Long search for a reliable, coetaneous picture of one of the larger ships of the merchant service of England, in the Pilgrim period, has been rewarded by the discovery of the excel lent “cut” of such a craft, taken from M. Blundeville’s “New and Necessarie Treatise of Navigation,” published early in the seventeenth century.  Appearing in a work of so high character, published by so competent a navigator and critic, and (approximately) in the very time of the Pilgrim “exodus,” there can be no doubt that it quite correctly, if roughly and insufficiently, depicts the outlines, rig, and general cast of a vessel of the may-Flower type and time, as she appeared to those of that day, familiar therewith.

It gives us a ship corresponding, in the chief essentials, to that which careful study of the detail and minutiae of the meagre may-Flower history and its collaterals had already permitted the author and others to construct mentally, and one which confirms in general the conceptions wrought out by the best artists and students who have attempted to portray the historic ship herself.

Captain J. W. Collins, whose experience and labors in this relation are further alluded to, and whose opinion is entitled to respect, writes the author in this connection, as follows “The cut from Blundeville’s treatise, which was published more or less contemporaneously with the Mayflower, is, in my judgment, misleading, since it doubtless represents a ship of an earlier date, and is evidently [sic] reproduced from a representation on tapestry, of which examples are still to be seen (with similar ships) in England.  The actual builder’s plans, reproduced by Admiral Paris, from drawings still preserved, of ships of the MAYFLOWER’S time, seem to me to offer more correct and conclusive data for accurately determining what the famous ship of the Pilgrim Fathers was like.”

Decidedly one of the larger and better vessels of the merchant class of her day, she presumably followed the prevalent lines of that class, no doubt correctly represented, in the main, by the few coeval pictures of such craft which have come down to us.  No one can state with absolute authority, her exact rig, model, or dimensions; but there can be no question that all these are very closely determined from even the meagre data and the prints we possess, so nearly did the ships of each class correspond in their respective features in those days.  There is a notable similarity in certain points of the may-Flower, as she has been represented by these different artists, which is evidence upon two points:  first, that all delineators have been obliged to study the type of vessel to which she belonged from such representations of it as each could find, as neither picture nor description of the vessel herself was to be had; and second, that as the result of such independent study nearly all are substantially agreed as to what the salient features