FISHERMEN'S OWN BOOK. 253 



II, Emperor of Russia, in his visit to Finland, after leaving Helsingfors, 

 went to the little town of Borgo, and laid with great ceremony the first stone 

 of a monument to the memory of the fisherman Beukels, who died in 1397, 

 in his native village, where his tomb was once visited by the Emperor 

 Charles V; and Peter the Great, in recognition of the importance of his 

 discovery, gave a pension to one of his descendants. 



A Valuable Nautical Contrivance. — An extremely simple but inval- 

 uable aid to navigation has recently been proposed by an experienced Brit- 

 ish master mariner, by which he is confident the largest steamship in an 

 ocean gale can be hove to with safety. His contrivance, as described in the 

 London " Shipping Gazette," is on the drogue system, and the advantages 

 he has experienced from it in emergency are "too great to express." His 

 sea anchor or drogue is made of stout canvas in the shape of a bag, with a 

 strong wire hoop at the top, to which the lanyard is fastened — the latter 

 being shackled to a spar thirty feet long. The spar, fitted with three iron 

 bands, is kept square by two wire guys, and fastened to a riding hawser 

 made of wire or manila. The drogue, when in use, is about four fathoms 

 beneath the surface of the agitated sea, thus escaping its force, and when 

 full of water proves a great resistance, keeping the ship's head to the sea 

 when driving to leeward in a heavy gale. This simple, cheap and quickly 

 improvised contrivance would undoubtedly be useful to vessels thrown on 

 their beam ends, or experiencing that ofttimes fatal accident — shifting of the 

 cargo in the presence of a severe storm. It would also, in many cases, by 

 enabling a disabled steamer to avoid drifting out of her course, or helping 

 her to keep out of the central path of an advancing cyclone, prove a timely 

 safeguard to life and property at sea. 



A Novel Experiment has been tried at the port of Peterhead in Scot- 

 land, where the waves of the North Sea have an unchecked sweep from the 

 wild coast of Norway, and break so furiously at the harbor mouth that warn- 

 ing signals are given against attempting to enter the harbor. A wooden 

 shed was erected and iron and lead piping carried down the beach a dis- 

 tance of nearly one hundred yards. Then a strong gutta-percha pipe with 

 three openings seventy-five yards apart was laid across the entrance to the 

 harbor. A force pump in the shed supplies this tubing with oil to allay the 

 waves. Recently the waves were running twenty feet high at the mouth of 

 Peterhead harbor, and the pump was put at work. The oil was forced 

 through the pipes and out of the valves. It spread over the bottom, rose to 

 the top of the water, and in a short time the seething foam was gone. Not 

 a white cap remained within reach of the calming fluid. Although the swell 

 continued, the surface of the sea was quite smooth, so that " a small boat 



