She was a wooden vessel, iron still being looked at askance when her keel was laid, and her lines were those of the true sailing-ship, with bows that bulged out almost square from either side of her cutwater, above which her long bowsprit raked the air. The result was that she steamed as a wind-jammer, with her bows delaying her speed by their large surface of resistance; and went better under canvas, with her screw running free. She was barque-rigged, that is to say she carried trysails on her fore and main, below the lovely tower of royals, topgallant sails and top-sails which even her stumpy sticks and too-wide yards could not make ungraceful. Her long thin funnel amidships looked as though it had got there by mistake, and indeed she belonged rather to the class of auxiliary steam than that of auxiliary sail, in spite of the motive with which she had conceived. In fact, her trouble was that in a world where steamships, and iron ones at that, were beginning more and more to snatch at trade, and where the great racing clippers still broke records, the _Spirito Santo_, being neither one thing nor the other, had become a losing proposition. Her owners grudged tar on her sides as sorely as kids of meat to the men, and no shabbier trader than the _Spirito Santo_ nosed her way from Port of Spain to the Golden Gate. Yet she got there all right, bullied and driven, got there on cheap coal and rotten rigging, though her engines seemed as though they must beat a hole in her straining sides and her planks part from sheer exhaustion. She held together as a coherent and reliable whole partly because, with all her lack of grace, she was a sweet ship in a seaway if one knew her idiosyncrasies, partly because her skipper could nurse a ship through anything while the hull stayed afloat. And the _Spirito Santo_ took some handling, for in spite of her wide yards and tonnage to the tune of seven hundred, she only drew fourteen feet and was as tricky as a cat. Her skipper coaxed her and humoured her, bullied her at just the right moment, in short, treated her as though she had been a woman--only Joab Elderkin would not have taken the trouble over any she-thing of flesh and blood.