Stout little craft were thus put together, and sometimes when the vessel was completed the farmer-builder took his place at the helm and steered her to the fishing banks, or took her through Hell Gate to the great and thriving city of New York.

The world has never seen a more amphibious populace.
[Illustration: "THE FARMER-BUILDER TOOK HIS PLACE AT THE HELM"] The cost of the little vessels of colonial times we learn from old letters and accounts to have averaged four pounds sterling to the ton.

Boston, Charleston, Salem, Ipswich, Salisbury, and Portsmouth were the chief building places in Massachusetts; New London in Connecticut, and Providence in Rhode Island.

Vessels of a type not seen to-day made up the greater part of the New England fleet.

The ketch, often referred to in early annals, was a two-master, sometimes rigged with lanteen sails, but more often with the foremast square-rigged, like a ship's foremast, and the mainmast like the mizzen of a modern bark, with a square topsail surmounting a fore-and-aft mainsail.