OLD-FASHIONED SHIPPING,* THIS is an attractive book on seafaring matters

as they were before the days of iron ships and the introduction of steam. It does not pretend to be a systematic treatise on the con. struction and rig of ships and boats of the past, a subject of immeasurable proportions, but is simply an attempt to record some of the forms, rigs, and ways of shipping which have lately disappeared, or which are threatened with speedy ex- tinction. The book bad its origin in some suggestive and encouraging words from Mr. Ruskin, to whom, in 1884, Mr. Leslie had sent " some sketChes and notes on old ships, boats, sails, and rigging." Mr. Ruskin wrote in reply that "I never saw anything half so delightful or useful as these compared sails so easily explained." All who are interested in the subject of marine stores will, after reading this excellent little book; feel inclined to agree with Mr. Ruskin. Mr. Leslie has always shown himself to be an agreeable writer, and those who remember Sea-Painter's Log or Privateering in the Days of Queen Anne, will turn with feelings of pleasurable anticipation to his latest effort. Not only is our author a very clever marine artist, but he is also an experienced boatman and a practical boat-builder, and in these varied professions he has collected a mass of information about ships and boats which he imparts in a delightful manner, and, illustrates with his own drawings. Of these, there are a hundred and thirty-five scattered through the book. Nearly all of them are outline drawings only, but as such they are admirable ; and whilst fully serving their chief purpose of explaining and illustrating

* ON Sea W00,4, Ways, and Words, in Ow pays of pule uual .110/1r. By Ruburt 0. Lune. Lundim (Ampulla and Hall. 180U.

the letterpress, they afford, in many cases, beautiful examples of marine draughtsmanship.

Sails, Mr. Leslie points out, may roughly be divided into squares and triangles. The Northern nations affected the square sail, which was either slung by the middle of its yard, or else was "a very square-headed lug, like those used by the Deal men in their galley-punts.'" An example of the square sail in its perfect simplicity may be seen in the Norwegian coaster, or " jagt," a type of vessel which has doubtless been handed down unaltered from the time of the Vikings. Very curious it is to note that on Lakes Como and Maggiore the large craft strongly resemble these Norwegian coasters; and isolated on these waters, 600 ft. above sea-level, they probably offer examples of an equally ancient form of vessel. The Southern races favoured the lateen, or latin, sail, which is triangular. It

is the sail of the Indian Ocean, and Mr. Leslie suggests that it travelled west up the Red Sea toward the Mediterranean, by means of the Arab dhow. This great triangular sail admits of many modifications. Its pillion, or yard, may be extended to an enormous length, as in the dahabeeyah of the Nile, whose lofty-peaked sails catch the breeze over the river's bank, an important point quite lost sight of when the boats of our military expedition were fitted with masts and sails fit to carry them through half-a-gale on our coasts, but almost useless in the sheltered waters of the Nile. Mr. Leslie gives a number of interesting drawings, showing how the pinion may be shortened, and the sail divided into a lug, foresail and jib, and yet the general 'form of the great triangular lateen sail fully main- tained. The idea that he thus supports is ingenious, and the resemblance between the Jersey fishing-boat and the coasting lugger of the Adriatic is certainly very remarkable, as may be seen froth the drawings given for comparison. But might it not be urged with equal force that the lug-sails of our own boats, and those of the chassemaree of the coast of Normandy, are modified forms of the square sail of the Northmen, with an added jib ? This surely is by no means improbable. Mr. Leslie himself admits " that everything connected with English boatmanship and boat-bnilding, goes to show the distinctly Viking character of our work as compared with that of French, Spanish, and Italian fishermen." Nearly all our fishing-boats are clench-built, as are ninny other Northern types of boat.

This method of building, by which •.each plank overlaps the one below it, gives great toughness and basket-like stiffness to

a boat, and is lighter and stronger than the carvel-built or

smoother-surface boats of the South, and it has been distinctly handed down to us from Viking times. All English cutters used to be clench-built, and Mr. Leslie mentions a boat-builder at Siamouth who used a hammer "'which in his grandfather's time had driven the nails of a clench-built skip of a hundred tons." Nowadays, the Yorkshire billy-boy is the largest craft in England, it may be in Europe, built in this way.

The spritsail, the object of which is to get the advantage of a lofty peak and retain a short mast, Mr. Leslie considers to be essentially an English or Northern sail. The Thames sailing-barge offers the best example of this. Of this fine class of vessel Mr. Leslie writes with much admiration :-

" Like the wherry, the Thames sailing-barge, in all her details and bright colours, dates back for centuries, and is even to-day a very flourishing old-world craft indeed, which, spite of steam- lighters, tugs, &c., is still found economically well adapted for the carriage, not only of heavy goods like bricks and machinery, but of lofty deck-loads of hay and straw ; while her very light draught makes her one of the handiest of vessels for the winding naviga- tion of the Thames, both above and below London, and enables her to work her way close inshore, and thus take advantage of every tidal eddy in plying to windward against tide, or, as an old pilot would say, to hug a bight and shun a p'int,' when doing so. And this, with the splendid set of her per- fectly wind-tight sails, dressed with fish-oil and ochre, and her power of holding way as she shoots up in . the wind as she goes about, makes •it hard for even a fast-sailing boat to heat one. The sprit of a London barge is certainly the largest and longest spar of its kind I can never see one of these groat sailing-barges, in an upper roach of the Thames or Medway, without feeling admiration and respect for the ingenuity which contrived a vessel that, with a draught of some S ft., can, handled by two men, carry sixty or eighty tons of bricks or coal to where she lies, far up among the fresh-water weeds and lilies, with all that tangle of rope, mast, and brown sail, now flat upon her deck, yet so easily raised or lowered as she passed a bridge; and with scarce any freeboard and hold of the water, yet able with her groat lee-boards to hold a fine wind, or turn in her length, and make long voyages round stormy headlands almost out of sight of land. In truth, if much of the shipping of the Middle Ages was as well-found and fitted for its work as this London barge, of which we have authentic records in pictures of the time of Eliza-

both, naval architecture could not have been far behind that of the fand."

We know little of shipping earlier than the fifteenth century. What Mr. Leslie calls " the feeble impressions of vessels as they saw them," given us in the works of monks and nuns, are simply ridiculous. Everything connected with the service of the sea tends naturally to he conservative, practical seamen always dreading innovation. Until the days of steam, and the adoption of iron and steel in shipbuilding and rigging, advance was made very slowly, and many of the small craft of our coasts had, in all likelihood, altered but little for many hundred years. Hence the French chassemaree, the Beer fishing-boats, the square-rigged coaster of Norway, are, Mr. Leslie thinks, true types of the early ship ; whilst the Flemish bilandre, the Yorkshire billy-boy, and the Dutch galliot have, like the London barge, retained their characteristics materially unchanged for centuries.

In the full-rigged ship we have the best example of the combination of square and triangular sails which is to be found among all kinds of square-rigged craft. Until fifty years ago, when much larger vessels were first built, these ships had not been materially altered in their sails for nearly two centuries. This rig, like most important improvements, came from the

South and East, for the Northern shipmen were behind those of the Mediterranean, whence Henry VIII. obtained Italian shipwrights " to help him build that fleet of small ships, des. tined under his successors, after repelling Spain's attack upon our coasts, to make England mistress of the seas." Mr. Leslie traces the evolution of the full-rigged ship through the " barca," the Genoese carsick, and the polacca, and draws attention to the fact that the mizzen was actually a lateen sail until the eighteenth century. This interesting feature may be noticed in drawings of old ships, and also in the beautiful models in the museum at Greenwich Hospital. Here it may be said that it is a treat to go through this museum with Mr. Leslie's book in hand, and to trace in the splendid models there the changes that have taken place in naval construction during the last two hundred and fifty years. As no catsta' love of this museum seems to be obtainable, Mr. Leslie's book is all the more welcome and useful as a guide and memento..

Nothing nobler or more beautiful than a full-rigged ship has ever been made by the hand of man, and Mr. Leslie writes enthusiastically on the wealth of decoration which was bestowed in these vessels in the days when a ship was really a floating home to her passengers and crew. The figure-heads

both of merchant-ships and men-of-war were often master- pieces of art, and we have some excellent drawings of some examples of these, including that of the 'Fighting T6nairaire,' concerning which historical vessel Mr. Leslie writes as follows

" This vessel, the real 'Fighting T(.1m6raire ' of Turnees great . picture, must not be confused with the older French,briilt ship of the same name, of seventy-four guns, captured by ,Admiral Boscawon in 1759, and sold in 1794. The Fighting T6m6raire' was a ninety-eight-gun ship, built at Chatham, and launched in 1708, and was desperately engaged at Trafalgar, where she followed Nelson's ship, the Victory,' into action, It is curious to find from a model at Greenwich, that the figure-bond of Nelson's favourite was a fac-simile of the head of an older line-of-battle ship of the same name, lost with all hands in the Channel in 1744. At Trafalgar 'the T6m6raire ' was com- manded by Captain Elias, Harvey, with Thomas Kennedy as First Lieutenant; her rigging and spars were almost entirely cut to pieces, the head of her rudder was shot off, and 8 ft. of the star- board side of her lower-deck, abreast the mainmast, was stove in. During the action, the ' Marais° ' was fouled by the French ship 'Fougeux,' and was at once lashed to that ship ; then Kennedy, with James Arseot, mate, Robert Helgate, mid- shipman, twenty men and six marines, boarded the Fougeux,' and in ten minutes she was taken.' I have repeated this noble story because Mr. Thernbie,y, in his Life of Turner,' states that when a title was wanted for an engraving of the Ttcin6raire,' no history of the ship could be found. Turner insisted that the title ought to be the 'Fighting T6m6raire ' (the title ho gave in the Academy catalogue) ; but, owing to the mistake of looking upon this ship as the older French seventy-four, which was broken up when Turner was a child, long before he saw the ninety-eight-gun ship towed to her last berth' in 18J8, this title was not con- sidered historically correct and with great reliuncitrzoily,es:eTuHrnoewr allowed the engraving. to be called The Old TcCrn little was then known of the history of either ship is shown by Mr. Thornbury speaking of the "rchnhaire ' as having been taken from the French at the Battle of the Nile ! The fact being that no ship of that name, French or English, was engaged in that action. Nautical critics of his time also fell foul of Turner for representing his ship as rigged, or jury-rigged, when towed to her last berth.' But from Admiralty records it is now ascertained that, though an unusual thing, this vessel was actually sold to a shipbreaker, with masts, yards, and rigging all standing, in 1836,

just as Turner saw and painted her. The truth is, that Turner, who then spent much of his time upon the Thames in his own boat, and among watermen in riverside resorts, probably knew more of the history of the ship ho painted than most of his nautical critics or Mr. Thornbury."

French naval architecture a century ago was is advance of English. Our crack frigates were either taken from the French, or built on the lines of vessels captured from them. It was our superior seamanship, rather than our superior ships, that brought so many of these French-named vessels into the English Navy. Mr. Leslie gives most interesting chapters on " The Eighteenth-Century Galley," " Old Sea-Lights," " Old Ground-Tackle " (the management of hempen cables is a lost art), The Black X Liner," and other kindred subjects. The earlier poop-lanterns were of immense size, and allowed the use of a number of large candles in each of them. The " ship's chandler " of those days was a very important person, and the term is still in use, although with a widely extended refer- ence to ships' stores generally. Night-signals in those times were difficult and complicated matters. Nor were the ships themselves well lighted, and a night action was a desperate affair, We cannot refrain from the following extract, describing Rodney's action on January 16th, 1780, when he took five and destroyed two out of eleven ships of the line, the remaining four escaping in the dark and storm :- " Imagine, then, the beat of drum to quarters, and what a scene it must have produced on the night in which Rodney engaged that Spanish fleet. The men from below all hurriedly tumbling up one after another, with hammocks hastily rolled together for stowing; the magazines dimly lighted through iron-barred sliding scuttles from certain adjoining dens, known as light-rooms,' by light borrowed from which cartridges are being filled and handed up by powder-monkeys to the fighting decks above, along which are ranged at intervals match-tubs,' with scores in their brims to receive the slow matches used in firing the guns, the lighted ends as they hang in these scores all reflected in the water washing to and fro in the bottom of the match-tubs. Then by lantern- light, hung from beams barely 5 ft. Gin. from the deck, the men are loading the great guns ; and as the order from those on deck, watching the ship's roll, comes to fire, broadside after broadside is poured in upon the Spaniard's passing ships. All this, too, on a lee shore, an enemy's coast, in a gale of wind and dark night ; and the whole pack of twenty ships of the line kept in hand by the will of one man—Rodney (he went to sea from Harrow School at twelve). It was a hard life ; but what a splendid scene of fire-lighted wave, and smoke driven by the gale, must he have overlooked from his lofty poop, as each of his great ships opened her fire upon the enemy that stormy night. Then, while all this is passing above, on the fighting-decks, the surgeons, their mates, and loblolly boys, away below almost [sic] the roar of the battle, are at, work in the cock-pit manufacturing; by unsteady lantern-light, as best they can, in an air heavy with fumes of sulphur and rolling bilge-water, those one-legged and one-armed pensioners, many of whom wore still with us at Greenwich less than forty years ago."

A very interesting glossary of "Old Sea-Words" completes this volume.