SAIL AGAIN ?
Snt,—Coal and oil are wasting assets, but ocean winds will blow for ever. Speed maniacs may class sailing-ships with stage-coaches as being too slow ; but real or artificial scarcity of quick-driving fuel has already prevented steam-trawlers from trawling, and has brought back horse-drawn transport in some cases. Small merchant ships are using auxiliary fore- and-aft sails to give them more miles to the gallon. Increased fuel scarcity might bring back square-rigged ocean-voyaging sailing-ships, driven an average hundred miles a day by an outside force that costs nothing, weighs nothing, takes no time to load, and needs no engine- room space that shuts out payload. To use this free force efficiently, modern inventions could much improve in many ways the square-rigged
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