Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 1).djvu/567

 outward dimensions. Her burden was said to be three hundred "botti," or about two hundred and seventy English tons ; her length, on the upper deck, one hundred and seventy-nine feet; the mast, thirty-eight feet in circumference at the lowest and thickest part, and one hundred and eighty-four feet high; the height of her poop from the keel, seventy-seven feet nearly, without the after-castle; that of her bow nearly sixty-one, independent of the forecastle; her sail, and she seems to have carried but one, was more than a hundred and fifty-three feet broad, and ninety-six high. She was heavily rigged with so many shrouds, says Cambi, that they alone were worth a treasure; her anchors were numerous, and weighed about twenty-five hundred-weight each; she had seventy cabins; her cables were twenty-three inches round, and eighty fathoms long; she was fitted with ovens, cisterns, and stalls for horses; her long boat carried nearly seventy-two tons, and six hundred souls were embarked in her. This was the largest vessel that had been seen in a Florentine port for a long time, and no ordinary seamanship must have been necessary to manage so unwieldy a sail as she seems to have carried."  We should rather have expected a Post-Captain in the British Navy to have remarked that no such sail could have been carried on the vessel he names, for its spread would have been equal to close upon fifteen thousand square feet of canvas; dimensions, compared with which the largest sail in the Great