The snow: the big two-master with a hidden third mast

What is a snow ship?

A snow was a sailing ship with two main masts, a foremast and a mainmast, both carrying big square sails, the kind that hang across the ship from horizontal poles called yards.

What made a snow a snow was a third, much thinner mast standing on deck just behind the mainmast, almost touching it. Sailors called it the trysail mast. It carried a fore-and-aft sail, one that runs along the length of the ship like the mainsail of a sloop. William Falconer’s sea dictionary of 1769 compared this sail to the mizzen, the rear sail of a three-masted ship. Much later, around 1800, sailors began to call it the spanker.

Why did a snow need that little extra mast?

The top edge of the fore-and-aft sail was laced to a spar called a gaff, which had to slide up and down when the sail was raised or lowered. If the gaff had hung on the mainmast itself, it would have tangled with the big square sail there. Giving it its own slim mast kept the two apart.

So a snow could carry both a large square mainsail and a fore-and-aft sail behind it. That was the whole point of the design: more sail on two masts, with each sail easy to handle. Early snows set the trysail without a boom along its bottom edge; booms came in later.

What is the difference between a snow and a brig?

On paper the difference is simple. A brig usually hung its fore-and-aft sail directly on the mainmast, so it gave up the big square mainsail low down. A snow kept that square sail and put the fore-and-aft sail on its separate trysail mast.

In real life the names were slippery. The first Lloyd’s Register of ships, printed in 1764, does not always tell brigs and snows apart, and historians say many people in the 1700s used the words loosely. In the end the little trysail mast was replaced by a wire, the two types merged, and “snow” fell out of use.

A brigantine was different again. In the usual modern definition it has square sails only on the foremast, with a fore-and-aft sail on the mainmast.

Why is it called a snow?

The name has nothing to do with weather. It comes from the Dutch word snauw, or the Low German snau, and the same kind of ship had similar names in Danish, Swedish and German. Dictionary writers say the deeper origin is uncertain. One common explanation is that the word meant a beak or snout, describing the ship’s pointed bow, but that is a guess rather than a proven fact.

The English word is recorded by 1676, when a London newspaper mentioned two small snows with four guns each off Ostend.

How big was a snow?

Sea dictionaries of the later 1700s, from Falconer in 1769 to David Steel’s rigging manuals of 1794 and 1818, all describe the snow as generally the largest two-masted vessel. Falconer also called it among the most convenient ships to sail.

Real snows came in a range of sizes. Records name a 70-ton snow from Lancaster and a 115-ton snow built in Massachusetts in 1754, and snows up to about 150 tons. That made a typical snow much bigger than an everyday trading sloop. A 115-ton snow could be sailed by a crew of nine, but an armed snow of 1763, of 120 tons, carried 48 men and 12 guns.

Who sailed snows around 1715, and how common were they?

Snows had been around since the late 1600s, and navies already used them. In 1710 the famous Danish-Norwegian sea officer Tordenskiold got his first command, a small snow with five guns. A Royal Navy plan of 1721 shows the Swift, a sloop-of-war of six guns rigged as a snow. A “sloop-of-war” was the navy’s name for a small warship, whatever its masts, so a sloop-of-war could be a two-masted snow. In 1721 a Boston judge, Samuel Sewall, noted the arrival of the snow Anna in his diary.

Still, around 1715 the snow was a fairly new type in colonial shipping. The naval historian Howard Chapelle wrote that brigs and snows came into American use gradually during the early 1700s. Most of the snows that turn up in records, such as the merchant snows of Marblehead, Massachusetts, in the 1730s to 1750s, come from later decades. By the middle of the century the snow was a favourite for mid-sized merchant ships crossing the Atlantic, trading to Europe, the Caribbean and Africa.

Were snows used as slave ships?

Yes. In the British slave trade of the mid-1700s, many slave ships were mid-sized snows and brigs rather than great three-masters. A Bristol snow called the Molly sailed in 1758 to Bonny, in today’s Nigeria, where her captain bought enslaved Africans for the Caribbean with British guns, knives and hats and cloth woven in India. The Liverpool snow Aston traded on the River Gambia in 1771. In 1752 the 70-ton Lancaster snow Elizabeth reached Virginia from the Gambia after a voyage full of sickness, with 130 captive people; a Liverpool trade handbook said she could carry 200.

The Aston’s invoice book lists people alongside beeswax and ivory, as if they were goods. Behind each entry was a person taken from home by force. A reference book of 1787 even labelled its picture of a snow “snow, or slave ship”.

Did pirates sail snows?

Sometimes, usually because they seized one. In spring 1726 a sailor named William Fly signed on in Jamaica aboard the Elizabeth, a snow from Bristol bound for West Africa. At sea he and others mutinied, killed the captain and the mate, renamed the ship Fame’s Revenge and took several vessels. Within weeks the men he had forced to join him turned on him. Fly was hanged in Boston in July 1726.