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, for instance some schooners. Still others employ a combination of square and fore-and-aft sails, including the barque, barquentine, and brigantine.
A brig is a type of sailing vessel defined by its rig: two masts which are both square-rigged. Brigs originated in the second half of the 18th century and were a common type of smaller merchant vessel or warship from then until the latter part of the 19th century. In commercial use, they were gradually replaced by fore-and-aft rigged vessels such as schooners, as owners sought to reduce crew costs by having rigs that could be handled by fewer men. In Royal Navy use, brigs were retained for training use when the battle fleets consisted almost entirely of iron-hulled steamships.
A barque, barc, or bark is a type of sailing vessel with three or more masts consisting of a fore mast, mainmast and additional masts rigged square and only the aftmost mast rigged fore and aft. Sometimes, the mizzen is only partly fore-and-aft rigged, bearing a square-rigged sail above.
Falls of Clyde is the last surviving iron-hulled, four-masted full-rigged ship, and the only remaining sail-driven oil tanker. She was designated a U.S. National Historic Landmark in 1989, but deregistered in 2024 due to her condition. Hawaii is seeking proposals to scrap the ship. She is currently not open to the public.
C.A. Thayer is a schooner built in 1895 near Eureka, California. The schooner has been preserved and open to the public at the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park since 1963. She is one of the last survivors of the sailing schooners in the West coast lumber trade to San Francisco from Washington, Oregon, and Northern California. She was designated a National Historic Landmark on 13 November 1966.
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.
Polly Woodside is a Belfast-built, three-masted, iron-hulled barque, preserved in Melbourne, Victoria (Australia), and forming the central feature of the South Wharf precinct. The ship was originally built in Belfast by William J. Woodside and was launched in 1885. Polly Woodside is typical of thousands of smaller iron barques built in the last days of sail, intended for deep water trade around the world and designed to be operated as economically as possible.
Alan John Villiers, DSC was a writer, adventurer, photographer and mariner.
The tall ship Elissa is a three-masted barque. She is based in Galveston, Texas, and is one of the oldest ships sailing today. Launched in 1877, she is now a museum ship at the Texas Seaport Museum. She was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1990. The Texas Legislature designated Elissa the official tall ship of Texas in 2005.
The Maritime Museum of San Diego, established in 1948, preserves one of the largest collections of historic sea vessels in the United States. Located on San Diego Bay, the centerpiece of the museum's collection is Star of India, an 1863 iron barque. The museum maintains the MacMullen Library and Research Archives aboard the 1898 ferryboat Berkeley. The museum also publishes the quarterly peer-reviewed journal Mains'l Haul: A Journal of Pacific Maritime History.
Moshulu is a four-masted steel barque, built as Kurt by William Hamilton and Company at Port Glasgow in Scotland in 1904. The largest remaining original windjammer, she is currently a floating restaurant docked in Penn's Landing, Philadelphia, adjacent to the museum ships USS Olympia and USS Becuna.
A jackass-barque, sometimes spelled jackass bark, is a sailing ship with three masts, of which the foremast is square-rigged and the main is partially square-rigged and partially fore-and-aft rigged (course). The mizzen mast is fore-and-aft rigged.
Preussen (PROY-sin) was a German steel-hulled, five-masted, ship-rigged sailing ship built in 1902 for the F. Laeisz shipping company and named after the German state and kingdom of Prussia. She was the world's only ship of this class with five masts, carrying six square sails on each mast.
Potosi was a five-masted steel barque built in 1865 by Joh. C. Tecklenborg ship yard in Geestemünde, Germany, for the sailing ship company F. Laeisz as a trading vessel. Its primary purpose was as a "nitrate clipper" collecting guano in South America for use in chemical companies in Germany. As its shipping route was between Germany, Bolivia until 1870 but, during the "pacific War" was transferred to Chile, it was designed to be capable of withstanding the rough weather encountered around Cape Horn.
Isaac H. Evans, originally Boyd N. Sheppard, is a two-masted schooner berthed in Rockland, Maine. She is a Maine windjammer, serving the tourist trade. Built in 1886 in Mauricetown, New Jersey, she is the oldest of a small number of surviving oyster schooners, used in service of the oyster harvesting industry in the coastal waters of New Jersey. She was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1992.
Lewis R. French is a gaff-rigged topsail schooner sailing out of Camden, Maine as a "Maine windjammer" offering 3 to 6 night cruises to tourists. Built in 1871, she is the oldest known two-masted schooner in the United States, and one of a small number of this once-common form of vessel in active service. The ship was designated a US National Historic Landmark in 1992.
The Inca was "the first true five-masted schooner built on the West Coast."
Amaranth was a four-masted barquentine built by Matthew Turner of Benicia, California in 1901. Amaranth sailed in the China trade between Puget Sound and Shanghai. She was wrecked on a guano island in the South Pacific in 1913 while carrying a load of coal.
Carthaginian was a three-masted barque outfitted as a whaler that served both as a movie prop and a museum ship in Hawaii. Laid down and launched in Denmark in 1921 as the three-masted schooner Wandia, she was converted in 1964–1965 into a typical square-rigged 19th-century whaler for the filming of the 1966 movie Hawaii. Afterward, she was moored in the harbor of the former whaling port-of-call of Lahaina on the Hawaiian island of Maui, explaining the whaling industry in the Hawaiian islands. Carthaginian was lost in 1972 when she ran aground just outside the harbor on her way to drydock maintenance on Oahu and was replaced as a whaling museum by Carthaginian II in 1980.
SV Golden Horizon is a steel-hulled five-masted barque rigged tall ship which is in service as a cruise ship. Originally named Flying Clipper, the luxury vessel was designed by Polish naval architect Zygmunt Choreń, for Star Clippers Ltd. of Sweden, and built by the Brodosplit Shipyard in Split, Croatia. She is the largest sailing ship ever launched. Her design was based on France II, a famous French five-mast cargo windjammer built in 1911.
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