Short answers, pulled from the story.
The word barque entered English via the French term, which in turn came from the Latin barca by way of Occitan, Catalan, Spanish, or Italian. The Latin may stem from Celtic barc per Thurneysen or Greek baris per Diez, a term for an Egyptian boat.
A barque has three or more masts where the fore mast, mainmast, and any additional masts are rigged square while only the aftmost mast mizzen is rigged fore and aft. This configuration allows the vessel to outperform a schooner downwind and handle better than a full-rigged ship when going to windward.
In Britain, by the mid-19th century, the spelling had taken on the French form of barque although Francis Bacon used the spelling with a q as early as 1592. Shakespeare still used the spelling barke in Sonnet 116 in 1609 before the distinction became common.
The Pommern is the only windjammer in original condition and resides in Mariehamn outside the Åland maritime museum. The wooden whaling barque Charles W. Morgan launched 1841 and taken out of service 1921 is now a museum ship at Mystic Seaport in Connecticut.
Barques referred to using the French word as Egyptian hieroglyphs were first translated by the Frenchman Jean-François Champollion were boats used from Egypt's earliest recorded times to transport the dead pharaoh to become a deity. Cult statues of the deities traveled by boats on water and ritual boats were carried about by priests during festival ceremonies.