[Illustration: "THE FARMER-BUILDER TOOK HIS PLACE AT THE HELM"]

The cost of the little vessels of colonial times we learn from old letters
and accounts to have averaged four pounds sterling to the ton. Boston,
Charleston, Salem, Ipswich, Salisbury, and Portsmouth were the chief
building places in Massachusetts; New London in Connecticut, and
Providence in Rhode Island. Vessels of a type not seen to-day made up the
greater part of the New England fleet. The ketch, often referred to in
early annals, was a two-master, sometimes rigged with lanteen sails, but
more often with the foremast square-rigged, like a ship's foremast, and
the mainmast like the mizzen of a modern bark, with a square topsail
surmounting a fore-and-aft mainsail. The foremast was set very much
aft--often nearly amidships. The snow was practically a brig, carrying a
fore-and-aft sail on the mainmast, with a square sail directly above it. A
pink was rigged like a schooner, but without a bowsprit or jib. For the
fisheries a multitude of smaller types were constructed--such as the
lugger, the shallop, the sharpie, the bug-eye, the smack. Some of these
survive to the present day, and in many cases the name has passed into
disuse, while the type itself is now and then to be met with on our
coasts.

The importance of ship-building as a factor in the development of New
England did not rest merely upon the use of ships by the Americans alone.
That was a day when international trade was just beginning to be
understood and pushed, and every people wanted ships to carry their goods
to foreign lands and bring back coveted articles in exchange. The New
England vessel seldom made more than two voyages across the Atlantic
without being snapped up by some purchaser beyond seas. The ordinary
course was for the new craft to load with masts or spars, always in
demand, or with fish; set sail for a promising market, dispose of her