And this is a butter-rigged schooner! A well-defined distinction as rigs go, and all because the topgallant yard has no lifts! A long while after I asked an old sailor if he knew how it was that the term “butter-rigged” came to be applied to vessels furnished with this kind of topgallant yard, and he answered that he believed the name was given in consequence of numbers of this kind of craft trading to Holland for butter.
Niceties in nomenclature may be found as low down even as the humble barge. For instance, there is the well-known sprit-sail barge; a vessel with a mainsail that sets on a sprit—that is, a long pole, if I may so describe it, that stretches the outer head of the sail, from the foot of the mast. The mainsail of a sprit-sail barge is brailed up when taken in, and one must be careful that she has brails in talking to sailors about her, otherwise one’s ignorance will be greatly laughed at, sometimes secretly, and quite as often openly. For the landsman must know that there is another species of barge called a boomsail barge, which is a vessel with a gaff and a boom; so here you have throat and peak halliards, and brails are not required. Again, there is the ketch-barge, a long vessel constructed on modern lines, and rigged with a standing bowsprit and jibboom, a gaff mainsail and a gaff mizzen. Let these fine distinctions be remembered in speaking of the barge to the bargee, for here already we see very nearly as many types of barges as there are types of yachts.
Take the ketch. To the untutored eye she resembles a barge, yet she is no more a barge than a barque is a ship. And why? Because, says the nautical man, a ketch is a vessel with a top-sail and small mizzen; and that settles it. Nor can the list of barges be held as complete without reference to the dumb barge, that is, a barge without rigging or masts. Few ship-captains who have occasion to navigate the Thames but execrate the name of this kind of barge as one of the fruitfullest sources of their marine troubles and perplexities. This wretched, naked, darksome, and grimy object is incessantly floating under ships’ bows, bringing-up in wrong places, getting cut down round corners, generally with the destruction of one man, the other man nearly always holding on to something, and in many other ways constantly producing much small vexatious county-court litigation. The dumb barge is very happily named, and the term smells strongly of the bridge.
Some of the terms given to certain descriptions of rig mark a degree of forecastle scorn and illustrate the power of marine irony. As an example take the “jackass barque.” Only the eye of a mariner would distinguish any difference between a vessel so termed and the fully rigged barque. And what is the distinction? A jackass barque has fore and main topmasts and topgallant masts in one. This is why, I suppose, sailors call her jackass. Perhaps the term mule would have been more correct; and yet the polacre, that outdoes the jackass barque, in respect of spars, is suffered to pass without a derisive appellation. Here you have a vessel with masts all in one to as high as the topmast crosstrees, after which you come to separate topgallant masts, fidded.[[73]] Commonly, in consequence of there being no tops, the sailors climb aloft by means of a “Jacob’s ladder” that starts from the eyes of the lower rigging and ascends to the height of the crosstrees. Thus we find distinctions owing to masts simply, and not to the number of masts, but the manner in which they are fashioned. So a sailor speaks of skysail poles, of short royal mast heads, of stump or short topgallant masts; the vocabulary is apparently endless.
[73]. A fid is a bar of wood or iron passed through the fid-hole to support an upper mast. A fidded topmast or topgallant mast, is a mast erected above its lower mast, and supported by the fid.
And yet one word means only one thing, and every one is totally different from another. As a single example, when you speak of skysail poles you are talking of a length of mast continued above the royal mast, upon which a skysail yard may be crossed. When you speak of stump topgallant masts you refer to a mast that is neither royal mast nor skysail mast, and upon which only a topgallant-sail can be set, thus losing the two sails which the existence of the skysail pole admits of.
It is noteworthy that the only vessel to which a mast more or less makes no difference is a ship—that is, a ship in the sailor’s meaning of the word, and not according to Act of Parliament. For here let me say that the law defines a ship to be any fabric that is not propelled by oars, a piece of absurdity forced upon general acceptance by its conveniency. The proper definition of a ship is a vessel with three masts, each mast being square-rigged. She would be a ship, even if she did not carry anything above her crosstrees, for she is made so by her crossjack and mizzen top-sail yard and mizzen top;[[74]] yet, if you add a fourth mast to a ship she is still a ship, even if it be what is termed a spanker mast—that is, a mast rigged like the mizzen-mast of a barque. Four-masted ships are now common. They seem comparatively recent; but in reality they are as old at least as that noble American clipper, the Great Republic, that was afloat some twenty or thirty years ago. These fourth masts in ships are supposed to have been introduced on account of the length of the vessels; but I have seen ships as small as any three-masted craft rigged with four masts. They say that these four-masted concerns are handy in stays, that, proportionally, they need fewer hands than three-masted ships, and captains have told me that they have watched them thrashing to windward in a strong breeze with the power of an ocean passenger-steamer. I should think this very likely, if it were not that every vessel of this type which I have watched sailing or towing away, outward bound, has been so deep as to look amidships as if there was nothing but the thickness of her covering-board between her and the water.
[74]. “All the yards of a ship,” says Falconer, in his “Marine Dictionary,” “are square, except that of the mizzen.” In Falconer’s day the mizzen was set on a lateen yard, long since replaced by the gaff. There was then a crossjack yard to which the clews of the mizzen top-sail were sheeted home, but no crossjack was carried. There was in the last century (perhaps in the beginning of this) a vessel called Bilander. She was a brig, but with this peculiarity, that her mainsail was set on a lateen yard. The tack was secured to a ring-bolt in the middle of the vessel, and the sheet to another ring-bolt in the taffrail.
Many changes have been made in the rig of ships which have not altered their character. Double topgallant yards leave a ship a ship, though an alteration of this sort probably in another kind of vessel would cause sailors to invent a new name for her. Take, for example, that most familiar craft, the brig. If the trysail of this vessel sets directly upon her mainmast, then she is a brig; but if you affix a little mast abaft her mainmast, and call it a trysail mast, and then set your trysail upon this mast, the brig, by this very trifling change, becomes what is called a “snow.” A landsman might be defied to detect any difference between a snow and a brig, and even when the distinction was pointed out to him he would scarcely understand what it consisted of. Nevertheless, the addition or want of a trysail mast creates two kinds of vessels rigged absolutely alike in all other respects, and so far from the terms being interchangeable, as might be imagined of names applied to what looks to be the same thing, the word “snow” is used in advertisements of sales by auction in order that it may be known the vessel offered is not a brig; and thus you may see in the shipping papers advertisements announcing that “On Thursday the snow Aunt Sally will be sold, etc.,” and, perhaps under it, “On Tuesday next, the brig Ann Maria.”
These are queer niceties, and of very little use that I can see; but sailors insist upon them, and Jack must be allowed to have his way.