The origin of the ketch is also Dutch, although the word is in old
French _quaiche_ and in Spanish _queche_. We frequently find the
influence of the bomb-ketch in old pictures and engravings, in
which the mizzen is close up against the mainmast, and the latter
is stepped well abaft of amidships, so as to allow the shot fired
to clear the rigging, leaving a large fore-triangle. (See Fig. 62,
the _galiote à bombe_.) This influence is felt even as late as the
second half of the eighteenth century. The ketch is descended from
the Dutch galliot, which, besides having a gaff mizzen, had a sprit
mainsail like the barge, and with no boom, but three brails and one
row of reef-points. The usual vangs led down aft from the peak, and
she also had lee-runners. But, besides her triangular headsails,
consisting of a fore(stay)sail and a couple of jibs, she carried
also a small t’gallant sail, with big topsail below, and often a
large lower course below that—all these last three being square, as
on a full-rigged ship, and to this day many Baltic ketches continue
to be rigged in like manner. At the close of Charles II.’s reign we
find that among the 173 ships in the British Royal Navy there were
three ketches, but before this date, in his “Seamen’s Dictionary”
of 1644, Sir Henry Manwayring defines them simply as “a small boate
such as uses to come to Belinsgate with mackrell, oisters, &c.” From
the time of Charles I. the Dutch have had the privilege of mooring
three of their fish-carrying craft off Billingsgate in recognition
of “their straightforward dealings with us,” and any day the reader
likes to go down in the vicinity of London Bridge he will see two
or three Dutch schuyts swinging to their moorings. In an eighteenth
century work on naval architecture it is curious to see the galliot
also called a galleasse. In this case the mainsail has discarded
the sprit and taken on a small gaff with boom and loose foot. Two
rows of reef-points are also added, and the squaresails are still
there. An old English engraving also shows a close similarity to the
former bomb-ketch. But in the course of time all the squaresails were
abolished, the mainmast brought further forward, and the mizzen sail
enlarged so as to be not much smaller than the mainsail. Nowadays
nowhere is the modern ketch rig so prominent as on the east coast of
England, from as far north as Whitby to as far south as Ramsgate, and
even Brixham. The billy-boy, with her long raking bowsprit, setting
almost as many jibs as a full-rigged ship, and whose general design
bears the most remarkable likeness to the ship in the seal of Dam in
Fig. 40, is the Yorkshire adaptation of the old Dutch galliot, and,
with her leeboards and ketch rig, is well known in the North Sea. In
the ’seventies our East Coast fishermen were almost all rigged with
the lug-sail, but now some of the finest ketches will be found in the
fishing fleets of Yarmouth, Lowestoft, and Ramsgate. For powerful,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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