Sailing ships

by E. Keble Chatterton

If that should be possible, then it would be indeed welcome news to hear that the sluicing ebb of sailing ships and sailormen had stopped. (For, of course, no one nowadays, except perhaps the lady passenger, would ever think of honouring the marine mechanics on board a liner or battleship with the title of “sailor,” whose knowledge of seamanship is so elementary that they can as a rule neither sail a boat nor make a splice, let alone go up aloft.) But at present, when it is difficult to get enough officers and men for the steam merchant service, it is doubtful if the sailing ship, except in the case of a few deep-sea vessels and the coasters, fishermen, pilots, and yachts round our coasts, will be encouraged to remain with us.

In setting forth whatever may be of interest in the following pages I have, following the example of that illustrious Elizabethan, Richard Hakluyt, taken “infinite cares,” travelled many miles from port to port to talk with every kind of sailorman—deep-sea, coaster, or yacht’s hand—with fishermen, pilots, shipbuilders, riggers, marine architects, and sail-makers. In addition to this, I have been fortunate in gaining access to libraries containing, in various languages and of both ancient and modern date, invaluable accounts of ships of earlier days. The study of coins (curiously overlooked by some writers on ancient ships) has enabled me to submit some definite knowledge concerning craft of the classical age. The study of old fonts in this country, especially in those churches which were dedicated in the name of St. Nicholas, the patron of sailors, has helped to confirm the otherwise scanty evidence for the period between the tenth and fourteenth centuries. But perhaps the most valuable and interesting material is the illustration of an Egyptian sailing ship of the XII. Dynasty. This model, rigged for sailing up and rowing down the Nile, will be discussed in Chapter II. Hitherto we have had to depend for our knowledge of Egyptian ships on the illustrations found on the tombs. Although in recent years some models of boats have been discovered in these tombs, yet that which I am enabled to reproduce (Figs. 5 and 6) is the only one showing the boat properly rigged that has hitherto been unearthed. This model was discovered in the season of 1906-1907 at Rifeh, by Professor Flinders Petrie, and is the finest example that has yet reached England. It is now in the Manchester Museum, and I am indebted to Dr. Hoyle, the Director of the Museum, for his courtesy in enabling me to reproduce this very interesting model here.

Notwithstanding the deplorable fact that there are gaps existing at those critical stages where information would be the most welcome, it is nevertheless possible to construct a fairly continuous narrative of the development of the sailing ship. It will be noticed that in addition to the information to be found in ancient tombs of Egypt we have the evidence of ancient coins, vases, terra-cotta and wooden models, lamps, monuments, excavations in Scandinavia, England, Scotland, Germany. Coming to more modern times, there is the Bayeux Tapestry, with its excellent copy in the South Kensington Museum. We have, too, the pictorial representations on ancient seals and coins of this country. There are some reproductions of ships in old manuscripts; but it is an unfortunate fact that, except in comparatively modern times, it is rare to find the ship commemorated in paintings. Even when it is found, it is often represented with less regard to marine accuracy than to pictorial effect. When one considers the high position both Venice and Genoa occupied during the Middle Ages, alike in respect of art and maritime pursuits, it is difficult to understand why so remarkably few pictures of ships remain to us among the Old Masters. In both religious and secular paintings the ship is conspicuous by its absence. Perhaps it may be that artists had not received sufficient encouragement to paint marine subjects and that the gulf which to-day exists between the landsman and the sailor was equally great then.

However, various painters have seen fit to take the Pilgrimage of St. Ursula as their theme. Memling’s celebrated panels on the reliquary of that saint, now in St. John’s Hospital, Bruges, are of interest for our purpose, for no fewer than four of the six panels contain pictures of ships belonging to the period of the artist. The date of these miniatures is some time not later than the year 1489. Old printed books of the sixteenth century onwards frequently contain illustrations of ships of the time. Among the books, for instance, presented to the South Kensington Museum on the death of Lady Dilke will be found an interesting illustrated French translation of the Acts of the Apostles. The ships (of mediæval design) illustrating the Voyages of St. Paul are of value as showing the rig and details of the craft contemporary with the artist. These and similar illustrations, excepting always when the artist has become too fantastic and imaginative, are important links in connecting the story of the ships of ancient days with the modern full-rigged ship. Coming down to the seventeenth century, the paintings of the Dutch artists Jan Van de Cappelle, of Willem Van de Velde the younger, Bakhuizen, Ruisdael, and Cuyp give us the most interesting details as to rigging and hull. Claude’s picture, in the National Gallery, of the “Embarkation of St. Ursula,” painted towards the end of the seventeenth century, shows the high-pooped ship of his own day. Charles Brooking of the eighteenth century, Turner and Clarkson Stanfield of the nineteenth, show us in their pictures many invaluable minutiæ of sailing ships. And even if Ruskin’s criticism hold good, that Stanfield’s ships never look weather-beaten but “always newly painted and clean,” yet for our purpose this is no disadvantage; and it will be appreciated still more in a few years when our descendants go into art galleries to seek out from contemporary paintings the appearance of ships of the Victorian period.

Happily the ships of our day have been perpetuated by such admirable marine artists as Moore, Wyllie, Vicat Cole, Napier Hemy, Dixon, Somerscales, Tuke, and others. But in addition to pictures, we have at hand some hundreds of models of vessels in the South Kensington Museum, the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, the Royal United Service Museum, Whitehall, in the Louvre, in Continental churches, museums, and arsenals, and in many private collections. Some of these models in Greenwich and South Kensington have been rigged from historical information in the museums themselves. It is impossible to deny the important influence that these wonderful little ships may have on the youthful minds of our nation, which has had the privilege for so many years of being called maritime. But to the student of ships of any age they are the greatest aid in assisting him—far greater, indeed, than pages of description, far greater also than the work of any painter—to realise the vessels that carried our ancestors across the seas. I am as certain that we owe to the Government the greatest thanks for putting these facilities before the public as I am uncertain that the same public appreciates them in the manner they deserve.

From all these sources, then, already enumerated, we are to begin to reconstruct as far as possible the ships of all ages. If we should be accused of arguing at times by inference without actual facts before us, let us be allowed to say this much: there are signs in a ship’s lines and rigging which, to the landsman, are devoid of meaning, but to the man who has been wont to handle ships, and perhaps to design and build them, they are full of significance. Generally speaking, to the former a model is a nicely-carved piece of wood, adorned with a maze of complicated strings. Curves of hull, the position of the masts, the amount of sail area aft or forward, go for nothing. To the expert every inch of rope has its definite value, every line of her design speaks of speed or seaworthiness, or of the opposite. The careful balance of sails will show whether she is, to use sailor slang, “as handy as a gimlet” or as hard-mouthed a beast as ever was governed by a rudder. Therefore, if, in looking at the lines and rig of a ship of the Phœnicians, we should say, without being able to quote any historian of antiquity, that she would never go to windward because her sail area was deficient and her draught of water too slight, and assume from this that the Phœnicians always waited for a fair wind or rowed with oars, we must not be accused of proving too much. This is not a matter for the archæologist, but for the practised mariner with some knowledge of the theory of his art. Any sailor, for instance, on looking at a model or illustration of a Burmese junk (see Fig. 1), would tell you at once that her lines and rig are such as would make her useless for going against the wind. He knows this by inference. As a fact, he learns afterwards that, like the boats of the Egyptians—which she much resembles in general shape, in mast, and in sail—these junks can only sail before the wind (which is usually favourable) in ascending the river Irawadi, and return with the current.

Fig. 1. Burmese Junk.

A nation exhibits its characteristics, its exact state of progress and degree of refinement in three things: its art, its literature, and its ships. Indeed we might go so far as to affirm that these last are but a branch of the first. Just as the house was at first merely a thing of utility, becoming in the course of time adorned with carvings and decoration, so the ship, from being the rough, clumsy dug-out, with the advance of civilisation becomes adorned at first with animals’ heads, with eyes, with a human head, with coloured hull, and at a subsequent stage with sails bearing devices of high artistic merit. Finally, gilded portholes and gilded sterns were added to the ship, so that, to quote the description of Charles I.’s Sovereign of the Seas, “she was so gorgeously ornamented with carving and gilding that she seemed to have been designed rather for a vain display of magnificence than for the service of the State.”