furled sails on Heller La Reale

All the lines used in furling and setting a lateen sail are explained pretty clearly in Dr. Anderson's The Rigging of Ships in the Days of the Spritsail Topmast.  Since he concentrates on full-rigged warships, the information about lateen sails can be found in the section dealing with the mizzen mast and its sail (typically the only lateen sail in a Western European warship of the period).  Chapter X, "Running Rigging of the Mizzen," starts on p. 231.

The question of whether lines should be taut or slack on a ship model is an interesting and surprisingly complex one.  The truth of the matter is that in a real sailing ship scarcely any of the rigging is ever really taut.  (Even such lines as the shrouds and stays normally have a little slack in them.  The mainstay of a 17th- or 18th-century ship, for instance, usually had a pair of stay tackle attached to it, which bent it downward.  The shrouds would be set up periodically as taut as the crew could make them, but the catherpins would bend them very slightly out of true - and good contemporary paintings establish that, when the ship was working to windward, the shrouds and backstays on the lee side went noticeably slack.)  Almost the only lines in a real sailing ship's rigging that are perfectly straight are those that have weights hanging from their ends (e.g., the lifts when the yards are in their lowered positions).  Watch a good sailing ship movie (e.g., "Master and Commander") and take a look at lines like the braces, sheets, and tacks.  You'll see that all of them have slack in them - and the amount of slack varies depending on the wind direction and strength, the way the sails are set, and various other factors.

When sails are furled, lots of lines associated with them droop.  Model builders, however, are confronted with a problem:  thread doesn't act like rope.  It is, generally speaking, too light to droop in realistic, catenary-shaped curves.  Experienced modelers get around this in two ways.  Some of them (Donald McNarry's wonderful small-scale models are perhaps the best examples) make their rigging out of wire, and build the appropriate, scale-like curves into it.  That takes a great deal of knowledge and practice.  Most modelers - especially those working in larger scales, where wire obviously doesn't look like rope - fudge a little and set their rigging up taut.  You'll find that most good models in museums, and illustrated in books, are rigged that way - and have been since the days of the great seventeenth-century "Board Room models."  Strictly speaking it isn't authentic, but people who look at ship models are so accustomed to the practice that they rarely think about it.

 

I looked up that chapter, and the last chapter on sails themselves.  Some good info, but there is not mention of how the sails were taken up.  Were they just bunched up and tied, or rolled, or what?  I've looked around the web and can find nothing really conclusive as to how a galley did this...

Grymm

    One of the tricks that can be used when representing slack rigging, is to apply a 50/50 mix of white glue and water, with just enough detergent (dishwashing detergent) to allow the mixture to quickly soak into the thread. While the thread is wet, a paintbrush handle can be used to work the catenary into the line. It is admittedly a slow and tedious process, but it will produce a good effect. The moisture gives the thread weight, and the dilute glue will hold the catenary when dry.

I haven't done any in-depth reading about the rigging of French galleys, but I assume the process of setting and furling sails on board such a vessel was pretty much the same as everywhere else - though I wouldn't be suprised if those enormous lateen sails had a few unusual lines or fittings associated with them.  (I seem to recall that there are sheaves built into the mastheads to take the halyards, for instance.  But my memory may be wrong about that.) 

The basic process of furling a sail is pretty simple.  The lines holding it down (the sheets and tacks) are slacked off, and the lines used to furl it are hauled in.  In the case of a lateen sail, those include primarily the brails and martnets (if any).  That operation has the effect of spilling the wind from the sail and turnint it into a loose, sloppy bundle.  The gaskets are then used to turn it into a neat, tidy bundle against the lower side of the yard. 

In the case of a square-rigged sail, the bundle usually works out to be slightly smaller in diameter than the yard.  (One of the most common mistakes among inexperienced modelers is to make the bundles of furled sails too fat.)  Those huge lateen sails on a Reale might have been exceptions.  If you do some digging in books on late-seventeenth-century warships you may be able to find some good contemporary pictures of galleys with their sails furled.  In any case, if you want to rig such a model accurately you need a good set of plans, including a rigging diagram.  I believe there's a set of plans for a Reale among the series published by the Musee de la Marine, though they're pretty expensive.  Otherwise, the ones in the Landstrom book are pretty good and, I think, reliable.  That book has been around for a long time, but my inclination in such cases is to accept what Landstrom says unless there's a good reason to do otherwise.

In a seventeenth-century square-rigged vessel the topsails were handled a little differently than the others.  Rather than being lashed into a bundle that was spread along the length of the yard, the center portion of the topsail was gathered into a vertical, cylindrical shape hanging down from the center of the yard, with the clews projecting from the bottom.  (I suspect that arrangement got started in the sixteenth century, when the topsail yard was half as long as the lower yard.  That configuration would make it awkward to furl the sail along the yard, since the foot of the sail would be twice the length of the head.)  It's kind of hard to describe verbally, but almost any contemporary illustration will make it clear.  That method of furling topsails seems to have been in use, at least occasionally, for most of the eighteenth century; contemporary pictures from the American Revolution sometimes show topsails furled that way and sometimes don't.

The best guide to topics like this is John Harland's Seamanship in the Age of Sail, an outstanding, beautifully-illustrated reference that contains just about enough information to let the reader sail a ship of practically any period and nationality.  Unfortunately it's pretty expensive, but your library may have it; if not, it's certainly available through the Inter-Library Loan service.