beginning of ship-building in America. The first vessel of which we have
record was the "Virginia," built at the mouth of the Kennebec River in
1608, to carry home a discontented English colony at Stage Island. She was
a two-master of 30 tons burden. The next American vessel recorded was the
Dutch "yacht" "Onrest," built at New York in 1615. Nowadays sailors define
a yacht as a vessel that carries no cargo but food and champagne, but the
"Onrest" was not a yacht of this type. She was of 16 tons burden, and this
small size explains her description.

The first ship built for commercial purposes in New England was "The
Blessing of the Bay," a sturdy little sloop of 60 tons. Fate surely
designed to give a special significance to this venture, for she was owned
by John Winthrop, the first of New England statesmen, and her keel was
laid on the Fourth of July, 1631--a day destined after the lapse of one
hundred and forty-five years to mean much in the world's calendar. Sixty
tons is not an awe-inspiring register. The pleasure yacht of some
millionaire stock-jobber to-day will be ten times that size, while 20,000
tons has come to be an every-day register for an ocean vessel; but our
pleasure-seeking "Corsairs," and our castellated "City of New York" will
never fill so big a place in history as this little sloop, the size of a
river lighter, launched at Mistick, and straightway dispatched to the
trade with the Dutch at New Amsterdam. Long before her time, however, in
1526, the Spanish adventurer, Lucas Vasquez de Ayllon, losing on the coast
of Florida a brigantine out of the squadron of three ships which formed
his expedition, built a small craft called a gavarra to replace it.

From that early Fourth of July, for more than two hundred years shipyards
multiplied and prospered along the American coast. The Yankees, with their
racial adaptability, which long made them jacks of all trades and good at
all, combined their shipbuilding with other industries, and to the hurt of