The narrow waterways of the low countries demanded a type of sail that could be handled more easily and could sail closer to the wind than the square sail could. This the fore-and-aft sail did, and so it filled an important need. I have not the space, in what remains of this chapter, to trace its growth in all its detail. Furthermore, E. Keble Chatterton has done so admirably in “The Story of the Fore-and-Aft Rig.” Let it suffice to say that the growth has been more a perfection than a series of revolutionary changes. At first the rig was crude. The sails were laced to the masts, for hoops sliding on the mast and to which the sail is made fast, while now almost universal, were then unknown. A boom was used to spread the foot of the sail, but not until the famous yacht _America_ crossed the Atlantic and won the cup that still is held in America as the greatest racing trophy in the world was the foot of the sail laced to the boom. Many times I have sat at the wheel of the _America_ as she lies in the basin of the U. S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, her masts denuded of the pile of canvas that drove her to that famous victory, and thought of her and of the little group of men whose careful thought resulted in her triumph. Such men as those, in the thousands of years through which ships have grown, have been the men who have made possible the growth of the dugout canoe with its sail of skin into the _Great Republics_ and the _Americas_ and, later, the _Majestics_. Such men as those have aided greatly in the advance of civilization. I have space here for but one more thing. The Dutch, as I have said, were responsible for the origin of the fore-and-aft rig, and Europeans largely developed the yawl, the ketch, the brig, and several other forms that use fore-and-aft sails. But schooners are the most numerous of these and they originated, as their name did, in a New England shipyard. The story is an old one and well known, but I shall include it here, for it is the only case of which I know in which a new ship form together with its name appeared so abruptly. It was in Gloucester, Massachusetts, that port now famous for the ablest schooners that sail the seas, that the schooner originated. In 1713 an ingenious builder built a boat and placed in her two masts bearing fore-and-aft sails. For a head sail he spread that triangular canvas now so common, but this was the first time that these sails, all long familiar, had been arranged according to the now common plan. She left the stocks and floated lightly on the water, and an interested spectator cried, “Look! See how she scoons!”