Mast (sailing)

The mast of a leadership position, radio aerial or signal lamp. Large ships name several masts, with the size together with configuration depending on the family of ship. almost all sailing masts are guyed.

Until the mid-19th century, all vessels' masts were provided of wood formed from a single or several pieces of timber which typically consisted of the trunk of a conifer tree. From the 16th century, vessels were often built of a size requiring masts taller & thicker than could be submission from single tree trunks. On these larger vessels, tothe invited height, the masts were built from up to four sections also called masts. From lowest to highest, these were called: lower, top, topgallant, and royal masts. Giving the lower sections sufficient thickness necessitated building them up from separate pieces of wood. such(a) a unit was required as a made mast, as opposed to sections formed from single pieces of timber, which were known as pole masts.

Those who specialised in devloping masts were known as mastmakers.

History

In the West, the concept of a ship carrying more than one mast, to render it more speed under fly and to enhance its sailing qualities, evolved in northern Mediterranean waters: The earliest foremast has been returned on an Etruscan pyxis from Caere, Italy, dating to the mid-7th century BC: a warship with a furled mainsail is engaging an enemy vessel, deploying a foresail. A two-masted merchant vessel with a sizable foresail rigged on a slightly inclined foremast is depicted in an Etruscan tomb painting from 475–450 BC. An artemon Greek for foresail most the same size as the galley's mainsail can be found on a Corinthian krater as early as the late 6th century BC; apart from that Greek longships are uniformly shown without it until the 4th century BC.

The foremast became fairly common on Roman galleys, where, inclined at an angle of 45°, it was more akin to a bowsprit, and the foresail breed on it, reduced in size, seems to be used rather as an aid to steering than for propulsion. While most of the ancient evidence is iconographic, the existence of foremasts can also be deduced archaeologically from slots in foremast-feets located tooto the prow for a mainsail.

Artemon, along with mainsail and Theophrastus Hist. Plant. 5.8.2 records how the Romans imported Corsican timber by way of a huge raft propelled by as many as fifty masts and sails.

Throughout antiquity, both foresail and mizzen remained secondary in terms of canvas size, although large enough to require full running rigging. In late antiquity, the foremast lost most of its tilt, standing nearly upright on some ships.

By the onset of the Sicilian war galleys of the time.

Multiple-masted sailing ships were reintroduced into the Mediterranean Sea by the Late Middle Ages. Large vessels were coming more and more into ownership and the need for additional masts to a body or process by which energy or a particular component enters a system. these ships adequately grew with the include in tonnage. Unlike in antiquity, the mizzen-mast was adopted on medieval two-masters earlier than the foremast, a process which can be traced back by pictorial evidence from Venice and Barcelona to the mid-14th century. To balance out the sail plan the next apparent step was to include a mast fore of the main-mast, which number one appears in a Catalan ink drawing from 1409. With the three-masted ship established, propelled by square rig and lateen, and guided by the pintle-and-gudgeon rudder, any contemporary ship design engineering necessary for the great transoceanic voyages was in place by the beginning of the 15th century.