The owner must have been a man of wit as well as originality for he replied: “Very well. A scooner let her be.” And schooner she still is, but in the two centuries since that time her form has impressed itself on many thousand ships, and the port that gave her birth has gained a reputation that is world-wide as the port of the ablest schooners and the ablest sailors that ever graced the great expanse of ocean. CHAPTER IV THE DEVELOPMENT OF STEAMSHIPS From the day a really successful steam-driven vessel first moved herself awkwardly in the water until the _Majestic_ slid from her German ways was not much more than a hundred years. But that hundred years shows more of progress in the development of ships than the preceding thousand. So breathlessly rapid has been the development of steamships that there are men still alive who remember them as frail experimental craft upon which little dependence could be placed. “Sail,” said the citizen of a hundred years ago, “is a dependable mode of propulsion. Steam is a ridiculous power, or at best a dangerous and highly experimental one.” “Steam,” says the “landlubber” of to-day, “is satisfactory for me. Sailing is a foolhardy business.” And neither the century-old viewpoint nor the new one is entirely right. * * * * * Steam was vaguely recognized as a source of power even in early Egyptian history, and several times before the birth of Watt inconsequential experiments were made with it. There is a story, not now accepted as true, of one Blasco de Garay, who in 1543 experimented at Barcelona, Spain, with a boat propelled by steam. It was not for another 100 years, however, that steam was practically applied. But as early as 1690 it is known that Thomas Savery and Denis Papin proposed the use of steam as an aid to navigation. Papin even built a model boat in which a crude steam engine was installed. A man named Newcomen seems to have been the builder of the engines used in these and other early experiments. One engine built by this experimenter was used in 1736 in a boat built by Jonathan Hulls in England.