Only a part of them was built by Mr. Cramp, but they were all built upon his plans. They were large surf-boats of three different sizes, and were carried to Vera Cruz on the decks of schooners chartered for the purpose. The thwarts were taken out of the larger boats and the smaller ones of different sizes were stowed in them. The “Standard History of the Mexican War” shows that out of the total number (three hundred) designed by Cramp and contracted for with different boat-builders, only one hundred and eighty-six (186) were actually delivered and used, and in the operations against Vera Cruz, General Scott’s army was landed by divisions. The Regular Division commanded by General Worth was put on shore first, then the Volunteer Division of General Robert Patterson, and, finally, the mixed Regular and Volunteer Division of General Twiggs. After these boats had been used for their original purpose they were cast adrift. Their sea-worthiness may be estimated from the fact that some of them were picked up in mid-Atlantic months afterward. There are stories in history about invading armies burning their bridges behind them, but this is unquestionably the only instance where an army deliberately cast loose the boats in which it had landed upon the soil of an enemy. Burning bridges might mean, and doubtless would, the simple destruction of means of recrossing a river in the case of disaster, but the destruction or dispersion of the boats in which Scott’s army landed at Vera Cruz meant the obliteration of any possible means they might have had of crossing a gulf and ocean had the fortune of war been adverse to them. Starbuck, in his “History of the American Whale-fishery,” refers to this incident, and says that some of these boats were picked up by whaling-ships, whose crews highly prized them, and that they were used for years afterward in the sperm and right-whale fisheries of the Pacific Ocean. At the beginning of the career of Mr. Cramp in ship-building, the profession had arrived at its highest state of efficiency in everything that related to the design, finish, and outfit of ships. They were with but few exceptions all of wood, and it was in the wooden ship and during the period between 1840 and 1860 that the art and everything belonging to it attained its highest proficiency. Ship-building as an art, profession, and science culminated about this time,—the great transition from wood to iron. From the earliest period up to that time the professional ship-builder or “master builder,” as he has always been called, was a master in reality. He designed, modelled, and built his own ships, and his appreciation of the beautiful and his artistic taste were of the most refined and cultivated character, and were everything that the term sculptor, artist, and constructor meant. He was acutely sensitive; his contempt for the quack and commonplace in his profession was as great as that of the physician in regular practice for the medical quack.