their help the men paddled from morning to night, singing as cheerily after their forty-mile run as in the morning. Other boats were used by the Indians and French, but not so universally. The Indian pirogue was a canoe-shaped boat hollowed out of one of the huge cotton-trees,--a vessel forty or fifty feet long and holding thirty men, but too heavy to carry easily around the numerous portages. The French introduced into the lakes in the eighteenth century the bateau, a flat-bottomed boat with sharp-pointed ends, which resisted the storms better than the clumsy scow barges, and was the precursor of the present two-masted Mackinaw boat. On the canoe and bateau sails were sometimes used, but only in very favorable weather, and in any of these boats all but the most experienced navigators hugged closely the shores of the stormy, wind-swept waters. To us with our eight and ten and twelve thousand ton steel vessels, which find the lake storms a source of dread and danger, it seems incredible that the greater part of the navigation for three centuries was in these frail, light canoes and bateaux. With the story of the pioneer sailing vessel of La Salle, the sixty-ton _Griffon_ of the seventeenth century design, with her high stern deck and her two masts with clumsy square sails, we are already familiar. After she was lost in 1679, sailing vessels did not again appear on the lakes for nearly seventy-five years. Then there were two on Lake Superior, one the property of the man who made the first attempt at copper mining in that region. The first sailing vessels to come into historical importance were the _Beaver_ and the _Gladwin_, which did such efficient service at the siege of Detroit in 1763. War brought out the need of such vessels, and a shipyard started by the English on Navy Island in the Niagara River turned out several schooners during the next few years. At the end of the eighteenth century, however, the entire fleet of Lakes Huron, Erie, and Michigan consisted of only three schooners and six sloops, and no one dreamed of the commercial changes to come before another century was over. Under the orders of the English government a Mr. Collins had made in 1788 a careful survey of the lakes and had stated that vessels on Lake Ontario might be of sixty or even seventy-five or eighty tons, but those on the other lakes should not exceed fifteen tons’ burden; but the ship-builders paid little attention to his instructions.