In an earlier chapter we mentioned that it was in Holland during the sixteenth century that the fore-and-aft rig originated. At first it was only used for quite small sailing boats, but it was not long before craft of fifty tons and more adopted it. We must remember that about this time the Dutch were more advanced in maritime matters than any other nation. With them shipbuilding and naval architecture were much nearer to being an art and a science than elsewhere. The vast number of miles open to inland navigation, the shallowness of their channels and coasts naturally encouraged and stimulated them to study the problem of smaller ships. What the Tigris and Euphrates and Nile had been to the ancients the inland waterways were to the Dutch. The squaresail rig was out of the question. It was far too clumsy for tacking in and out of the small harbours of the Zuyder Zee and German Ocean. It would not sail close enough to the wind to allow the little craft just to lay her course in a straight narrow channel, while at the same time the Mediterranean lateen rig with its enormous yard was not suitable for the boisterous, squally North Sea. So the Dutchman, appreciating the virtues which the lateen shape possessed, just preserved this same triangular form, but cut it in two for convenience and handiness, though at the sacrifice of speed. Let the reader take his pencil and draw a vertical line to represent a mast. Across this let him draw a triangle with the apex well over to one side of the mast and the rest of the triangle and base to the other. This is roughly the shape of the Mediterranean and Eastern lateen as one can see by comparing Figs. 102 and 103. Now rub out from the drawing that part which is forward of the mast, and there remains a rectangular figure which is the germ of the first mainsail the cutter, or, more properly, the sloop-rigged boat had. In actual practice the sail was made much squarer at the top. A sprit was then stretched diagonally across the sail, with the peak on nearly the same level as where the throat now is. This sprit was supported just as in the Thames barge to-day, by a yard-tackle coming down from the throat to the sprit. It was thus, as we see from the engravings of the contemporary record of the first Dutch voyage to the North Pole in 1599, that the little craft that brought the ill-fated members home was rigged. Similarly the staysail, working on the forestay, as to-day, was in shape and size roughly equivalent to that part which in the triangular sketch just now would project forward of the mast. Vangs came down from the peak, and a bonnet being in use on the contemporary full-rigged ships, was naturally enough used for the smaller ships, too. Thus the sprit is really the old lateen yard modified, and the fore-and-aft rig is in its earliest days but the dhow rig cut in two. I have made a close study of the earliest Dutch engravings and paintings, and have little doubt in my mind as to the