Ships of the seven seas

by Hawthorne Daniel

But the days of the clipper ships were numbered. Steam was already making inroads, and when the Suez Canal was opened in 1869, steamships could make the voyage to the East through the narrow waters of the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, where sailing ships were impotent to follow, in much less time than even the clippers could round Cape Horn. And so there passed from the sea what were probably the most beautiful of all the ships that ever sailed its dark blue surface. Yachts there may be whose fragile lines are just a bit more delicate, whose sails are bleached more white. But such comparison is odious. It is as if Du Barry were compared with Juno. Now and again a watchful eye may still see a square-rigged ship being impudently towed about some teeming harbour by some officious tug, and occasionally a fortunate voyager may see one with her sails set as she harnesses the wind to take her half across the world. But the romantic days of sail have gone. The voyages from London to China around Good Hope, from New York to San Francisco around the Horn—they are things long past. Steam and a ditch through the sandhills of Suez did it. And now another ditch through the hills of Panama has double-locked the door, and sail is gone.

But hold! Sail is nearly gone, and yet it is here!

No more do fleets of monster ships with towering masts spread square sail after square sail to the honest winds of heaven. They, it is true, have almost disappeared, and what is left is not to be compared with what is gone. Yet in these days of steam and coal, of grimy stokers and machines called ships, there still remains, to gladden the eye of the white-haired men who sailed the clipper ships a half a century and more ago, a type of sailing ship that has proved to be so handy, so capable and efficient, that all the machines of a machine-mad world have not been able to drive them from the sea.

These are the schooners and the other craft whose sails, based on those old Dutch vessels that first used the jib, are of a different design.

The clipper ships and their predecessors were “square-rigged” ships. A schooner is a “fore-and-aft” rigged ship, and to-day the “fore-and-aft” rig is the only rig in common use.

It will have been seen, from this account, that the development of sails was slow. Century followed century and ships progressed but little. Even the most rapid period of development covered the four centuries, from 1450 to 1850, so that, while fore-and-aft sails have reached their present stage more rapidly than square-rigged ships, still the story is one that covers centuries.

I have already told of the origin in Holland of the jib, which seemed to grow out of the lateen sail. It was from that beginning that the “fore-and-aft” rig developed.

The narrow waterways of the low countries demanded a type of sail that could be handled more easily and could sail closer to the wind than the square sail could. This the fore-and-aft sail did, and so it filled an important need. I have not the space, in what remains of this chapter, to trace its growth in all its detail. Furthermore, E. Keble Chatterton has done so admirably in “The Story of the Fore-and-Aft Rig.”

Let it suffice to say that the growth has been more a perfection than a series of revolutionary changes. At first the rig was crude. The sails were laced to the masts, for hoops sliding on the mast and to which the sail is made fast, while now almost universal, were then unknown. A boom was used to spread the foot of the sail, but not until the famous yacht America crossed the Atlantic and won the cup that still is held in America as the greatest racing trophy in the world was the foot of the sail laced to the boom.

Many times I have sat at the wheel of the America as she lies in the basin of the U. S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, her masts denuded of the pile of canvas that drove her to that famous victory, and thought of her and of the little group of men whose careful thought resulted in her triumph. Such men as those, in the thousands of years through which ships have grown, have been the men who have made possible the growth of the dugout canoe with its sail of skin into the Great Republics and the Americas and, later, the Majestics. Such men as those have aided greatly in the advance of civilization.