Strictly speaking, a sail-boat is a craft propelled by any sort or number of sails. Usually, however, the term sail-boat is restricted to an open pleasure-boat carrying a single sail, and rigged after the fashion called, for some inscrutable reason, the cat rig. When a pleasure-boat is large enough to have a cabin or carries a jib and mainsail, she is usually honored with the name of yacht, and is thus promoted above the rank of sail-boat. . . . The cat-boat is, then, always dangerous when in careless or incompetent hands, and sometimes unavoidably dangerous when managed by the best of sailors. It is, however, the best and safest sail-boat which civilized boat-builders have produced, and we can not expect any thing safer from them. . . Nevertheless such a boat can be built, and with it two cool-headed girls can outsail the "Sappho" or the "Columbia" without risking any danger more serious than that of an occasional sprinkling of spray. . . .The Feejee double canoe is not, however, the consummate flower of barbarian boat-building genius. It has been surpassed by the flying proa of the Ladrone Islands--a craft that combines to some extent both the hollow and the solid log ideas, and which merits a brief description here.
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