I seem to remember making a note somewhere of a ship that was built in Bayonne in the Middle Ages, the keel of which, apart from the overhang, was well over 100 ft. long. I was going to say 190, but as it is only a memory, and I have not the notes by me, I may be wrong if I say that. It was certainly well over 100, and the record was exact. After all, there is no reason why men who could build a wooden ship at all--I mean a ship to hold the sea--could not build one up to a thousand tons or more. The limit is rather a limit of handling sails than of building. For what made our sudden modern increase in the size of ships was the use of a new motive power.
But one thing was certainly true of all those old ships, and remained true until quite modern times, and that was their light draught. They were all flat; and this is the more remarkable when one considers their high free-board. I have no doubt that those who study these things, which I do not, and who are experts in them, can explain the affair: it has always puzzled me badly. In very old pictures, miniatures, sculptures, or later engravings and drawings and paintings, the first thing that strikes me is this excess of free-board. I think it must strike the most casual observer who goes down to Portsmouth and looks at the modern low lines of the great men-of-war and contrasts them with the huge wall of the "Victory" size for size. One would think that so much free-board would have made the old craft top-heavy.
In the earlier ships we note regularly great structures forward and astern, poops and forecastles, which look as though they would give a most dangerous purchase to a beam wind, let alone lifting the centre of gravity of the boat too high. Yet they carried these easily, for all their light draught. How very light that draught was until quite modern times, we know by the nature of the harbours they entered, and we also know it from their habit of beaching boats. You read often enough of shipwreck, but very rarely indeed of shipwreck through capsizing. That may be because in earlier times they did not take the wind abeam. But I doubt it.
I imagine the common judgment that sailing into the wind is a recent art to be false. The old ships may not have sailed close to the wind; they certainly did not sail as close to the wind as we do; but that they could sail with the wind a little forward of the beam seems to me common sense. No one can sail a boat of the simplest rig--a boat with a mere balance sail or catrig--without finding that she can go into the wind. And a boat that could not go into the wind at all could never be certain of harbour. It is true they waited for a fair wind, as for that matter would most sailing-boats to-day if they had the time, and as do all sailing-boats when the wind is too much against them. No man, for instance, could beat out of Rye. There is no room. And in any modern week you may see sailing craft anchored in the Downs, or west of Dungeness, or in any one of the Roads of the Channel, waiting for a favourable wind to take them up or down. But that the ships our forefathers used could not sail into the wind at all seems to me nonsense. Being flat, however, they must have made a lot of leeway, and that is perhaps why it was not worth their while to try and beat for any distance against a strong breeze.