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Updated: May 4, 2025
The momentous change in trimming sails, already referred to, came first, when Fletcher succeeded in doing what no one had ever done before. There can be no doubt that the lateen sail, which goes back at least to the early Egyptians, had the germ of a fore-and-after in it.
She had ceased to be profitable in competition with the larger, more modern fore-and-after, but these battered, veteran craft died hard. They harked back to a simpler age, to the era of the stage-coach and the spinning-wheel, to the little shipyards that were to be found on every bay and inlet of New England. They were still owned and sailed by men who ashore were friends and neighbors.
The jibs and spanker generally go up at once, because they are useful as an aid to steering. The staysails generally wait. The jibs and staysails are triangular, the spanker a quadrangular fore-and-after. The square sails made fast to wide-spreading yards are the ones that take most hauling. But setting the sails by no means ends the work at them. Trimming is quite as important.
I mind me I made a great baking that week; and I put brandy into the mince for once, instead of vinegar and dried-apple juice, and there were the fowls stuffed and trussed on the shelf, and the pumpkin-pies like slices of split gold, and the cranberry-tarts, plats of crimson and puffs of snow, and I was brewing in my mind a right-royal red Indian-pudding to come out of the oven smoking hot and be soused with thick clots of yellow cream, when one of the boys ran in and told us the fleet'd got back, but no Dan with it, he'd changed over to a fore-and-after, and wouldn't be home at all, but was to stay down in the Georges all winter, and he'd sent us word.
And I found the doctor busy with the plague at Bay Saint Billy, himself quartered aboard the Greased Lightning, a fore-and-after which he had chartered for the season: to whom I lied diligently and without shame concerning my sister's condition, and with such happy effect that we put to sea in the brewing of the great gale of that year, with our topsail and tommy-dancer spread to a sousing breeze.
Then the Helen B. did her favourite trick, and before we had time to say much we had a sea over the quarter and were up to our waists, with the parrels of the trysail only half becketed round the mast, and the deck so full of gear that you couldn't put your foot on a plank, and the spanker beginning to get adrift again, being badly stopped, and the general confusion and hell's delight that you can only have on a fore-and-after when there's nothing really serious the matter.
"In one way, it looks like that, but, after all, a jibe's quite a common thing with a fore-and-after. If you run her off to lee when she's going before it her mainboom's bound to come over. Of course, nobody would run her off in a wicked breeze unless he had to, but you'd no choice with the ice in front of you." Wyllard lay very still for almost a minute.
Poor Sarah took off her frock and washed it before me, without a sign of distress or embarrassment; and then we went off together and had a bit of a dance, a rough-and-tumble fore-and-after, at the nearest booth. With her bonnet off, and neat cap, her beautiful complexion and dark hair and eyes, how happened it that she was really modest and well-behaved? And how came she there?
I stuck to the Helen B. Jackson after that as long as I could stand a fore-and-after; but that night when we lay in Havana was the last time I ever heard "Nancy Lee" on board of her. The spare hand had gone ashore with the rest, and he never came back, and he took his tune with him; but all those things are just as clear in my memory as if they had happened yesterday.
I was six months aboard a Garnsey lugger, hauling in the slack of the lee-sheet and coiling up rigging. From that I went a few trips in a fore-and-after, in the same trade, which, after all, was but a blind kind of sailing in the dark, where a man larns but little, excepting how to steer by the stars.
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