What to notice, and where the sources go quiet
Names follow the sail, not the spar
A studding sail’s head hangs from the yardarm above it and its foot is spread by a boom on the yard below. So the topmast studding sail boom is on the lower yard, and the topgallant studding sail boom is on the topsail yard. The lower studding sail hangs from the end of the topmast studding sail boom and has a boom of its own at the ship’s side.
Tack outside, sheet inside
On a course the tack is the rope that leads forward and the sheet the one that leads aft. On a studding sail the tack is the rope at the outer lower corner and the sheet the rope at the inner one. Only the lower studding sail has inner and outer halliards. Only the topmast studding sail has a deck sheet and a yard sheet.
Each sail leans on the one above
The topmast studding sail hangs from the end of the topsail yard, so that yard gets a burton as a preventer lift. The lower studding sail hangs from the topmast studding sail boom, so that boom gets a topping lift. The supports go on before the sails go up.
The gear is rove for the occasion
None of this is standing gear. Halliards are rove through the jewel blocks when the sails are wanted and unrove again afterwards, with a knot in the end, so that they cannot stop a yard coming down. A drawing of the ship’s rigging on an ordinary day would show the booms lashed along the yards and nothing else on this page.
Taking in is the hard part, and the gear is designed for it
Two of the topmast studding sail’s five ropes do nothing while it is set. The downhauler and the deck sheet are there to get it in under control: fold it at the boom end, then let the tack go, then haul it down.
“Martingale” has a second meaning
Here it is the rope that holds the lower studding sail boom down. The spar under the bowsprit is a different thing with the same name.
Where the sources disagree or go quiet
- Words of command. No source I read from 1790 to 1815 prints any for studding sails. The orders on this page are from Totten (US Navy, 1862), Luce (US Navy, 1877 printing) and Nares (Royal Navy, 1860s).
- Whose ship. Steel’s rigging text, which names the belaying points, is written round a 20-gun ship. His tables for the 74 give ropes and sizes and no leads. The leads here are his and Lever’s general descriptions put on to the 74’s spars.
- How far the booms go out. Neither says. The drawings put the heel of each boom a third of its length in from the yardarm, where Steel puts the inner boom iron of a lower yard.
- The topmast studding sail’s sheets. A fore sheet and an after sheet in Steel’s rigging text, with one sentence that contradicts another. A deck sheet and a yard sheet in Lever, and in Steel’s own pages on taking the sail in.
- The topgallant studding sail tack. To the main chains in Steel, to the top in Lever.
- The topgallant studding sail downhauler. In Steel’s text and his table; “seldom any” in Lever.
- The lower studding sail tack. Two in Steel, one of them led forward to the bees of the bowsprit. One in Lever.
- Supporting the topmast studding sail boom. Lever lifts it from its end with a burton. Steel lifts it from its middle.
- Holding the lower boom down. A martingale in Lever’s merchant ships; in men-of-war “a Tackle hooked to the Boom”, not described; in Steel a tackle at the heel.
- How the lower studding sail’s yard hangs. Steel’s table gives its length, 31 feet. Nothing I read says how much of the head it covers or where under the boom it hangs. That part of the drawing is a reconstruction.
- Belaying points. Named for the topmast studding sail halliards and tack, the lower studding sail tack and martingale, and the topgallant gear in the top. The rest are “upon deck”, “into the waist” or nothing, and are drawn hollow.
- Lever’s page 80, on setting the topmast studding sail, is damaged in the scan of the 1819 text. Where the page says so, the wording was completed from the research notes, which used the 1843 American edition for that passage.
- Dates. The end of the main lower studding sail in 1801, and the topgallant studding sails’ introduction about 1773, are from James Lees’s Masting and Rigging of English Ships of War, which I have only in snippets.
How this is drawn
The sails are drawn set to starboard as weather studding sails, abaft the square sails, with the yards square. The booms and studding sail yards are the lengths in Steel’s table of 1794 for the 74: topmast studding sail booms of 42 feet 6 inches and 48 feet 6 inches, topgallant studding sail booms of 31 and 35 feet, a lower boom of 53 feet 9 inches. The shapes of the sails are fitted between those spars by eye; Steel’s tables of sail dimensions were not read.
In the view from astern, a rope that leaves for another part of the ship is cut short with a dotted end. The deck plan is as wide as the yards, so the ends of the booms are off its edge.
Sources
- David Steel, The Elements and Practice of Rigging and Seamanship (London, 1794), pp. 35, 49, 217–219, 235 and 335. Transcription at maritime.org.
- Darcy Lever, The Young Sea Officer’s Sheet Anchor (2nd ed., 1819), pp. 33, 64–65 and 80–83, read in the 1827 reprint at archive.org.
- William Falconer, An Universal Dictionary of the Marine (1769), “Studding-sails”. Project Gutenberg.
- For the orders only, and later than the period: B. J. Totten, Naval Text-Book (US Navy, 1862), archive.org; S. B. Luce, Seamanship (US Navy, 1877 printing), archive.org; G. S. Nares, Seamanship (Royal Navy, 1860s), archive.org; R. H. Dana, The Seaman’s Friend (1841), Project Gutenberg.