suggested.  Captain Collins very interestingly notes in a letter to the author, concerning the measurements indicated by his model:  “Here we meet with a difficulty, even if it is not insurmountable.  This is found in the discrepancy which exists between the dimensions—­length, breadth, and depth—­requisite to produce a certain tonnage, as given by Admiral Paris and the British Admiralty.  Whether this is due to a difference in estimating tonnage between France (or other countries) and Great Britain, I am unable to say, but it is a somewhat remarkable fact that the National Museum model, which was made for a vessel of 120 tons, as given by Admiral Paris who was a Frenchman, has almost exactly the proportions of length, depth, and breadth that an English ship of 180 tons would have, if we can accept as correct the lists of measurements from the Admiralty records published by Charnock . . .  In the third volume of Charnock’s ’History of Marine Architecture,’ p. 274., I find that a supply transport of 175 tons, built in 1759, and evidently a merchant ship originally, or at least a vessel of that class, was 79.4 feet long (tonnage measure), 22.6 feet beam, and 11.61 feet deep.”  The correspondence is noticeable and of much interest, but as the writer comments, all depends upon whether or not “the measurement of the middle of the eighteenth century materially differed in Great Britain from what it was in the early part of the previous century.”

Like all vessels having high stems and sterns, she was unquestionably “a wet ship,”—­upon this voyage especially so, as Bradford shows, from being overloaded, and hence lower than usual in the water.  Captain John Smith says:  “But being pestered [vexed] nine weeks in this leaking, unwholesome ship, lying wet in their cabins; most of them grew very weak and weary of the sea.”  Bradford says, quoting the master of the may-Flower and others:  “As for the decks and upper works they would caulk them as well as they could, . . . though with the working of the ship, they would not long keep staunch.”  She was probably not an old craft, as her captain and others declared they “knew her to be strong and firm under water;” and the weakness of her upper works was doubtless due to the strain of her overload, in the heavy weather of the autumnal gales.  Bradford says:  “They met with many contrary winds and fierce storms with which their ship was shrewdly shaken and her upper works made very leaky.”  That the confidence of her master in her soundness below the water-line was well placed, is additionally proven by her excellent voyages to America, already noted, in 1629, and 1630, when she was ten years older.