Windswept_ The Story of Wind and Weather - Marq de Villiers [118]
From the thirteenth century onward, vessels both Occidental and Oriental were capable of sailing anywhere in the world. The workhorse of the trading world was the caravel, a ship about seventy feet long and with three masts: the foremast carrying a square foresail and topsail, stepped through the high forecastle at the bow; a mainmast, amidships, with square mainsail and topsail; and aft, on the raised sterncastle, the mizzenmast, with a lateen-rigged sail. With the exception of the lateen sail, the sails were hung from a yard at right angles to the longitudinal axis of the boat. The lateen sail at the stern, set fore and aft, had several advantages over the square sails. It was more efficient in sailing close to the wind, and it could be used to push the boat around when tacking. 11 The increased number of sails also created a boat with greater maneuverability, one that was faster, easier to sail, and required fewer crew. It became the standard vessel for Prince Henry's discoverers and was used by Columbus in his explorations.
For the next few hundred years shipbuilders produced as many new designs as Detroit did cars in the 1950s. Sails and sail types proliferated. Before long, a typical ship's mast would carry six sails—the "course" at the bottom, the lower and upper topsails, the lower and upper topgallants, and the royal or skysail at the top. Vessel types proliferated too. There were barques, barquentines, galleons, East Indiamen, frigates, brigs and brigantines, snows, and then schooners.
A full-rigged ship is a royal queen,
Way-hay for Boston town, oh!
A lady at court is a barquentine,
A barque is a gal with ringlets fair,
A brig is the same with shorter hair,
A topsail schooner's a racing mare,
but a schooner she's a clown, Oh!12
The schooner was developed in the Boston states, which in practice seemed to include Nova Scotia, as the fishing and trading workhorse of coastal waters; its ancestor was the two-masted coaster that plied British and Dutch waters in the sixteenth century In the nineteenth century, Lunenburg and Shelburne and Yarmouth, Portsmouth and Gloucester—especially Gloucester, Massachusetts—and Boston found themselves the center of one of the world's most productive industries, building more ships in a few decades than any other place but Old England, not just schooners but brigs and brigantines and barques. The schooners that emerged from shipyards up and down the coast generally had two or more masts, without any square sails. Most were small, nimble, weatherly craft, but some had seven masts and were among the largest sailing vessels ever built. The topsail schooner, a British development of the American schooner, did carry one or two square sails on the upper part of the foremast, which improved her downwind performance.
The age of sail ended with a panache seldom exceeded in any technology. For one brief decade, in the late 1840s and early 1850s, the clipper ship burst her way through the stodgy and the hidebound, and raced her wondrous way into men's hearts. As John Dyson put it eloquently in Spirit of Sail: On Board the World's Greatest Sailing Ships, "The Clipper was a ship to grapple with every element but fire. In the whole history of navigation nothing excelled her dash and good looks—the slender hull, springy as a sea hollow; the three tall masts slightly raked to give her a youthful look, hungry for action; the great blade of her bow, curved and sharp, scattering flying fish as it scythed blue water."
Before the clipper, commercial long-distance sailing was still a relatively ponderous, slow, methodical, and mundane affair. As Dyson says, British maritime law still mandated that "British cargoes [must be] carried on British keels," a way of keeping the upstart Yankees out of world trade. The great merchantmen, like the East Indiamen,