The Global Schooner: Origins, Development, Design and Construction, 1695-1845

In this new volume, Karl Heinz Marquardt presents the results of some twenty years of research into schooners and re-evaluates the longstanding perceptions about their origins and history. In doing so he answers the essential questions of genesis and, through his comprehensive exploration of the construction and fitting of a significant range of European, American and Australian schooner vessels, provides the first complete history of the development of the schooner.
In the first part of the book Marquardt puts forward for the very first time a new explanation, based on primary source material, of the origins of the schooner, tracing the term and its practical application back to Peregrine Osborne, the Marquis of Carmarthen in England in 1697. The evolution of the rig is then traced through its various guises as its application spread through Europe and the United States in the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In unprecedented detail the author isolates and examines the main types of schooner to play important roles in the schooner story and each type is illustrated by the explanation of a particular vessel, complete with full specifications, contemporary illustrations or model photographs and a full set of detailed line drawings. The vessels thus covered are the armed schooner and privateer Berbice, and coast-guard vessel Elgen, and gunboat Axel Thorsen and the merchant schooners The Schooner for Port Jackson and Enterprize.
The second part of the volume details the construction and fitting, the masting and rigging (both standing and running) as well as the armament and furniture of both merchant and naval schooners. Each of these sections is fully illustrated with detailed plates drawn by the author based on original research. Four tabulated appendices detail contemporary timber, mast and spar dimensions together with measurements for standing and running rigging, anchors, oars and boats. With a wealth of new research and an exciting array of original plans and drawings, The Global Schooner is set to become the schooner bible for the maritime historian, the modeller and the enthusiast alike.