barge. For instance, there is the well-known sprit-sail barge; a vessel
with a mainsail that sets on a sprit—that is, a long pole, if I may so
describe it, that stretches the outer head of the sail, from the foot of
the mast. The mainsail of a sprit-sail barge is brailed up when taken
in, and one must be careful that she has brails in talking to sailors
about her, otherwise one’s ignorance will be greatly laughed at,
sometimes secretly, and quite as often openly. For the landsman must
know that there is another species of barge called a boomsail barge,
which is a vessel with a gaff and a boom; so here you have throat and
peak halliards, and brails are not required. Again, there is the
ketch-barge, a long vessel constructed on modern lines, and rigged with
a standing bowsprit and jibboom, a gaff mainsail and a gaff mizzen. Let
these fine distinctions be remembered in speaking of the barge to the
bargee, for here already we see very nearly as many types of barges as
there are types of yachts.
Take the ketch. To the untutored eye she resembles a barge, yet she is
no more a barge than a barque is a ship. And why? Because, says the
nautical man, a ketch is a vessel with a top-sail and small mizzen; and
that settles it. Nor can the list of barges be held as complete without
reference to the dumb barge, that is, a barge without rigging or masts.
Few ship-captains who have occasion to navigate the Thames but execrate
the name of this kind of barge as one of the fruitfullest sources of
their marine troubles and perplexities. This wretched, naked, darksome,
and grimy object is incessantly floating under ships’ bows, bringing-up
in wrong places, getting cut down round corners, generally with the
destruction of one man, the other man nearly always holding on to
something, and in many other ways constantly producing much small
vexatious county-court litigation. The dumb barge is very happily named,
and the term smells strongly of the bridge.
Some of the terms given to certain descriptions of rig mark a degree of
forecastle scorn and illustrate the power of marine irony. As an example
take the “jackass barque.” Only the eye of a mariner would distinguish
any difference between a vessel so termed and the fully rigged barque.
And what is the distinction? A jackass barque has fore and main topmasts
and topgallant masts in one. This is why, I suppose, sailors call her
jackass. Perhaps the term mule would have been more correct; and yet the
polacre, that outdoes the jackass barque, in respect of spars, is
suffered to pass without a derisive appellation. Here you have a vessel
with masts all in one to as high as the topmast crosstrees, after which
you come to separate topgallant masts, fidded.[73] Commonly, in
consequence of there being no tops, the sailors climb aloft by means of
a “Jacob’s ladder” that starts from the eyes of the lower rigging and
ascends to the height of the crosstrees. Thus we find distinctions owing
to masts simply, and not to the number of masts, but the manner in which
they are fashioned. So a sailor speaks of skysail poles, of short royal
mast heads, of stump or short topgallant masts; the vocabulary is
apparently endless.
Footnote 73:
A _fid_ is a bar of wood or iron passed through the fid-hole to
support an upper mast. A fidded topmast or topgallant mast, is a mast
erected above its lower mast, and supported by the fid.
And yet one word means only one thing, and every one is totally
different from another. As a single example, when you speak of skysail
poles you are talking of a length of mast continued above the royal
mast, upon which a skysail yard may be crossed. When you speak of stump
topgallant masts you refer to a mast that is neither royal mast nor
skysail mast, and upon which only a topgallant-sail can be set, thus
losing the two sails which the existence of the skysail pole admits of.
It is noteworthy that the only vessel to which a mast more or less makes
no difference is a ship—that is, a ship in the sailor’s meaning of the
word, and not according to Act of Parliament. For here let me say that
the law defines a ship to be any fabric that is not propelled by oars, a
piece of absurdity forced upon general acceptance by its conveniency.
The proper definition of a ship is a vessel with three masts, each mast
being square-rigged. She would be a ship, even if she did not carry
anything above her crosstrees, for she is made so by her crossjack and
mizzen top-sail yard and mizzen top;[74] yet, if you add a fourth mast
to a ship she is still a ship, even if it be what is termed a spanker
mast—that is, a mast rigged like the mizzen-mast of a barque.
Four-masted ships are now common. They seem comparatively recent; but in
reality they are as old at least as that noble American clipper, the
_Great Republic_, that was afloat some twenty or thirty years ago. These
fourth masts in ships are supposed to have been introduced on account of
the length of the vessels; but I have seen ships as small as any
three-masted craft rigged with four masts. They say that these
four-masted concerns are handy in stays, that, proportionally, they need
fewer hands than three-masted ships, and captains have told me that they
have watched them thrashing to windward in a strong breeze with the
power of an ocean passenger-steamer. I should think this very likely, if
it were not that every vessel of this type which I have watched sailing
or towing away, outward bound, has been so deep as to look amidships as
if there was nothing but the thickness of her covering-board between her
and the water.
Footnote 74:
“All the yards of a ship,” says Falconer, in his “Marine Dictionary,”
“are square, except that of the mizzen.” In Falconer’s day the mizzen
was set on a lateen yard, long since replaced by the gaff. There was
then a crossjack yard to which the clews of the mizzen top-sail were
sheeted home, but no crossjack was carried. There was in the last
century (perhaps in the beginning of this) a vessel called _Bilander_.
She was a brig, but with this peculiarity, that her mainsail was set
on a lateen yard. The tack was secured to a ring-bolt in the middle of
the vessel, and the sheet to another ring-bolt in the taffrail.
Many changes have been made in the rig of ships which have not altered
their character. Double topgallant yards leave a ship a ship, though an
alteration of this sort probably in another kind of vessel would cause
sailors to invent a new name for her. Take, for example, that most
familiar craft, the brig. If the trysail of this vessel sets directly
upon her mainmast, then she is a brig; but if you affix a little mast
abaft her mainmast, and call it a trysail mast, and then set your
trysail upon this mast, the brig, by this very trifling change, becomes
what is called a “snow.” A landsman might be defied to detect any
difference between a snow and a brig, and even when the distinction was
pointed out to him he would scarcely understand what it consisted of.
Nevertheless, the addition or want of a trysail mast creates two kinds
of vessels rigged absolutely alike in all other respects, and so far
from the terms being interchangeable, as might be imagined of names
applied to what looks to be the same thing, the word “snow” is used in
advertisements of sales by auction in order that it may be known the
vessel offered is not a brig; and thus you may see in the shipping
papers advertisements announcing that “On Thursday the snow _Aunt Sally_
will be sold, etc.,” and, perhaps under it, “On Tuesday next, the brig
_Ann Maria_.”
These are queer niceties, and of very little use that I can see; but
sailors insist upon them, and Jack must be allowed to have his way.
Take, again, the yawl and the dandy. Both vessels are cutter-rigged
forward, with a mizzen-mast aft, upon which they set a small sail. To
the inexperienced eye they are exactly alike. What, then, is the
difference? It lies in the little sail that is set upon the mizzen-mast.
A yawl has a lug-mizzen, the foot of which sets on a spar that projects
over the stern. The dandy’s mizzen has a gaff and boom, though the
mizzens of some dandies, I believe, are what is termed jib-headed. The
distinction is minute, and yet the difference when looked into is found
to be decided enough. The yawl is chiefly the pleasure craft, the dandy
the fishing vessel.
Amongst fishing craft the varieties of rigs are few. They consist of the
dandy, the lugger, and the smack. The smack is a vessel that is rigged
like a cutter, and it is not necessary that a vessel should be a fishing
boat in order to be called a smack.
To people who care about the sea there is much that is interesting in
rigs. The variations are curious as illustrating experiments, and the
resolution to adopt certain forms useful in particular trades. There is
the barque, a three-masted vessel square-rigged on her fore and main
masts, and with fore-and-aft sails on her mizzen-mast; she is varied by
the barquentine, a vessel rigged like a brig, or indeed like a barque or
ship on her foremast, but with fore-and-aft sails only on her main and
mizzen-masts.[75] Then out of the brig you get the snow, and out of the
snow the hermaphrodite brig, which is a vessel with a brig’s foremast
and a schooner’s mainmast, and out of the hermaphrodite brig comes the
brigantine, that, unlike the hermaphrodite, carries a square top-sail at
the main, and, unlike the brig, has no maintop. In the same way there
are different types of schooners, such as the three-masted schooner, the
fore-and-aft schooner, the top-sail schooner, and the two-top-sail
schooner. Differences of cut, numbers of masts, spread of sail, give
distinctions to the smallest and humblest class of boats. Thus a tosher
is not a long-shore driver, though both little vessels are employed in
catching what they can close into the land.
Footnote 75:
The nomenclature of the sea has been so varied by successive
generations that it is extremely difficult to arrive at the paternity
of sails, to ascertain when such and such canvas was introduced and
why the names it bore were given. In some respects Sir Walter Raleigh
helps us in a passage in his “Discourse of Shipping.” “We have
lately,” says he, “added the bonnet and the drabler; to the courses we
have devised studding sails, topgallant sails, spritsails, and
topsails.” By “topsails,” I take it, he means spritsail-topsails, for
the top-sail was long anterior to the canvas he specifies. The sails
thus named are manifestly then as old as the closing years of the
reign of Elizabeth and the beginning of that of James I. The stay-sail
I find plentiful in the days of Queen Anne. In an old volume of
shipbuilding, written by an anonymous author who claims for his work,
“’Tis the product of thirty-two years study and experience; for it is
very well known that I have been so long imploy’d in her Majesty’s
service, and that of her Royal Predecessors”—I find the following:
“There are other sails called stay-sails, used almost on every stay;
as the main stay-sail, main-topmast stay-sail, fore-topmast stay-sail,
mizon stay-sail, and sometimes on the mizon-top-mast stay and
topgallant stay. And such sails are very useful, if the ship goes
anything from the wind, that is, when the sails are constantly full
and not shivering. There is another sail call’d a flying-gib, a sail
of good service to draw the ship forward, but very prejudicial to the
wear of the ship forward.” Towards the close of the last century ships
went so numerously clothed that it really seems as though nothing but
their prodigious beam enabled them to stand up to the press of canvas.
There were two jibs, fore topmast stay-sail, sprit-sail and
sprit-top-sail, and fore stay-sail. Here you have six sails for the
bowsprit and jibbooms. Royals were by this time used and were called
the topgallant royals. Over the driver was carried a gaff top-sail,
outside which was set another sail bent to a light yard. Ring-tails
and water-sails were common, the latter projecting far beyond the
stern. There were nine stay-sails, besides those carried at the fore.
A ship with studding-sails out on either side exposed no less than
forty-two sails. The present century has added little to sails. I can
only think of the skysail. But there have been great changes in shape.
Formerly the mizzen was set on a lateen yard. Stay-sails were shaped
like trysails, the stay on which they were hoisted shaping them as a
gaff does a spanker. Sprit-sails long ago disappeared, and the
tendency of late years has been to diminish canvas, insomuch that
studding-sails are no longer common.
One needs a good memory to bear even a few distinctions in mind. I
remember once standing on the banks of the Tyne and hearing a man,
pointing to a vessel like a lighter, call her a wherry. To my
South-country notions, of course, a wherry was a small open boat in
which people are rowed by a waterman, or which they hire for excursions.
Close alongside this gigantic Tyne wherry, which, by the way, if my
memory serves me rightly, was half full of coal, lay a similar-looking
craft that the same man spoke of as a keel. I asked him why one should
be called a keel and the other a wherry, when they were both very much
alike, and I am under the impression, though I cannot be sure at this
distance of time, that he said the difference lay in one being carvel
built, that is, with the outer planks coming together and forming a
perfectly smooth side, and the other being clincher-built, a term
applied to planks when they overlay one another. Be this as it may, it
is at least certain that a wherry in the north is different from a
wherry in the south, and really when one comes to consider the infinite
variety of rigs and builds, and the almost imperceptible subtleties
amongst them which make the same name utterly inapplicable to what looks
exactly like the same thing, nautical gentlemen, individuals who are not
exactly sailors, but who nevertheless know a very great deal indeed
about the sea, insomuch that they are prepared to instruct, at a
moment’s notice, the most ancient mariner they can come across in his
business—such people ought to be a little more compassionate than they
are usually found in dealing with those errors or oversights in marine
technicality which landsmen are repeatedly guilty of, and which writers
and others who ought to know better are occasionally chargeable with.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_HOW THE OLD NAVIGATORS MANAGED._
It is extremely difficult to understand how the old navigators contrived
to convey their ships from port to port. I do not mean the ancients, who
are supposed to have kept the land aboard and to have steered by the
stars, though it is certain that they must again and again have been
blown out to sea and yet made shift to get home again; but those early
voyagers who travelled to the Indies by way of the Cape and to the
American seaboard. They had no conception of longitude; they had no
means to determine it; and their latitude was extremely vague. An old
chart or map is often a strange sight. The figuration of continents and
islands is as little like the reality as a child’s fanciful drawing of
such things would be. The longitude is mere guesswork, and the “heights”
or parallels are leagues out. Yet these old people managed to reach the
places they started for. Sometimes, to be sure, if the trip were a long
one, they found themselves off the land at a distance of a hundred miles
or so north or south, as it might be, of their port; but, when you
consider that even their knowledge of the variation of the compass was
extremely imperfect—that the compass with them was a sluggish primitive
appliance—that they could be sure of nothing but their dead-reckoning
and the North Star—it should be amazing to us, who live in the age of
the exquisite sextant, the superb chronometer, Sir William Thompson’s
compass, the patent revolving log and Admiralty charts, that mariners
from the days of Diaz, Columbus, and Magellan, down to the period of Dr.
Maskelyne, the “Nautical Almanac,” and the establishment of the Board of
Longitude in the last century, should have been able, without hesitation
or difficulty, to push on their hundred different ways through the
ocean, and duly arrive at the parts they weighed for.
A list of the instruments in use at sea two centuries ago is published
as a supplement to Captain James’s “Strange and Dangerous Voyage in his
intended Discovery of the North-West Passage into the South Sea, in the
years 1631 and 1632,” contained in “Churchill’s Collection,” vol. ii.,
1704. The captain took with him a quadrant, “of old season’d pear-tree
wood, artificially made, and with all care possible divided into
diagonals, even to minutes.” It was four-foot semi-diameter, adds the
captain. In addition to this he had an equilateral triangle of the same
wood, “whose radius was five foot at least;” a second quadrant with a
semi-diameter of two feet; a staff for taking altitudes and distances
seven feet long, “whose transome was four foot, divided into equal parts
by way of diagonals, that all the figures in a radius of ten thousand
might be taken out actually;” another staff six feet long, a
cross-staff, three Jacob’s staves, and two of “Mr. Davis’s back staves.”
These huge unwieldy instruments seem entirely appropriate to the age of
folios. James took with him other appliances which he called horizontal
instruments. Among these were two semi-circles “two foot semi-diameter,
of seasoned pear-tree wood,” six “meridian compasses,” four needles in
square boxes, “moreover, four special needles (which my good friends Mr.
Allen and Mr. Marre gave me) of six inches diameter, and toucht
curiously with the best loadstone in England;” a loadstone with the
poles marked for fear of a mistake, a watch-clock, “a table every day
calculated, correspondent to the latitude, according to Mr. Gunter’s
directions in his book, the better to keep our time and our compass and
judge of our course,” log-lines and glasses, “two pair of curious
globes, made purposely,” and finally “I made a meridian line of 120
yards long, with six plumb lines hanging in it, some of them being above
30ft. high, and the weights hung in a hole in the ground, to avoid wind.
And this to take the sun’s or moon’s coming to the meridian. This line
we verified, by setting it by the pole itself, and by many other ways.”
Such was the scientific equipment of a man bound on a Polar expedition
in the year 1631.
There is an interesting appendix to this voyage “touching longitude,”
written by the astronomer Gellibrand. “The longitude of a meridian,” he
says, “is that which hath, and still wearieth, the greatest masters of
geography.” He ridicules the notion that longitude may be ascertained by
watching the variation of the needle, though it is worth noting that
this belief continued strong for many years later, as may be gathered
from a passage in the introductory essay to “Churchill’s Navigantium
atque Itinerantium Bibliotheca:” “One thing more we shall observe before
we quit this subject, and it is this, that the several methods for
finding the longitude before mentioned depend upon astronomical
observations, and those too very nice and exact, which at sea it is very
difficult at any time, and very often impracticable, to make; whence
arises the necessity of finding out some other way of discovering the
longitude, for which hitherto nothing has bid so fair as a perfect
finding out the variation of the magnetic needle, which being adjusted
to a table of longitudes, they would then reciprocally show each other.”
Gellibrand regards eclipses, more especially of the moon—“whose leisure,
however,” he adds, “we must often wait, and perhaps go without, if the
heavens be not propitious to us”—as the most satisfactory means of
determining the longitude. But at sea people want something more prompt
than an eclipse to find out where they are.
For generations, then, the mariner was left to depend upon his
dead-reckoning, which, as one method of navigating a ship, is still in
force, and I do not know that we have in any way altered this old
practice of computing, save by the introduction of the patent log, whose
indications are still in some directions checked by the log-reel of our
forefathers. Dead-reckoning simply consists of ascertaining how fast the
ship sails by heaving the log, by entering the courses sailed, by
allowing for leeway. The ship, let us say, steered north-east for one
hour, north-east by north during the following hour, north-north-east
for the third hour, and then during the fourth hour came up to
north-east again. In those four hours her rate varied: at one o’clock
the log showed her sailing at seven knots; at two, five-and-a-half
knots; at three, four-and-three-quarter knots; at four, six knots; and
her leeway was sometimes three-quarters of a point, sometimes one point,
sometimes more. Her place, then, on the chart may be easily set down or
“pricked” out of these entries in the log-slate. In thick weather there
is no other way of computing a ship’s progress and position. The sky may
be obscured for days, and all that a man can do is to heave his log,
watch how the ship heads, and observe her leeway. It was in this fashion
that the ancient mariner contrived to crawl about the ocean, and it is
worth observing that the log he measured his way with we still possess
and use. No ship, I should think, goes to sea without the reel, the
line, and the glass. The rotating logs tell you how far you have gone in
a given time with tolerable accuracy; but the reel-log is the only
appliance that I am acquainted with which will tell you how fast you are
going at the moment.
Seamen have told me that with their eye they can tell the speed of their
ship more accurately than with the log-line. I do not believe this, and
on testing these cocksure men I have never once found them right within
half a knot. Of course this refers to sailing ships. A steamer goes
along steadily, and it is quite conceivable that a person accustomed to
steamships could tell correctly the speed of one by looking over the
side. But a sailing vessel varies her rate with every puff. Under
certain conditions the increased sail that seems to be thrashing her
through it with greater velocity has diminished her speed. I
particularly recollect an instance. A dynamometer was attached to the
taffrail of a large full-rigged ship; to it was affixed a line which it
dragged through the water. The pull of the line was equivalent to a
weight of sixty pounds. The vessel was then sailing with the wind a
point before the beam, under all plain sail, the breeze fresh. The
foretopmast studding-sail was set, and the hand of the dynamometer went
back, showing that the speed had been decreased to the extent
illustrated by this diminution of weight in the pull of the line by the
setting of the studding-sail. The chief officer, however, was so certain
that the ship had improved her speed, despite the unmistakable
indications of the dynamometer, that to prove his judgment he ordered
the log to be hove, with the result that the speed was less by a knot (I
think) than it had been before the studding-sail was set. The fact is,
the ship had sail enough; the additional canvas simply buried, and so
retarded her. Yet this same mate was one of many seamen who had assured
me that they could tell the speed of a vessel better with the eye than
with the log.