was the ship in which Block sailed to the island that bears his 

 name and in which he explored the shores of Connecticut, Narra- 

 gansett Bay and the Cape Cod area. She was the forerunner of a con- 

 siderable shipbuilding industry developed by the Dutch for coast- 

 wise service between their various settlements and for use along the 

 Hudson River to Fort Orange or Albany; in particular, a sloop de- 

 veloped for use on the Hudson which had a long and useful life. As 

 late as 1825 a whole series of views of the river shows the presence 

 of ships of this type throughout its navigable course, with the Dutch 

 influence clearly discernible in the form of the hull and in the rig, 

 the mainsail having a particularly narrow head attached to a short 

 gaff. 



This development of a particular type of vessel on the Hudson 

 River was not exceptional. On the contrary, it was quite character- 

 istic of most of the important rivers and sections of the coast. Each 

 of these developed, for its own use and particular conditions, a vessel 



* or Pett, usage varies. 



