all this toil. The
tremendous sails, stretching a hundred feet from boom to gaff could
not have been managed otherwise. Even for trimming sheets or setting
topsails, it was necessary merely to take a turn or two around the drum
of the winch engine and turn the steam valve. The big schooner was the
last word in cheap, efficient transportation by water. In her own sphere
of activity she was as notable an achievement as the Western Ocean
packet or the Cape Horn clipper.

The masters who sailed these extraordinary vessels also changed and had
to learn a new kind of seamanship. They must be very competent men, for
the tests of their skill and readiness were really greater than those
demanded of the deepwater skipper. They drove these great schooners
alongshore winter and summer; across Nantucket Shoals and around Cape
Cod, and their salvation depended on shortening sail ahead of the gale.
Let the wind once blow and the sea get up, and it was almost impossible
to strip the canvas off an unwieldy six-master. The captain's chief fear
was of being blown offshore, of having his vessel run away with him!
Unlike the deep-water man, he preferred running in toward the beach and
letting go his anchors. There he would ride out the storm and hoist sail
when the weather moderated.

These were American shipmasters of the old breed, raised in schooners
as a rule, and adapting themselves to modern conditions. They sailed for
nominal wages and primage, or five per cent of the gross freight paid
the vessel. Before the Great War in Europe, freights were low and the
schooner skippers earned scanty incomes. Then came a world shortage
of tonnage and immediately coastwise freights soared skyward. The big
schooners of the Palmer fleet began to reap fabulous dividends and their
masters shared in the unexpected opulence. Besides their primage they
owned shares in their vessels, a thirty-second or so, and presently
their settlement at the end of a voyage coastwise amounted to an income
of a thousand dollars a month. They earned this money, and the
managing owners cheerfully paid them, for there had been lean years and
uncomplaining service and the sailor had proved himself worthy of his
hire. So tempting was the foreign war trade, that a fleet of them was
sent across the Atlantic until the American Government barred them from
the war zone as too easy a prey for submarine attack. They therefore
returned to the old coastwise route or loaded for South