Excerpt from A Journal of Travels in England, Holland and Scotland, and of Two Passages Over the Atlantic, 1820, Vol. 3 of 3 The style of Dutch naval architecture is most curious and singular. Their ships are round both at stem and stem, and seem to be contrived merely for strength and capacity, without any reference to elegance of form, or swiftness of sailing. They have flat bottoms on account of the numerous shoals upon the coast of Holland, and all of them, not excepting even the large ships, are furnished with a lee-board to enable them to sail by the wind, which they do very poorly at best; before a wind they do very well. They are gaily painted and adorned, although in bad taste; upon the top of the rudder there is usually a head, with a face of large and coarse features; we some times saw them with grinning mouths and large goggling eyes; and as the image necessarily turns with the helm. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.