old sailing ships - navigation and steering?

Read Moby Dick

Ahab is the captain. Then there are three mates (1st, 2nd, 3rd) and four harpooners to head each of the four small boats. There is a "shipkeeper" who stays onboard while everyone else is in the whaleboats, and a "steward" who, I think, was responsible for provisioning the ship. Everyone else is just "sailor", usually distinguished by national origin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Moby-Dick_characters

Though a ship usually had a cook, too, according to popular thinking.

Hi Layla! I'm doing exactly this kind of research for the novel I'm currently revising, and I've found a few helpful resources I can share. This site has a number of simple, informative articles about historical sailing ships and how they were operated. (I've linked to one of the articles, but you can click around and explore the others. It's sometimes pirate-focused, but there's some good general info too.)

Another resource I've found helpful, as far as what sailing life actually looked like, is the book Sailors: English Merchant Seamen 1650-1775 by Peter Earle.

Naval, fishing, or merchant?

What country?

What year?

What size?

Mediterranean or Atlantic?

All of those issues are important. Just one example would be that the Spanish consistently used two to three times the crew of English merchant ships.

Best of luck,

Jim Clark-Dawe

It's time to drop back to first principles.

Go to your local library. Go to the children's room. Find any books they have on old-time sailing ships and 17th/18th/19th century navigation. Read them (they're often well illustrated!) Check the bibliography of each; copy down the titles. (Take notes, including the title, author, page number, and accession number of each book you take information from. You'll need this again.)

Once you have a grounding in what things looked like and what they were called, go to the adult section of the library. Find the section on historical ships and sailing (Dewey Decimal 387.204). Read all the books they have. Be sure to read the footnotes. Again, copy out the bibliographies. Take notes as before.

Now you're ready to start doing some serious research. Find books that you think you need to read (you'll have seen them mentioned, in the bibliographies if nowhere else). Interlibrary loan is your friend. Read them. Take notes. (By this time you may only need to read selected chapters.)

Okay! At the point where if you were on Jeopardy! and the final category was "old sailing ships - navigation and steering" you'd bet everything -- now you can plan your trip to one of the many historical museums that deal with the subject. Mystic Seaport, the Newport News Mariner's Museum, etc.

Go there, take notes! (Have fun, too.) Remember, all this is tax deductible!

When every new source you find quotes sources you've already read, you may be ready to write your book.

Remember: sailing ship people, like horse people and gun people are absolute sticklers for authenticity. You can't fake being an expert; you have to actually be one.

Again, have fun!

Oh, and if you want the details of how to find your position at sea, using every tech level from ancient times (navigation by birds; navigation by clouds) to the present, get a copy of The New American Practical Navigator by Nathaniel Bowditch, LL.D. (H.O. Pub 9). You will learn what the captain, quartermaster, sailing master, or other navigating types knew from any period of history you care to name.

Don't forget the pilot, if you're sailing in waters you don't know but someone else has charted...

Jeff

And never, ever run afoul of the ship's bosun . . . woe unto the inattentive, inept, or lazy crewman--a seaman's life could not be made more miserable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boatswain

A major historical point is that the mystery of determining longitude at sea wasn't solved until about 1770, when the first reliable sea-clock was invented. That happened in England, and permitted the British navy to become the pre-eminent naval force in the world for quite a while. I'm not sure when other maritime nations acquired similar technology. See Dava Sobel's excellent book Longitude, or watch the documentary Lost at Sea, which is base on the book.

caw

There are differences in terminology between merchant marine and royal navy.

Also, if you go back far enough, with warships, the Captain was in charge of the fighting force and the ships master did the sailing. Still there to some extent by Napoleonic period with there being a ship's sailing master, as well of course as having a master gunner - technical experts in their areas.
If you are talking Royal Navy, then certainly by the Napoleonic period, the ship's officers had to pass tough exams regarding their competence in sailing and fighting a ship. Until they passed the exams, there was no promotion. Unlike the army at that period, when commissions could be bought and there was no formal test of competence.

Another really good source of information would be Captain Bligh's own account, The Mutiny on Board the H.M.S. Bounty, quite readable and full of detail. The trilogy of novels written by Nordhoff and Hall in the 1920s about this famous historical event are also very good, and full of useful detail (Mutiny on the Bounty, Men Against the Sea, Pitcairn's Island. And there are a couple of American non-fiction first-hand accounts of sailing in the mid-19th century, Two Years before the Mast, by Richard Henry Dana, and The Cruise of the Cachalot, by Frank Bullen, the latter being a much clearer account of the work on a whaling vessel than is Melville's more whaley Moby Dick.

caw

caw

Just as an addendum: You'll need to get your jargon right for the period and milieu. People who fancy maritime history and like reading about the Age of Sail tend to be very knowledgeable and nitpicky about such details. Know what such things as 'dead reckoning' and 'knots' (as a unit of velocity) are all about. And sextants and binnacles and jibs, etc. etc. etc.

caw