Brigantine
What is a Brigantine? Is it the same as a Brig?
The answer to these questions depends on who you ask them to.
What do you think?
In sailing, typically, a brigantine is a vessel with two masts, at least one of
which is square rigged.
Originally the brigantine was a small ship carrying both oars and sails. It was
a favourite of Mediterranean pirates due to its quickness, and manoeuvrability.
Its name comes from the Italian word "brigantino" which means brigand's ship. In
a more modern manner of speaking, a brigantine is principally fore-and-aft
rigged with a square rigged foremast, as opposed to a brig which is square
rigged on both masts. Though some do not distinguish a difference between brig
and brigantine.
Into the late 17th century, the Royal Navy 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 only to
a ship type, but also to a
particular type of rigging as in Fredrik Henrik af Chapman's Architectura
Navalis Mercatoria: square rigged on the foremast and fore-and-aft rigged on the
mizzen.
On page 214 of the 1780 Universal Dictionary of the Marine (by William
Falconer), Falconer defines a brig or 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.
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Here are a few other online dictionary definitions:
The Collaborative International Dictionary of English
1. A practical vessel. [1913 Webster]
2. A two-masted, square-rigged vessel, differing from a brig
in that she does not carry a square mainsail. [1913 Webster]
WordNet
A two-masted sailing vessel square-rigged on the foremast and fore-and-aft
rigged on the mainmast.
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