64 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
[Jan. 8, 1910. 
The End of the Voyage. 
Entering Penobscot Bay. 
The Second Mate and His Mats. 
DOWN EAST ON A SCHOONER. 
Shooting the Sun. 
The Officers and Crew. 
Out at Sea. 
The Skipper. 
The Start Off Liberty Island. 
Down East on a Schooner. 
Saturday, Aug. 28. —“In five minutes we 
shall be left to our own mercy,” said Capt. 
Saunders of the schooner Northland as the tug 
ahead was rounding Scotland lightship off 
Sandy Hook and preparing to cast the schooner 
adrift and let the wind blow her where it filled. 
From the time that the Northland had left her 
dock at Black Tom (Communipaw) and passed 
by the Bay Ridge grounds of the Crescent 
Athletic Club at 7:30 a. m., then out through 
the Narrows, the crew had been busy getting 
up sail, and as this job on a modern schooner 
is a mechanical one, it is of interest to cite 
how easily the work is done. 
The first signs of canvas raising were when 
the Captain remarked that the engineer was 
anxious to hoist sail. And the next minute as 
i f by magic one of the center sails began to 
rise with not a man of the crew pulling a rope. 
The first and second mates, with whistles in 
their mouths, were watching the rising sail at 
their stations each side of the mast, while 
scattered about the deck were the six sailors, 
two tending turns at the revolving ends of the 
steam hoisting winch, and the others at the 
bits waiting to belay the halliards as the mates 
piped the signal that the canvas was up. 
From one mast to another the crew, with 
the use of a connecting rope fittingly termed 
a messenger, simply caught the throat and peak 
halliards around the winch ends that projected 
from each side of the forward house and the 
vessel’s canvas wings were run up with no 
hand labor more than the fastening of the 
ropes. The jibs were hoisted two at a time, 
the topsails were set and the sheets of all sails 
were trimmed by steam power. The only bit of 
old-fashioned hand-hauling that was needed at 
all was on swaying down one of the topsail 
ropes (the tack), and in hoisting the fifth 
(outer) jib, which work was too light to require 
the power of the engine. During all of the sail 
hoisting the Captain paced quietly the quarter 
deck, watching keenly the actions of the crew, 
but without a word or sign of command save 
a motion to set the last jib. 
Compare this sail raising on a modern 
schooner with the old-time tales of setting sail 
on a square-rigger when yards and not booms 
were the order of the day, and when captain, 
mates and boatswains roared out their orders 
and stood ready to enforce them with belaying 
pins. And when there was a general scurrying 
and hustling about the decks and rigging to 
carry out the many commands which came from 
the poop. 
When all sail had been set on the Northland, 
she was close hauled into the light southerly 
wind that she might fetch by Fire Island and 
then stand eastward in her trip to Stockton. 
Maine. The Northland is a four-masted vessel 
of 2,047 tons register, 300 feet long, 47 feet 
beam, about the same size as the famous 
square-rigged ships of the 8o’s, and, as the 
Captain put it, she was “quite a lump of a 
schooner.” To drive this great hulk of oak 
and pine, with an estimated weight of 4,000 tons 
when light, and 7,000 tons when loaded, the 
vessel carried 25,000 square feet of canvas di¬ 
vided into four lower sails, four topsails and 
five jibs. A wind-catching power sufficient to 
give any engineering mind activity in figuring 
out the driving force of the sails according to 
the different wind pressures and the actual force 
obtained as represented in the speed of the 
vessel. Besides this tremendous wind power 
the Northland was equipped with a 500-horse- 
power gasolene engine, which would drive her 
in calm weather at the rate of four knots an 
hour. Under sails alone she could make as 
high as fourteen knots. At sundown on the 
first day of this trip she had passed Fire Island, 
and as the moon showed her head above the 
waters, the breeze had freshened sufficiently 
from the southwest to promise a fair run for 
the night. 
Latitude 40° 25' N.; longitude 72° 59' W. 
Sunday, Aug. 29.—The weather promise of 
last night was fulfilled, for the southwest air 
current had driven the schooner along until 
this morning she was off Block Island, on the 
Rhode Island coast, and the breeze was now 
developing into a smoking southwester with 
more or less rain. The prospects were so good 
of passing the dangerous Vineyard Shoals by 
daylight that the Captain put on the auxiliary 
power to make sure. In the afternoon the 
schooner had reached Vineyard Sound with a 
twenty-mile wind coming over the quarter, the 
direction of the sailor’s delight. 
The yachts that were beating to the westward 
were under reefed mainsails, but to the North¬ 
land, this twenty-mile breath of Boreas was 
nothing more than a summer zephyr, enough 
to move the schooner along on a trot. On 
sped the ship, and the skipper stood by the 
wheel to direct a change of course every few' 
minutes in order to dodge the shoals that 
abounded on either side of the narrow channel 
way. The sailing so closely the shores of 
Martha’s Vineyard and the Massachusetts coast 
made the scene most attractive, and just before 
sundown the vessel w'as abreast Pollock Rip 
lightship off the southern end of Cape Cod, 
and the Captain prepared to wear ship and head 
from the east to the north. 
The maneuver of wearing or jibing a modern 
schooner in a twenty-mile breeze again empha¬ 
sized the ease with which these big fore and 
afters are handled. The first act was to clew 
up the topsails, that is, gather them into a ball of 
canvas, which was accomplished with the engine 
hauling down on the clew lines. The topsails 
were taken in that they would not catch on the 
mast head stays as the gaffs swung over. The 
next move was to hook the engine onto the 
spanker boom sheet and haul the sail to wind- 
