19th Century Sailing Ships

I am totally excited! Do you want know why? The 19th Century Sailing Ships are often regarded as the "Golden Age of Sail" in the maritime history and being the sailor that I am, it would be hard to contain this excitement within me!

In terms of designs, many developments were made, such as to the rigs. Depending on the type of ship, purpose, the captain and many more, these ships either used the "fore and aft rig" which simply means that the ship's sails are in tandem to its fore and aft line; or the "square rig" which simply means that the ships are rigged across the ship.

Each of these methods of rigging gave certain advantages. Let's take a brief look at the two:

Fore And Aft Rig

The advantage of this form of rig is that the ships only required a small number of crew. The way the sail is rigged meant that it could point higher into the wind and that means, easier control especially when it came to the changing wind direction of the coastal lines.

Among the different sailing ships to use this rig are the Sloops, Grand Bank Fishing Schooners, Ketches and Tern Schooner.

Square Rig

This is more of an offshore rig used by sailing ships that make long ocean journeys. The ships that used this form of rig vary from small brigantines to brigs of several hundred tons to barques weighing several thousand tons.

Talking about square rig brings my mind to the 1886 Balcuttha. Built by the Charles Connell and Company shipyard situated in Glasgow, Scotland.

Some 19th Century Sailing Ships were mainly cargo ships and were recorded in history to have carried goods around South America (known as the Cape Horn area back then).

What brought my mind to this was due to its complex square-rigging system with 25 sails altogether; it took a crew of 26 to handle it during her journeys at sea.

Let's take a look at a different aspect. Did you know that we are actually taking a page out of history's books? What I am referring to is the use of barque Belem, a 3-masted vessel the last French merchant ship to be built in 1896.

What's interesting that there are plans to revive the use of these sailing ship-to-ship 60,000 bottles of wine from Languedoc, Bordeaux, France to Dublin, Ireland. Although the journey will take longer, it will also reduce the amount of carbon emitted! Hooray for sailing ships!

Another different perspective and now, I will bring you to shipwrecks. Isn't it fascinating? Think of all the amount of treasure contained. Wow! In terms of history, the wreck of the Loch Ard was said to be one of Australia's very worst.

Still, the ship, which set to sail to Melbourne from England in 1878, sunk due to bad weather after 13 weeks of journey and only within days within Melbourne. The wreck witnessed all of the 18 passengers and 36 crewmembers perishing except for Eva Carmichael and Tom Pearce.

That's about all I have to share about 19th Century Sailing Ships. I certainly hope you had as great a time reading as I had sharing with all of you!