The illustration in Fig. 69 represents a corvette of about the year 1780. Corvettes were vessels having far less freeboard and without the high quarter-deck. They were ship-rigged and carried less than twenty guns. Those carried on the ship before us would be six-pounders. Her crew would number 125, her tonnage would be 340, her length on the gun-deck, 101 feet, length of keel, 85·5 feet, beam 28 feet, depth of hold 12·5 feet. As to her canvas carried, the triangular headsails with the two spritsails will be seen. In addition to her courses, she carries topsails, topgallants, and royals on the fore and main masts. The converted lateen has already been referred to, but it should be noticed that while she has on the mizzen a topsail, topgallant and royal, and also a cross-jack yard, yet no sail is set on the latter, as it is to-day on a full-rigged ship. This yard had been in use since the beginning of the seventeenth century, and it was not until 1840 that a Yankee skipper took it into his head to introduce the sail which is known as the cro’jack. The French, since from this spar no sail was set, called it the “barren yard”—_vergue sec_.[106] It was during this century that the frigate proper as a fast cruiser was introduced into the English Navy. Still stirred to energy by the activity displayed by the French, the dimensions of English ships were constantly being increased during the last years of the eighteenth century. The capture, in 1792, of the fine three-master _Commerce de Marseilles_, with a tonnage of 2747, and a length of over 200 feet, came as a welcome prize to our fleet which had nothing to equal her in respect either of size or armament. Again the design embodied in her was carefully studied by our experts, and before the close of the century two important improvements were made in English men-of-war. The first was to cease placing the lower battery so low down to the water. The reader will readily see that if the enemy were to leeward—as in all probability he should be—our lower ports must necessarily be kept closed unless there were only such a faint draught of wind as scarcely caused the ship to heel over. The French were thus at a great advantage in being able to fire from every one of their guns down to the lowest tier. The second improvement consisted in giving our newer ships a length far greater in proportion to the beam. CHAPTER VIII. THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE SAILING SHIP IN THE NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH CENTURIES.