Learning from Royals and Gallants The quest for the truth of the Cape Horn sailing ship might well begin with the naming of the Wavertree's masts: starting at the bow , the fore, main and mi zzen; then each mast reaches skyward in three sections. In the case of her mainmast, the stout iron lower mast reaches 69 feet above the deck, and its wooden topmast, 52 feet long, which, with needed overlap at the doubl ing, reaches 37 feet 6 inches farther up; and finall y the topgallant (not yet stepped as these words are written) will reach 60 fee t 6 inches above thatso that its truck is 166 fee t above the deck, or abo ut 16 stories high. When Wavertree was launched in 1885, she was rigged for a skysail , so the skysail pole is included in her tapering, slender topgall antmast. And the hi story of the development of the Cape Horn sailing ship is recited in the naming of those masts and the sail s they carry. The topmost sail , in thi s case the skysail , was obviously added last in the evolution of the full-fledged sailing ship. It sounds like a word from the prac tica l 1800s, tipping its hat not to royalty or ga llantry, but to a natural phenomenon, the sky. And indeed we find thi s sail blooming on American ships as the 1800s open, Americans having every reason to cram on all the sail a ship would carry, as against the Engli sh, Dutch and others sailing in regul ated trades, principa ll y to the ir own colonies, with less need to push so hard . The littl e bri g Pilgrim, which Richard Henry Dana sailed in around Cape Hom in 1834, set skysail s atop her spindl y masts. There is something to reachMainmast Mizzen
tracingoutthecourseof common speech, notes a handbook a generation earlier in 1794, making mention of "sky-scrapers," triangular sails set above the royals (the hi ghest squaresail s then regul arl y carried) to get a scrap more canvas atop everything. The royal, the next sa il down, was defined in 1769 by Falconer as "A name given to the highest sail . . . in any ship." And so it was in Falconer's day. But thi s had been true for over a century, fo r back in Stuart times the great ship Sovereign of the Seas (launched 1637) carri ed royals on three masts, and it ' s clear from contemporary pictures that the royal yard was a standing yard , that is, carried in place aloft under normal conditions, not just sent up when occas ion called fo r it. These same pictures confirm , by the way, that the upper sail s were stored by be ing gathered into the capacious "tops," big walled platforms on the masts. The days of men laying out on the upper yards to stow sail came later in the century , as yards grew longer and footropes were added to them so the men had a secure footing-well, more or less secure-to stand on as they reached over the yard to gather in and furl the sail. In the laterdaysof sail , skysail s tended to be done away with as sai ling ships carried c heape r cargoes, with ever smaller crews, and the royal resumed undi sputed sway as the topmost sail. The Wavertree lost her skysai l early on, as an economy meas ure, and the great steel carriers of the 1900s were des igned from the beginning with royals as the topmost sail. The nex t sa il below the royal is the topgallant (pro no un ced t' gallant), a swas hbuckling Renaissance name fo r a sail that began to Foremast come into use in earl y Tudor t im es a nd th a t ma y b e glimpsed sometimes in the ~---'<--- Fore Topgallant Mast pi ctures of th e ships that fo ught in the Armada campaign of 1588, particularly the loftier, more windward-going Engli sh ships. "Gallant" then meant something extra, something over the top, as it still does in some senses. The 0 ED
ing up high, under such conditions, since the wind tends to die out firs t along the water, while zephyrs may still be caught fa rther aloft. By mid-century, the big Ameri can Ca li fo rni a cl ippers were carrying standing skysa il s as a matter of course, as did the ir successors, the burdensome down easters , which after the Ci vil War continued to carry cargo from East Coast ports, mainl y New York, aro und Cape Hom to San Francisco, Portl and and Seattle, a trade that petered o ut a little before World War I. As noted earlier, these ships with skysails drew the seaman' s eye. And di stinctions were made; a ship carrying a skysail yard onl y on the mainmast was known as a " main skysail yarder," while the proud lofty ship with three was called a " three skysa il yarder." These somewhat cumbersome phrases may not come trippingly off yo ur ton g ue, but th ey did off seamen's-these were common ways to characterize a down easter. The first use of the name "skysaiI" cited by the Oxford English Dictionary, whi ch does a marvelous job survey ing the first appearance of words in the language and their evolving meanings in the common usage, notes the seaex perienced noveli st Frederick Marryat hav ing one of his characters say: "I set and took in every sail , from a sky-sail to a try-sail. " He means he went through the changes from be ing in full bl oom to be ing snugged do wn, the trysai l being a customary heavy weather sail , and the skysail the rare topmost fl ower that bl oom s onl y in gentle breezes in fa ir weather. That remark was written in 1829. The OED , faithful to its charge of
The Wave rtree' s sister Mil verton, whose sail plan is shown here, sports the main skysail the Wavertree was built to can y. Both ships were denuded of this lo.fry kite to economize on labor.
SEA HISTORY 7 1, AUTUMN 1994
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