This, in my own poor way, having been done, I now moor ship, weather-bitt cables, and leave the sloop _Spray_, for the present, safe in port.
APPENDIX [Illustration: Again tied to the old stake at Fairhaven.] APPENDIX LINES AND SAIL-PLAN OF THE "SPRAY" Her pedigree so far as known--The Lines of the _Spray_--Her self-steering qualities--Sail-plan and steering-gear--An unprecedented feat--A final word of cheer to would-be navigators.
From a feeling of diffidence toward sailors of great experience, I refrained, in the preceding chapters as prepared for serial publication in the "Century Magazine," from entering fully into the details of the _Spray's_ build, and of the primitive methods employed to sail her.

Having had no yachting experience at all, I had no means of knowing that the trim vessels seen in our harbors and near the land could not all do as much, or even more, than the _Spray_, sailing, for example, on a course with the helm lashed.
I was aware that no other vessel had sailed in this manner around the globe, but would have been loath to say that another could not do it, or that many men had not sailed vessels of a certain rig in that manner as far as they wished to go.

I was greatly amused, therefore, by the flat assertions of an expert that it could not be done.
[Illustration: Plan of the after cabin of the _Spray._] The _Spray_, as I sailed her, was entirely a new boat, built over from a sloop which bore the same name, and which, tradition said, had first served as an oysterman, about a hundred years ago, on the coast of Delaware.

There was no record in the custom-house of where she was built.

She was once owned at Noank, Connecticut, afterward in New Bedford and when Captain Eben Pierce presented her to me, at the end of her natural life, she stood, as I have already described, propped up in a field at Fairhaven.