[Illustration: FIG. 64. A DUTCH MAN-OF-WAR OF ABOUT THE END OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.] The illustration in Fig. 64 is of a model of a Dutch man-of-war now in the Royal United Service Museum, Whitehall. It is supposed to be of contemporary date, belonging roughly to the period of Louis XIV’s. rule, 1661-1715. The rigging may be relied upon, but the model is too broad in proportion to her length. The guns are also exaggerated in size, but for all that it may serve to assist the reader in visualising the ships of what was so important a maritime Power. The notable characteristic of the Dutch and French craft of the seventeenth century as opposed to the English was that the two former had their sterns terminating squarely, while the English rounded the lines of the stern above water more. This foreign characteristic of the square stern is everywhere noticeable in the contemporary paintings and engravings of Holland. Over and over again we see the overhanging stern gallery, with the transom stern below, going in (so to speak), for the gallery above to project out. We find it in the earliest yachts of Holland, in the Dutch East Indiamen as well as the ships of the line. The reader will recollect at an earlier period we referred to the “tumble-home” which had become a new phase in naval architecture consequent on the introduction of cannon on board ship. This during the ensuing two centuries had been overdone, so that the upper deck bore a ridiculously narrow proportion to the width of the ship at the water-line, but the Dutch in the height of their naval knowledge were the first of the nations to relinquish it. It is to the Dutch of the last part of the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth centuries that we owe the beginnings of the fore-and-aft rig and of yachting as we mentioned earlier. But in order that our attention may not be distracted from the history of the squaresail, it will be more convenient to deal with the development of the smaller craft in Chapter IX.