So successful was this topsail that ship-builders and sailors began to think of ways of making it larger. Its size was limited to the height of the mast above the great square mainsail. At first masts were cut from taller trees, but soon a practical limit to this method of securing additional height was reached, because of the limited size of trees. Then it was that the topmast was invented. Another mast, only slightly smaller than the first, was lashed with its base overlapping the top of the mainmast, which, because the upper part was now of no use, was again shortened. This proved satisfactory, and later another section and another still was added until the mast had grown from one simple spar into a structure made up of three or four or even five rising one above the other until, in the greatest of all square-rigged ships—the _Great Republic_, built in 1853—the mainmast, surmounted by the topmast, the topgallant, the royal, and the skysailmasts, towered almost half as high above her keel as the summit of Washington Monument stands above its concrete base. But that was long years after the times we are discussing, and such a ship was far beyond even the imaginations of the shipwrights and sailors of 1500. Years before this time, as I have already explained, ships had developed raised structures at bow and stern, called forecastles and sterncastles, and by now these had become integral parts of the hull. But the hulls! It can be said with little fear of contradiction that they had become the most ridiculous ships, in appearance at least, that ever sailed the seas. Their sterns were built up and up into huge structures that contained many decks and many cabins. Forward these ships, more often than not, ran their ridiculous noses down until it sometimes seemed as if they were inquisitive to learn what was beneath the surface of the water. Above these weird hulls were three or four towering masts, and forward was a long bowsprit that reared itself up at so steep an angle as to suggest that it feared that the bow, at the very next moment, would surely go completely beneath the sea. The mast farthest astern—which in a three-masted northern ship was then and still is called the mizzenmast—for many years carried only a lateen sail. Finally, however, the part of this triangular sail that ran forward of the mast was eliminated, although the spar itself was still the same. But finally this long spar was cut off where it met the mast, and it became the gaff of the sail that now is called, on square-rigged ships, the spanker. On this mast, too, above this lateen sail that, pollywog-like, was losing its tail in its growth into a spanker, it slowly became the custom to set sails similar to those which on the other masts had come into common use above the great square sails that were set nearest to the deck. [Illustration: THE _AMARANTHE_