Schooner

Goleta Lewis R. French.

The two mast sailing cookie Étoile, of the National Navy of France, used for naval instruction.

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The Rainbow Warrior II is a "modern" three mast gulet (originally in 1957) used by the Greenpeace environmental organization between 1989 and 2011.

The schooner is a sailing ship with two or more masts (there have been up to seven masts), the largest being the mizzen, with a rig consisting of auric sails (gaffs and scandalous) and knife sails (jibs and staysails); that is to say, sails arranged in the mast following the line of the bay, from bow to stern, instead of mounted on transversal yards, like square sails.

History

The schooner appears in the 18th century and has similar functional characteristics to the brigantine, from which it differs mainly by its rigging. She is a ship capable of reaching great speed upwind and through, and was used in a similar way to the brigantine, although due to its smaller size it was used more for merchant cabotage activities. The knife rig requires fewer personnel to handle. The schooners used to be of less displacement than the brigantines, although there were also those with more tonnage, which were used in navigation between continents, and in some cases up to three masts.

The schooner disappeared in the 19th century along with sailing. The largest merchant schooner in the world was the Thomas W. Lawson (1902-1907), an American steel-hulled sailing ship with seven masts and a maximum load of 11,000 tons. The schooner rig had a great influence on today's sports sailing boats and on the modern construction of large sailing vessels, such as training or entertainment ships, which almost always use schooner-type rigs or their variants.

Types

Ordinary schooners can be classified as:

• Stays fins: they are the ones that pair candles of stay among the masts.

• Auric fins (“bermudian” fins): are the ones that pair auric candles (cangreges and scandalous) among the masts.

All of them incorporate jibs between the first mast and the bowsprit, and auric sails behind the last]mast.

Variants

Boats with variants of the schooner rig, in addition to the brigantine-schooner (cross-rigged ratchet stick, such as the Juan Sebastián Elcano), are the sail schooner, with one or two of such sails on the foresail (the mast closest to the bow); topsail schooner (foremast with gaff, scandalous and topsails in main); Schooner-Polish, main rigged with schooner and foresail with two square sails and gaff, without tops or spreaders; pailebot (lower foresail topsail) and ketch, with the same rigs, the foresail being the mainmast.