seaworthy craft, able to heave-to comfortably, and with the capacity
of riding out gales that few modern yachts with their cut-away bows
could survive, there is nothing on the sea, size for size, to beat
these ketches. In Fig. 98 we give an illustration of a Lowestoft
“drifter.” With her boomless mainsail and raking mizzen, setting a
jackyard topsail over both main and mizzen, she sets also in light
winds a large reaching jib.
[Illustration: FIG. 98. LOWESTOFT DRIFTER.]
[Illustration: FIG. 99. THAMES BARGE.]
We come next to the yawl. Correctly speaking this word has reference
not to rig but to shape. The Scandinavian _yol_ was a light vessel,
clinker-built and double-ended, like the Viking shape. The Yarmouth
yawls that we shall consider presently, were correctly called yawls
with their bow and stern alike. But the word has now come to refer
to a later adaptation of the ketch, in which the mainsail has grown
bigger and the mizzen smaller. In a ketch the mizzen mast is stepped
forward of the rudder-head; in the yawl the mizzen mast is abaft the
rudder-head. The _Jullanar_, for instance, in Fig. 117, is a yawl.
But to the Londoner no more familiar example could be found of a
yawl than the Thames barge, of which the illustration in Fig. 99
is a fair specimen. Still inheriting her Dutch-like spritsail and
brailing arrangement, she has also the vangs that were first attached
to the peak in the sixteenth century. The old-fashioned topsail is a
cross between a modern jackyarder and the old Dutch square topsail.
Aft she carries another small spritsail on the diminutive mizzen.
Smaller types of barge, called “stumpies,” have only pole-masts and
neither bowsprit nor jib nor topsail. But the larger type of barge,
carrying topmast and setting a big jib-headed topsail, known as
topsail barges, with their red-ochred canvas and the untanned jib,
always known by bargemen as the “spinnaker,” have grown to such sizes
that they go right down to the west end of the English Channel. Yet
these are rather ketches than yawls. But even in the Thames barges
developments have not ceased. Obviously Dutch, as they strike one in
a moment, the old Dutch bluff bows have been replaced by the straight
bow as seen in the sketch. A whole book could be written about the
barge and her ways, her history, her leeboards, her lengthy
topmast, and the wooden horse on which the staysail works; but we
must pass on.
[Illustration: FIG. 100. NORFOLK WHERRY.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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