A ? for you riggers

I see your point. As drawn, the tackles don't appear to have any function. The word "parrel" normally implies a gadget that holds a yard (or gaff, or boom) to a mast. This gear doesn't do that; the heavy lines in the middle don't pass around the mast. A "yard tackle" normally is a piece of gear used to hoist stuff (cargo, boats, etc.) on board the ship. I don't see what hauling on the tackles in this drawing would accomplish, beyond giving backaches to the guys doing the hauling.

Charles Davis was one of the big figures in the early years of ship modeling as a hobby. He made his share of mistakes ( his "reconstruction" of the brig Lexington is a disaster), but when it came to this sort of thing he was generally reliable. I wonder if the text that accompanies the drawing might shed some light. BigJim, could you post the text?

Or maybe there's just a small goof in the drawing. If the big lines in the middle passed around behind the mast, or if the drawing was changed so we were looking at the tackles from the BACK, with the lines passing around the mast, things would make sense. Hauling on the tackles would draw the yard tight against the mast, and easing the tackles would let the wind blow the yard away from the mast a bit. That came in handy when the ship was working to windward: the yard could swing around a little more without fouling the shrouds. I'm used to seeing such a piece of gear referred to as a truss tackle, but I guess it may have been called a yard tackle sometime somewhere.

If I'm right about that, BigJim may have discovered an 85-year old drafting mistake. That kind of thing can happen to a draftsman leaning over a series of drawings  he's been working on for hours at a stretch, with a publisher breathing down his neck to get them done. Verrry interesting.

Indeed there are a number of people who have made really great scale drawings for modelers, especially for aircraft modelers, highly regarded figures.  Some model mags used to have scale drawings each month, in the days when scratch building was more popular.  But the experienced folks always used to warn newbies that these guys were not infallible.  I recently discovered a major flaw in the scaling between two different views of the same drawing in a book of one of those folks.

For old ships it is even worse than old aircraft.  With aircraft we have photos of the prototypes.  If the ship is old enough there will be no photos, and artists who painted ships in seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were not draftsmen, and some of the paintings were really bad when they depicted rigging!

I surmise (almost certain in this case) that the parrel(s) would attach to the parell strap, which was left out of the diagram. Depending on which yard is depicted, there would be one or two parrels that would attach to the straps and wrap around the mast (most likely the straps would have been threaded through an eye splice at each end of the parrel line). The parrels consist of wooden beads threaded on a line that would 'roll' as the yard is raised or lowered allowing free movement of the yard vs. just a bare line which would tend to jam due to friction. [I haven't seen them attached this way before. Normally(?) they would belay directly to the yard and not a strop, but rigging could vary widely from ship to ship]

The pulley rigging to the straps is something I have never seen either. I am guessing that this allowed the parrels to be loosened or tightened? 

OOOPS !

Arnie may be right. But I get the impression (maybe I'm wrong) that this drawing shows a lower yard and mast of a square-rigged ship from the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. (Warning: Charles Davis was notorious for injecting anachronisms into his drawings.) in that period the lower yard of a good-sized ship wasn't usually secured with a parrel, but with a simple rope truss. (HMS Victory and the USS Constitution are good examples.)

Aside: would you believe that when I tried to type "HMS," this infernal "smart phone tried to change it to "Hamas"? Heaven help us.

There are variations, but essentially a yard truss is a pair of heavy ropes secured to the yard on either side of the mast. Each of the lines has an eye spliced into one end. The other end passes behind the mast, goes through the eye in the end of the other line, and ends with a tackle that allows it to be hove taut or slacked off, thereby controlling the distance between the yard and the mast. I'm used to seeing simple, vertical tackles running straight to the deck. Davis shows them running along the yard. That would certainly work.

Ships of earlier years did use rib-and-bead parrels on their lower yards. As the nineteenth century went on, the truss tackle got replaced by an iron fitting (called a truss) that kept the yard a foot or two in front of the mast, so the yard could swing around without bumping into the shrouds. (Example: the Cutty Sark.)

I THINK Davis's goof was to show the yard passing in front of, rather than behind, the mast, so we seem to be looking at them from the front rather than the back. As he shows it, the lines he calls yard tackles (I'd call them truss tackles) are set up on the front of the yard. That wouldn't work.

Don is so right about the olde days when model mags published lots of drawings - many of them quite beautiful. In recent decades we've seen what I'm afraid is a last great flourishing of the traditional art of drafting. Twenty or thirty years ago the British monthly Scale Models regularly carried aircraft drawings by a man named Arthur Bentley that we're almost unbelievable in their detail, accuracy, and artistic subtlety. (More than once my copy of SM mysteriously vanished; my dad had taken it to work at the OSU School of Architecture to show the students just how good a drawing could be.) And some of the draftsmen responsible for the Anatomy of the Ship volumes ( I'm thinking of John McKay, John Roberts, and Janos Skulski in particular) are among the best ever. I'm not fit to sharpen their pencils. CAD is a wonderful thing, but I've shed more than one tear over the passing of a great art form. Nowadays, if I walk into the university bookstore and ask for a rapidograph tip, or a set of ship curves, or an adjustable triangle, the student/clerk looks at me as though I had two heads. And this phone tried to change "rapidograph" to "rapidly raspy."

The old master marine painters (the Van De Veldes, Robert Salmon, James Butterworth, Michel Corne, et al) actually were highly conscientious about rigging. The trouble is that almost every old painting we see today has been restored or repaired at least once - and restorers, trying to deal with chipped paint, cracks, and faded colors, frequently know nothing about rigging. I've seen more than one glaring error that turned out to be a blunder by some so-called restorer in the nineteenth century. Modern conservators are trained not to do stuff like that.

Sorry; too long as usual. But this is interesting stuff.

Here is the text.

The text confirms my suspicion: there's a goof in the drawing. The text says, regarding what Davis calls parrel straps and I call trusses, that "one end was very short, with an eye spliced in it, and the other was long enough to go around the mast and reeve through the eye spliced into the short end of the opposite parrel strap." In the drawing, the line doesn't go around the mast. If it did, the drawing would make perfect sense.

I wonder if a draftsman using CAD would make such a mistake. Something tells me he might.

One other point. Charles Davis was a knowledgeable man with experience in latter-day sailing merchant ships. I'm used to calling those lines "trusses" and "truss tackles," but if he says the people he worked with called them "parrel straps" and "yard tackles," I believe him. He also uses the term "cranse iron." I've seen that one in lots of other places, used interchangeably with "truss." (Fig. 137 shows one in use. Notice the rather big gap between the yard and the mast.) There's no absolutely universal vocabulary for such things.

Thank you! That was all very informative. And, I'm glad to know my mind wasn't playing tricks on me.