The great number of navigable streams soon led to shipbuilding in the interior.  It was obviously cheaper to build the vessel at the edge of the forest, where all the material grew ready to hand, and sail the completed craft to the seaboard, than to first transport the material thither in the rough.  But American resourcefulness before long went even further.  As the forests receded from the banks of the streams before the woodman’s axe, the shipwrights followed.  In the depths of the woods, miles perhaps from water, snows, pinnaces, ketches, and sloops were built.  When the heavy snows of winter had fallen, and the roads were hard and smooth, runners were laid under the little ships, great teams of oxen—­sometimes more than one hundred yoke—­were attached, and the craft dragged down to the river, to lie there on the ice until the spring thaw came to gently let it down into its proper element.  Many a farmer, too, whose lands sloped down to a small harbor, or stream, set up by the water side the frame of a vessel, and worked patiently at it during the winter days when the flinty soil repelled the plough and farm work was stopped.  Stout little craft were thus put together, and sometimes when the vessel was completed the farmer-builder took his place at the helm and steered her to the fishing banks, or took her through Hell Gate to the great and thriving city of New York.  The world has never seen a more amphibious populace.

[Illustration:  “THE FARMER-BUILDER TOOK HIS PLACE AT THE HELM”]

The cost of the little vessels of colonial times we learn from old letters and accounts to have averaged four pounds sterling to the ton.  Boston, Charleston, Salem, Ipswich, Salisbury, and Portsmouth were the chief building places in Massachusetts; New London in Connecticut, and Providence in Rhode Island.  Vessels of a type not seen to-day made up the greater part of the New England fleet.  The ketch, often referred to in early annals, was a two-master, sometimes rigged with lanteen sails, but more often with the foremast square-rigged, like a ship’s foremast, and the mainmast like the mizzen of a modern bark, with a square topsail surmounting a fore-and-aft mainsail.  The foremast was set very much aft—­often nearly amidships.  The snow was practically a brig, carrying a fore-and-aft sail on the mainmast, with a square sail directly above it.  A pink was rigged like a schooner, but without a bowsprit or jib.  For the fisheries a multitude of smaller types were constructed—­such as the lugger, the shallop, the sharpie, the bug-eye, the smack.  Some of these survive to the present day, and in many cases the name has passed into disuse, while the type itself is now and then to be met with on our coasts.