All this description of its origin is, of course, purely imaginary. I have no information as to how it originated, but I offer the explanation I have given as a plausible surmise. The earliest actual representation of a ship using this sail is, so far as I can learn, on a map sent in 1527 from Seville by one M. Robert Thorne to a Doctor Ley. On this map, like so many of its time, there are numerous decorations and pictures. One of these is a small craft, Dutch in appearance, which carries a combination of sails not unlike those of a simple sloop of to-day. It is somewhat as if a lateen sail had been cut in two vertically a third of the way back from the forward end, and the two pieces mounted separately—the triangular section depending from the fore stay, and the remainder from a spar similar to what we now call the gaff. This interesting old map was called to my attention by a mention of it made by E. Keble Chatterton in his “Sailing Ships and Their Story.” But this triangular sail, while it was in common use from so early a date on small boats, did not appear on ships of the larger sizes until the latter part of the 17th Century and the first part of the 18th. At this time the lateen sail was still in evidence although it was beginning to undergo the first of the changes I have mentioned, while the fore and mainmasts now commonly spread two square sails, and sometimes three; and sometimes, too, this third sail, instead of being square, was triangular, as the earliest topsails had been. But the latter part of the 17th Century brought the first real steps in scientific design. Men began to study the disturbances set up by the passage through the water of various shaped hulls, and began to replace rule-of-thumb methods of design with designs based on more or less scientific conclusions. This also began to show itself in the design of masts and spars and sails. Long since, the steering oar, which for centuries was mounted on the starboard or right-hand side of the ship near the stern, had given way to the rudder, hung astern as rudders are still hung, and now the science of ship design began the steps that ultimately resulted in the _Flying Cloud_ and the _Great Republic_ and those other clipper ships that in the 19th Century set records for speed that many of our steamships of to-day cannot equal. Throughout the 18th Century ships were gradually improved along these scientific lines until, in the merchant service, the beautiful ships of the British East India Company, with their piles of snowy canvas, their shining teakwood rails, and their graceful spars, were the proudest ships that had ever sailed the seas. In the naval services the greater ships had taken a less beautiful form but had grown into the impressive if awkward line-of-battle ships of which an excellent example is still to be seen in the _Victory_, Nelson’s famous flagship, which the British still proudly, and properly, maintain at Portsmouth.