from Portland to Savannah lays more knots over
her stern than a tramp bound out from England to Lisbon. It is a shorter
voyage from Cardiff to Algiers than an American skipper pricks off on
his chart when he takes his steamer from New York to New Orleans or
Galveston. This coastwise trade may lack the romance of the old school
of the square-rigged ship in the Roaring Forties, but it has always
been the more perilous and exacting. Its seamen suffer hardships unknown
elsewhere, for they have to endure winters of intense cold and heavy
gales and they are always in risk of stranding or being driven ashore.

The story of these hardy men is interwoven, for the most part, with the
development of the schooner in size and power. This graceful craft,
so peculiar to its own coast and people, was built for utility and
possessed a simple beauty of its own when under full sail. The schooners
were at first very small because it was believed that large fore-and-aft
sails could not be handled with safety. They were difficult to reef or
lower in a blow until it was discovered that three masts instead of two
made the task much easier. For many years the three-masted schooner was
the most popular kind of American merchant vessel. They clustered in
every Atlantic port and were built in the yards of New England, New
York, New Jersey, and Virginia,--built by the mile, as the saying was,
and sawed off in lengths to suit the owners' pleasure. They carried
the coal, ice, lumber of the whole seaboard and were so economical of
man-power that they earned dividends where steamers or square-rigged
ships would not have paid for themselves.

As soon as a small steam-engine was employed to hoist the sails, it
became possible to launch much larger schooners and to operate them at
a marvelously low cost. Rapidly the four-master gained favor, and then
came the five- and six-masted vessels, gigantic ships of their kind.
Instead of the hundred-ton schooner of a century ago, Hampton Roads
and Boston Harbor saw these great cargo carriers which could stow under
hatches four and five thousand tons of coal, and whose masts soared a
hundred and fifty feet above the deck. Square-rigged ships of the same
capacity would have required crews of a hundred men, but these schooners
were comfortably handled by a company of fifteen all told, only ten of
whom were in the forecastle. There was no need of sweating and hauling
at braces and halliards. The steam-winch undertook