Square rigged ships, the backbone of international commerce for so many centuries, were very poor performers
to windward. Tall ships built and rigged in the present day perpetuate this serious defect, which despite their
auxiliary engines entails a measure of risk since what they now carry is exclusively human cargo. The problem all along
has been a simple one: their yards can not swing round enough to lay a close-hauled course because the standing
rigging gets in the way. Our technological progress is full of these blind spots, such as landing men on the
Moon before we were able to figure out how to make a viable hang glider out of cloth and sticks. This problem
had been seriously addressed by the British Admiralty through a systematic serie of sea trials between 1825 and
1845, it being observed that ships which could brace their yards sharpest outsailed the others, even if they
were smaller. But at the last Experimental Brig Squadron trials a steam ship was already present, spelling the
doom of official interest in sail. Nothing came of these trials, and commercial sailing ship builders went
on rigging them just as they always had done.
And yet truly weatherly square riggers have appeared on the historical scene, and it is possible to replicate their features today without departing from traditional materials or manual handling procedures. The author has been working on these efforts since 1986 and to date the result is one 36-metre, 260 Gross Tons sail training vessel PELICAN OF LONDON which on early sea trials pointed 38º to the apparent wind (47º to the true wind) in a 25 knot squall, doing 7 knots.
PELICAN´s rig is a present-day version of the three masted Xebec-Polacre, which existed in the mid XVIII Century. These ships were a variant of the
Xebec (Chebec), a lean. mean vessel of Arab origin with three masts each setting a tall Lateen sail which were quite deadly in their purpose,
which was piracy. In self defence the Christian Mediterranean nations copied these Xebecs for their own navies, and later on when skilled
manpower became scarce in Europe they adopted square rig on the mainmast, with very little detriment to windward ability. In the heyday of these
ships, shipwrights in the port of Soller (Mallorca) became acknowledged as the best, with the Bey of Tunis ordering a 26-gun ship from them (rather
as though Don Vito Corleone ordered a bullet-proof Rolls from the NYPD workshops, but these were confusing times), and even Louis XIV of France
"borrowing" them with Spanish Government permission to built him four ships at Toulon, two of which carried squares on the mainmast.
In 1986 a 2.25m working model was built with the updated version of this rig. Sailed extensively in the Bay of Palma de Mallorca, this little
ship could brace her yards to within 18 1/2º of centreline as opposed to the conventional 37º. She pointed extremely high, eventually coming,
through the good offices of Harry Spencer, MBE, doyen of British period ship riggers, to the attention of Commander Graham Neilson, RN, Re´d.,
creator of the STV Brig ASTRID. who had just purchased the 36 metre steel hull which was to become PELICAN OF LONDON. Graham had been
contemplating another Brig but was seduced by the idea of weatherliness.
Another scale model was made incorporating the Xebec-Polacre three masted rig, and shaped and ballasted exactly to PELICAN´s hull lines(she weighed 193 Kgs, 425 lbs). . This was test sailed in Palma Bay in 1998 and exhibited all the previous model´s windward ability, which the parent ship was to reproduce on her sailing trials in 2007.
In this three-masted rig the inherent difficulty with traditional square rig´s standing rigging has been solved basically by leading the backstays
much further aft, and by taking the upper stays for the mainmast to strong points on the foremast
At the same time a new wire necessarily made its appearance, the Neilson Stay. This item results from taking the main forestay to the mast at a
point just under the lower yard, so that this is free to swing unfettered above it through a wide arc. In a paper read before the 14th
Chesapeake Bay Symposium the author proposed that this wire shouild be named after the first experienced square rigger Master to adopt it. In
due course the entire rig was validated by the Lloyd´s Register Rig Verification Programme with no significant amendments.
PELICAN OF LONDON on early sea trials, Jan 2007
Pelican of London (Copyright © Max www.tallshipstock.com)
For More information about Adventure Under Sail and TS Pelican Click HERE
Shortly after the Chesapeake Symposium the author was approached as to the viability of applying these principles to a Brig, but sadly this could not be considered at that stage. The problem was that merely rearranging the standing rigging was just the tip of the iceberg, there were innumerable difficulties in dealing with such items as buntlines, clewlines, leechlines and lifts in the full scale design so as to cope with such amplitude of yard swing, and besides, a Brig has no mast forward of her foremast to which to handily lead her upper stays. The conundrum was to be finally solved in 2006, with the aid of a second "new" wire, the Sky Link Assembly.
But first a machine was made for measuring the result of increasing mast spacing from the traditional 40% of Length on Deck, in a Brig designed to go to windward. This apparatus ran on roller bearing rails next to the sea, and at a flick of the wrist the deck could be telescoped to increase mast spacing to 50%L, sailing thrust being measured by an in-line kitchen dial scale. At 45% to the true wind, although the mainsail squares seemed to have been filling quite adequately with the masts "close up", the effect was an astonishing 84% increase in thrust.
What is the Sky Link Assembly? Basically, a stay from the fore masthead to the stemhead in which two stainless steel link plates are worked. The topmast stay and topgallant stay which would conventionally go down to the bowsprit and jibboom interfering with yard swing on the way, go instead to their respective link plates, which they can do almost horizontally, passing between the foot of each sail and the yard below it. Equally the stays for staysail and jib, coming up from the bowsprit and jibboom, end at the link plates and are thus not present behind the yards. Inthe event of collision wiping out the jibboom and bowsprit, the Sky Link Assembly is capable of carrying the mast unaided.
In 2007 a further sailing model was made, to scale 1:20 and incorporating these features, with a hull designed by the author to
ensure weatherly ability in a Brig 41m long on deck, 7.4m beam, 4m draft and displacing 376 Tons. On sea trials its windward performance
indicated that the full sized ship, encumbered with full standing and running rigging, deckhouses, boats, etc., might well exceed that of the
less nimble fore-and-aft rigged ships
This model is available at Palma de Mallorca for further experiment as a generic test bench leading to the production of a complete design of a
similar ship between 35m and 45m Length, for Sail Training or Adventure Cruise purposes.
Master