here were none. The sails were hoisted by
hand; the halyards were rove through ordinary ships' blocks with
common patent rollers. Of course the sheets were all belayed aft.

[Illustration: Steering-gear of the _Spray_. The dotted lines are the
ropes used to lash the wheel. In practice the loose ends were belayed,
one over the other, around the top spokes of the wheel.]

The windlass used was in the shape of a winch, or crab, I think it is
called. I had three anchors, weighing forty pounds, one hundred
pounds, and one hundred and eighty pounds respectively. The windlass
and the forty-pound anchor, and the "fiddle-head," or carving, on the
end of the cutwater, belonged to the original _Spray_. The ballast,
concrete cement, was stanchioned down securely. There was no iron or
lead or other weight on the keel.

If I took measurements by rule I did not set them down, and after
sailing even the longest voyage in her I could not tell offhand the
length of her mast, boom, or gaff. I did not know the center of effort
in her sails, except as it hit me in practice at sea, nor did I care a
rope yarn about it. Mathematical calculations, however, are all right
in a good boat, and the _Spray_ could have stood them. She was easily
balanced and easily kept in trim.

Some of the oldest and ablest shipmasters have asked how it was
possible for her to hold a true course before the wind, which was just
what the _Spray_ did for weeks together. One of these gentlemen, a
highly esteemed shipmaster and friend, testified as government expert
in a famous murder trial in Boston, not long since, that a ship would
not hold her course long enough for the steersman to leave the helm to
cut the captain's throat. Ordinarily it would be so. One might say
that with a square-rigged ship it would always be so. But the _Spray_,
at the moment of the tragedy in question, was sailing around the globe
with no one at the helm, except at intervals more or less rare.
However, I may say here that this would have had no bearing on the
murder case in Boston. In all probability Justice laid her hand on the
true rogue. In other words, in the case of a model and rig similar to
that of the tragedy ship, I should myself testify as did the nautical
experts at the trial.

[Illustration: Body-plan of the _Spray_.]

But see the run the _Spray_ made from Thursday Island to the Keeling
Cocos Islands, twenty-seven hundred miles distant, in twenty-three
days, with no one at