The running rigging of a 74-gun ship, about 1805
Jibs, staysails, the mizen and driver, and the spritsail under the bowsprit. Read down the page: the drawing beside the text follows whichever rope you are reading about, and the numbers on it match the numbered steps of the lead. These sails lie along the middle of the ship, so they are shown in profile and from above.
lead as Steel or Lever describe it position neither gives; my inference made fast block belayed fitting not named in the sources
The hull, masts and stays are those of the other pages: the 74 of David Steel’s tables of 1794, with heights above the water that are my estimates, good to a few feet. The sails are drawn set and amidships, as if the wind were nowhere, so that the two sides of the ship can be compared. In life every one of them lies off to leeward.
The outlines of the sails are not measured. Steel gives rules and tables for cutting each sail, and they were not read for this page; each outline is fitted by eye to the stay it sets on and to where its sheets are said to lead. Ropes that in life run together along a stay or a spar are drawn a little apart, and a foot or two off the centreline, so they can be told from one another in the plan.
The ship is rigged as of about 1805: a standing gaff and a driver boom on the mizen mast, a brailed mizen as the standing sail, a flying jibboom, and the spritsail yard still across the bowsprit. Steel in 1794 describes an earlier state, with a mizen yard and no boom or flying jib; Lever in 1808 a slightly later one. Where they differ the text says which the drawing follows. Steel’s belaying points are those of the 20-gun ship in his plates, which has no poop, and have been moved to the matching place on a 74.