288 THE OCEAN RIVER 



their equipment is maintained in a higher state of perfection; 

 as the American shipping has increased in late years in the 

 proportion of more than twelve per cent per annum while 

 the British shipping have increased in the same period one 

 and a half per cent per annum/' 



Europe's stepchild of the west was coming of age at the 

 beginning of the nineteenth century for two reasons. Her fresh 

 and inventive use of the sea paths of commerce had developed, 

 along with the original codfisheries of colonial days, into a 

 world-carrying trade on fast and efEcjent bottoms that could 

 not be matched elsewhere. And back of this, new seaports 

 like New York, with the Erie Canal leading into the trans- 

 mountain west, and Baltimore, with her roadways and new 

 canal pouring inland wealth through the Alleghenies, brought 

 a fresh supply of truly continental goods like flour and hides 

 that were needed in the world market. No wonder the packet 

 ships of the '30's and '40's, followed by the magnificent China 

 clippers, were a glorious testament to the final conquest of 

 sail over the storms and currents of the Ocean River. 



This is how it came about. The shore fishing off the New 

 England Banks near Cape Cod was carried on at first by 

 crude ketches that did not handle too well. The Chebacco 

 boats — early name of Essex, Mass., where they were built — 

 followed this design for offshore fishing both winter and sum- 

 mer. They were not very big but chunky, with two masts, the 

 foremast well forward. They used square sails that could be 

 snugly trimmed. They were seaworthy and safe but slow. 

 From this design they developed the short-sterned "pinkie" 

 in the early nineteenth century. It had a raking sternpost and 

 an extension of the bulwarks aft raised up as a rest for the 

 boom. A parallel development from the blunt two-masted 

 craft of an earlier day were the square-sterned schooners some- 

 times called ''dog-boddies" and ''heel-tappers." They in turn 

 took on sharper lines, and the raked masts of the Chesapeake 



