Page:The history of yachting.djvu/338

 166 the cutter rig was used on private yachts, smugglers, and in the Royal Navy.

There were also "customs" and "excise" cutters, known in the present century as revenue cutters, which, in the United States were all rigged as schooners until they became steamers. About the middle of the nineteenth century there was one celebrated revenue "cutter," rigged as a topsail schooner, called the Hamilton, commanded by Captain Josiah Sturgis, whose sister married Joshua Bates, of Baring Brothers, London. The cruising ground of the Hamilton was between Cape Ann and Cape Cod, and one of the pleasures of the few yachtsmen in Massachusetts Bay in those days (1845) was to be brought to by a gun from the Hamilton, and have Sturgis come alongside in his gig to examine their papers and sample the contents of their wine-lockers, for he was well-liked and welcome at all times.

The earliest portrait of a Dutch cutter—here reproduced—appears in an etching executed in 1750 by an unknown artist in Holland. A portrait of a Dutch schooner is also given in this picture, and is the earliest representation of a European schooner to be found. It will be noticed that she has pole masts and no spring stay, a practice that continued in England until the middle of the last century.

The portrait of an English sloop, taken from an engraving published about the middle of the eighteenth century is here introduced. It shows the evolution of the rig from the early Dutch