aid on the Fourth of July, 1631--a day destined after the lapse of one
hundred and forty-five years to mean much in the world's calendar. Sixty
tons is not an awe-inspiring register. The pleasure yacht of some
millionaire stock-jobber to-day will be ten times that size, while 20,000
tons has come to be an every-day register for an ocean vessel; but our
pleasure-seeking "Corsairs," and our castellated "City of New York" will
never fill so big a place in history as this little sloop, the size of a
river lighter, launched at Mistick, and straightway dispatched to the
trade with the Dutch at New Amsterdam. Long before her time, however, in
1526, the Spanish adventurer, Lucas Vasquez de Ayllon, losing on the coast
of Florida a brigantine out of the squadron of three ships which formed
his expedition, built a small craft called a gavarra to replace it.

From that early Fourth of July, for more than two hundred years shipyards
multiplied and prospered along the American coast. The Yankees, with their
racial adaptability, which long made them jacks of all trades and good at
all, combined their shipbuilding with other industries, and to the hurt of
neither. Early in 1632, at Richmond Island, off the coast of Maine, was
built what was probably the first regular packet between England and
America. She carried to the old country lumber, fish, furs, oil, and other
colonial products, and brought back guns, ammunition, and liquor--not a
fortunate exchange. Of course meanwhile English, Dutch, and Spanish ships
were trading to the colonies, and every local essay in shipbuilding meant
competition with old and established ship-yards and ship owners. Yet the
industry throve, not only in the considerable yards established at Boston
and other large towns, but in a small way all along the coast. Special
privileges were extended to ship-builders. They were exempt from military
and other public duties. In 1636 the "Desire," a vessel of 120 tons, was
built at Marblehead, the largest to that time. By 1640 the port records of
European ports begin to show the clearings of American-built vessels.

[Illustration: THE KETCH]

In those days of wooden hulls and tapering masts the forests of New
England were the envy of every European monarch ambitious to develop a
navy. It was a time, too, of greater naval activity than the world had
ever seen--though but trivial in comparison with the present expenditures
of Christian nations for guns and floating stee