Seamen have very rarely been good authors, until we come to modern times; and writers have usually been unacquainted with the technicalities of seafaring. The difficulty, therefore, has been great. The only solution is to regard the efforts of ancient artists and authors critically with the eyes of a seaman, and to make allowances. With this concession, realising what a ship can do and what she never could be asked to do; realising also that the artist’s intention was not so much to bequeath to posterity an accurately rigged ship as to depict an idea—as, for instance, the progress of a saint, in which a ship appeared incidentally—we can find all these quaint artistic efforts worth examining, and yielding up information. So it is with the writers. Even that fifteenth century French humorist Rabelais helps us if we allow for his ignorance of seafaring matters. So long as a man writes of what he actually saw with his own eyes, and not what he imagined, we have valuable and illuminative truth. Rabelais was no seaman, but his description of the handling of the ship in a gale is worth preserving. At the approach of bad weather we see the pilot shortening sail. The terrified Panurge exclaims with horror that the bitts are broken, the tackle is in pieces, the timbers are splitting, the mast dipping into the sea up to the truck. His is the attitude of the “all-is-lost” landsman who exists through all the ages of the merchant ship. Thus he goes on: “Alas! alas! where are our topsails? All is lost, by God! Our topmast is under water. Alas! to whom will this wreck belong? Friends, put me here behind one of these bulkheads. Lads, your top-crane has fallen.” He hears the rudder-pintle creaking. “Is it broken?” Eventually the pilot heaves-to under her main-course, but later the weather moderates so that the ship can resume her voyage. “To the main topsail,” rings out an order. “Hoist! hoist! To the main-mizzen topsail. The rope to the capstan. Heave! heave! heave! Hands to the halyards. Hoist! hoist! Clear away the tacks. Clear away the sheets. Clear away the bowlines. Port tack. Down helm. Haul taut starboard sheet. Luff. Full and by. Up helm. (“Up, it is,” replied the sailors.) Keep her going. Head for the harbour-mouth.” Thus, with the steering tackles manned, and the ship sailing close-hauled on the port tack, the pilot makes the helmsman keep her out of the wind and straight for their haven.[3]