Chapter IX: Part 9

“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.”

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.

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.

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_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.

It is true, nevertheless, that the mariners of certain nations in former times chose the eye in preference to the knotted line. The Dutch, in particular, though they always took the reel and glass to sea with them, seldom used them. There looks to have been something of laziness in their habit. An account of the Hollander’s slatternly trick of navigation may be found in a note to “Voyages to the East Indies by the late John Splinter Stavorinus,” in 1768–71–74 and ’75. This author tells us that the Dutchmen of his own and of earlier times steered by the true compass, or rather endeavoured to do so, “by means of a small central movable card, which they set to the meridian; and whenever they discover the variation has altered twenty-two degrees since the last adjustment, they again correct the central card. This is steering within a quarter of a point without aiming at greater exactness.” There was the same guesswork in their dead-reckoning. They hove no log, says Stavorinus. The officer of the watch corrected the course for leeway by his own judgment before marking it down on the logboard. They computed their speed by measuring a distance of forty feet along the ship’s side. “They take notice of any remarkable patch of froth when it is abreast of the foremost end of the measured distance, and count half-seconds till the mark of froth is abreast of the after end. With the number of half-seconds thus obtained they divide the number forty-eight, taking the product for the rate of sailing in geographical miles in one hour, or the number of Dutch miles in four hours.” One finds the same phlegmatic indifference in their manner of taking sights. “It is not usual to make any allowance in the sun’s declination on account of being on a different meridian from that for which the tables are calculated. They in general compute the numbers just as they are found in the tables. From all this,” drily adds Stavorinus, “it is not difficult to conceive the reason why the Dutch are frequently above ten degrees out in their reckoning.”

The Spaniards and the Portuguese were more wary, if not more knowing, than the Dutch. Extreme vigilance in conning ship was apparently a feature of the navigation of those old and famous races of mariners. Sir Richard Hawkins (Purchas, vol. iv.) is express in this. I will let him deliver himself in his own quaint inimitable tongue. “In this point of steeridge (steering) the Spaniards and Portugalls do exceede all that I have seene, I meane for their care, which is chiefest in navigation. And I wish in this, and in all their workes of discipline and reformation, we should follow their examples, as also those of any other nation. In every shippe of moment, upon the halfe-decke or quarter-decke, they have a chaire or seate, out of which, whilst they navigate, the pilot, or his adjutants (which are the same officers which in our shippes we term the master and his mates) never depart day nor night from the sight of the compasse, and have another before them, whereby they see what they doe, and are ever witnesses of the good or bad steeridge of all men that take the helme.” A later generation of sailors, “Portugalls” as well as others, knew better than to suffer men on the look-out, whether officers of the watch or quarter-masters, to be seated.

The common contrivance for taking the height of the sun at sea in order to obtain the latitude was the cross-staff or fore-staff. It was composed of a wooden staff, upon which was marked a scale of degrees and parts of degrees; it was also fitted with crosspieces for sliding along it at their middle parts. The smallest crosspieces were used for observing the least altitudes. The observation of the sun’s height was taken by means of the shadow which the extremity of the crosspiece cast on the staff when the instrument was adjusted. Contrast this humble, uncouth engine with the sextant of to-day! The back-staff was another implement, the invention of Davis, the Arctic explorer, by the help of which the ancient mariner made his way about the ocean. He had also the astrolabe. Clarke, in his “Progress of Maritime Discovery,” speaks of the sea-astrolabe as deriving its name from the “Armillary sphere invented by Hipparchus at Alexandria.” He finds it first in use among the Portuguese, perhaps because they claim its introduction into Portugal by Martin de Boerina in 1485. The introduction of the cross-staff, on the other hand, is attributed to Warner, who published an account of it at Nuremberg in 1514. As regards the astrolabe, there is certainly a mistake in the date, for we find Chaucer writing a treatise on this instrument in 1391. The method indicated by the old poet for ascertaining the latitude may be accepted as the one employed by the mariners of his own and of much later periods. One special article in his Treatise is entitled by the poet, “Another conclusion to prove the latitude of a region that ye ben in,” and the whole passage is so quaint and interesting withal that every nautical reader of this volume will, I am sure, thank me for transcribing it. I quote from the edition of the Treatise published by Mr. A. E. Brae in 1870.

“If,” writes Chaucer, “thou desire to know this latitude of the region, take the altitude of the sonne in the myddle of the daye, when the sonne is in the hed of Aries or of Libra, for than movethe the sonne in the lyne equinoctial, and abate the nombre of that same sonne’s altitude out of 90 degrees, and than is the remnaunt of the nombre that leveth the altitude of the region; as thus—I suppose that the sonne is thilke daye at noon 38 degrees of heyght; abate, than, 38 degrees out of 90, so leveth ther 52, than is 52 degrees the latitude. I saye not this but for ensample, for wel I wot the latitude of Oxenforde is certain minutes lesse. Nowe, if it so be that thou thinketh too long a tarrying to abyde til that the sonne be in the hed of Aries or Libra, than waite when that the sonne is in any other degree of the zodiake, and consider if the degree of his declinacion be Northward from the equinoctial; abate than from the sonne’s altytude at none the nombre of his declinacion, and than hast thou the height of the hedes of Aries and Libra; as thus—my sonne, peraventure, is in the 10 degree of Leo, almost 56 degrees of height at none, and his declinacion is almost 18 degrees Northward from the equinoctial; abate than thilke 18 degrees of declinacion out of the altitude at none, than leveth 38 degrees—lo there the height of the hed of Aries or Libra and thyn equinoctial in that region.”

So, then, all the ancient mariner had to do was to take the height of the sun, subtract or add the declination, and accept the remainder as his latitude. An easy process, that gives us Cape Horn on the fifty-second parallel and Valdivia on the forty-third![76] And yet they managed excellently well, hove their log, turned their hour-glasses, and arrived in due course, their ships covered with barnacles and themselves with glory. In one sense it was the marine age of gold. There were no Board of Trade examinations, no certificates of competency, no obligation to find the time by equal altitudes, or the longitude by chronometer or by lunar observations. The whole art of the navigation of our ancestors is summed up in the account of a voyage sent by Thomas Steevens to his father in 1579, in which he tells him that it is hard to sail from east to west, or contrary, because there is no fixed point in all the sky whereby to direct a course. “I shall tell you,” says he, “what helps God provideth for these men.” And he informs his father that not a “fowle” appears, nor a sign in the air or in the sea which has not been written about by those who make the voyage—that is, to the East Indies. “Wherefore, partly by their own experience, and pondering withal what space the ship was able to make with such a winde, and such direction, and partly by the experience of others whose books and navigations they have, they gesse whereabouts they be.”[77]

Footnote 76:

That is, according to one or two old maps I have seen.

Footnote 77:

I have elsewhere quoted this and other passages. Many of these papers
were written at long intervals, and I could not charge my memory with
references already made use of.

And accurately enough they “gessed,” too. But then there was no dispatch; every owner of a bottom took his own risks, and a few months sooner or later (chiefly later) was nothing to people who could find a dry dock on every beach, and a market for trucking wherever there was a coloured man. Many generations were born and died before real help came to the mariner, and he was able to sail as securely east or west as north or south. There was no “Nautical Almanac” till the year 1769. This invaluable compilation was originally proposed and then calculated by Dr. Maskelyne, and published by order of the Commissioners of Longitude. So conservative, however, is the character of the seaman that he candidly owned himself but very little obliged to Dr. Maskelyne and the Admiralty. So long afterwards as 1794 I find William Hutchinson, mariner, in a very admirable and voluminous treatise on Naval Architecture, writing in defiant terms touching the “Nautical Almanac.” “The Board of Longitude,” he says, “in order to facilitate the discovery that is expected to be made by this last-mentioned method,” namely, the “Nautical Almanac,” “has ordered that the masters for the Royal Navy must qualify themselves by learning to pass an examination to show that they understand the ‘Nautical Almanac,’ which is a task, in my opinion, that cannot be expected from many of our most hardy and expert navigators, whose education has been mostly from early youth through the hard, laborious, busy scenes of life at sea, and who have never had the opportunity to get the learning that is necessary to understand the true principles of this Almanac.”

Possibly even in this day it might not be hard to find sea veterans who would secretly agree with Mr. Hutchinson’s protest, and lament the extinction of an epoch when the quadrant and the log-line were thought “larning” enough. At any rate, I have a lively recollection of reading something closely corresponding to such views in the _British Merchant Service Journal_, the organ of the London Shipmasters’ Society, for 1879–80.

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_PLATES AND RIVETS._[78]

Footnote 78:

Written in 1882.

The great shipping question of the day is the loadline. Who is to be responsible for Plimsoll’s mark? Is the shipowner to go on fixing it at his own risk, or will the Government fix it for him? and if so, where? Is the carrying power of a vessel to be calculated by her surplus buoyancy, or is her clear side to be taken in relation to her depth of hold?—and is it possible to fix one loading point for all vessels, whether they be well-decked ships, or flush-decked ships, or hurricane-decked ships? All these are scientific conundrums, which will have to be solved sooner or later. They are certainly of the gravest possible moment to the shipping interests. As the law now stands, a shipowner is permitted to determine at what height on the vessel’s side a loadline shall be fixed; but, if, in the opinion of the officials, the loadmark does not furnish sufficient freeboard, the ship can be stopped, and forced to discharge as much of her cargo as shall raise her to the height the officials may consider she requires. The injustice of this is tolerably obvious. Practically, the Board of Trade have their preconceived theory of the proper freeboard of every vessel. They or their representatives say, “Yonder is a vessel of three thousand tons. She needs so many feet of clear side. Her owners, in our opinion, are overloading her. But let them proceed. When she is full, her stores, crew, and passengers aboard, and everything ready for the voyage, we will stop her and force her to disgorge.” Now, if the Board of Trade can decide after, why can they not decide before? Why should shipowners be obliged to guess at the theories of freeboard which the Board have in their mind, and be visited with the penalty of a costly delay if their conjectures should be wrong? The Government authorities say, We will not fix the loadline: you must do that at your own risk. But practically they _do_ fix the loadline by empowering their representatives to stop ships which look to be overloaded. Surely it would be more consistent with common sense and common justice to determine a loadline for the shipowner before he fills up his ship than to keep the determination carefully concealed from him until his vessel is about to start or actually has commenced her voyage.

This, then, as I have said, is the great shipping question of the times, and it is the outcome of the wise and humane consideration how to diminish the perils of the deep for those who have to seek a living upon it. It is to be hoped that the numerous scientific controversies which have grown out of the subject of the loadline may not overcloud and conceal the object the Plimsoll disc was intended to effect. That object was to prevent owners from sending human lives to sea aboard ships so deeply freighted that the first heavy gale of wind was bound to sink them. Unhappily departmental timidity has gone very near to neutralizing a great and beneficent measure without satisfying the class who were to be appeased and quieted. Many overladen ships contrive somehow to sneak off to sea unnoticed by those functionaries whose duty it is to stop such vessels. If they founder with all hands the law considers itself sufficiently avenged by mulcting the owners and imprisoning them. Unfortunately, this does not save the sailor’s life. It is another illustration of the truth that every special interest is bound to suffer from the lack of thoroughness in the measures of those to whom it looks for protection. One seems to find the same perfunctoriness in most of the legislation that deals with sailors. It was a good thing to extinguish the old floating coffins. And yet it was but a half-measure, too. It was merely the lopping of a few twigs from a great rotten branch. A much larger evil than the despatching of unseaworthy ships was left untouched—I mean the construction of unseaworthy ships. It was monstrous, indeed, that men should be allowed to send on a dangerous voyage vessels which had been afloat for years and years, cobbled-up old fabrics which leaked like sieves, but whose safety was a matter of profound indifference to their owners, because of the insurance that must make whatever happened good luck to them. But it seems to me much more monstrous that men should be allowed to build ships—every one of which carries as large a company of souls as would equip a whole fleet of the old condemned coasters—whose iron frames and whose iron plates are fit for nothing but to be branded with the word “Murder,” so that when the metal fragments come ashore the beholder may know for what purpose they were designed.

Legislation has protected the sailor; but read the reports of the marine inquiries held. Take the trouble to count for yourself the number of missing ships—missing nobody knows how or why—which are catalogued in a short twelvemonth. Glance at the depositions of the men brought ashore from vessels which have foundered under their feet. Here are facts speaking with a trumpet-tongue, sounding a deep and bitter reproach upon our British ears, and converting our legislative efforts into mere irony. Will any seaman pretend that Plimsoll’s mark, as we now have it, has abridged, by so much as one sixty-fourth part of the whole, the perils he had to face before the question of freeboard was ever made a subject of discussion? Will he assert that the extinction of the “floating coffin” has increased the chances of his safety, in the face of the innumerable iron ships which are, month after month, slipped along the ways into that ocean whose bottom they are bound to sound in due course? I am not speaking of the great ocean passenger steamship; she, no doubt, in point of construction and strength, may be as perfect as she looks, with the exterior gilt and paint, and the interior sumptuousness of velvet, and silk, and polished panelling. I am referring to the class of vessels which are doing the work of the old condemned coasters, and more than the work, since we find them pushing into seas into which the “coffin” never ventured. “The vessel did not arrive at her destination,” runs the report of a recent inquiry held by Mr. H. C. Rothery; “it may, therefore, fairly be concluded that she has gone to the bottom, and the object of the present inquiry is to ascertain, if possible, how she has been lost.” If possible!

To show the character of that possibility the _Annex_ prints it thus “...”

Could anything be more eloquent? Will the builder interpret those points to signify his rivet-holes?

Or take from a late deposition the narrative of a shipmaster, who relates that “he proceeded;” the wind was so and so; such and such a light bore N.W., the land was three miles distant, the sea smooth, and the vessel steaming full speed. On a sudden it was noticed that the ship was down by the head. The engineer sounded the forehold, and found nearly four feet of water in it. Then all hands were called on deck and the steam pumps set to work. But the water gained on the pumps, and meanwhile the vessel steadily continued to settle down by the head. The fore hatches were removed, and nearly six feet of water found. The pumps continued working, and the crew baled with might and main with buckets. But all was of no good, so deponent got the boats ready for use. He tried to drive his ship shorewards, but she would not answer her helm, on which he stopped the engines and lowered the boats. They were picked up by another vessel, and shortly after they were aboard the ship they had quitted went down head foremost.

This occurred close to the land, where there was plenty of help, and so we get the poor shipmaster’s deposition. But it might have occurred leagues out at sea, where there was no succour, and then the ship would have been missing, “nothing heard of the crew,” and the formal marine inquiry would have wound up with another handful of dots. And what caused that steamer to go down head foremost on a fine clear day, and in smooth water? There was no collision; there were no shoals. Had a butt started? Had a head-plate worked loose? One is inclined to say _ex pede Herculem_ of such disasters as this. They should save marine courts a deal of brain-cudgelling over incidents which, in the days of teak, and oak, and treenails, would truly take very solemn rank among the “unaccountables.”