Sailing ships are all different, and there are many types of ship, which makes it difficult to write an all-embracing guide to sailing one. This entry is based upon the training provided by the San Diego Maritime Museum - an annual sail training course that is open to the general public - and as such is specific to The Star of India. As an original 19th century ship this is not a bad place to start, although you will probably want to familiarise yourself with sailing ship terminology beforehand.

Getting Started

The first thing to do before you can sail anywhere is to get away from the dock, pier, or whatever else your ship is moored (tied) to. If the wind happens to be blowing in the right direction you could simply set one or two sails, cast off the mooring lines, and allow yourself to be blown clear, but this is rarely the case and not something that can be relied on. By the 1830s most large harbours used steam driven tugs to tow sailing ships out to sea, but before that, and in smaller ports, ships had to use a process known as warping.

Warping is simple in concept, but hard work in practise. The basic idea is to pull the ship to wherever you want it by hauling on a rope that is secured to something solid. The rope is wound around a capstan – a large vertical drum that is turned by the crew, winding in the rope and pulling the ship to where you want it. This bit is easy, but there is nowhere to secure the other end of the rope in the open sea!

To warp a ship out of the harbour it is therefore necessary to provide something to pull against. A special anchor, called a kedging anchor, is carried as far from the ship as possible by the longboat and then dropped to the seabed. The remaining crew warp the ship out to it, and then it is hauled up and the process repeated as many times as necessary.

This can be pretty time consuming and tiring as the ship is usually being blown in the wrong direction while the anchor is being moved! If you wait for the tide to be on its way out it will probably help you get on your way, and it may not be necessary to warp the ship at all.

Getting under way

Eventually the ship is in a position from which it can get started, or maybe it has been anchored and is now ready to sail again. In all likelihood it will now be pointing directly into the wind, which is not a direction that sailing ships can go, so it needs to be turned in another direction as soon as the anchor is raised. Raising a staysail at the bow, and sheeting it tight on one side of the ship will usually be sufficient to swing the bow around so that the wind is coming from the beam – the side – and from there we can start sailing properly.

Fore-and-aft sails are easier to manage than squares, so they are usually raised first but, as indicated above, they have a tendency to make the ship turn. In fact, many sailing ships have very small rudders and are mostly controlled by skilled sail management. Fore-and-aft balance is achieved by raising, lowering, and carefully sheeting the staysails to keep the forces at the front and rear of the ship the same.

The first staysails to be raised are usually those in the centre of the ship – the main-topmast-staysail, followed by the fore-topmast-staysail and the mizzen staysail. The jibs (right at the front) and the spanker (at the back) will follow, and by this time the ship should be moving fast enough to have steerage way.

Now it’s time for the squares. They should already have been unfurled and be in their gear - hanging from the yards supported by the bunts and clews. Sheets need to be pulled tight, and halyards hauled, but before this can happen we need to think about the easiest way to do everything.

Pulling a sail tight when it is full of wind is not easy, so we need to position everything so that the wind is blowing across the sail and not into it. As there is minimal wear and tear on the rig when the yards are braced square (at 90 degrees to the ship) we need to make sure that the ship is sailing with the wind comfortably on the beam.

Once everything is ready we set the sails in such a way as to maintain the balance of the ship. The sails on both the fore- and mainmasts masts are always set simultaneously. The fore- and main- lower topsails are set first, then the upper tops, t’gallants and finally the royals. The mainsail and foresail, which are also known as courses are set last because they obscure the captain’s view of what is happening on deck.

Setting Course

With all sails set the ship can now worry about pointing in the right direction, and for the purposes of the sailor there are only two directions a ship can sail in:

Sometimes the wind obligingly blows in such a direction that you may be able set a course directly to your destination. When this happens the sails need to be adjusted to catch the wind as efficiently as possible, and may need to be trimmed occasionally to maintain optimum performance.

This is called sailing by and large, the helmsman steers by the compass, and the crew adjusts the sails to keep up.

The wind can’t always be relied on to blow in the right direction, and often you may be obliged to sail in a direction other than the one you want to go. Later you will make a turn to compensate and slowly zig-zag to where you want to be. This is called tacking and the main aim is always to make as much progress against the wind as possible, so the sails are always trimmed to their extreme in order to obtain the maximum benefit.

When sailing like this the helmsman ignores the compass and watches the highest sails of the stack to be sure that he is as close to the wind as possible. The sails are not adjusted, but the course of the ship changes with the wind. The aim is to keep the sails at the masthead full of wind, so this is called steering full and by (the masthead).

How the Sails Actually Work

Sails can function in two ways. With the wind behind them sails work like parachutes. They fill with wind and drag you along. This is pretty simple and requires no further explanation¹.

Sails also function in a much cleverer and more interesting way, which you can demonstrate for yourself at home. Take a piece of thin paper, and hold it by two corners so that the edge between those corners is in front of your mouth and the paper is drooping in front of you. Now blow over the top of the paper. If you’re doing it right the paper will actually lift (a bit).

This is known as the Bernouilli effect, after its discoverer, and is the principle on which aeroplane wings and ships sails both work. Sails are basically wings aligned vertically, and the trick is to move them so that the wind blows over them in the right direction causing them to lift.

Rotating a stack of squares, or sheeting a fore-and-aft sail in or out, is changing the angle at which the wind hits this wing and altering its efficiency. Get the angle right and you get the maximum lift, the maximum force in the right direction, and can actually make some progress against the wind.

Trim the sails too far, or turn your ship too far against the wind, and the wind starts to press down on the forward face of the sail, causing it to backwind and work against you. The yards are trimmed, and the ship sailed, so that the highest sails (which are most sensitive) are almost but not quite on the edge of starting to backwind. The edge of the sail which is leading into the wind starts to curl instead of staying straight and this is the signal that the limit has been reached. When this happens you have to trim the yards further, or if the limit of movement has been reached you have to alter course slightly, so that the wind once again flows over the sail efficiently.

Changing Direction

As mentioned, a lot of sailing is about going in the wrong direction. Ships need to change course fairly often so that their average course is towards their goal, and there are two ways of accomplishing this.

Tacking

Tacking means turning the ship so that it heads directly into the wind on the way to the desired course. Although this is the preferred way of changing course in a fore-and-aft rigged boat it is not very popular with square-riggers because the sails will sooner or later have to be totally backwinded. This can potentially stop the ship dead in the water, or even make it travel backwards, which makes it extremely difficult to steer the ship. If this happens a ship is said to be taken aback, and risks having the masts blown over if the wind is strong.