Part 19

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.

Footnote 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.

Footnote 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.

Take, again, the yawl and the dandy. Both vessels are cutter-rigged forward, with a mizzen-mast aft, upon which they set a small sail. To the inexperienced eye they are exactly alike. What, then, is the difference? It lies in the little sail that is set upon the mizzen-mast. A yawl has a lug-mizzen, the foot of which sets on a spar that projects over the stern. The dandy’s mizzen has a gaff and boom, though the mizzens of some dandies, I believe, are what is termed jib-headed. The distinction is minute, and yet the difference when looked into is found to be decided enough. The yawl is chiefly the pleasure craft, the dandy the fishing vessel.

Amongst fishing craft the varieties of rigs are few. They consist of the dandy, the lugger, and the smack. The smack is a vessel that is rigged like a cutter, and it is not necessary that a vessel should be a fishing boat in order to be called a smack.

To people who care about the sea there is much that is interesting in rigs. The variations are curious as illustrating experiments, and the resolution to adopt certain forms useful in particular trades. There is the barque, a three-masted vessel square-rigged on her fore and main masts, and with fore-and-aft sails on her mizzen-mast; she is varied by the barquentine, a vessel rigged like a brig, or indeed like a barque or ship on her foremast, but with fore-and-aft sails only on her main and mizzen-masts.[75] Then out of the brig you get the snow, and out of the snow the hermaphrodite brig, which is a vessel with a brig’s foremast and a schooner’s mainmast, and out of the hermaphrodite brig comes the brigantine, that, unlike the hermaphrodite, carries a square top-sail at the main, and, unlike the brig, has no maintop. In the same way there are different types of schooners, such as the three-masted schooner, the fore-and-aft schooner, the top-sail schooner, and the two-top-sail schooner. Differences of cut, numbers of masts, spread of sail, give distinctions to the smallest and humblest class of boats. Thus a tosher is not a long-shore driver, though both little vessels are employed in catching what they can close into the land.

Footnote 75:

The nomenclature of the sea has been so varied by successive generations that it is extremely difficult to arrive at the paternity of sails, to ascertain when such and such canvas was introduced and why the names it bore were given. In some respects Sir Walter Raleigh helps us in a passage in his “Discourse of Shipping.” “We have lately,” says he, “added the bonnet and the drabler; to the courses we have devised studding sails, topgallant sails, spritsails, and topsails.” By “topsails,” I take it, he means spritsail-topsails, for the top-sail was long anterior to the canvas he specifies. The sails thus named are manifestly then as old as the closing years of the reign of Elizabeth and the beginning of that of James I. The stay-sail I find plentiful in the days of Queen Anne. In an old volume of shipbuilding, written by an anonymous author who claims for his work, “’Tis the product of thirty-two years study and experience; for it is very well known that I have been so long imploy’d in her Majesty’s service, and that of her Royal Predecessors”—I find the following: “There are other sails called stay-sails, used almost on every stay; as the main stay-sail, main-topmast stay-sail, fore-topmast stay-sail, mizon stay-sail, and sometimes on the mizon-top-mast stay and topgallant stay. And such sails are very useful, if the ship goes anything from the wind, that is, when the sails are constantly full and not shivering. There is another sail call’d a flying-gib, a sail of good service to draw the ship forward, but very prejudicial to the wear of the ship forward.” Towards the close of the last century ships went so numerously clothed that it really seems as though nothing but their prodigious beam enabled them to stand up to the press of canvas. There were two jibs, fore topmast stay-sail, sprit-sail and sprit-top-sail, and fore stay-sail. Here you have six sails for the bowsprit and jibbooms. Royals were by this time used and were called the topgallant royals. Over the driver was carried a gaff top-sail, outside which was set another sail bent to a light yard. Ring-tails and water-sails were common, the latter projecting far beyond the stern. There were nine stay-sails, besides those carried at the fore. A ship with studding-sails out on either side exposed no less than forty-two sails. The present century has added little to sails. I can only think of the skysail. But there have been great changes in shape. Formerly the mizzen was set on a lateen yard. Stay-sails were shaped like trysails, the stay on which they were hoisted shaping them as a gaff does a spanker. Sprit-sails long ago disappeared, and the tendency of late years has been to diminish canvas, insomuch that studding-sails are no longer common.

One needs a good memory to bear even a few distinctions in mind. I remember once standing on the banks of the Tyne and hearing a man, pointing to a vessel like a lighter, call her a wherry. To my South-country notions, of course, a wherry was a small open boat in which people are rowed by a waterman, or which they hire for excursions. Close alongside this gigantic Tyne wherry, which, by the way, if my memory serves me rightly, was half full of coal, lay a similar-looking craft that the same man spoke of as a keel. I asked him why one should be called a keel and the other a wherry, when they were both very much alike, and I am under the impression, though I cannot be sure at this distance of time, that he said the difference lay in one being carvel built, that is, with the outer planks coming together and forming a perfectly smooth side, and the other being clincher-built, a term applied to planks when they overlay one another. Be this as it may, it is at least certain that a wherry in the north is different from a wherry in the south, and really when one comes to consider the infinite variety of rigs and builds, and the almost imperceptible subtleties amongst them which make the same name utterly inapplicable to what looks exactly like the same thing, nautical gentlemen, individuals who are not exactly sailors, but who nevertheless know a very great deal indeed about the sea, insomuch that they are prepared to instruct, at a moment’s notice, the most ancient mariner they can come across in his business—such people ought to be a little more compassionate than they are usually found in dealing with those errors or oversights in marine technicality which landsmen are repeatedly guilty of, and which writers and others who ought to know better are occasionally chargeable with.

_HOW THE OLD NAVIGATORS MANAGED._

It is extremely difficult to understand how the old navigators contrived to convey their ships from port to port. I do not mean the ancients, who are supposed to have kept the land aboard and to have steered by the stars, though it is certain that they must again and again have been blown out to sea and yet made shift to get home again; but those early voyagers who travelled to the Indies by way of the Cape and to the American seaboard. They had no conception of longitude; they had no means to determine it; and their latitude was extremely vague. An old chart or map is often a strange sight. The figuration of continents and islands is as little like the reality as a child’s fanciful drawing of such things would be. The longitude is mere guesswork, and the “heights” or parallels are leagues out. Yet these old people managed to reach the places they started for. Sometimes, to be sure, if the trip were a long one, they found themselves off the land at a distance of a hundred miles or so north or south, as it might be, of their port; but, when you consider that even their knowledge of the variation of the compass was extremely imperfect—that the compass with them was a sluggish primitive appliance—that they could be sure of nothing but their dead-reckoning and the North Star—it should be amazing to us, who live in the age of the exquisite sextant, the superb chronometer, Sir William Thompson’s compass, the patent revolving log and Admiralty charts, that mariners from the days of Diaz, Columbus, and Magellan, down to the period of Dr. Maskelyne, the “Nautical Almanac,” and the establishment of the Board of Longitude in the last century, should have been able, without hesitation or difficulty, to push on their hundred different ways through the ocean, and duly arrive at the parts they weighed for.

A list of the instruments in use at sea two centuries ago is published as a supplement to Captain James’s “Strange and Dangerous Voyage in his intended Discovery of the North-West Passage into the South Sea, in the years 1631 and 1632,” contained in “Churchill’s Collection,” vol. ii., 1704. The captain took with him a quadrant, “of old season’d pear-tree wood, artificially made, and with all care possible divided into diagonals, even to minutes.” It was four-foot semi-diameter, adds the captain. In addition to this he had an equilateral triangle of the same wood, “whose radius was five foot at least;” a second quadrant with a semi-diameter of two feet; a staff for taking altitudes and distances seven feet long, “whose transome was four foot, divided into equal parts by way of diagonals, that all the figures in a radius of ten thousand might be taken out actually;” another staff six feet long, a cross-staff, three Jacob’s staves, and two of “Mr. Davis’s back staves.” These huge unwieldy instruments seem entirely appropriate to the age of folios. James took with him other appliances which he called horizontal instruments. Among these were two semi-circles “two foot semi-diameter, of seasoned pear-tree wood,” six “meridian compasses,” four needles in square boxes, “moreover, four special needles (which my good friends Mr. Allen and Mr. Marre gave me) of six inches diameter, and toucht curiously with the best loadstone in England;” a loadstone with the poles marked for fear of a mistake, a watch-clock, “a table every day calculated, correspondent to the latitude, according to Mr. Gunter’s directions in his book, the better to keep our time and our compass and judge of our course,” log-lines and glasses, “two pair of curious globes, made purposely,” and finally “I made a meridian line of 120 yards long, with six plumb lines hanging in it, some of them being above 30ft. high, and the weights hung in a hole in the ground, to avoid wind. And this to take the sun’s or moon’s coming to the meridian. This line we verified, by setting it by the pole itself, and by many other ways.” Such was the scientific equipment of a man bound on a Polar expedition in the year 1631.

There is an interesting appendix to this voyage “touching longitude,” written by the astronomer Gellibrand. “The longitude of a meridian,” he says, “is that which hath, and still wearieth, the greatest masters of geography.” He ridicules the notion that longitude may be ascertained by watching the variation of the needle, though it is worth noting that this belief continued strong for many years later, as may be gathered from a passage in the introductory essay to “Churchill’s Navigantium atque Itinerantium Bibliotheca:” “One thing more we shall observe before we quit this subject, and it is this, that the several methods for finding the longitude before mentioned depend upon astronomical observations, and those too very nice and exact, which at sea it is very difficult at any time, and very often impracticable, to make; whence arises the necessity of finding out some other way of discovering the longitude, for which hitherto nothing has bid so fair as a perfect finding out the variation of the magnetic needle, which being adjusted to a table of longitudes, they would then reciprocally show each other.” Gellibrand regards eclipses, more especially of the moon—“whose leisure, however,” he adds, “we must often wait, and perhaps go without, if the heavens be not propitious to us”—as the most satisfactory means of determining the longitude. But at sea people want something more prompt than an eclipse to find out where they are.

For generations, then, the mariner was left to depend upon his dead-reckoning, which, as one method of navigating a ship, is still in force, and I do not know that we have in any way altered this old practice of computing, save by the introduction of the patent log, whose indications are still in some directions checked by the log-reel of our forefathers. Dead-reckoning simply consists of ascertaining how fast the ship sails by heaving the log, by entering the courses sailed, by allowing for leeway. The ship, let us say, steered north-east for one hour, north-east by north during the following hour, north-north-east for the third hour, and then during the fourth hour came up to north-east again. In those four hours her rate varied: at one o’clock the log showed her sailing at seven knots; at two, five-and-a-half knots; at three, four-and-three-quarter knots; at four, six knots; and her leeway was sometimes three-quarters of a point, sometimes one point, sometimes more. Her place, then, on the chart may be easily set down or “pricked” out of these entries in the log-slate. In thick weather there is no other way of computing a ship’s progress and position. The sky may be obscured for days, and all that a man can do is to heave his log, watch how the ship heads, and observe her leeway. It was in this fashion that the ancient mariner contrived to crawl about the ocean, and it is worth observing that the log he measured his way with we still possess and use. No ship, I should think, goes to sea without the reel, the line, and the glass. The rotating logs tell you how far you have gone in a given time with tolerable accuracy; but the reel-log is the only appliance that I am acquainted with which will tell you how fast you are going at the moment.

Seamen have told me that with their eye they can tell the speed of their ship more accurately than with the log-line. I do not believe this, and on testing these cocksure men I have never once found them right within half a knot. Of course this refers to sailing ships. A steamer goes along steadily, and it is quite conceivable that a person accustomed to steamships could tell correctly the speed of one by looking over the side. But a sailing vessel varies her rate with every puff. Under certain conditions the increased sail that seems to be thrashing her through it with greater velocity has diminished her speed. I particularly recollect an instance. A dynamometer was attached to the taffrail of a large full-rigged ship; to it was affixed a line which it dragged through the water. The pull of the line was equivalent to a weight of sixty pounds. The vessel was then sailing with the wind a point before the beam, under all plain sail, the breeze fresh. The foretopmast studding-sail was set, and the hand of the dynamometer went back, showing that the speed had been decreased to the extent illustrated by this diminution of weight in the pull of the line by the setting of the studding-sail. The chief officer, however, was so certain that the ship had improved her speed, despite the unmistakable indications of the dynamometer, that to prove his judgment he ordered the log to be hove, with the result that the speed was less by a knot (I think) than it had been before the studding-sail was set. The fact is, the ship had sail enough; the additional canvas simply buried, and so retarded her. Yet this same mate was one of many seamen who had assured me that they could tell the speed of a vessel better with the eye than with the log.