Nathaniel S. Wilson (born 1947) is a Master sailmaker, rigger, and sail designer based in East Boothbay, Maine. He is most well known for building sails for large traditional sailing vessels in the United States and abroad. He has been an innovator in the sailing industry, helping to develop the modern ship sail cloth Oceanus with North Cloth. [1] Wilson is a local legend in Maine and is known worldwide for his expansive knowledge of sailmaking and rigging, both for traditional and modern vessels.
Ships that have or have had sails and/or rigging built by Wilson include the U.S.S. Constitution, USCGC Eagle, Charles W. Morgan, Pride of Baltimore II , Sultana, Clearwater, Spirit of Massachusetts, American Eagle, Lettie G. Howard , Mayflower II , Shenandoah, Alabama, Godspeed and Niagara, amongst thousands of other vessels of various sizes and shapes. [2] [3] [4]
A sailing ship is a sea-going vessel that uses sails mounted on masts to harness the power of wind and propel the vessel. There is a variety of sail plans that propel sailing ships, employing square-rigged or fore-and-aft sails. Some ships carry square sails on each mast—the brig and full-rigged ship, said to be "ship-rigged" when there are three or more masts. Others carry only fore-and-aft sails on each mast—schooners. Still others employ a combination of square and fore-and aft sails, including the barque, barquentine, and brigantine.
A sail plan is a description of the specific ways that a sailing craft is rigged. Also, the term “sail plan” is a graphic depiction of the arrangement of the sails for a given sailing craft.
A brig is a sailing vessel with two square-rigged masts. During the Age of Sail, brigs were seen as fast and maneuverable and were used as both naval warships and merchant vessels. They were especially popular in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Brigs fell out of use with the arrival of the steam ship because they required a relatively large crew for their small size and were difficult to sail into the wind. Their rigging differs from that of a brigantine which has a gaff-rigged mainsail, while a brig has a square mainsail with an additional gaff-rigged spanker behind the mainsail.
A tall ship is a large, traditionally-rigged sailing vessel. Popular modern tall ship rigs include topsail schooners, brigantines, brigs and barques. "Tall ship" can also be defined more specifically by an organization, such as for a race or festival.
The mast of a sailing vessel is a tall spar, or arrangement of spars, erected more or less vertically on the centre-line of a ship or boat. Its purposes include carrying sails, spars, and derricks, and giving necessary height to a navigation light, look-out position, signal yard, control position, radio aerial or signal lamp. Large ships have several masts, with the size and configuration depending on the style of ship. Nearly all sailing masts are guyed.
This is a glossary of nautical terms; some remain current, while many date from the 17th to 19th centuries. See also Wiktionary's nautical terms, Category:Nautical terms, and Nautical metaphors in English. See the Further reading section for additional words and references.
A Bermuda rig, Bermudian rig, or Marconi rig is a configuration of mast and rigging for a type of sailboat and is the typical configuration for most modern sailboats. This configuration was developed in Bermuda in the 17th century; the term Marconi, a reference to the inventor of the radio, Guglielmo Marconi, became associated with this configuration in the early 20th century because the wires that stabilize the mast of a Bermuda rig reminded observers of the wires on early radio masts.
Iron-hulled sailing ships represented the final evolution of sailing ships at the end of the age of sail. They were built to carry bulk cargo for long distances in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They were the largest of merchant sailing ships, with three to five masts and square sails, as well as other sail plans. They carried lumber, guano, grain or ore between continents. Later examples had steel hulls. They are sometimes referred to as "windjammers" or "tall ships". Several survive, variously operating as school ships, museum ships, restaurant ships, and cruise ships.
The junk rig, also known as the Chinese lugsail or sampan rig, is a type of sail rig in which rigid members, called battens, span the full width of the sail and extend the sail forward of the mast.
The schooner Bowdoin was designed by William H. Hand, Jr., and built in 1921, in East Boothbay, Maine, at the Hodgdon Brothers Shipyard now known as Hodgdon Yachts. She is the only American schooner built specifically for Arctic exploration, and was designed under the direction of explorer Donald B. MacMillan. She has made 29 trips above the Arctic Circle in her life, three since she was acquired by the Maine Maritime Academy in 1988. She is currently owned by the Maine Maritime Academy, located in Castine, Maine, and is used for their sail training curriculum. She is named for Bowdoin College.
The Last Grain Race is a 1956 book by Eric Newby, a travel writer, about his time spent on the four-masted steel barque Moshulu during the vessel's last voyage in the Australian grain trade.
The American Eagle, originally Andrew and Rosalie, is a two-masted schooner serving the tourist trade out of Rockland, Maine. Launched in 1930 at Gloucester, Massachusetts, she was the last auxiliary schooner to be built in that port, and one of Gloucester's last sail-powered fishing vessels. A National Historic Landmark, she is also the oldest known surviving vessel of the type, which was supplanted not long afterward by modern trawlers.
The three-masted schooner Victory Chimes, also known as Edwin and Maud or Domino Effect, is a US National Historic Landmark. She is the last surviving Chesapeake Ram schooner. The boat on the Maine State Quarter is meant to resemble the Victory Chimes.
Bounty was an enlarged reconstruction of the original 1787 Royal Navy sailing ship HMS Bounty. Built in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia in 1960, she sank off the coast of North Carolina during Hurricane Sandy on 29 October 2012.
HMS Maidstone was a 28-gun Coventry-class sixth-rate frigate of the Royal Navy. She was launched in 1758 and taken to pieces in 1794.
A sail is a tensile structure—made from fabric or other membrane materials—that uses wind power to propel sailing craft, including sailing ships, sailboats, windsurfers, ice boats, and even sail-powered land vehicles. Sails may be made from a combination of woven materials—including canvas or polyester cloth, laminated membranes or bonded filaments—usually in a three- or four-sided shape.
Dismasting, also spelled demasting, occurs to a sailing ship when one or more of the masts responsible for hoisting the sails that propel the vessel breaks. Dismasting usually occurs as the result of high winds during a storm acting upon masts, sails, rigging, and spars. Over compression of the mast owing to tightening the rigger too much and g-forces as a consequence of wave action and the boat swinging back and forth can also be result in a dismasting. Dismasting does not necessarily impair the vessel's ability to stay afloat, but rather its ability to move under sail power. Frequently, the hull of the vessel remains intact, upright and seaworthy.
Bagheera, formerly Beacon Rock, is a historic schooner normally berthed at the Maine State Pier in Portland, Maine. She is a two-masted auxiliary rigged schooner, built in 1924 by the noted naval architect John G. Alden, and is noted for her racing success on the Great Lakes. She is now owned and operated by the Portland Schooner Company, which offers sailing tours of Casco Bay, using Bagheera and Wendameen. Bagheera was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2009.
Hodgdon Yachts is a builder of yachts and specialized military vessels, based in East Boothbay, Maine. It is a family-run business that was founded in 1816—reputedly the oldest continuously operating family boatbuilder in the United States. Hodgdon Yachts is noted for building superyachts, both sail and power, using advanced composite materials and construction techniques. It's also noted for its ability to incorporate those advanced materials into traditional designs that employ modern electronic and mechanical marine systems. The company has several divisions—yachts, custom tenders, yacht interiors, yacht services and military composites with offices in Boothbay, Maine, Newport, Rhode Island and Monaco.