The belaying plan of a 74-gun ship, about 1805
Every rope of the running rigging ends somewhere a man can lay a hand on it. This page plots all of those ends at once, says what the pattern is, and is plain about which of them the sources name and which are guesses.
A 74 of this date had no long rail of belaying pins along the bulwark. That belongs to later ships. Ropes came to a mixture of fittings, each suited to a weight of work, and the page on tackles and belaying draws them.
Steel 1794, pp. 160, 162, 171, 179 and the leads on pp. 198–219; Falconer 1769, “Belay”; a pin rack recovered from the wreck of Invincible (74, lost 1758), in Cousins 2022.
The profile is above and the deck plan below, to the same scale, bow to the right. Choose a line from the list or click one in the drawing to see its whole lead. A round point is on the forecastle, quarterdeck or poop, at the shrouds or in a top. A square point is on the upper deck, a level below. A hollow point is one the period sources do not name.
Profile above and deck plan below, bow to the right. The yards are drawn square.
Jeers, truss tackles, clew garnets, slab-lines, topsail sheets and topgallant halliards all land at the bitts. The topsail sheet starts at a yardarm but is brought in along the lower yard to the quarter block before it turns down, so it counts as a line from the middle.
Lower lifts come to a block at the side abreast the shrouds. Topsail halliards come to the channels and in over the side. Topsail lifts end at the deadeyes. Course tacks and sheets come in through the side. The exceptions are buntlines and leech-lines, which go up to the top first and come down to the breast-rail.
Fore braces to the bitts on the quarterdeck abaft the mainmast; fore topsail braces to the boat skid at the after end of the forecastle; fore topgallant braces to the belfry. Main braces right aft to the quarter; main topsail braces to the bitts abaft the mizen mast; main topgallant braces into the mizen shrouds. The crossjack braces alone lead forward, and cross. Wartime preventer braces lead the opposite way to the working ones, so one shot does not cut both.
That rule is often given for later ships with long pin rails. Steel’s fore braces run the other way. What his leads do show is that the lighter and higher the gear, the higher up it stops: topgallant lifts and buntlines belay in the top; topsail lifts and buntlines and topgallant clewlines stop at the lower shrouds; only the heavy gear of the topsails and courses comes to the bitts and the range cleats.
Gear that hoists comes down abaft its mast. Gear that hauls a sail forward or up to its yard tends to land forward of it. So a good deal of the mainsail’s and main topsail’s gear is worked from the forecastle, and the fore yards are braced from the quarterdeck. This is a generalisation from Steel’s entries, not something he states.
The main bowlines, the crossjack braces and the mizen topsail bowlines each belay on the side opposite to the one they serve.
The fore sheet, main tack and main sheet come in through sheave-holes in the side to cleats on the upper deck, and the main topsail sheets and clew garnets to bitts there. In large ships the fore tack came in under the forecastle too.
Steel 1794, pp. 202–213, 235; Lever 1819, pp. 48–49, 54, 57.
No Admiralty order fixing where ropes belayed has turned up, and Steel offers alternatives: “a cleat … or to the topsail-sheet-bitts”, and of one rope that it “belays where most convenient”. Fittings on the bulwarks were within the reach of a ship’s own carpenters and the taste of her captain and boatswain. Consistency was custom in the service and strict habit within a ship.
It was learned by doing. Falconer declined to describe the leads at all: “To explain the track of every particular rope, through its different channels, would be equally useless and unintelligible to a land reader: to mariners it was superfluous: and even the youths who are trained to the sea, would reap little advantage from it; because their situation affords them much better opportunities of making these minute discoveries.” Lever wrote the Sheet Anchor to fill that gap for young officers who “feel a diffidence in soliciting information, either from a fear of exposing their ignorance, or from an idea that such a request may be treated with ridicule”.
Some fittings sort the ropes for the men: Falconer describes the rack at the bowsprit as a frame of sheaves “to direct the sailors to the respective ropes passing through it”, and Steel has trucks seized to the shrouds “to lead ropes through, that they may be more readily found”.
The argument from darkness is stated outright only later, and by an American: “So much of the handling of gear is done in the dark that the men may be confused, perhaps at a critical moment, if the position of any running rigging is frequently varied from that sanctioned by well-established custom” (Luce, Text-Book of Seamanship, 1891 revision). It is a fair statement of the principle, but it is not evidence for the Royal Navy of 1805.
Falconer 1769, preface and “Rack”; Lever, preface; Steel 1794, pp. 179, 225; Luce 1891, p. 155.
The positions come from the leads Steel gives in 1794, with Lever where he adds something. Where they say only “upon deck”, the point is drawn near the foot of the mast or at the side and marked hollow. The standard modern authority, James Lees’s Masting and Rigging of English Ships of War, has belaying plans that would settle many of the hollow points; I could not read it, and what is reported of it at second hand is contradictory on dates. The positions of kevels, cleats and timberheads along the bulwarks are not on the Admiralty deck plans, so points “at the side” are right as to which deck and roughly how far aft, and no better. HMS Victory as she stands reflects her restoration in the 1920s and is not used as evidence here.