In the records of the Crusades we find mention made of the larger and second class of the Mediterranean ships of sail. Near to Beirut the English espied in the distance a great ship with three tapering masts, strongly built, painted green and yellow, with 1500 men aboard. On being hailed she pretended at first to belong to Richard’s colleague in the Crusade, the King of France, whose flag indeed she was flying, but she was soon discovered to be a Saracen ship, and after some difficulty was rammed and sunk by the English Viking-shaped and smaller vessels. In Hakluyt’s account of this ship she is described as a “carack.” She was probably not very much different from the caravel shown in Fig. 43. The three tapering masts which astounded the Englishmen in their one-masted Viking ships and the tall sides of the carack which gave Richard’s men so much difficulty in assault from their comparatively small vessels of low freeboard, would not fail to bring forth changes in English shipbuilding as soon as internal and external peace was assured and sufficient technical skill had been acquired. This big ship or carack class—call it what you will—marks a determined stand in naval architecture to build real ships as distinct from big boats. From her evolved the vessels that sailed across the Atlantic with Columbus, that carried Elizabethan explorers to all points of the compass, that fought the Armada and the Dutch, and became adapted in time to such wooden walls as the _Victory_ and others, and which are not radically dissimilar from the modern full-rigged ships, though made of iron instead of wood, with steel rigging and a much larger spread of canvas.