Till the time when Hadley’s quadrant was adopted, masters had always stuck to Davis’. The ship’s time was still kept by half-hour glass. The quartermaster, when the sand had run down, capsized the glass again and struck the ship’s bell--on eight occasions during the watch. All the different courses sailed during a watch of four hours were marked by the quartermaster on a circular disc of hard wood. This was called a traverse board, and thereon were marked the different points of the compass. On the line of each point radiating from the centre were eight little holes, just as one sees in a cribbage-board. One at a time, pegs were placed into these holes to register the various courses sailed in every watch. And then, later on, the courses were entered on a log-book or slate, and the course and distance made good reckoned out. [Illustration: QUARTER-DECK OF AN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FRIGATE. Showing the steering wheels in use.] I have not been able to find any authority which would settle the date when wheels for steering a ship were first invented; but I am convinced that it was somewhere about the middle of the eighteenth century. Hutchinson, whose “Practical Seamanship” was published in 1777, speaks of the steering wheel in the following terms: “The great advantages experienced from steering a ship with this excellent machine has occasioned it to become more and more in use; even small ships that have their tillers upon deck frequently now steer with a wheel.” And he states that most of these wheels have eight spokes, though large ships have a ten-spoked wheel. The Newcastle colliers, of which we were speaking just now, had anything but good charts to guide them, and their methods of coasting are certainly worth noting. About two-thirds of their voyage from Newcastle-on-Tyne to the Pool of London will be found to have consisted of navigating in the region of dangerous shoals. And yet in that eighteenth century, even though they had not a really reliable chart between them, hundreds of these little brigs used to sail backwards and forwards between the metropolis and the north with scarcely ever a shipwreck. Indeed, so few were the losses that the owners very rarely had their craft insured. That meant that they could afford to carry their coal, iron, timber, hemp, flax, or whatever it might be, at low freights. There was keen competition to get their goods first to market, and some very sportive passages were made. The last of these interesting old craft, so cleverly handled, so fascinating as they must have been to watch, I believe ended her days in a North Sea gale not very long since. [Illustration: COLLIER BRIG DISCHARGING HER CARGO. After E. W. COOKE.]