Reef points are short pieces of rope passing through the sail. The ends are allowed to hang free on opposite sides of the canvas. On square sails there are two or three rows of these running across the upper part of the sail. When the captain orders sail reduced the men go into the rigging, lie out along the yard supporting the sail to be reefed and pulling the sail up until they reach the first row of reef points, proceed to tie the two ends of the points together over the top of the sail. This ties a part of the sail into a small space, reducing by that much the area spread to the wind.
This great improvement, together with the new arrangement of sails, began to make sailing ships into structures that, more or less, were reaching out toward the perfection that led ultimately to such speed and ease of handling as never before was thought possible.
A 16TH-CENTURY DUTCH BOAT
It was on boats of this type that the jib seems first to have been used. To-day in Holland one sees a similar boat, called a schuyl, which is almost identical with this, except that it utilizes a curved gaff at the top of the mainsail.
The topmasts, topgallantmasts, and others, too, by this time were no longer being lashed rigidly in place but were being arranged so that they could be partly lowered by sliding them lengthwise through their supports.
All this time hulls were improving, and the ridiculous sterncastles finally reached their climax and began to recede. And then came a new development that gave the builder of ships the final thing they needed, so far as the sails themselves were concerned, to make possible the ultimate perfection of sailing ships. This was the adoption, in place of the awkward spritsails and sprit topsails, of the triangular “jibs” and staysails that are a conspicuous part of most modern sailing vessels.
Perhaps this highly efficient triangular sail did not spring, Minerva-like, fully formed, from the head of any mediæval ship-designer. It first appeared in use on small boats, and perhaps appeared there in triangular form because of the impracticability of mounting a bowsprit capable of carrying the common but awkward spritsail. Another reason, perhaps, for its triangular form, was the fact that the stay leading from the bow to the masthead, while it lent itself to holding a sail, caused any such sail to be triangular in shape because of the angle at which the stay was stretched.
Nor was a triangular sail in itself a change from the old order of things. For more than two thousand years the lateen sail had been in use, and a lateen sail is much the same shape as a jib or a staysail. Its principal difference lies in the fact that its direct support is a spar, while the support of a jib is a rope which serves also as a support for the mast. And so it is easy to imagine some old Dutch sailor—for the jib appeared first in Holland—rigging up a kind of makeshift sail on his fore stay, seeing that, because a lateen sail worked astern, another sail so similar in shape might work at the bow. Perhaps he was laughed at for his pains, for sailors are sensitive to appearances and a triangular sail at the bow of a boat in the early 16th Century was different from anything to which sailors were accustomed, and consequently, in their eyes, was, no doubt, ridiculous. But the “ridiculous” sail proved efficient, as sometimes happens in other things, and because of its efficiency and its simplicity it began to take its place as an accepted form.
