But the cost of building, maintaining, and handling these grand fabrics is so great that they are steadily diminishing in numbers, and perhaps are destined before long to disappear altogether from the seas to which they have lent so much picturesqueness and romance. The supremacy of the schooner seems likely to prove complete. Unwilling to concede everything at once, many vessels are now rigged with square sails on the foremast and mainmast and fore-and-aft sails on the mizzen (a _bark_), or square sails on the foremast only, and the others schooner-rigged (a _barkentine_); but even these are disappearing in favor of the three-masted or four-masted schooner. This is due to the fact that the schooner rig will sail closer to the wind and gives as much force in proportion as the ship style, while it is far less expensive to build, and more quickly and easily managed, not requiring nearly as many men, and therefore being cheaper to run as well as to set up. It is for these reasons that I have called it one of the greatest of Yankee notions. [Illustration: A MULETA, OR PORTUGUESE LATEEN-RIGGED FISHING-BOAT.] CHAPTER IV EARLY VOYAGES AND EXPLORATIONS PART I—PREVIOUS TO THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA Wherever it may have been that man first appeared upon the earth, the period must certainly have been incalculably long ago, for he had time to spread to all parts of the habitable globe long before any sort of record begins. Little, if any, part of the world has yet been found where the evidences of man’s residence in the long-forgotten past do not exist. So long ago that all tradition of it is forgotten, and only the imperishable stone implements they used remain as traces of their presence, mankind had reached and settled the farthest northern and eastern coasts of Europe and Asia, and the southern extremities of Africa and India. These might have been reached by land; but similar traces exist in many islands which, so far as we can see, could never have been connected with each other or with any continent by lands now submerged (as perhaps has been the case in some other islands) since man originated. Such places, then, could have been reached and colonized only by means of boats, and that at an exceedingly remote time. Some hint of what these prehistoric navigators might have been able to do may be gathered from the performances that we know of in the South Sea, where almost every island and coral atoll that could support a colony has apparently been inhabited, since long before even tradition begins, although some of them, like the Hawaiian group, are separated from all others by hundreds of miles of open sea.