“And yet,” said he, “I’m certain that if the prejudices of yachting skippers and yachting crews could be overcome, and owners induced to see the thing in its right light, the schooner yacht could be rendered a faster craft than the most splashing and frothing of the yawls or cutters which now seem capable of sailing round them. It was only the other day I was looking at a yacht race. There was a middling breeze blowing. I turned the glass upon a schooner that was in the race; she was ratching through it with spars almost erect, whilst the yawls lay down till their rail looked to be under. Why was that? Would not you say because the schooner hadn’t canvas enough? She was showing all she had; but she wanted more, and if more had been given her she would have been leading instead of hanging in the wake of the toys that were swirling ahead of her. What other canvas would I give her? Why, of course, I’d give her a fore-yard and a top-sail and a topgallant yard. Consider what a square sail would have done for that schooner. I’ve been sailing in a vessel of that rig when we’ve taken the square top-sail off her, and the moment that bit of canvas was clewed up you might have felt the way deadened in her as if she’d lost her life—as if all impulse was gone. The yachting skippers have got a prejudice against square canvas. It comes, in my opinion, in a good many cases, from the feeling that if they were shipmates with a top-sail-yard they wouldn’t quite know what to do with it. I’ve spoken to a good many of them upon the subject, and asked how it is that they don’t recommend their gents to rig their vessels with square yards forward; but their regular answer is, ‘Pooh! we don’t want no square sails. Who’s going to be bothered with bracing yards about and mucking up aloft after shipshape bunts when gaffs and booms ’ll blow us along as fast as we need to go?’ That’s what it comes to. ‘Who’s going to be bothered?’ A skipper said to me: ‘Take a vessel in stays. You’ve got your top-sail aback, and instead of shooting ahead as a fore-and-after will, she stops dead while she slowly comes round.’ That shows his ignorance. I’ve been ratching down the Mersey in a clipper schooner, and such way did she get from her square canvas, and such little notice did she take of her top-sail coming aback, that I’ve seen the skipper head her for the shore with a slow putting down of his helm to let her edge along, and I’ve watched her run for a good spell parallel with the shore before she came round on the other tack. The increased way the square canvas gives a schooner counterbalances whatever loss of way an aback top-sail is supposed to cause her. My own opinion of the advantage of that canvas is such that I’d undertake to fit a schooner yacht with a square rig forward on these terms: That I was allowed to sail her first; that if she beat I was to receive double pay for my services, and if she lost what I’d done should be at my own expense, and I’d restore her to her old rig free. Only fancy in ratching the pulling power you’d be giving to a schooner. Your foreyard is suspended by a truss, and if you choose you could sweat it fore and aft if you liked. There’s nothing in square canvas to prevent a schooner from lying up as close as if she was fore-and-aft rigged. Naturally schooners ’ll go to leeward and be lost sight of as racers if the canvas they compete under is out of all proportion with the canvas that yawls and cutters spread. This is my notion, anyway, and such is my faith in my own opinion that I’m willing to stand or fall by it on the terms I’ve given you, if so be any owner of a schooner yacht is agreeable to give me the chance.”
I have no comment to offer on this sailor’s observations. My knowledge of racing yachts, their qualities and requirements, does not carry me nearly far enough to form any approach to a judgment upon the use that might be made amongst competing schooners of square sails and square topsails. I may say, in the language of the old sea-song, “I served my time in the Blackwall Line.” I went to sea at the age of thirteen and a half in Duncan Dunbar’s service, and kept to the life until I was nearly two and twenty. Few sailors combine a knowledge of fore-and-aft with square-rig seamanship. There is as great a difference between them as there is between steam and sail. For my own part, I must confess to knowing very little about yachts and yachting. The point that struck me most in this man’s conversation was the vast amount of experience that must obviously be embodied in the innumerable rigs which are found afloat in all parts of the world. A single sail will make all the difference between two vessels; nay, even the shape of a sail will as completely distinguish one craft from another as the uniform of a soldier distinguishes him from a policeman. Think of the years of weather, of violent seas, of smooth waters lightly fanned, of strong head breezes, and soft airs blowing over the stern, which have entered into the creation of those hundred different types of canvas—square, oblong, pyramidal, angular, jib-headed, long-headed, and the rest of it, which pass and repass our shores. Here is an old sailor declaring that schooner yachts ought to be square-rigged forward, and he says that nearly all the yacht captains he has talked to upon this subject are opposed to his ideas. One can perceive in this the difficulty there must have been in the beginning to settle the question of canvas, a question only to be dealt with by experience, but an experience so varied and immense that it is impossible for any man, capable of rightly compassing the character of it, not to find something absolutely impressive in its way in every cloth that gleams upon the sea.
I remember once being in the smoking-room of a large hotel, and hearing two men, in the presence of several companions of theirs, arguing about what a billyboy was. One man said it was a kind of barge, the other maintained that it was a sloop-rigged vessel similar to the old hoy. Much nonsense was talked, yet the people sitting about them listened with attention, emptied their glasses, and looked as though they thought that no matter which of the disputants was wrong—and one must be wrong—both of them evidently knew a very great deal about rigs. At last an elderly man, with a velvet collar to his black cloth coat, coming out of his chair in a corner, said, “I beg pardon for intruding, but I happen to know something about billyboys; in fact, I own a couple. What sort of a billyboy do you gentlemen mean? Is it a sloop-billyboy, or a schooner-billyboy, or a ketch-billyboy?” The company looked hard at him, for it was plain a general misgiving as to his seriousness seized them when he spoke of a ketch-billyboy. “The sort of billyboy we are arguing about,” was the answer, “is just simply—a billyboy.” “Well,” said the other, “as I told you gents, I own two. One’s ketch-rigged, and t’other’s cutter-rigged. The billyboy,” he added, “is a round starned vessel with standing bowsprit and jib-stay, and mostly she’s all hatchways.” That was his definition, and it was accepted, the man who argued that the billyboy was rigged like a sloop looking particularly pleased.
Now one would wish to know whether a billyboy, no matter how many masts she carried, would still be called a billyboy if she had a running instead of a standing bowsprit? This is one of those delicate points over which I will venture to say many a hoarse argument has been roared out amidst clouds of tobacco smoke and the fumes of old Jamaica.
“There,” said I one day, pointing to a very smart schooner that was passing, “goes a pretty little vessel.”
“Aye,” answered the ’longshoreman whom I had addressed, “a butterman.”
“Freighted with butter, eh?” said I, not doubting that that was what he meant.
“Butter!” he ejaculated, “No. What I mean is she’s butter-rigged.”
“And pray what is butter-rigged?” said I, for I protest I had never heard the expression before.
“Why,” he said, “a butter-rigged schooner’s a vessel that sets her t’gall’nt sail flying. The yard comes down on the taw’sa’l yard, and the sails is furled together.”