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Brigantine

 
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Brigantine
 
 
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In sailing
Sailing

Sailing is the art of controlling a boat with large pieces of canvas cloth called sails. By changing the rigging, rudder, and dagger or centre board, a sailor manages the force of the wind on the sails in order to change the direction and speed of a boat....
, a brigantine is a vessel with two masts, only the forward of which is square rig
Square rig

Square rig is a generic type of Sail-plan in which the primary driving sails are carried on horizontal spars which are perpendicular, or , to the keel of the vessel and to the masts....
ged.

Originally the brigantine was a small ship carrying both oars and sails. It was a favorite of Mediterranean pirates and its name comes from the Italian word "brigantino" which meant brigand's ship. In modern parlance, a brigantine is a principally fore-and-aft rig with a square rigged foremast, as opposed to a brig
Brig

In Glossary of nautical terms, a brig is a vessel with two square rig masts. During the Age of Sail, brigs were seen as fast and maneuverable and were used as both naval war ships and merchant ships....
 which is square rigged on both masts.

In the late 17th century, the Royal Navy
Royal Navy

The Royal Navy of the United Kingdom is the oldest of the British Armed Forces . From the mid-18th century until well into the 20th century, it was the most powerful navy in the world, playing a key part in establishing the British Empire as the dominant world power from 1815 until the early 1940s....
 used the term brigantine to refer to small two-masted vessels designed to be rowed as well as sailed, rigged with square sails on both masts.

By the first half of the 18th century the word had evolved to refer not to a ship type name, but rather to a particular type of rigging: square rig
Square rig

Square rig is a generic type of Sail-plan in which the primary driving sails are carried on horizontal spars which are perpendicular, or , to the keel of the vessel and to the masts....
ged on the foremast and fore-and-aft rigged on the mainmast.

The 1780 Universal Dictionary of the Marine by William Falconer
William Falconer

William Falconer was a Scotland poet.Falconer was the son of a barber in Edinburgh, where he was born, became a sailor, and was thus thoroughly competent to describe the management of the storm-tossed vessel, the career and fate of which are described in his poem, The Shipwreck , a work of genuine, though unequal, talent....
 defines brig and brigantine as follows:

BRIG, or BRIGANTINE, a merchant-ship with two masts.






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In sailing
Sailing

Sailing is the art of controlling a boat with large pieces of canvas cloth called sails. By changing the rigging, rudder, and dagger or centre board, a sailor manages the force of the wind on the sails in order to change the direction and speed of a boat....
, a brigantine is a vessel with two masts, only the forward of which is square rig
Square rig

Square rig is a generic type of Sail-plan in which the primary driving sails are carried on horizontal spars which are perpendicular, or , to the keel of the vessel and to the masts....
ged.

Originally the brigantine was a small ship carrying both oars and sails. It was a favorite of Mediterranean pirates and its name comes from the Italian word "brigantino" which meant brigand's ship. In modern parlance, a brigantine is a principally fore-and-aft rig with a square rigged foremast, as opposed to a brig
Brig

In Glossary of nautical terms, a brig is a vessel with two square rig masts. During the Age of Sail, brigs were seen as fast and maneuverable and were used as both naval war ships and merchant ships....
 which is square rigged on both masts.

In the late 17th century, the Royal Navy
Royal Navy

The Royal Navy of the United Kingdom is the oldest of the British Armed Forces . From the mid-18th century until well into the 20th century, it was the most powerful navy in the world, playing a key part in establishing the British Empire as the dominant world power from 1815 until the early 1940s....
 used the term brigantine to refer to small two-masted vessels designed to be rowed as well as sailed, rigged with square sails on both masts.

By the first half of the 18th century the word had evolved to refer not to a ship type name, but rather to a particular type of rigging: square rig
Square rig

Square rig is a generic type of Sail-plan in which the primary driving sails are carried on horizontal spars which are perpendicular, or , to the keel of the vessel and to the masts....
ged on the foremast and fore-and-aft rigged on the mainmast.

The 1780 Universal Dictionary of the Marine by William Falconer
William Falconer

William Falconer was a Scotland poet.Falconer was the son of a barber in Edinburgh, where he was born, became a sailor, and was thus thoroughly competent to describe the management of the storm-tossed vessel, the career and fate of which are described in his poem, The Shipwreck , a work of genuine, though unequal, talent....
 defines brig and brigantine as follows:

BRIG, or BRIGANTINE, a merchant-ship with two masts. This term is not universally confined to vessels of a particular construction, or which are masted and rigged in a method different from all others. It is variously applied, by the mariners of different European nations, to a peculiar sort of vessel of their own marine.
...
Among English seamen, this vessel is distinguished by having her main-sail set nearly in the plane of her keel; whereas the main-sails of larger ships are hung athwart, or at right angles with the ship’s length, and fastened to a yard which hangs parallel to the deck: but in a brig, the foremost edge of the main-sail is fastened in different places to hoops which encircle the main-mast, and slide up and down it as the sail is hoisted or lowered: it is extended by a gaff above, and by a boom below.


Later, brig and brigantine developed distinct meanings. The Oxford English Dictionary
Oxford English Dictionary

The Oxford English Dictionary , published by the Oxford University Press , is a comprehensive dictionary of the English language. Two fully-bound print editions of the OED have been published under its current name, in 1928 and 1989; as of December 2008 the dictionary's current editors have completed a quarter of the third edition....
 (with citations from 1720 to 1854) defines brig as:
1. a. A vessel
originally identical with the brigantine (of which word brig was a colloquial abbreviation); but, while the full name has remained with the unchanged brigantine, the shortened name has accompanied the modifications which have subsequently been made in rig, so that a brig is now A vessel with two masts square-rigged like a ship's fore- and main-masts, but carrying also on her main-mast a lower fore-and-aft sail with a gaff and boom.
A brig differs from a snow
Snow (ship)

A snow or snaw, is a sailing vessel. A type of brig , snows were primarily used as merchant ships, but saw war service as well. The twin brigs USS Lawrence and USS Niagara , American warships of the Battle of Lake Erie, were both snows....
 in having no try-sail mast, and in lowering her gaff to furl the sail. Merchant snows are often called 'brigs'. This vessel was probably developed from the brigantine by the men-of-war brigs, so as to obtain greater sail-power.


Early American usage was to refer to a brigantine as a hermaphrodite brig
Hermaphrodite brig

A hermaphrodite brig, or brig-schooner is a type of two-masted sailing ship which has square rigs on the foremast combined with fore-and-aft rigged sails on the mainmast....
.

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