Hutchinson remarks that it often happens there is no room to turn a vessel to windward through a crowd of ships, so she has to let the tide drive her through stern first. In Fig. 1 below, the yards are braced sharp up, and she is driving astern to windward. In Fig. 2 the ship is being put on the other tack so as to clear the shore in the bend of the river. In Fig. 3, the tide having slacked, the ship has come to anchor with wind against tide.] One or two devices which have since passed away, but were in use during the eighteenth century, may be mentioned before we pass on. I wonder how many “seamen” now serving on steamships would know what “fothering” meant? It was a device that in the days of the old wooden sailing ships saved both lives and ship on more than one occasion. This was an ingenious means of stopping a leak below the vessel’s water-line when at sea and unable to beach or dry-dock. It was employed at least once during Captain Cook’s voyages at a critical time after the ship had struck on a rock, and the sea was pouring in so fast that the pumps were of little avail. Moore, in his “Midshipman’s Vocabulary,” published in 1805, describes the method as performed by fastening a sail at the four corners, letting it down under the ship’s bottom, and then putting a quantity of chopped rope-yarns, oakum, wool, cotton, etc., between it and the ship’s side. By repeating this operation several times the leak sucks up a portion of the loose stuff, and so the water ceases for the most part to pour into the ship. Hutchinson also mentions that once when cruising the step of their foremast carried away in a gale of wind, and made so great a leak that pumping was little good. They were far from the nearest land, and matters were critical; so they unbent the spritsail, stitched it over one side with oakum, then with ropes to the clews and ear-rings they applied it to the leak, and so effectually stopped the hole that before long the pumps had freed the ship of water.