Aged Sail Colors

I've seen lots of references to nationalistic differences in the colors of sails, including the assertion that a 19th-century American merchant vessel could be distinguished from a British one at a distance because the American's sails looked white and the British one's a pale beige.  I'm not sure how much of this sort of thing to believe.

I'd be extremely careful about any generalities when dealing with a topic like this one.  I confess I've never heard of anything resembling dope being applied to sails of large vessels prior to the twentieth century - though I'm sure it's common nowadays.

The biggest thing to remember is that, unless you're building a model of an extremely modern vessel with synthetic sails, they definitely shouldn't be pure white.  I like a pale grey with a slightly - very slightly - beige cast to it.  I'd probably tend to make a British ship's sails very slightly more beige than an American one's, but that's about as far as I'd want to press the issue.

Can one make any generalities relative to a given sail cloth over time?  I'm working on the 24 gun ship Dolphin during her 1764-1766 circumnavigation. After a year at sea, replacement sails/patches would obviously be of different colors than the older, worn sails.

thanks 

It seems reasonable that new patches on old sails would be lighter than the original canvas.  And probably of a very slightly different color - since no two bolts of sailcloth would be exactly alike.  But the bottom line in such subjects is:  keep it subtle.  My inclination would be to aim for a difference in hue and value that's only noticeable to somebody looking at the model closely.

A good guide for such topics is the Old Master marine painters.  Take a look at some good color reproductions of paintings by people like the Van de Veldes, Robert Salmon, Thomas Cluny, and Francis Holman.  They learned their trade by looking at the real thing. 

Another thing you'll notice in the works of painters like that:  they often made their flags translucent.  They were right.  Big flags frequently were made of an extremely open-weave fabric, like very coarse gauze.  That kept them from blowing themselves to pieces in a high wind - or messing up the ship's navigation.  Some of those flags were as big as ship's topgallants.