Barque

• 1. Introduction

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  The barque is a type of sailing vessel defined by one single rule: every mast but the last one is rigged with square sails, and only the aftermost mast carries fore-and-aft sails. That distinction, which might sound like a minor technicality, turned out to shape centuries of ocean trade, exploration, and religious ritual across cultures separated by thousands of years and thousands of miles.

  Why did sailors settle on this particular arrangement? Why not square sails on every mast, or fore-and-aft sails throughout? The answer lies in a compromise so well-considered that it made the barque the workhorse of the golden age of sail in the mid-19th century. And behind the rig itself lies a word with roots stretching from Celtic languages to Greek descriptions of Egyptian boats, passed through Occitan, Catalan, Italian, Spanish, French, and finally into English in at least two distinct spellings.

  The story of the barque runs from the pharaohs of ancient Egypt to a United States Coast Guard training vessel captured as a war prize in the 20th century. It runs from Shakespeare's spelling in 1609 to Maurice Ravel sitting at a piano in 1905. Those threads, across such wildly different worlds, all connect back to a boat.

• 2. The Word Itself

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  Francis Bacon used the spelling "barque" with a "q" as early as 1592, yet Shakespeare still wrote "barke" in Sonnet 116 in 1609, seventeen years later. That gap between two contemporaries illustrates just how unsettled English usage was at the time.

  The word entered English through French, and French had taken it from the Latin barca. Where Latin got it is a matter of scholarly debate. Rudolf Thurneysen traced barca to Celtic barc, while Friedrich Diez argued for the Greek word baris, which referred to an Egyptian boat. The Oxford English Dictionary found the Greek origin improbable. What seems clearest is that the form barc came from Celtic languages, with the English form "bark" possibly arriving via Irish.

  In Latin, Spanish, and Italian, barca referred to a small boat rather than a large ship. French influence in England eventually introduced both "barge" and "barque" into English, though the two words drifted apart in meaning over time. By well before the 19th century, barge had settled into meaning a small vessel of coastal or inland waters, or a fast rowing boat carried by warships and reserved for the commanding officer. Bark, meanwhile, evolved into a term for a sailing vessel with a specific rig.

  By the mid-19th century Britain had settled on the French spelling, barque. The modern convention is precise: barque refers to a ship, while bark refers to a sound or to tree hide. The word "barcarole," the folk song originally sung by Venetian gondoliers, shares the same root, coming from the Italian barca, meaning boat.

• 3. The Bark in Royal Navy Use

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  In the 18th century, the Royal Navy applied the term bark to vessels that resisted easy classification. A ship that did not fit neatly into the Navy's established categories got the label by default.

  When the British admiralty needed a vessel for James Cook's journey of exploration, they purchased a collier and registered her as a bark. The name chosen was Endeavour, specifically to distinguish her from another vessel already in service, a sloop also named Endeavour. The Endeavour that Cook sailed turned out to be a full-rigged ship with a plain bluff bow and a full stern with windows.

  William Falconer captured the informal nature of the term in his Dictionary of the Marine. He defined bark as "a general name given to small ships," while noting that sailors particularly applied it to vessels carrying three masts without a mizzen topsail. Northern mariners trained in the coal trade, he added, used the word for a broad-sterned ship with no ornamental figure on the stem or prow.

  A 16th-century paper document in the Cheshire and Chester Archives and Local Studies Service names Robert Ratclyfe as owner of the bark Sunday, with 10 mariners appointed to serve under the Earl of Sussex, Lord Deputy of Ireland. That single document places a named bark in named hands, serving a named official, at a specific moment in English administrative history.

• 4. The Rig That Ruled the Seas

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  By the end of the 18th century, the barque rig had become a defined standard: three or more masts, fore-and-aft sails on the aftermost mast, and square sails on every other mast. Barques reached passages that nearly matched fully square-rigged ships but could operate with smaller crews.

  The crew advantage was the key. Fewer of the labour-intensive square sails meant a ship could be handled by fewer people, and those people cost less to employ. The rig itself was cheaper to build than a full-rigged ship. Conversely, full-rigged ships were deliberately kept in service as training vessels precisely because their larger crews meant more seamen could be trained at once.

  The barque also occupied a genuine middle position in sailing performance. Downwind, it could outrun a schooner or barkentine. Going to windward, it handled better than a full-rigged ship. A full-rigged ship was the best pure downwind runner, and fore-and-aft vessels were the best upwind, but the barque combined elements of both. Whether any given rig was optimal depended on how much a voyage could be planned around following winds.

  Most ocean-going windjammers ended up as four-masted barques for exactly these reasons. On the Moshulu, the main mast reached 58 metres above the deck. A four-masted barque could be handled by as few as 10 people at minimum, though a typical crew ran to around 30, and nearly half of those could be apprentices.

• 5. Surviving Ships

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  The Pommern stands today as the only windjammer preserved in its original condition, moored in Mariehamn near the Aland maritime museum. Its existence as an intact commercial barque is considered rare.

  The wooden barque Sigyn, built in Gothenburg in 1887, became a museum ship in Turku. The Charles W. Morgan, a wooden whaling barque launched in 1841 and taken out of service in 1921, is preserved at Mystic Seaport in Connecticut. As of the summer of 2014, it had been refitted and was sailing the New England coast again.

  The Star of India carries a different distinction: it is the oldest active sailing vessel in the world. Built in 1863 as a full-rigged ship, it was later converted into a barque in 1901. The Sydney Heritage Fleet restored an iron-hulled three-masted barque, the James Craig, originally built under the name Clan Macleod in 1874, and by the time of its last documented sailing it went to sea fortnightly.

  The United States Coast Guard operates the USCGC Eagle, built in Germany in 1936 and seized as a war prize. The Coast Guard Academy in New London uses Eagle as a training vessel, keeping alive the same logic that kept full-rigged ships in training service two centuries earlier: the more hands a ship requires, the more sailors it can train.

• 6. Barques in Ancient Egypt

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  Egyptian barques appear in drawings, paintings, and reliefs stretching across thousands of years of recorded culture, used from Egypt's earliest documented times. The word barque reached modern scholars through an indirect route: Egyptian hieroglyphs were first translated by the Frenchman Jean-Francois Champollion, and so French terminology shaped how the boats are named in scholarly literature.

  The most important role a barque played in Egyptian belief was carrying the dead pharaoh to become a deity. Great care went into providing a beautiful vessel for this journey, and models of boats were placed in tombs as a result. Many such models have been found, ranging from tiny to large in size. Wealthy and royal Egyptians who were not pharaohs also provided barques for their own final journeys.

  Deities were understood to travel by barque in the sky, which made the Milky Way a great celestial waterway comparable in importance to the Nile on Earth. Cult statues of deities traveled by water in boats during religious life, and priests carried ritual boats in festival ceremonies. Temples included barque shrines where the sacred vessels rested between processions, watched over and maintained by priests. Some temples contained more than one such shrine.

  The form of the vessel depicted in Egyptian images changed remarkably little across thousands of years of the culture's existence. That consistency across so long a span suggests how central the barque was to Egyptian religious thought.

• 7. The Barque of St. Peter

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  The Barque of St. Peter is a phrase used in the Roman Catholic Church to refer to the Church itself. Peter, the first Pope, had been a fisherman before becoming an apostle of Jesus, and that background gave the metaphor its grounding.

  The Pope is commonly described as steering the Barque of St. Peter, a framing that places the leader of the Church in the role of a helmsman on a vessel navigating the world. The image connects the earthly work of the Church to the ancient association between boats and passage through uncertain waters, a metaphor that runs from Egyptian beliefs about the afterlife through to modern Catholic usage.

  Maurice Ravel drew on the barque's resonance in a different direction. In 1905, the French composer wrote Une Barque sur l'ocean, originally for piano. He orchestrated it the following year, in 1906. The piece stands as one more thread in the long cultural life of a word that moved from Celtic languages through Latin, through multiple Mediterranean tongues, and into the artistic imagination of 20th-century France.