Sailing
Boats that go by wind, and what people did in them. A Polynesian double canoe navigated across the Pacific by star compass and swell with no instrument aboard, a Nova Scotian oyster sloop taken round the world alone between 1895 and 1898, a man who faked his position reports until his trimaran was found empty in the Atlantic, and a South African who won the Golden Globe Race in 2023 after stopping to pull a rival out of the southern Indian Ocean. Also the ordinary parts: masts and mainsails, the yard where a hull is planked, a dinghy going over in a gust, tea clippers, a sail-freight barge, and the Southern Ocean, which decides everything and where almost nobody has ever been able to take a photograph. The oldest thread here is still going: the canoes are sailing now.
A chronological documentary of 1,348 moments spanning 1642–2026 on Loreline.
Curated by Olivier · last updated 2026-09-20
Eras
- Voyaging, Ocean crossings that were not races, and the oldest thread in the subject. Hōkūleʻa, the double-hulled canoe launched in 1975, and the revival of wayfinding by star compass, swell and bird, learned from Mau Piailug of Satawal. Māori waka, the dhows that ran the monsoon between the Gulf and East Africa, junks, and small boats making passages nobody asked for. The largest part of this archive, because it is the best documented.
- Wrecks, When it goes wrong. The Fastnet storm of 1979 that killed fifteen competitors, the 1998 Sydney to Hobart that killed six, the Pamir foundering in a hurricane with most of her cadets aboard, and the Vasa, which sank in Stockholm harbour in 1628 on her maiden voyage and was raised in 1961. Deaths are stated as what they are, with the figures given as ranges where the sources disagree.
- Shipyards, Where boats are made and mended. Frames on the stocks, planks steamed and bent, caulking, rigging and sail lofts, moulds and vacuum bags, and the carbon shops that build a foiler. From plank-on-frame to the preservation yards that keep the survivors alive, including the long restorations people have filmed plank by plank.
- Rigs, What holds the sails up and what the sails are made of. Sloop, cutter, ketch, yawl, schooner and square rig; gaff giving way to Bermuda; masts, booms, bowsprits, shrouds, ratlines and winches. Flax to cotton to Dacron to laminate to carbon, and the crab claw and battened lug rigs that never used any of them.
- Cargo, Sail as work rather than sport. Tea and wool clippers, the windjammers of the Åland fleet, topsail schooners still trading into the 1960s, river barges, and the modern sail-freight revival moving goods under wind again. The trade that sail lost to steam, and the small part of it that has come back.
- Racing, Boats racing boats, from the schooner America round the Isle of Wight in 1851 to foiling monohulls at fifty-odd knots. The America's Cup and the trophy that stayed in New York from 1851 until 1983, the J Class, the offshore classics, Cowes and the Fastnet, and one-design fleets on a start line. Where a claim is contested the caption says who is claiming it.
- Southern Ocean, The place that decides everything. Below forty degrees south there is no land to stop the swell and nobody within reach to help. Cape Horn, the Roaring Forties, ice, knockdowns and rescues at the far end of a radio. Almost no still photograph of these voyages exists, so most of what is here was filmed by the sailors themselves from inside the boat.
- Dinghies, Small boats and the people who learn in them. Optimists, Lasers, Finns, the 470 and the 49er, Moths on foils, club racing, youth fleets and Olympic classes. Capsizing is a normal event here rather than an emergency, and most of the sailors in the rest of this archive started in one of these.
- Circumnavigation, Going all the way round, and the boats that survive to show for it. Slocum in a rebuilt oyster sloop between 1895 and 1898, Chichester stopping once at Sydney, Knox-Johnston taking 312 days without stopping at all and finishing as the only one of nine. Much of what is photographable here is monuments and museum vessels rather than the voyages themselves, which is honest: the boats outlived the passages.
- Tall Ships, Square riggers and sail training. The Tall Ships Races, Operation Sail, the Danmark and the Sir Winston Churchill, cadets aloft on a yard, and the ships kept sailing as schools long after cargo left them. Also the losses, because sail training has its own casualty list.
- - First European drawing of Maori canoes, 1642. Made by Isaack Gilsemans, artist on Abel Tasman's expedition, at what is now Golden Bay in New Zealand, during a violent encounter between the Dutch ships and Māori in December 1642. The key marks the ships Zeehaen and Heemskerck at left and right, and the canoes that came out to them. It is the first European image of Māori.
- - New Zealand war canoe drawn on Cook's first voyage. A drawing titled New Zealand War Canoe from the British Museum's collection of work by A. Buchan, S. Parkinson and J. F. Miller, made in the countries visited on Cook's first voyage of 1768 to 1771. A white dog with dark spots sits at centre right.
- - War canoe challenging Cook's ship. Titled New Zealand War Canoe bidding defiance to the Ship, from the British Museum's collection of drawings made on Cook's first voyage, 1768 to 1771. A man stands with both arms outstretched holding a mere, the short Māori club, and a white dog sits in the middle of the canoe.
- - Tongan tongiaki seen by Tasman in 1643. A Tongan tongiaki with a bonito fishing canoe in the foreground, engraved after a drawing made during Abel Tasman's voyage of 1643 and reproduced by A. Dalrymple in 1770. The tongiaki was a large double canoe, and this is among the earliest European records of one.
- - Canoes of Tolaga and Bream Bays, engraved 1827. A hand-coloured plate by Edmond François Paris and Laurent showing canoes of Tolaga and Bream Bays in New Zealand, with plan and profile views, a triangular sail, a close study of the sail, and carvings from prows and sterns. It was published in the atlas to Dumont d'Urville's voyage of the corvette Astrolabe, 1826 to 1829.
- - Early depiction of a Maori canoe from Tasman's journal. An engraving after one of the earliest European records of a Māori canoe, drawn on Abel Tasman's 1642 voyage. Tasman never landed in New Zealand and the drawings made from his ships are all that the expedition brought back of the vessels it met.
- - Pierre Clément Marie Caussé - Bâteaux dans la tempête. Early 19th-century marine painting by Pierre Clément Marie Caussé depicting shipwrecks in a storm. Fifteen competitors died in that race and 21 people in total, the other six being crew of Bucks Fizz and Tempean rather than rescuers. Eighty six boats finished, 194 retired, 24 were abandoned and five were lost or believed sunk.
- - 25 ft Yawl RMG J0802. Signed William Symonds [Surveyor of the Navy, 1832-1848]. lines & profile. A yawl carries a small mizzen abaft the rudder post, where a ketch's mizzen stands forward of it. The mizzen on a yawl is a balancing sail rather than a driving one.
- - Passengers being rescued from the burning 'Ocean Monarch'.. Photographed 1848. Composite construction from 1863 put iron frames under wooden planking so a hull could be copper sheathed without galvanic corrosion between the two metals. That is the method by which Cutty Sark was built in 1869.
- - The 'Streatham' and the opium clipper 'Red Rover' title. Photographed 1850. Composite construction, iron frames with wooden planking that allowed copper sheathing without galvanic corrosion, arrived in 1863, and by 1871 the tea clippers faced serious steam competition. Baltimore clippers came out of Chesapeake Bay before the Revolution and reached their zenith between 1795 and 1815, rarely exceeding 200 tons.
- - Ariel with Josephine behind. the Ariel, a British Barkentine used for coastal trade, which was built in 1849 and was part of the Freeman Line, a well known English shipping company; and the Josephine, a British Brigantine, used for trans-oceanic voyages. Copper sheathing keeps worm and weed off a wooden bottom, and it is the reason composite construction was invented. A hull comes out of the water to be surveyed, recaulked, sheathed and painted.
- - California Clipper 500. Photographed alongside in port, 1850. Composite construction, iron frames with wooden planking that allowed copper sheathing without galvanic corrosion, arrived in 1863, and by 1871 the tea clippers faced serious steam competition. Baltimore clippers came out of Chesapeake Bay before the Revolution and reached their zenith between 1795 and 1815, rarely exceeding 200 tons.
- - California Clipper 500 (edited). Photographed alongside in port, 1850. A clipper is a mid nineteenth century merchant sailing vessel designed for speed: narrow, limited in cargo and carrying very large sail area. The boom ran from 1843 and was ended by the Panama Railroad in 1855 and the Suez Canal in 1869.
- - Launch of the Yacht America. Print, wood engraving of the launch of the Yacht America from Brown's shipyard, New York City. ca 1851. A hull goes down the slipway once. Cutty Sark was launched on 22 November 1869 after Scott & Linton collapsed financially and William Denny and Brothers finished her; Vasa was launched in 1628 and sailed 1,300 metres.
- - Flying Cloud, clipper ship by Donald McKay, 1851 - Addison Gallery of American Art - Phil. Ship model in the Addison Gallery of American Art - Phillips Academy Andover - Andover, Massachusetts, USA. Eleanor Creesy navigated Flying Cloud on both record runs and her husband Josiah Perkins Creesy was the captain. The 89 day 8 hour New York to San Francisco record stood until 1989.
- - Schooner America Off New York by James E. Buttersworth. Photographed under sail, 1852. The schooner America was launched from William H. Brown's New York yard on 3 May 1851 for a syndicate led by Commodore John Cox Stevens, and designed by George Steers along the lines of the pilot boat Mary Taylor. On 22 August 1851 she raced fifteen Royal Yacht Squadron yachts round the Isle of Wight and won the RYS £100 Cup by eighteen minutes over a 53 mile course.
- - Deal boat going out to a wreck. Small two-masted boat going out through high breaker to a ship lying on its side in the waves. Herzogin Cecilie went ashore in the English Channel off Devon in 1936 and was wrecked there. Pride of Baltimore capsized in a microburst squall north of Puerto Rico on 14 May 1986 and four people died.
- - 14085-2 15 Cape Horn and Valparaiso. Photographed 1853. Pamir was the last commercial sailing ship to round it with a paying cargo, on 11 July 1949.
- - Clipper ship card Bunker Hill. Davis, Commander, is now receiving the last of her cargo at Pier 10 East River. The A 1 Out-and-Out Clipper Ship Bunker Hill DATE:ca. 1853 [ 1 ] H: 4 in, W: 6 1/2 in. Clippers dominated the New York to San Francisco run from 1848 with the California Gold Rush.
- - David Crockett (1853 clipper ship) sailing card. Sailing card for the clipper ship David Crockett. Composite construction, iron frames with wooden planking that allowed copper sheathing without galvanic corrosion, arrived in 1863, and by 1871 the tea clippers faced serious steam competition. Baltimore clippers came out of Chesapeake Bay before the Revolution and reached their zenith between 1795 and 1815, rarely exceeding 200 tons.
- - The Merchant Brig Rimac In Two Positions Off Cape Horn, With Another Of Brocklebank's Bri. Photographed under sail, 1854. Pamir was the last commercial sailing ship to round it with a paying cargo, on 11 July 1949.
- - Lightning (clipper, 1854). Clipper Ship „Lightning“ & Pilot vessel. Two sailing ships in rough seas. Composite construction from 1863 put iron frames under wooden planking so a hull could be copper sheathed without galvanic corrosion between the two metals. That is the method by which Cutty Sark was built in 1869.
- - A Clipper ship in a hurricane. Photographed 1856. Composite construction, iron frames with wooden planking that allowed copper sheathing without galvanic corrosion, arrived in 1863, and by 1871 the tea clippers faced serious steam competition. Baltimore clippers came out of Chesapeake Bay before the Revolution and reached their zenith between 1795 and 1815, rarely exceeding 200 tons.
- - Yacht America by John Hansen-IMG 5878. Photographed as preserved, 1857. Copper sheathing keeps worm and weed off a wooden bottom, and it is the reason composite construction was invented. A hull comes out of the water to be surveyed, recaulked, sheathed and painted.
- - Nowrojee Jamsetjee Wadia, Parsi master shipbuilder RAS 01.007. Photographed as preserved, 1857. A hull is built on land and enters the water once, and it is the one moment in a ship life that a whole town turns out for. Vasa sailed about 1,300 metres from her launch before a gust heeled her far enough to force open gunports under water.
- - Maori canoe prow from around 1860. A tauihu carved in wood and haliotis shell in New Zealand around 1860, now in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The prow board is fitted to the front of a waka taua and its spirals are cut right through the timber.
- - Carved detail of a Maori canoe prow. A second view of the same tauihu, made in Aotearoa around 1860 in wood and haliotis shell and held by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The shell inlay marks the eyes of the carved figures.
- - Jamsetjee Bomanjee Wadia (1756-1821) and Nourojee Jamsetjee Wadia (1774-1860), Shipbuilde. Photographed as preserved, 1860. A hull goes down the slipway once. Cutty Sark was launched on 22 November 1869 after Scott & Linton collapsed financially and William Denny and Brothers finished her; Vasa was launched in 1628 and sailed 1,300 metres.
- - Maori canoe prow, wood and haliotis shell. A third view of the circa 1860 tauihu in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art collection. Prow boards were removed and stored ashore when a canoe was not in use, which is why so many survive without their hulls.
- - Flying Cloud. This sketch shows the American clipper, Flying Cloud, flying the American flag at the rear. The Flying Cloud made several trips to Brisbane under the Black Ball Line, transporting immigrants. Flying Cloud was built in 1851 by Donald McKay and set the fastest New York to San Francisco passage within weeks of launching, then broke her own record at 89 days and 8 hours, a mark unbroken until 1989. Eleanor Creesy navigated on both record runs; her husband Josiah Perkins Creesy was the captain.
- - The brig Vision , Capt. Donovan, on her voyage from New York to London, 1864. Photographed in detail on deck, 1864. A brig carries square sails on both of its two masts. It handles well but needs a large crew for its size, which is why the type largely disappeared from commercial work before the photographic era ended.
- - The 'Ariel' & 'Taeping' Racing up the English Channel on 5 September during the Great Tea. Photographed under sail, 1866. The Great Tea Race of 1866 ended in joint victory over roughly 15,800 nautical miles in 99 days, an average of just over 6.6 knots. The names of the joint winning ships are not established in the sources used here.
- - Portait of Full-Rigged Ship ‚BENGAL‘. The clipper ship Bengal was built in Liverpool in 1868. At 1838 gross tons, she was a fast and able vessel and is known to have sailed under several different house flags over the years. Her background includes service in both the tea trade and the lucrative smuggling of opium. The clipper boom ran from 1843 and was ended by the Panama Railroad in 1855 and the Suez Canal in 1869.
- - Great international yacht race, August 8, 1870- from the club house, Staten Island, aroun. Photographed 1870. Boats racing boats is where the sport formalised, in seventeenth century Netherlands and then in England from a 1661 wager between two royal vessels from Greenwich to Gravesend and back, one at times steered by Charles II.
- - The Sail/Steam Yacht Emily of the New York Yacht Club Observing a Stakes Race between the. Photographed under sail, 1870. The Water Club of Cork of 1720 is the earliest known yacht club, followed by the Royal Yacht Squadron in 1815 and the New York Yacht Club in 1844. Yacht comes from the Dutch jacht, a swift light vessel of war, commerce or pleasure.
- - New York Yacht Club Race by James Edward Buttersworth, c. 1871, oil on canvas - New Brita. Photographed as preserved, 1871. The Water Club of Cork of 1720 is the earliest known yacht club, followed by the Royal Yacht Squadron in 1815 and the New York Yacht Club in 1844. Yacht comes from the Dutch jacht, a swift light vessel of war, commerce or pleasure.
- - The tea clipper Thermopylae. 1872, photographed as preserved. Cutty Sark and Thermopylae both left Shanghai on 18 June 1872. Cutty Sark built a 400 nautical mile lead and then lost her rudder in a gale near the Sunda Strait; carpenter Henry Henderson built a replacement over six days.
- - Thermopylae (bark). The bark „Thermopylae“ in full sail. 'the log of the cutty Sark' by Basil Lubbock includes this image and is captioned 'under canadian ensign'. Thermopylae arrived on 18 October and Cutty Sark a week later, on a 122 day passage. She lost the race having been the faster ship.
- - Framed Print Of Clipper Thermopylae. artwork in Aberdeen Archives, Gallery & Museums Collection. Cutty Sark and Thermopylae both left Shanghai on 18 June 1872. Cutty Sark built a 400 nautical mile lead and then lost her rudder in a gale near the Sunda Strait; carpenter Henry Henderson built a replacement over six days.
- - Thermopylae (ship, 1868). Photographed under sail, 1872. Thermopylae arrived on 18 October and Cutty Sark a week later, on a 122 day passage. She lost the race having been the faster ship.
- - Thermopylae. The clipper „Thermopylae“ in a painting. Cutty Sark and Thermopylae both left Shanghai on 18 June 1872. Cutty Sark built a 400 nautical mile lead and then lost her rudder in a gale near the Sunda Strait; carpenter Henry Henderson built a replacement over six days.
- - Schooner Idler with Schooner Dauntless Leading, by James Edward Buttersworth, c. 1875, oi. Exhibit in the Peabody Essex Museum - Salem, Massachusetts, USA. Composite construction from 1863 put iron frames under wooden planking so a hull could be copper sheathed without galvanic corrosion between the two metals. That is the method by which Cutty Sark was built in 1869.
- - Sobraon 1875 SLNSW FL607736. Clipper ship Sobraon, Gravesend, England, ca. 1875, by F. C. Gould, mounted albumen print, State Library of New South Wales, MLMSS 7715/Box 1X/Item 2. Clippers dominated the New York to San Francisco run from 1848 with the California Gold Rush.
- - Off Cape Horn. Photographed 1877. Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America is the gate of the clipper route and the mark the Vendée Globe keeps to port. Below forty degrees south there is no land to stop the swell, which is what makes the passage what it is.
- - Bermuda rigged sloop at Convict Bay ca 1879. A Bermuda rigged sloop at Convict Bay, St. George's, Bermuda, circa 1879. The Bermuda rig originated in Bermuda in the seventeenth century, developing from fore and aft boats built by a Dutch-born Bermudian whose people had adapted Moorish lateen sails, stepping yard arms in thwarts which became raked masts. The English called the result leg-of-mutton sails.
- - An Incident during the Search for H.M.S. Atalanta. Photographed alongside in port, 1880. The 1979 Fastnet storm brought 60 knots with little or no advance warning and fifty foot waves running in conflicting directions, with a pressure low of 979 hPa. The UK Meteorological Office recorded a maximum of Force 10 while competitors estimated Force 11, and both figures belong in the account.
- - Old store Race St. Wharf, Phila. - William H. Rau, 1324 Chestnut St., Phila.. Photographed 1880. Sail lofts cut and seam cloth on a flat floor large enough to lay out a whole sail. The material changed from flax to cotton in the nineteenth century, to Dacron polyester, then to Kevlar from 1971 and Mylar laminates in the 1970s, but the loft floor did not.
- - Maori poling a canoe through rapids, about 1880. An oil painting by John Philemon Backhouse, who lived from 1845 to 1908, showing a man poling his small canoe past a fern-covered cliff on the Waipa River. Backhouse wrote on the facing page about the difficulty of getting canoes upstream.
- - Yacht Chiquita in a Race off Boston Light, by James Edward Buttersworth, c. 1880, oil on. Exhibit in the Peabody Essex Museum - Salem, Massachusetts, USA. Copper sheathing keeps worm and weed off a wooden bottom, and it is the reason composite construction was invented. A hull comes out of the water to be surveyed, recaulked, sheathed and painted.
- - Deportatie van Napoleon naar Sint-Helena, 1815, RP-T-00-3852. Identificatie Titel(s): Deportatie van Napoleon naar Sint-Helena, 1815 De Lage Overtogt (titel op object) Objecttype: tekening. Fore and aft rigs run sloop, cutter, ketch, yawl and schooner; square and hybrid rigs run brig, brigantine, barque, barquentine and full rigged ship. The single distinction most often got wrong is ketch against yawl, decided by whether the mizzen stands forward of or abaft the rudder post.
…and 1,298 more moments.
Full text archive: /loreline-text/sailing.md
