Note 75 — PECULIARITIES OF RIG.

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.