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.
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