burned while lying at Manhattan Island.
This vessel, thirty-eight feet long and of eleven feet beam, was
employed for several years in exploring the Atlantic coast.

With the advent of the nineteenth century a new ideal in naval
architecture arose, that of the ship moved by steam-power instead of
wind-power, and fitted to combat with the seas alike in storm and calm,
with little heed as to whether the wind was fair or foul. The steamship
appeared, and grew in size and power until such giants of the wave as
the Titanic and Olympic were set afloat. To the development of this
modern class of ships our attention must now be turned.

As the reckless cowboy of the West is fast becoming a thing of the past,
so is the daring seaman of fame and story. In his place is coming a
class of men miscalled sailors, who never reefed a sail or coiled a
cable, who do not know how to launch a life-boat or pull an oar, and
in whose career we meet the ridiculous episode of the life-boats of the
Titanic, where women were obliged to take the oars from their hands and
row the boats. Thus has the old-time hero of the waves been transformed
into one fitted to serve as a clown of the vaudeville stage.

The advent of steam navigation came early in the nineteenth century,
though interesting steps in this direction were taken earlier. No sooner
was the steam-engine developed than men began to speculate on it as a
moving power on sea and land. Early among these were several Americans,
Oliver Evans, one of the first to project steam railway travel, and
James Rumsey and John Fitch, steamboat inventors of early date. There
were several experimenters in Europe also, but the first to produce a
practical steamboat was Robert Fulton, a native of Pennsylvania, whose
successful boat; the Clermont, made its maiden trip up the Hudson in
1807. A crude affair was the Clermont, with a top speed of about seven
miles an hour; but it was the dwarf from which the giant steamers of
to-day have grown.

Boats of this type quickly made their way over the American rivers and
before 1820 regular lines of steamboats were running between England and
Ireland. In 1817 James Watt, the inventor of the practical steam-engine,
crossed in a steamer from England to Belgium. But these short voyages
were far surpassed by an American enterprise, that of the first ocean
steamship, the Savannah, which crossed the Atlantic from Savannah to
Liverpool in 1819.

Twelve years passed before