The lateen sail and the sindhbad sailor. Do what you must Which sail is better, lateen or oblique?

For the auxiliary purpose of the sail, the lateen rig is especially convenient. It can be used with equal success on both kayaks and rowing boats for sailing on open waters under favorable conditions. weather conditions. The kayak, armed with a lateen mainsail, even competes in speed with the Meva dinghy at full speed to the wind.

The recommendations of sailing tourist Yu. Kuzhel will help you make a lateen sail yourself (Latin sail. “Tourist”, 1978, No. 5). Latin sailing equipment(Fig. 33) has a free, without shrouds, mast (2), on which a sail (6) is suspended using a halyard (1) and a tack guy (4). The sail is stretched with slats (3, 5) inserted into pockets along its front and lower luffs. Various tackles are attached to the spar using carabiners. In Fig. Figure 34 shows a working drawing of a sail with an area of ​​4.5 m2. The correct shape of the sail is ensured by the configuration of the pockets and luff. The halyard and clew corners are reinforced with halyard planks.

Rice. 33. Latin weapons

Rice. 34. Working drawing of the lateen sail

Having familiarized yourself with this design, it is easy to see how easy it is to work with a lateen sail. It can be raised and removed, and when lowered, it does not interfere with rowing. The mast in the kayak is installed in its standard place at the beginning of the cockpit. It is useful to equip kayaks with such sailing rigs with centerboards and one transverse beam with inflatable tanks at its ends. The centerboard assembly is conveniently located behind the back of the front crew seat. In hiking conditions, the simplest transverse beam is an ordinary kayak oar with inflatable balls tied to its blades (Peregudov V. Planing floats from a kayak oar. “Boats and Yachts.” 1975, No. 3).

For rowing boats, it is necessary to additionally manufacture a steering device. The mast is installed on the bottom of the rowing boat and is pressed against the transverse beam with a clamp.

However, there is evidence of the use of sails in land transport - for example, the sail was widely used to create auxiliary motive power on carts in China, and it also powers wheeled and ice buoys.

The simplest sail is a piece of material (see canvas). Larger sails are sewn from several pieces. Before stitching, the panels are shaped in such a way that the finished sail, installed in its place and filled with wind, has a well-streamlined convex-concave shape, resembling a bird’s wing in cross-section, and develops the greatest useful force.

For making modern sails synthetic fabrics are used. In some cases (for example, to make sails for windsurfers), not fabric, but a durable film is used. There are also more complex and expensive sail manufacturing technologies, in which the entire sail is made not from pieces of fabric or film, but from high-strength synthetic threads placed between two layers of film along the lines of action on the sail of the greatest loads.

There are also structures that are completely different from an ordinary sail, representing a wing placed vertically and using the power of the wind for the same purposes as a sail. Such structures are sometimes installed, for example, on sports boats (also, by the way, quite different from ordinary boats familiar to most) in order to achieve speed records on the water. Having very little in common with a stretched piece of material, these wings are nevertheless called, due to their inertia, either a “rigid sail” or a “wing sail”.

History of the sail

People learned to use a sail about 5.5 thousand years ago. Judging by the surviving drawings and the results of excavations, the Egyptians were the first to use the sail. [ ]

Types of sails

Straight sails

Straight sails- sails that are placed across the ship and attached to yards that rise to masts and topmasts. They look like an isosceles trapezoid. The straight sail is controlled by turning the yard with braces and sheets in a horizontal plane. On sharp tacks the windward luff straight sail is diverted to the wind using a special tackle called a spruit.

Large ships are armed with straight sails sailing ships: ships, barques, barquentines, brigs and brigantines. Straight sails became widespread due to the ability to obtain huge sailing areas using a combination of small sails. No person will be able to cope with a sail whose area exceeds a certain limit (approximately 5-8 square meters per person).

Slant sails

On at the moment is the most common type of sail on yachts. In terms of ease of control, installation and traction characteristics, it is the undisputed leader.

A yacht with properly adjusted Bermuda sails can be sailed for a long time by just one person. A maneuver such as tacking can be performed without calling a watchman at all, by shifting the rudder.

Vessel "Reaper" with lugger sails

Luger (raik) sail- a type of oblique sail.

The sail is most often in the shape of an irregular trapezoid, with the upper luff attached to the rake and the lower luff to the boom.

Sprint sail- a quadrangular oblique sail, stretched diagonally with a thin pole (spring or sprint), resting on its upper corner at one end and against the lower part of the mast at the other.

Gaff sail

Jib

Staysail

Other types of sails

• Blooper

• Genaker

• Spinnaker

• Tallboy

Sail parts

Names of parts of the sail

In sailing, all parts of the sail have their own names. Triangular sails are the most commonly used, and so most have six terms - one for each corner and side of the sail. The side of the sail is generally called luff . There are front, back and lower luffs. The luff is considered to be the luff adjacent to the mast. Sail angles triangular shape are called tack , halyard And clew . The lower one, adjacent to the mast, is the tack angle, the upper one, adjacent to the mast, is the halyard angle, and the rear one, adjacent to the boom, is the clew angle.

The luffs and corners of the sail, as the most loaded areas of the sail, are decorated with various reinforcements made of fabric using the so-called “details”. Corner reinforcements are called boats And bows . Luff reinforcements, as a rule, do not have special names.

The history of the origin of the lateen (oblique) sail is lost in the depths of time. It appeared in the Mediterranean Sea among the Arabs, then it was borrowed by Europeans. But the Arabs also borrowed it, most likely from the Persians. Here we recall the famous Sinbad the Sailor, who, judging by his name, was neither an Arab nor a Persian, but a native of the Indian province of Sindh. This version has not yet been expressed anywhere, but I really like it. In this regard, it is interesting to re-read the Arabic (?) tales told by Scheherazade. The name of this princess sounds interesting; it is definitely of Iranian origin. Thus, navigation in the Indian Ocean has its deep origins. But it was the oblique sail that allowed people to sail against the wind. The presence of currents and monsoons in the Indian Ocean should have stimulated the creators of this discovery. After all, it was thanks to the oblique sail that Columbus sailed Atlantic Ocean. This article describes in detail the origin of the oblique sail.

"It is known that one of the distinguishing features medieval galley there was the presence of lateen sailing weapons. We will definitely talk about the emergence of lateen sails on galleys, but now I would like to say a few words about the history of the emergence of oblique, including lateen, sails in general. Who and when invented the lateen sail is unknown. Therefore, as usual in such cases, there is no shortage of hypotheses, sometimes mutually exclusive, colored by poorly hidden attempts to establish national priorities (the postulate “Russia is the homeland of elephants” applies not only to Russia and not only to elephants). The operating principle of a lateen sail is fundamentally different from the operating principle of a straight sail. It is installed not across, but almost along the wind, and the driving force is a component of the pressure difference between the concave and convex parts of the sail, in exactly the same way as it is formed lift airplane wing. The main advantages of a lateen sail are that it has less resistance to movement, is used more effectively in light winds and allows you to sail steeper to the wind than when using a straight sail. So why did the dominance of the straight sail last so long?

There was only one reason why the large rectangular sail remained for many, many centuries on ships sailing the Nile. This river is known to flow from south to north while the prevailing winds blow from north to south. Consequently, when the ship went downstream, the spar was cut and the oarsmen got to work. On the way back, there was a steady tailwind, which did not require tacking to follow the upstream. The simplicity in the design of straight sails and their control contributed to their long-term dominance on Egyptian and then other Mediterranean ships. A straight sail does not need to change from tack to tack with a slight change in the direction of the tailwind, while the use of oblique sails in this case requires constant attention from the crew.

The most likely transition from a straight sail to a lateen sail is as follows. Using a square sail, sailors noticed that when the ship was not sailing exactly in the jibe, the efficiency of the sail could be increased by turning it so that it was perpendicular to the wind. If this technique is used when the vessel has a keel or a steering device (or better yet, both together), then the vessel's course relative to the wind can be chosen over a wider range, rather than simply moving along the direction of the wind.

If the wind direction is approaching the beam, i.e. the ship is sailing close to the backstay course, this technique begins to work worse, however, the drop in the driving force can be partially compensated if the windward luff of the sail is directed towards the wind. This method works well if the windward luff is pulled tight, which can be achieved by tilting the windward portion of the top yard (or gaff) down. Using a straight sail in this way is a direct path to the invention of the lateen sail, perhaps through the intermediate use of a quadrangular rack (lugger) sail (when a quadrangular sail is attached by the upper luff to the rake, with the latch and lower soft luff of the sail protruding in front of the mast). Campbell, in his study "The lateen sail in world history" (Journal of World History, Spring 1995), believes that the specific shape of the lateen sail of the Indian Ocean increases the plausibility of this hypothesis: the short edge of the windward luff is perhaps a remnant of the original luff of a square sail. However, this remains only a hypothesis, not confirmed by material evidence. Development of oblique sailing weapons in the zone Pacific Ocean And Southeast Asia followed its own paths, independent of the development of the sail in the Mediterranean, which confirms the hypothesis of two, and possibly three independent directions of development of the lateen sail.

The most heated debate revolved around the question of whether the lateen sail is of Mediterranean origin or whether it originally appeared in the Indian Ocean and was brought to the Mediterranean by the Arabs. Supporters of the second version provide the following arguments in support of it. The lateen sail was universally known as the “Arab sail,” by borrowing which Western sailors significantly increased the efficiency of their fleet. Further, there is no evidence of the presence of Latin weapons in the Mediterranean until the end of the ninth century, i.e. after almost two centuries had passed since the beginning of the action of Arab ships in the Mediterranean (George F. Hourani, Arab Seafaring in the Indian Ocean in Ancient and Early Medieval Times (Princeton, 1951)).

Our Arabist T.A. Shumovsky clearly resolves this issue. In his book “The Arabs and the Sea” (1964, p. 173) he writes:

“Brought by Arab sailors from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea and becoming the property of Europe, the bow-stern triangular sail revolutionized European sailing. The transition from the primitive single-mast ship with a square sail to three-masted ships with an Arabian triangle made it possible sailing ship go against the wind, that is, practically in. in any direction favorable to him, from where the technical possibility arose to carry out the expeditions of Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Magellan and their successors.”

R. Bowen (Richard LeBaron Bowen, “Arab Dhows of Eastern Arabia,” The American Neptune 9 (1949): 92) also believes that the Indian Ocean is most likely the birthplace of the lateen sail, since in the evolution of sailing weapons discussed above from straight to Latin, it is in the Indian Ocean that intermediate modifications of the sail are present. In the Mediterranean Sea, no sails were found that could be considered the predecessors of the Latin one. At the same time, R. Bowen believes that it would be wrong to attribute the invention of the lateen sail to the Arabs. He believes that the Arabs showed themselves to be seafarers too late to be considered the inventors of the lateen sail. According to this authoritative scientist, the Arabs adopted maritime knowledge from the Persians, along with a maritime vocabulary, principles of navigation, and, possibly, Latin sailing weapons. And then the Arabs moved the lateen sail to the Mediterranean Sea. This hypothesis is allegedly confirmed by the fact that the first images of a lateen sail in the Mediterranean fine arts appeared in the ninth century. In this regard, it is appropriate to quote Van Doorninck's remark, quoted in A History of Seafaring Based on Underwater Archaeology, (ed. George F. Bass (London, 1972), p. 146) that manuscript illustrators, as a rule, worked with traditional stereotypical forms and rarely introduced innovations into their art. So triangular lateen sails may have appeared long before their images began to be used in illuminated manuscript texts. Consequently, this fact provides the basis for the statement only that lateen sails in the Mediterranean Sea appeared “no later than” in the 9th century. But the main difficulty in promoting this hypothesis is that, as Bowen stated in an earlier study, there is not a single evidence of the use of the lateen sail in the western Indian Ocean before the arrival of the Portuguese there. True, there were suggestions that the rack (luger) sail could have been brought into western part Indian Ocean by Greek merchants trading with India during the era of Roman rule. And yet, despite the most careful scientific searches, it has not been possible to find a single literary or pictorial evidence of the types of sailing weapons used in the western part of Indian Ocean until the 15th century. Evidence from Arabic poetry of the 9th-10th centuries cited by J. Hourani to support the hypothesis that the Arabs used the lateen sail. do not stand up to any criticism. Poetic images are compared ship sail in the distance with a whale's fin or a fountain released by it. On this basis, J. Hourani concludes that this refers to a lateen sail rather than a straight sail. But the whale does not have a dorsal fin, and the fountain released by the whale looks more like a cloud of steam than any specific shape. This is rather a purely romantic image that does not give a clue to the shape of the sail. The surviving characteristics of the sails of Arab ships, which are cited by Ibn Majid (15th century), do not clarify the issue. He points out that the ratio of the windward luff to the leeward length is 10:13.5, i.e. the sail is almost straight, and it is more of a lugger than a lateen sail (Arab Navigation in the Indian Ocean before the Coming of the Portuguese (London, 1971 ), p. 52.)"

LATIN SAILS, LATIN SAILING WEAPONS

(Latin sails) - triangular sails, which have become widespread since the Middle Ages in the Mediterranean on ships of the Latin peoples; they laced their luff to a very long (composite) rail, which rose in an inclined position so that one leg (rear) was raised high, and the other was lowered almost to the deck. The lateen rig of boats is somewhat modified, where triangular sails are laced not to the raft, but with their luff to the mast and a retractable topmast, raised along with the sail along the mast.

• - in ancient times, the war of the Latins against Rome. In 496 BC e. The 1st L. century began between Rome, which claimed hegemony in the Latin Union, and the Latins. Soon after the legendary battle of Lake Regil. was again...

  Soviet historical encyclopedia

• - Ius Latii, see Latium, Latium, 7,...

  Real Dictionary of Classical Antiquities

• - vessel - a set of sails, spars, rigging, deck mechanisms and practical things of a sailing vessel. Type P. v. determined by the type of sails, the area of ​​distribution or the type of vessel...

  Big Encyclopedic Polytechnic Dictionary

• - triangular sails that are laced to a long, often composite batten...

  Marine dictionary

• - triangular sails, which were laced with their upper luff to a long composite rail that rose obliquely, that is, the rear corner was raised high, and the front corner was lowered almost to the deck...

  Marine dictionary

• - a method for dividing observations to eliminate heterogeneity when conducting further research. See Analysis of Variance...

  Geological encyclopedia

• - triangular sails, in which the upper part of the luff is laced to the topmast, and the lower part is tied to segars running along the mast...

  Marine dictionary

• - a type of rig for small ships with a triangular sail, which only recently began to be used on racing yachts...

  Marine dictionary

• - a set of sails, spar and rigging that receive and transmit wind energy to a sailing ship to propel it...

  Marine dictionary

• - a set of sails, spar and rigging on a sailboat...

  Marine dictionary

• - the following types of boat sailing equipment are distinguished. Gaff, if the sails are tied to the gaffs...

  Marine dictionary

• - in ancient times, the war of the Latins against Rome. In 496 BC. e. The 1st L. century began between Rome, which claimed hegemony in the Latin Union, and the Latins. Soon after the legendary battle of Lake Regil. was...
• - a vessel, a set of elements of the equipment of a sailing vessel. Type P. v. determined by the shape of the Sails, the elements of the Spar and the sails, the area of ​​distribution or the type of vessel on which it is used...

  Great Soviet Encyclopedia

• - wars of the cities of the Latin Union against the hegemony of Rome in it. The 1st Latin War ended with the restoration of the alliance led by Rome...
• - LATIN letter is an alphabetic letter used by the ancient Romans. Preserved among most peoples of the West. Europe, formed the basis of the writing systems of many languages ​​of the world. Goes back to Greek writing...

  Large encyclopedic dictionary

• - vessel - a set of sails, spars and rigging of a sailing vessel. The type of sailing equipment is determined by the type of sails, the type of vessel, and the area of ​​distribution. See Sailing Ship...

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"LATIN SAILS, LATIN SAILING WEAPONS" in books

CHAPTER 13 The Royal Family in Samoa. King Malie-toa. Farewell, friends from Vailima. South of the Fiji Islands. Arrival in Newcastle, Australia. Yachts. Sydney. Swimming on the Spray. Commodore Foy gives the Spray new sailing equipment. Forward to Melbourne! A profit-generating shark. Change of course.

APPENDIX Lines and rigging of the "Spray" Pedigree of the "Spray", as far as it can be established. Contours of "Spray". Advantages of Spray self-control. Sailing rig and steering gear. An unprecedented feat. A final word of encouragement to future sailors

APPENDIX Lines and rigging of the "Spray" Pedigree of the "Spray", as far as it can be established. Contours of "Spray". Advantages of Spray self-control. Sailing rig and steering gear. An unprecedented feat. A final word of encouragement to the future

Latin word "yoke"

The Latin word “yoke” European “tails” stick out in our domestic “Mongolian studies” in the most unexpected places. Thus, E.P. Savelyev, in a book about the history of the Cossacks, suddenly reports: “Jean Joinville, one of the most truthful French historians of that time (1224–1238),

Latin word "yoke"