Home › Round Ships

Round Ships

IT HAS been seen that the proportion of breadth to length was greater in the round ships than in the galleys.

The long ships of early times were primarily the vessels of war, celerity of movement being of the utmost importance. The round ships, both of antiquity and of the Middle Ages, constructed to carry heavy cargoes, were not exactly swift movers. Not that the round ships of these times were not sometimes used for fighting: quite the reverse. Although usually designed as carriers of freight and passengers, their greater bulk naturally enabled them to embark a greater number of armed men, and later, when cannon were introduced, to mount armaments disposed in a manner impossible in the long narrow rowing craft, where the chief points of vantage for placing guns of large calibre, i.e., low down amidship, were preempted by the benches and oars of the rowers. Adaptability for fighting was, in still later times, further advanced by their ever-increasing mobility, a quality in which eventually, excepting in a calm, they surpassed the long ship.

Until practically the end of the 18th Century, quite large vessels, such as ship-rigged sloops of war and small frigates, as well as brigs, brigantines, and schooners, were often equipped with oars.

By a curious verbal transposition the square sails of the round ships were sometimes called in certain maritime localities round sails; while the ships themselves on account of the shape of their rectangular canvas were designated as square ships.

By far the greater number of vessels described in this work have been grouped under the class of round ships.

And yet many known types have been omitted, especially those bearing what are known as fore and aft rigs. When they have been shown it has been because in some manner their equipment included, albeit only incidentally, some feature of the square rig.

There has seemed to the authors a modernity in the fore and aft rig (although it has a clear title to considerable antiquity), a modernness emphasized by its very persistence and universality in the face of the gradual late disappearance of so many of the old-time square riggers; this has been the deciding factor in excluding it from this collection. For like old friends and old wives, we middle-aged folk (and probably many of the younger ones, too) like the old square-rigged ships best.