The words convey an impression of dodging from port to port for short distances, whereas many of the voyages are longer than those of the foreign routes in European waters.

It is farther by sea from Boston to Philadelphia than from Plymouth, England, to Bordeaux.

A schooner making the run from Portland to Savannah lays more knots over her stern than a tramp bound out from England to Lisbon.

It is a shorter voyage from Cardiff to Algiers than an American skipper pricks off on his chart when he takes his steamer from New York to New Orleans or Galveston.

This coastwise trade may lack the romance of the old school of the square-rigged ship in the Roaring Forties, but it has always been the more perilous and exacting.