62 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
[JAN. 13, 1906. 



speed, seaworthiness, carrying capacity and 
beauty—nautical beauty; and what the fleet of 
clippers turned out from East Boston and New- 
buryport and the Kennebec was to the seafaring 
world of 1850, the huge four, five and six- 
masters turned out of the Maine shipyards are 
to-day. Not fitted to go off-shore they go 
along the coast; rigged in the simplest manner 
with steam to do the heavy work, they require 
but few sailors; a five-master of 2,000 tons 
would carry but five sailors, possibly six in 
winter; a ship of- that size would have twenty or 
twenty-five men. Modeled so as to sail without 
ballast “light” as the term is, they go down the 
coast with swept holds standing up under the 
westerly gales and “‘holding” the coast steamers 
all day in friendly brushes. Protected by the 
wise law which prohibits foreign vessels from 
participating in the coastwise business they have 
no competition outside of their own country 
(which is enough) and sometimes pay 15 or 20 
per cent. net, and, manned by as hardy and 
daring a set of skippers as ever walked, they 
brave summer’s heat and winter’s cold from the 
Gulf of Maine to the Gulf of Mexico, and 
furnish a field which some time may have a 
Dana to make it known. 
Our ships that used to round the capes and 
VIGILANT, RECENTLY PURCHASED 
enter distant seas have almost disappeared; a 
few, cut down into barges, are still towed 
around by the nose up and down the coast, 
until some winter gale catches them off Cape 
Cod or the Jersey beaches and sends them to 
the bottom with their wretched crews; but the 
genius which built the fastest clippers in the 
world has not gone; the immense coasting 
schooners of to-day stand as a testimonial to 
the skill which made New England shipyards 
famous the world over. No more does one see 
at our docks the maze of masts and rigging 
which was so picturesque in the square-rigged 
days; no longer snowy decks and bright work 
and nice work on the rigging which showed the 
sailor’s skill; no more the mystic cargoes from 
far-away climes, bringing with them the scent 
of spices and the odor of the tropics; no more 
logs of gales off the “Horn,” calms in the 
doldrums or long glorious runs of weeks with- 
out starting sheet or brace, for, far out at the 
end of a long unoccupied pier one immense 
steamship under a foreign flag represents a 
half dozen ships of a generation ago whose 
cargo she carries in a third of the time. And in 
place of a crew of splicers is a rabble of under- 
sized Coolies, Lascars and Greeks, living on 
rice and clad in a shirt. In place of yarns of 
smi, 

seamanship in working ship through thousands 
of miles of ocean is the monotonous story of 
the thump of the engines, so many revolutions 
to the mile; and instead of the weatherbeaten, 
grizzled, bluff, hearty skipper, to whom you 
look as the man that brought her in there, is 
a pale, flabby man without a mark of the sea 
about him, except the uniform he wears—the 
engineer. 
But our coasting schooners have a story of 
their own. Yarns of Cape Cod and the shoals 
and Hatteras, the Florida straits and the 
Gulf of Mexico, instead of the China Sea and 
the South Pacific, are still full of romance and 
peril and adventure. And to handle one of these 
big schooners on this coast in all kinds of 
weather takes nerve and skill. The list of dis- 
asters in the marine columns of the daily papers 
tells its story; winter lengthens the list fright- 
fully, and a few lines which never reach the eyes 
of the casual reader may tell of a struggle com- 
pared with which the scare-head on the first 
page is a trifle. 
The . American coasting fleet covers the 
ground from Nova Scotia to Central America. 
The largest and most costly vessels are en- 
gaged in the coal trade between the so-called 
“coal ports’ and the northern cities of New 
BY WILLIAM E. ISELIN, N. Y. Y. C. 
