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| With all sails set Despite the presence of magnificent force and might in the great modern vessel of war that rates from twelve to twenty thousand tons, there is little that suggests the romance of the sea about the huge mass of steel, magnificent and formidable though it may appear. The modern ship is sexless, or rather masculine. But no one would apply to such a fine old war-vessel as is pictured here, the training-ship “Saratoga,” anything less than the sailor's half-endearing term of femininity. Ships, just as we see this one, fought in the War of the Revolution, and, with hardly a change, the “Saratoga” appears here as in the Mediterranean she forged ahead in chase of one of the Barbary pirates, or maneuvered to escape from a British seventy-four in the War of 1812. In the older days, she would not have had the handy double topsails which give her one more yard to each mast. Perhaps with single topsails she looked still handsomer. It required seamanship in those days to make a landfall. Dead reckoning was “dead reckoning” with a vengeance. Nowadays, after the departure has been taken and the ship laid on her course, the revolutions of the engines, the knowledge of ocean currents, and the spinning taffrail log give a navigating officer a technical knowledge of his whereabouts. It was different when they depended on the wind alone. It was in the school of the sailing-ship that most of the officers who fought in the Civil War had been trained. The “Saratoga” was one of Commodore Perry's fleet when he sailed to Japan, in 1852. Just previous to the outbreak of the war she had been engaged in putting down piracy in the West Indies, and long after the war was started she was hovering off the western coast of Africa, capturing the “Nightingale,” a slaver with over 960 slaves herded between decks. During the war she was used mainly as a school-ship. |
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[49]
Review of Reviews. New York. 1912.
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