carpet-tacks, not a great
many, to facilitate the enterprise as already mentioned in the story.
But above all to be taken into account were some years of schooling,
where I studied with diligence Neptune's laws, and these laws I tried
to obey when I sailed overseas; it was worth the while.

And now, without having wearied my friends, I hope, with detailed
scientific accounts, theories, or deductions, I will only say that I
have endeavored to tell just the story of the adventure itself. This,
in my own poor way, having been done, I now moor ship, weather-bitt
cables, and leave the sloop _Spray_, for the present, safe in port.

APPENDIX

[Illustration: Again tied to the old stake at Fairhaven.]

APPENDIX

LINES AND SAIL-PLAN OF THE "SPRAY"

Her pedigree so far as known--The Lines of the _Spray_--Her
self-steering qualities--Sail-plan and steering-gear--An unprecedented
feat--A final word of cheer to would-be navigators.

From a feeling of diffidence toward sailors of great experience, I
refrained, in the preceding chapters as prepared for serial
publication in the "Century Magazine," from entering fully into the
details of the _Spray's_ build, and of the primitive methods employed
to sail her. Having had no yachting experience at all, I had no means
of knowing that the trim vessels seen in our harbors and near the land
could not all do as much, or even more, than the _Spray_, sailing, for
example, on a course with the helm lashed.

I was aware that no other vessel had sailed in this manner around the
globe, but would have been loath to say that another could not do it,
or that many men had not sailed vessels of a certain rig in that
manner as far as they wished to go. I was greatly amused, therefore,
by the flat assertions of an expert that it could not be done.

[Illustration: Plan of the after cabin of the _Spray._]

The _Spray_, as I sailed her, was entirely a new boat, built over from
a sloop which bore the same name, and which, tradition said, had first
served as an oysterman, about a hundred years ago, on the coast of
Delaware. There was no record in the custom-house of where she was
built. She was once owned at Noank, Connecticut, afterward in New
Bedford and when Captain Eben Pierce presented her to me, at the end
of her natural life, she stood, as I have already described, propped
up in a field at Fairhaven. Her lines were supposed to be those of a
North Sea fisherman. In rebuilding timbe