While not nearly as much in demand today as they were in the days of the Yankee clippers, these skills nevertheless remain important and necessary to today's yachtsmen and owners of smaller pleasure boats.In this excellent handbook on basic shipboard skills, marine expert Hervey Garrett Smith offers boating and yachting enthusiasts a complete course in rigging, working, and maintaining a ship. More than 100 illustrations help the reader grasp the fundamentals and fine points of handling a ship while the author describes in detail a sailor's tools, basic knots, and useful hitches as well as the arts of splicing, handsewing, and canvas work.Other topics equally important to safe, economical, and efficient boat maintenance and management include belaying, coiling, and stowing; towing procedures; how to make a chafing gear; and much more. Easy-to-follow instructions for fashioning decorative knots, ornamental coverings, and nettings, and even how to make a proper bucket round out this engaging and informative guide.Packed with useful "hands-on" information conveyed in a chatty, humorous style, The Arts of the Sailor is the perfect book to keep aboard ship for study and for ready reference when the need arises. It also makes delightful reading for armchair sailors and the legions of landlubbers with an interest in the sea.

    To this end it includes over five hundred photographs and over a hundred drawings, specially made to show construction procedures step by step as they were worked out in actual garments.[...]The first elements of dressmaking procedures are given in the early chapters, so that one who has never sewed before can learn to use a sewing machine, to select and check commercial patterns, and to cut out and assemble dresses. The first seven chapters, preliminary to those on construction processes, offer such instruction for the beginner, but like the others they also include material relating to advanced work so that the reader with sewing experience can find help for her problems too. It is believed that the inclusion of advanced as well as elementary work will give the beginner added incentive. For she should find her elementary work worth while if she sees it in terms of what she can expect to do later. The chapters on actual construction give procedures for each major type of collar, placket, sleeve, and so on. A detailed index, as well as the many cross references in the text, give the book maximum flexibility.