efore their
advance brigs, barks, and even the magnificent full-rigged ship itself
gave way, until now a square-rigged ship is an unusual spectacle on the
ocean. The vitality of the schooner is such that it bids fair to survive
both of the crushing blows dealt to old-fashioned marine architecture--the
substitution of metal for wood, and of steam for sails. To both the
schooner adapted itself. Extending its long, slender hull to carry four,
five, and even seven masts, its builders abandoned the stout oak and pine
for molded iron and later steel plates, and when it appeared that the huge
booms, extending the mighty sails, were difficult for an ordinary crew to
handle, one mast, made like the rest of steel, was transformed into a
smokestack--still bearing sails--a donkey engine was installed in the
hold, and the booms went aloft, or the anchor rose to the peak to the tune
of smoky puffing instead of the rhythmical chanty songs of the sailors. So
the modern schooner, a very leviathan of sailing craft, plows the seas,
electric-lighted, steering by steam, a telephone system connecting all
parts of her hull--everything modern about her except her name. Not as
dignified, graceful, and picturesque as the ship perhaps--but she lasts,
while the ship disappears.

But to return to the colonial shipping. Boston soon became one of the
chief building centers, though indeed wherever men were gathered in a
seashore village ships were built. Winthrop, one of the pioneers in the
industry, writes: "The work was hard to accomplish for want of money,
etc., but our shipwrights were content to take such pay as the country
could make," and indeed in the old account books of the day we can read of
very unusual payments made for labor, as shown, for example, in a contract
for building a ship at Newburyport in 1141, by which the owners were bound
to pay "L300 in cash, L300 by orders on good shops in Boston; two-thirds
money; four hundred pounds by orders up the river for tim'r and plank, ten
bbls. flour, 50 pounds weight of loaf sugar, one bagg of cotton wool, one
hund. bushels of corn in the spring; one hhd. of Rum, one hundred weight
of cheese * * * whole am't of price for vessel L3000 lawful money."

By 1642 they were building good-sized vessels at Boston, and the year
following was launched the first full-rigged ship, the "Trial," which went
to Malaga, and brought back "wine, fruit, oil, linen and wool, which was a
great advantage to the countr