In the ’eighties, however, or perhaps a little earlier, steam began its irresistible competition for freight and in thirty years sailing ships had come to play a small and comparatively unimportant part in the world’s affairs. Still there remain many sailing ships, particularly in the fishing fleets and the coasting trade, and occasionally, but with less and less frequency, one sees a fine old square-rigged ship driving through the great green swells of mid-ocean, but they are few—and for the person who is drawn by the drama and adventure of the sea, painfully few. In the ’sixties steamship tonnage was launched at about the same rate as sail in Great Britain, but early in the ’seventies the rapid increase of steamship tonnage began, and sailing ships correspondingly declined. Sailing ships were built, of course, and are still being built, and in Britain their average size even continued to increase until 1892, but then began to decrease in size to correspond with their decrease in numbers. Steamships, on the other hand, increased both in individual size and in numbers. This increase in size had been noticeable ever since steam came to be a recognized source of power for ships. In 1815, for instance, steamships averaged only 80 tons. By 1830 this had grown to 102 tons; by 1860 it had risen to 473 tons; and its temporary maximum was attained in 1882 when the average had grown to 1,442 tons. The next few years saw a decrease, but 1890 saw the figure raised to 1,500 tons. By that time steam had absolutely proved itself, and the day of the supremacy of the sailing ship on the high seas had definitely passed, and steamships had reached the point of almost infinite variety of design. So great and so diverse are the designs of present-day ships that Captain David W. Bone, in “The Lookoutman,” published in 1923, expended the space of an entire volume to a discussion of them; nor did he enter into technicalities other than those that, at least to the sailor, lie on the surface. With this precedent to guide one I feel that I am perhaps unduly optimistic in endeavouring to cover this subject, even superficially, in the following two chapters; but so vast is the subject that this book pretends to cover that each chapter could easily be enlarged to many times its size. CHAPTER V THE PERFECTION OF STEAMSHIPS