A HONG-KONG “PULL-AWAY” BOAT.
Showing method of hoisting and reefing matting sails.
There must be some good reason for a broad division like this, and it is found in the different conditions which eastern and western seamen had to meet. The lateen seems to have originated in the Indian Ocean, is seen wherever Arabs are, and has been taken eastward by the Malays as far into the South Sea Islands as their influence extended. It is a huge, triangular canvas extended at a steep angle by a long, flexible yard balanced across the mast to which it is loosely hung, and controlled by a sheet attached to the free corner. It is thus very lofty, and therefore suitable to a region of steady and usually light winds. This is the characteristic rig of the Arab dhow—a model that has come down from remote antiquity and is capable of excellent service on the northern and eastern coasts of Africa, where it prevails. It was probably in a small vessel of this kind that the Apostle Paul suffered shipwreck; and an outgrowth and perfection of it is the dahabiyeh of the Nile, now become famous as a tourists’ pleasure-boat, whose immensely lofty sail is precisely adapted to catch every faint breath that comes across the river from the deserts. Such sails are spread like the great pointed wings of an albatross over the narrow decks of the Malayan “flying proas” and other swift South Sea craft, and urge upon their fleet errands the xebecs, saics, feluccas, and other light craft of the Levant and Barbary coasts, identified with former piracy and modern smuggling, as well as with fishing and freighting. Some of these boats have two or three masts, the xebec and felucca being notable because of the curious forward rake of the foremast; and in that extremely picturesque Portuguese fishing-boat called the muleta there are, in addition to the big lateen, a huge free second sail ballooning out to leeward from the tip of the yard, and a host of little flying jibs forward, which somebody has well likened to a flock of birds hovering about the prow. Good examples of lateen-rigged boats may be seen in Louisiana, built and manned by the Greek, Maltese, and Sicilian fishermen.
The difficulty of handling in rough or squally weather this long yard and expansive canvas makes it unsuitable for such weather as prevails in the western Mediterranean or on the Atlantic; and to meet these stormy and frequently changing conditions, and obtain a rig with which they could beat to windward, the earliest rough-water seamen devised square sails. What the rig of the ancient far-voyaging Phenician ships was we have no means of knowing, but the indications are that they carried lug sails, which appear to be the simplest and earliest of the “square” forms; that is, sails suspended from short cross-yards, and controlled by ropes (sheets) attached to their lower corners. Such at least were the sails of the Roman and Greek merchant and war vessels of the classical era, and they persist to-day in the local fishing-smacks of the stormy Adriatic.
The true home of the square-sailed craft, however, was northern Europe, where the Norwegian, Dutch, and Norman coasters and fishermen of to-day probably represent fairly well the rigs of the bold viking boats of twelve or fifteen centuries ago.
Of the slow development of ship-building during the middle ages we have little information, but in the fourteenth century we begin to hear of a revival in the art, as, indeed, was needful when the long voyages were to be undertaken which the discovery of the mariner’s compass had then rendered possible. In this revival the Venetians and Genoese took the lead, but the English were not far behind. There was a large variety of vessels in that day, rude though they were, and called by names we should hardly recognize.
Though the hulls of these vessels were large and tight, their shape was poorly adapted for speed or for safety in bad weather. Their decks were built up into immensely high structures at the stern and bows, after the old galley model, and to form forts for soldiers. Our word “forecastle” reminds us of this old usage. Their masts were single sticks,—not divided into topmasts,—and hence, necessarily, were thick and heavy; and they bore upon their summits large “top-castles” where marines stood in battle to shoot down upon the enemy’s decks. This weight above, with the height of surface exposed to the wind and the clumsy rigging, made it impossible for them to sail safely except with a fair and gentle wind (they never attempted it otherwise), and they were required to carry an enormous quantity of ballast. There was so little room for anything except armament, sleeping-berths, and a cooking-room in the war-ships that every war fleet had to take with it small vessels carrying provisions; and the case was little better in respect to merchant vessels.
The ships in which Vasco da Gama, Columbus, the Cabots, and other explorers did their marvelous work were no better than this. Strangely inefficient they seem to us, and we wonder that some of the simplest contrivances in rigging were not adopted centuries before they came into use until we remember that it was not for long, speedy voyages that vessels were intended previous to the sixteenth century (with certain exceptions in northern seas), but simply as a means of carrying slowly from one coast-port to another a great number of men or huge cargoes.
However, as the known world widened and trade grew, inventions by private ship-owners continually improved the rigging, though it would be hard to find a class of men slower to change old ways for new than the seamen. Columbus’s “caravel” had four short masts, the forward one having a square lug-sail and the three after masts lateens. It was very gradually, indeed, that lateens were given up, and most curious combinations of sails were to be seen in this transition period of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The old-fashioned Mediterranean barca, for example, had as foremast the forward-raking “trinchetto” of the felucca, with a huge lateen, while the mainmast bore three square sails and the mizzen two lugs; and in addition to this two banks of oars were provided! In fact, it was not until 1800 that English frigates substituted a spanker for the lateen-rigged mizzen.
Another curiosity of rigging possessed by these solidly built, beautifully carved vessels (no such exterior decoration has been seen since as adorned the ships of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) was the quaint little spritsail-topmast. By this time the single heavy pole-mast had been superseded by the three built-up masts and topmasts, braced by stays, made accessible by rope ladders (shrouds), and carrying several tiers of topsails instead of only one. A bowsprit had been added, also, and this became almost a fourth mast, so loaded were it and its stays with various small sails. Its outer end bore this miniature spritsail-mast, with topmast, shrouds, and tiny sails all complete, surmounted by a pole-head, or jack-staff, upon which was hoisted the flag since known as the jack, and always now carried at the prow of any national boat or ship, even such as the shapeless monitors.
But gradually, out of the experience of long voyages, the competition of merchants, and as an effect of improved gunnery and consequent changes in naval tactics, the lofty deck-structures, great tops, needless outworks, and odd sails, like this spritsail, were got rid of, and vessels were trimmed down and equalized until they became, as now, “ship-shape, Bristol-fashion.”