The rigging of modern sailing-vessels is divided into “standing” and “running”; the former includes the masts, their stays, now generally made of wire, and such other rope-work as is not adjustable.
The sails, also, may be assigned to two classes: first, those attached to a mast, with or without boom and gaff, or to a stay, which are called fore-and-aft sails because they may be ranged lengthwise of the ship; and, second, those suspended by their upper and lower edges to or between spars or “yards” swung across the mast, and known as “square” sails, the lowermost of which are really lugs. All the variations of shape seen in America, except the rare and local lateens, can be counted in one or the other of these classes.
The styles of rig visible in American waters are not many, and are easily learned. Let us begin with the simplest—that having one mast.
ANCIENT CARAVELS.
Copied from old manuscripts and tapestries.
The cat-boat (i. e., cat-rigged boat) is one having a simple pole-mast stepped very near the bow, and a fore-and-aft sail laced to a gaff and boom and managed by a sheet. This is the rig of the ordinary American sail-boat, which is noted for its ability in pointing up into the wind. In England it is known as a una-boat. Sometimes the peak of the sail is sustained by a little loose spar called a “sprit,” instead of a gaff. In the chapter on Yachting will be found further illustrations of these small rigs.
A sloop has one mast (with topmast) set well back from the stem, and a bowsprit. The sloop-rig consists of a fore-and-aft mainsail, spread by means of a boom and gaff, a gaff-topsail, a forestaysail, and one or more jibs. A cutter is now substantially the same thing, though formerly somewhat distinguished. Both are derived, probably, from the northern lugger, and old-time pictures show queer intermediate forms, often having a square topsail instead of a gaff. Thus the earlier of the Hudson River sloops, which were not only the freight-carriers but the packet-boats between New York and Albany from the time the Dutch introduced them until steamboats took their place, had the top of the mainsail supported, lug-fashion, by a short yard, and carried above that a square topsail; but this rig was steadily modified toward the modern type to make it faster and safer in the sudden squalls that beset this hill-girt river.
Of two-masted rigs, the oldest is the brig, which has square sails on both masts, just like the main and mizzen masts of a full-rigged ship. Then there is the brigantine, a slight modification of the brig, and the hermaphrodite brig, or brig-schooner, with fore-and-aft sails on the after mast. This kind of vessel has been greatly modified (one of its most extraordinary forms was the ketch), is less common now than formerly, and took its name, which is derived from the same source as “brigand,” from the fact that it was the most common rig of the pirates of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Its place was largely taken for small vessels by a purely American invention, and one of the greatest of Yankee notions—the schooner. The schooner was originally small, and had two masts; but now is often built of great size, with as many as five or six masts, each of which has a fore-and-aft rig—that is, a sloop’s mainsail and gaff-topsail on every mast, with forestaysail and several jibs in front, and staysails between. Sometimes a square sail is placed on the foretopmast, which makes the vessel a topsail schooner. The first one was built by a Gloucester sea-captain about 1817, and proved so satisfactory that all the fishing-fleet were soon rigged in that way, whence the idea has spread to all parts of the world.
Until recently, however, vessels large enough to have three masts were always “square-rigged,” as barks, barkentines, or ships; for, although we have come to speak of any big vessel as a “ship,” yet in proper nautical language a ship is a vessel rigged in a particular way, and it is nothing else. In fact, in olden times they were sometimes very small—too small to be economical, as we now know. The “Naval Chronicle” for 1807 contained an account of a full-rigged ship of only thirty-six tons’ burden, which for one hundred and thirty years previous to that date had been cruising about the English coast, and may be doing so yet, for aught I know.
