“A schooner let her be!” responded the builder, proud of his handiwork, and ready to seize the opportunity to confer a novel title upon his novel creation.  Though a combination of old elements, the schooner was in effect a new design.  Barks, ketches, snows, and brigantines carried fore-and-aft rigs in connection with square sails on either mast, but now for the first time two masts were rigged fore and aft, and the square sails wholly discarded.  The advantages of the new rig were quickly discovered.  Vessels carrying it were found to sail closer to the wind, were easier to handle in narrow quarters, and—­what in the end proved of prime importance—­could be safely manned by smaller crews.  With these advantages the schooner made its way to the front in the shipping lists.  The New England shipyards began building them, almost to the exclusion of other types.  Before their advance brigs, barks, and even the magnificent full-rigged ship itself gave way, until now a square-rigged ship is an unusual spectacle on the ocean.  The vitality of the schooner is such that it bids fair to survive both of the crushing blows dealt to old-fashioned marine architecture—­the substitution of metal for wood, and of steam for sails.  To both the schooner adapted itself.  Extending its long, slender hull to carry four, five, and even seven masts, its builders abandoned the stout oak and pine for molded iron and later steel plates, and when it appeared that the huge booms, extending the mighty sails, were difficult for an ordinary crew to handle, one mast, made like the rest of steel, was transformed into a smokestack—­still bearing sails—­a donkey engine was installed in the hold, and the booms went aloft, or the anchor rose to the peak to the tune of smoky puffing instead of the rhythmical chanty songs of the sailors.  So the modern schooner, a very leviathan of sailing craft, plows the seas, electric-lighted, steering by steam, a telephone system connecting all parts of her hull—­everything modern about her except her name.  Not as dignified, graceful, and picturesque as the ship perhaps—­but she lasts, while the ship disappears.

But to return to the colonial shipping.  Boston soon became one of the chief building centers, though indeed wherever men were gathered in a seashore village ships were built.  Winthrop, one of the pioneers in the industry, writes:  “The work was hard to accomplish for want of money, etc., but our shipwrights were content to take such pay as the country could make,” and indeed in the old account books of the day we can read of very unusual payments made for labor, as shown, for example, in a contract for building a ship at Newburyport in 1141, by which the owners were bound to pay “L300 in cash, L300 by orders on good shops in Boston; two-thirds money; four hundred pounds by orders up the river for tim’r and plank, ten bbls. flour, 50 pounds weight of loaf sugar, one bagg of cotton wool, one hund. bushels of corn in the spring; one hhd. of Rum, one hundred weight of cheese * * * whole am’t of price for vessel L3000 lawful money.”