Like the catboat, if the weather were a constant quantity, the schooner would be a rig without peer. In smooth water and when she can carry her sail, especially to windward, there is no rig to equal the schooner. She has the speed and weatherliness of the sloop, with lighter and easier sails to handle. She can be shortened down without reefing, and can spread plenty of light canvas in soft winds. Her defect is the defect of all fore-and-afters, although in her case it is aggravated by having the mainmast stepped further aft—she is a bad runner in heavy water.
I have made a passage of twelve days in a schooner, during which time we never had the stops off the mainsail; during part of the time having no after-sail, and the rest of the time a trysail set. To have set the mainsail and squared off the boom would surely have brought about a disaster.
Jib and Mainsail
Sloop Rig
Let me here repeat some former remarks on the subject: It is often a matter of wonder to landsmen why sailors continue to use square sails, when to all intents the fore-and-aft canvas is so much easier to handle. So it is in smooth water and under average conditions; so long as one of our typical fore-and-aft schooners can carry all sail and make progress in a windward direction there is no abler vessel afloat. But when obliged to shorten down or make a run for it, they are the worst craft in the world. So long as you can keep sail on them they will do all that a ship can be asked to do, but once they are stripped in a gale, good-bye to safety. Take a good look at an ordinary two-masted coaster, and you will comprehend at once why this is. These vessels have enormously long lower masts, and the spread of the rigging is in consequence small; their booms are long and heavy, and all the weight above deck is centered in a line over the keel. The pressure of canvas, except when the sails are winged, is all on one side, and is exerted so as to bring a twisting strain upon the supporting spars. There is not, as in the square-rigger, a balancing of weights and strains. The freer these vessels are sailing the more pronounced is this strain. The only relief the spar can find is to impart this strain to the hull, which in consequence forces the bow in the opposite direction and brings a pressure upon the helm. To prevent this action a reducing of the after canvas is necessary.
Pole Mast Sloop