ffin's 'Farthest North,'
reached in 1616, was latitude 77 deg. 45'. This remained an unbroken
record for two hundred and thirty-six years. Champlain's own voyage
from Honfleur to Tadoussac in eighteen days broke all previous records,
remained itself unbroken for a century, and would be a credit to a
sailing ship to-day. His vessel was the _Don de Dieu_, of which he
left no exact description, but which was easily reproduced for the
tercentenary of Quebec in 1908 from the corresponding French merchant
vessels of her day. She was about a hundred tons and could be handled
by a crew of twenty. The nearest modern equivalent of her rig is that
of a barque, though she carried a little square sail under her bowsprit
and had no jibs, while her spanker had a most lateenish look. Her
mainsail had a good hoist and spread. She had three masts and six
sails altogether. The masts were 'pole,' that is, all of one piece.
The tallest was seventy-three feet from step to truck, that is, from
where the mast is stepped in over the keel to the disc that caps its
top. She carried stone ballast; her rudder was worked by a tiller,
with the help of a simple rope tackle to take the strain; and the poop
contained three cabins.

[Illustration: CHAMPLAIN'S SHIP, The _DON DE DIEU_. From the mdoel at
the Quebec Tercentenary]

{56}

Not long after the death of Champlain (1635) there was a world-wide
advance in shipbuilding. Perhaps it would not be too much to say that
the modern school of wooden sailing-ship designers began with Phineas
Pett, who was one of a family that served England well for nearly two
hundred years. He designed the _Sovereign of the Seas_, which brought
English workmanship well to the front in the reign of Charles I. She
surpassed all records, with a total depth from keel to lanthorn of
seventy-six feet, which exceeds the centre line, from keel to captain's
bridge, of modern 'fliers' with nearly twenty times her tonnage. The
Cromwellian period also gave birth to a most effective fleet, which in
its turn was succeeded by the British fleets that won the Second
Hundred Years' War with France and decided the destiny of Canada. This
long war, or series of wars, begun against Louis XIV in the seventeenth
century, only ended with the fall of Napoleon at Waterloo. La Hogue in
1692, Quebec in 1759, and Trafalgar in 1805 were three of the great
deciding crises. La Hogue and Trafalgar were purely naval; while
Quebec was the