Barque

From Free net encyclopedia

The word barc appears to have come from Celtic languages so that the form adopted by English, perhaps from Irish, was bark while that adopted by French , perhaps from Gaulish, was barge. Post Conquest French influence in England means that English now uses both words though their meanings are not now the same. Well before the 19th century a barge had become a small vessel of coastal or inland waters. Somewhat later, a bark became a sailing vessel of a distinctive rig as detailed below. In Britain, by the mid-nineteenth century, the spelling had taken on the French form of barque. Francis Bacon used this form of the word as early as 1605 though he will not have had the big late-nineteenth century barques in mind.

In the 18th century, the British Royal Navy used the term Bark for a nondescript vessel which did not fit any of its usual categories. Thus, when on the advice of Captain James Cook, a collier was bought into the navy and converted for exploration she was called HM Bark Endeavour. She happened to be a ship-rigged sailing vessel with a plain bluff bow and a full stern with windows.

By the end of the 18th century, however, the term barque (sometimes, particularly in the USA, spelled bark) came to refer to any vessel with a particular type of rig. This comprises three (or more) masts, fore and aft sails on the aftermost mast and square sails on all other masts. A well-preserved example of a commercial barque is Falls of Clyde; built in 1878, it is now preserved as a museum ship in Honolulu. The United States Coast Guard still has an operational Barque, built in Germany in 1936 and captured as a war prize, the Eagle.

Related rigs are brigantine (2 masts), barquentine (three or more masts, square-rigged on only the fore mast), and jackass-barque.

The advantage of these rigs was that they needed smaller (therefore cheaper) crews than a comparable ship or brig-rigged vessel. Conversely, the ship rig tended to be retained for training vessels where the larger the crew, the more seamen were trained.

Throughout the period of sail, the word was used also as a shortening of the barca-longa of the Mediterranean Sea.