In the beginning of the seventeenth century one Peter Jansen, a Dutch merchant, ordered a ship to be built for him on the lines of Noah’s ark. Of course, as this vessel was designed to contain only a few animals, and those chiefly men, her size was not that of her famous prototype. The Dutchman’s orders were that the vessel should exactly answer proportionally to the dimensions of the fabric that was stranded on Ararat. Jansen flourished in pre-scientific times; but this notion of his went so far beyond the most extravagant credulities of the period that the scheme was viewed as a mere fanatical whim of a Mennonite, to which sect our friend belonged. He persevered, however, in spite of being heartily jeered at, more particularly by the seafaring folk who assembled to view the shipwrights at work; but when the vessel was eventually launched it was discovered that ships built in this manner were, in times of peace, commodious above all others, because they would convey one-third more cargo than other holds, and yet be navigated by the same number of hands which other forecastles carried. Those who would hear more of this ark may consult—if they can find it—the “Bibliotheca Biblia,” vol. i.^[62]

That Jansen erred, according to the light of his times, who shall declare? Sir Thomas Browne, who lived much about that period, would prove—I do not say he does—that Noah’s ark was the swiftest vessel that ever drove a keel through a surge—nimbler than the Baltimore clippers, the Mediterranean fruiters, the slavers of the Spanish main; in fact, very nearly as fast as the Atlantic expresses which storm through the ocean between the Mersey and New York. I find in the “Extracts from Commonplace Books” in Browne’s works this passage: “Whether Noah might not be the first man that compassed the globe? Since, if the flood covered the whole earth, and no lands appeared to hinder the current, he must be carried with the wind and current according to the sun, and so in the space of the deluge might near make the tour of the globe. And since if there were no continent of America, and all that tract a sea, a ship setting out from Africa without other help would at last fall upon some part of India or China.” This is as much as to say that Noah sailed round the world in forty days! Smart work when you consider that it takes a twelve-knot mail-boat thirty-seven days to steam to New Zealand.

It cannot, however, be concluded from her dimensions that, even though blown along by a gale of wind right over her stern, the ark equalled the speed of a Union or Royal Mail steamer. Sir Walter Raleigh, in his “History of the World,” a mine of exquisite thought and of sweet and noble expression, devotes a page or two to consideration of the size and form of Noah’s ship; and what a man who was as great a sailor as he was poet, philosopher, and soldier, and who lived near to Jansen’s time, has to say of her must be worth hearing in this particular connection. He is unable to point to the place where the ark was “framed,” but suspects it was near the Caucasus where grew “goodly cedars.” “It was thought to have a flat bottom, and a crested roof, and the wood gopher of which it was made was very probably cedar, being light, easy to cut, sweet, and lasting.” The pitch he thinks was bitumen. Her length was six hundred feet, the breadth one hundred feet, and the depth sixty feet. He calculates her internal capacity in cubical cubits, four hundred and fifty thousand, “which is sufficient for an hundred kind of beasts and their meat in the lower and second stories, and two hundred and eighty fowls, with Noah and his family, in the third.” So far as beam and length go she was considerably narrower than the ships in Jansen’s day, which were commonly about three and a half times as long as they were broad. But what of her bows? Had she a run? Had she the flat bottom of a barge or the moulded depth of the clipper? But it matters not; Jansen’s inspiration found no copyists; his fabric has floated solitarily down to us as a strange ship; and now that we have viewed her she may brace round her top-sail yard again and proceed on her phantom course.

I do not think, however, that we can find much title in our own marine performances to justify laughter at the old folks’ ships. Is it conceivable that ugly as Jansen’s Noah’s ark must have been she would not have looked comely alongside some of the metal horrors of recent and contemporary invention? Something of the indefinable charm you find in the simpering shepherds and shepherdesses of the crockery age of literature, in Meliboeus piping to the skipping lambkins on an oaten pipe and Daphne toying with a lover’s true-knot under some spreading shade, enters into those vanished ships with their black or yellow sides, their rows of little guns, their gay and fluttering finery of masthead streamers, ancients, pennons, and the like. I know more than one war ship now afloat that you might “dress” from stem to pole-masthead and overboard aft, turn her into a rainbow of bunting, without achieving more than the accentuation of her ugliness. No! it is not for us, forsooth, to talk of taste, smile as we may at the illustrations of our grandsires’ sturdy struggles towards that imperial fruition in which we, their inheritors, find our most reasonable and sovereign boast.

I find a pretty fancy, and an audacious one, too, in an account of a strange ship in 1769. In that year there arrived at Naples from Palermo a small vessel, whose length of keel was twelve feet. She was ship-rigged—that is to say, she had three masts, with all the yards that ships then carried across, and her ship’s company was composed of one man only. She is described as being the model of a man-of-war of sixty guns. Her builder, who navigated her, was a carpenter; he had worked in an Italian arsenal, then went to Trieste, where he built his ship, embarked in her with two men for Messina, then proceeded alone to Palermo and Naples to present his wonderful model to the King. She is probably the only full-rigged model of a ship actually sailed by a man in her from one port to another on record. Figure the blue Italian waters and this lovely toy, with the sunshine flashing up its canvas into satin, blandly leaning over from the fragrant breeze, and slipping through the liquid sapphire with a little curl of silver at her stem!

The model craft exercises a fascination that is felt beyond boyhood. Many a long hour have I spent on the shores of the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens, watching the tiny fleets there till imagination has been transported by the charming miniature imagery into the heart of a horizon capacious enough to hold some scores of Londons with their metropolitan suburbs. This diversion seems to have delighted the fastidious and elegant taste of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who, in his “American Note Books,” speaks of frequent visits to the “Frog Pond” merely to see the boys sail their ships. “There is a full-rigged man-of-war,” he says, “with, I believe, every spar, rope, and sail, that sometimes makes its appearance; and when on a voyage across the pond it so identically resembles a great ship, except in size, that it has the effect of a picture. All its motions—its tossing up and down on the small waves, and its sinking and rising in a calm swell, its heeling to the breeze—the whole effect, in short, is that of a real ship at sea; while, moreover, there is something that kindles the imagination more than the reality would do.” I have a note of another beautiful model constructed so long ago as 1767. It was a little ship of sixty-four guns, completely rigged—four inches long! The materials of which it was composed were gold, silver, steel, brass, copper, ivory, ebony, and hair. The hull, masts, yards, and booms were of ivory; the guns, blocks, anchors, and dead-eyes silver; the colours—the Royal Standard, the Admiralty and union flags, the jack and ensign—were of ivory. The sixty-four guns weighed fifty grains. The scale was forty feet to one inch. His Royal Highness the Duke of York was so delighted with its singular minuteness and the exquisite delicacy of its workmanship, that he recommended it to the attention of his Majesty, who was graciously pleased to place it in his cabinet of curiosities. The artist was an officer in the navy, and I hope the royal admiration was accompanied by recognition of the sailor’s genius.

Herman Melville, in “Redburn,” speaks of an old-fashioned glass ship, about eighteen inches long, of French manufacture. “Every bit of it was glass, and that was a great wonder of itself; because the masts, yards, and ropes were made to exactly resemble the corresponding parts of a real vessel that could go to sea. She carried two tiers of black guns all along her two decks; and often I used to try to peep in at the portholes to see what else was inside.... Not to speak of the tall masts and yards and rigging of this famous ship, among whose mazes of spun glass I used to rove in imagination till I grew dizzy at the main truck, I will only make mention of the people on board of her. They, too, were all of glass, as beautiful little glass sailors as anybody ever saw, with hats and shoes on, just like living men, and curious blue jackets with a sort of ruffle round the bottom. Four or five of these sailors were very nimble little chaps, and were mounting up the rigging with very long strides; but for all that, they never gained a single inch in the year, as I can take my oath. Another sailor was sitting astride of the spanker-boom, with his arms over his head, but I never could find out what that was for; a second was in the foretop with a coil of glass rigging over his shoulder; the cook with a glass axe was splitting wood near the fore hatch; the steward in a glass apron was hurrying towards the cabin with a plate of glass pudding; and a glass dog with a red mouth was barking at him; whilst the captain in a glass cap was smoking a glass cigar on the quarter-deck.”

Among strange vessels may be classed fabrics—no matter of what size—of copper, leather, canvas, cloth, and (for the age) iron. The ancient Briton’s coracle was the leather boat. This is Rees’ presumption, in his “Beauties of South Wales,” from the circumstance of the fishermen in certain Welsh rivers using a corwg, or coracle, “which,” says he, “is probably coeval with the earliest population of the island.” The form of the coracle was nearly oval, its length five feet, and its breadth four. The frame was formed of split rods, plaited like basket-work and covered with raw hide. It was a portable boat, and its owner carried it on his back when he wished to convey it to or from his home. How far iron, as a material for the construction of ships, can be traced back I do not know. Grantham, a sound authority, gets no further than 1787. I can beat that record by ten years. In the “Annual Register” for 1777, under the month of June, I find, “A new pleasure-boat, constructed of sheet-iron, was lately launched into the river Foss, in Yorkshire. She is twelve feet long, sailed with fifteen persons, and is so light that two men may carry her.” Clearly a strange ship to those who beheld her! Twelve years later another strange craft was sent afloat: “A very curious experiment was tried—that of proving how far an entire copper vessel would answer the purpose of sailing. Mr. Williams, a joint proprietor of the great copper mines, was the projector, and a very numerous party attended the experiment. It was launched at Deptford, and promises to answer every purpose for which it was designed. Should it do so entirely it will prove a very singular advantage to the British navy.” The joint proprietor’s patriotic scheme apparently bore no fruit. What would the ship-builder of this day think of copper vessels?

A cheaper experiment in strange craft was adventured in the direction of cloth. What particular merit this boat had is not stated. It was the invention of a Frenchman named Desquinemara. The fabric was said to be impermeable to air and water. All that I can learn of this boat is, the experiments proved so successful that an account of them was sent to the class of the Physical and Mathematical Sciences of the Institute, in order that a decision should be come at as to the useful purposes to which this novel invention was applicable. After which this cloth boat, sliding past on Time’s current, slips into blackness and disappears. Of a strange vessel made of canvas I find a tolerably full account. She was the invention of a certain Colonel Brown, whose brother, a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, accompanied by thirty persons, crossed the Thames in her, and passed through one of the arches of Westminster Bridge, in the view of many thousands of spectators. She is described as a military batteau made of prepared canvas, so as to be impervious to water. Her length was seventeen feet, width five feet, and depth three feet, and when loaded with thirty people she drew only three inches. She was capable of carrying one hundred soldiers with arms, accoutrements, and baggage, fifty of them sitting and fifty lying. She weighed sixty pounds, and could be taken to pieces and put together again in three minutes. I do not learn that this strange vessel was ever employed.^[63]

Another account of a strange craft I find in 1793. This was a vessel intended to “sail” against wind and tide, and on trial she managed to do it at the rate of four knots an hour. She was fitted with a pump of a diameter of two feet, worked by a steam engine, by means of which a stream of water was driven through the keel. The impetus of the water forced through the square channel against the exterior water acted as an impelling power. This idea has been again and again revived, possibly by some who considered their scheme as surprisingly novel and revolutionary.

One of the strangest vessels which ever floated was the paddle-wheel boat of 1472. A sketch of one form of this boat^[64] exhibits a periagua-shaped vessel, sharp at both ends, and fitted with five sets of paddles fitted to beams, which work in orifices like tholes. A somewhat similar boat is heard of in 1681, in which year a vessel, fitted with revolving oars or paddles, distanced the King’s barge, leaving her far astern, though she was manned by sixteen rowers. An ingenious gentleman, in the Middle Ages, invented a mode of propulsion by erecting an immense bellows in the stern of a vessel. He thought that, when the wind dropped, there was nothing to do but fill his sails with the bellows, and so blow himself along his course. He hardly foresaw that the bellows and the sails would act against each other, and leave the ship motionless; or worse yet, in a calm, give her a small sternway. Jonathan Hull’s ship of 1736 would also be reckoned by his contemporaries a strange vessel. She was, indeed, the first steamer that ever blackened the surface of water with the reflection of the smoke of coal. His patent was for “a machine for carrying ships and vessels out of or into any harbour or river against wind and tide, or in a calm.” Hull’s was a stern-wheel boat, and adaptation of his invention of late years has familiarized to us an object that would have been viewed with wonder even a quarter of a century since.

An illustrated history of shipbuilding would furnish the student with a series of plates of objects quite as astonishing for variety of shapes and freaks of taste as anything to be found in pictures in books of zoology and the physiology of fishes. The summit of perfection in form, beauty, in an almost spirit-like interpretation of the poetry of the sea, moulded and embodied by the hand of the shipwright and the rigger, was reached in some of the frigates afloat at the period of the introduction of iron. Grace and loveliness are now perpetuated by the yacht builder. Some of the iron sailing ships are, it must be admitted, framed with much elegance of judgment. But the vicious obligations of economy, supplemented by the severe conditions which now enter into naval arming, have forced us into many hideous forms, and render this age in the matter of marine taste the heaviest sinner of all the centuries. The uncouthness of the junk, the clumsiness of the galliot, the absurd freeboard, crowning poops, square bows, and tower-like rigs of the ships of olden times are admitted features; but all staring qualities were sobered by an atmosphere of quaintness, a complexion of romance, by elements of colour and furniture and apparel, which did somehow greatly help the imagination into ideal surveys and considerations. But is there anything to idealize in the leviathan mass of twelve-inch plates that floats past like a gasworks gone adrift? And what of poetry may we find in a metal tube that shows nothing above water but a short polemast and a conning-tower?