32 AN AMERICAN FARMER IN ENGLAND. 



with cheering emigrants, hopeful of Australian and Michiganian 

 riches, and yet defiant of sea-sickness,) dropping down with the 

 tide, or jerked along by brave little steam-tugs, each belching 

 from her chimney, long, dense, swelling volumes of smoke ; with 

 hosts of small craft lounging lazily along, under all sorts of sooty 

 canvass. 



These small craft are all painted dead black, and you cannot 

 imagine how clumsy they are. The greater part of them are 

 single masted, as I described the pilot-boat to be. In addition to 

 the mainsail and fore-staysail (an in-board jib), they set a very 

 large gaff topsail, hoisting as a flying sail, with a gaff crossing the 

 topmast (like our men-of-war's boat sails) : their bowsprit is a 

 spar rigging out, like a studding-sail boom, and with this they 

 stretch forth before them an enormous jib, nearly as long in the 

 foot as in the hoist, and of this, too, before the wind, some of them 

 make a beam-sail. If it blows fresh, they can shorten in their 

 bowsprit, and set a smaller jib ; and about the time our sloops 

 would be knotting their second reef and taking their bonnets off, 

 they have their bowsprit all in board, their long topmast struck, 

 and make themselves comfortable under the staysail and a two- 

 reefed mainsail. If it comes on to blow still harder, when ours 

 must trust to a scud, they will still be jumping through it with a 

 little storm staysail, and the mainsail reefed to a triangle. 



These single-masted vessels are called cutters, not sloops, (a 

 proper sloop I did not see in England ;) and our word cutter, 

 wrongly applied to the revenue schooners, is derived from the 

 English term revenue cutter, the armed vessels of the British 

 preventive service, being properly cutters. Cutters frequently 

 carry yards and square sails. "We saw one to-day with square 

 sail, topsail, top-gallant and royal set. I have heard old men 

 say, that when they were boys, our coasting sloops used to have 

 these sails, and before the revolution, our small craft were, not 



