cargo, and take freight for England. There she would be sold, her crew
making their way home in other ships, and her purchase money expended in
articles needed in the colonies. This was the ordinary practice, and with
vessels sold abroad so soon after their completion the shipyards must have
been active to have fitted out, as the records show, a fleet of fully 280
vessels for Massachusetts alone by 1718. Before this time, too, the
American shipwrights had made such progress in the mastery of their craft
that they were building ships for the royal navy. The "Falkland," built at
Portsmouth about 1690, and carrying 54 guns, was the earliest of these,
but after her time corvettes, sloops-of-war, and frigates were launched in
New England yards to fight for the king. It was good preparation for
building those that at a later date should fight against him.

Looking back over the long record of American maritime progress, one
cannot but be impressed with the many and important contributions made by
Americans--native or adopted--to marine architecture. To an American
citizen, John Ericsson, the world owes the screw propeller. Americans sent
the first steamship across the ocean--the "Savannah," in 1819. Americans,
engaged in a fratricidal war, invented the ironclad in the "Monitor" and
the "Merrimac," and, demonstrating the value of iron ships for warfare,
sounded the knell of wooden ships for peaceful trade. An American first
demonstrated the commercial possibilities of the steamboat, and if history
denies to Fulton entire precedence with his "Clermont," in 1807, it may
still be claimed for John Fitch, another American, with his imperfect boat
on the Delaware in 1787. But perhaps none of these inventions had more
homely utility than the New England schooner, which had its birth and its
christening at Gloucester in 1713. The story of its naming is one of the
oldest in our marine folk-lore.

"See how she schoons!" cried a bystander, coining a verb to describe the