The Book of the Sailboat: How to rig, sail and handle small boats

by A. Hyatt Verrill

In certain parts of Great Britain the people still use the queer craft called coracles which Cæsar found the Britons using when his Roman legions invaded Albion, and although these curious boats, that look like the shell of a turtle or half of a walnut shell and are made of plaited willow, are among the most ancient forms of boats, yet the Welsh find them superior to modern boats in many ways. Somewhat similar are the goofahs of the Orient, circular, basket-like craft made of willow wands and covered with pitch which are used upon the Tigris and Euphrates and have not changed in the least since Bible days.

In the South Seas and other places the natives still use catamarans and proas which are really nothing but two logs fastened together, and yet the most efficient and safest of life rafts used by our greatest steamships are merely modifications of these same catamarans.

The purpose of any boat is to float and support its occupants while traveling across the water, and while it seems a far cry from the coracle or the dugout to a palatial steamship or a stately, four-masted, sailing ship, yet the principle of each is identical and each serves the purpose for which it was designed equally well; it is merely a matter of improvement, and many of the terms and names of parts which were used by the earliest sailors are still retained on our greatest liners and largest sailing vessels.

Starboard and larboard, for example, are merely corruptions or steerboard and leeboard, terms applied to the two sides of the ships of the Vikings and referring to the great steering oar on the right-hand side of the vessel and the board dropped over the opposite side to prevent the craft from making leeway or sliding sideways through the water. The bowsprit was originally a small spritsail spread to the vessel’s bow; the stern was once the steering; the name forecastle was given to the sailors’ quarters when the deckhouses were literally castles in form, and we still speak of cockpits though we seldom stop to remember that the term was originally bestowed because this open portion of a boat resembled the circular areas wherein cockfights were held.

The enormous steel frames which support the great plates of a steamship’s sides are still as much ribs to the sailor as the flimsy bits of wood bent into place by the naked savage building his frail canoe, and scores of the ropes, sails, rigging and other portions of a ship’s fabric retain their ancient names in a similar manner. The seaman is the most conservative of beings and adheres to every time-honored custom, belief and habit and when the last sailor and the last wooden ship have disappeared many of the terms and ways that were dear to the heart of Jack Tar will still live on and be perpetuated for all time.

It is partly owing to this unwillingness on the part of the sailor to adopt anything new or unusual which has led to the survival of distinct forms of boats, for the seaman and boatman of every country believed the craft of his own waters to be superior to those of any other place. In rig, sail and other details each race of maritime people has preserved the traditions of their ancestors and even in neighboring localities we find boats which in form of hull, sails and rigging are absolutely distinct. Many of these are used only in one locality, one harbor or on one small island, but many others have been carried hither and thither and one can almost trace the history of a country or the wanderings of its people by the types of boats used.

Of course, the first boats were propelled by hand, either by pushing them along with poles or by rough paddles, but even naked savages soon learned that they could let the wind work for them and raised mats, skins or even bushes to catch the breeze and waft them across the water. But it was many, many centuries before man learned that he could do away with oars entirely and could sail in any direction, regardless of the way the wind blew.

Even in the time of Columbus the ships could scarcely make headway against the wind and were more or less at the mercy of every passing breeze, but once sailors discovered the secret of sailing to windward the advance and improvement of ships and rigging was very rapid. The great, cumbersome, square sails of the earlier ships were divided into many pieces so as to be more readily handled and trimmed; triangular sails took the place of the picturesque spritsails on the vessels’ bows; hulls were built lower and deeper and while the number of masts varied they were reduced until two- and three-masted, square-rigged vessels, known as brigs and ships, were the standard types of ocean-going craft.

Among smaller vessels there were sloops, luggers, ketches and other types of fore-and-aft-rigged craft, and as these sails had many advantages over the square sails and their awkward yards they replaced the latter in some cases and thus barks, brigs and brigantines came into use.

Then some brilliant sailor genius did away with the square sails altogether and a new type of vessel came into existence which was called a “schooner.” But conservative, croaking Jack still pinned his faith to yards and square sails and for many years schooners carried lofty topsails of the same form as the upper sails of square-rigged ships.