A CORVETTE OF 1780
This ship shows the new sail plan overcoming the old. The masts carry topsails, topgallantsails, and royals, and what was formerly a lateen sail on the mizzenmast has become a spanker. Furthermore, while the ship carries jibs, she has not yet parted with her spritsails.
All this description of its origin is, of course, purely imaginary. I have no information as to how it originated, but I offer the explanation I have given as a plausible surmise. The earliest actual representation of a ship using this sail is, so far as I can learn, on a map sent in 1527 from Seville by one M. Robert Thorne to a Doctor Ley. On this map, like so many of its time, there are numerous decorations and pictures. One of these is a small craft, Dutch in appearance, which carries a combination of sails not unlike those of a simple sloop of to-day. It is somewhat as if a lateen sail had been cut in two vertically a third of the way back from the forward end, and the two pieces mounted separately—the triangular section depending from the fore stay, and the remainder from a spar similar to what we now call the gaff. This interesting old map was called to my attention by a mention of it made by E. Keble Chatterton in his “Sailing Ships and Their Story.”
But this triangular sail, while it was in common use from so early a date on small boats, did not appear on ships of the larger sizes until the latter part of the 17th Century and the first part of the 18th. At this time the lateen sail was still in evidence although it was beginning to undergo the first of the changes I have mentioned, while the fore and mainmasts now commonly spread two square sails, and sometimes three; and sometimes, too, this third sail, instead of being square, was triangular, as the earliest topsails had been.
But the latter part of the 17th Century brought the first real steps in scientific design. Men began to study the disturbances set up by the passage through the water of various shaped hulls, and began to replace rule-of-thumb methods of design with designs based on more or less scientific conclusions. This also began to show itself in the design of masts and spars and sails. Long since, the steering oar, which for centuries was mounted on the starboard or right-hand side of the ship near the stern, had given way to the rudder, hung astern as rudders are still hung, and now the science of ship design began the steps that ultimately resulted in the Flying Cloud and the Great Republic and those other clipper ships that in the 19th Century set records for speed that many of our steamships of to-day cannot equal.
Throughout the 18th Century ships were gradually improved along these scientific lines until, in the merchant service, the beautiful ships of the British East India Company, with their piles of snowy canvas, their shining teakwood rails, and their graceful spars, were the proudest ships that had ever sailed the seas. In the naval services the greater ships had taken a less beautiful form but had grown into the impressive if awkward line-of-battle ships of which an excellent example is still to be seen in the Victory, Nelson’s famous flagship, which the British still proudly, and properly, maintain at Portsmouth.
But now begins the super-perfection of sailing ships—the development of the clippers, those beautiful structures of wood and iron and canvas that for a brief time so surpassed every other ship on every sea as to set them apart in an era of their own. These were ships of such beauty and speed and spirit that they stand clearly separate and alone.
CHAPTER III
THE PERFECTION OF SAILS—THE CLIPPER SHIPS
In the 17th Century a new people began to make their mark in the world of the sea. Formerly the development of ships had been almost exclusively, at least for two thousand years, in the hands of Europeans—the Mediterranean peoples first, and later, the peoples of northern Europe.
One of the important reasons for the north European interest in ships had come about as a result of the discovery of the New World and, with that, the discovery that the world was actually round. That dynamic age now often called the age of discovery opened up new lands that lent themselves to colonization, and because Europe was filled with energy and was in a proper frame of mind to take advantage of the opportunity, important colonies sprang up in the Americas, in the Pacific, and in Africa.