For many years, though the Dutch had changed their rig for small craft, yet they still felt the influence of the bigger squaresail ships, notably in the design of the sterns. Thus the familiar decoration and the sheer to a high poop will be noticed in the vessel that occupies the centre of Fig. 85, which is rigged with a spritsail. This has been copied from another Van der Velde in the same gallery (No. 978). I have selected this picture expressly for the purpose of indicating, as Van der Velde has done, as many of the prevailing types of Dutch seventeenth-century craft as possible in a small space. The short gaff, the spritsail furled by means of its brails, the large squaresail for spinnaker work seen on the ship to the left of the picture, the high stempost (relic of the Vikings) on the ship to the right—these will all be found deserving of notice. It was no doubt a ship very similar to the high-pooped yacht in the centre of this picture that was sent to Charles II. in 1660 by the Dutch. The vessel was called the _Mary_, and was the first yacht ever owned in this country. In England the revenue and other sailing cutters of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were rigged with the square topgallant sail and “goared” topsail below, with a hollow foot. Old prints of the beginning of the eighteenth century (1717) show British cutters sailing with the jack flying from the staff at the end of the bowsprit just clear of the jib. The bowsprit is steeved remarkably high and is very long. In a like manner were rigged also the yachts of this period. So the cutters continued until the ’forties and ’fifties, when the bluff bows and rough rig gave way to a larger, cleaner lined, and more scientific production than the slavish copying of a seventeenth century Dutch type could produce. Now the old-fashioned square topsail has utterly disappeared in fore-and-afters, and one of more or less triangular shape has taken its place. But since it is in the building and rigging of yachts that the most complete changes have occurred during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries we shall postpone the further progress of the cutter until later in the chapter. [Illustration: FIG. 86. THE BAWLEY.]