A rig for working vessels
Before the ketch became a cruising favourite, it was above all a working vessel. In the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ketches did a great deal of ordinary, unglamorous work: carrying coal, bricks, grain, stone and general goods between small ports. A few were fitted out as warships of a very particular kind. Both roles drew on the same qualities, which were a hull that could carry a lot, a rig that a small crew could handle, and a moderate draught that let the vessel work in shallow water.
The rig itself, with a main mast and a smaller mizzen forward of the rudder post, is not the subject here; this article concerns what ketches were used for.
Coastal cargo carriers
Britain is a good example of why coastal shipping mattered. Much of its bulk trade went by sea, around the coast, because roads were poor and canals and railways came late. Coal from the north-east of England went to London and the south coast. Stone, brick, timber, grain and manufactured goods moved from port to port. Sailing ketches, alongside brigs, sloops and later schooners, carried a large share of these goods. A similar pattern existed in the Netherlands, Germany, Scandinavia and on the coasts of North America.
The ketch was well suited to this kind of work.
- It could carry a useful cargo on a modest crew, which kept running costs down.
- The divided sail plan gave a crew of a few men manageable sails.
- The hull could be built relatively full, with a flat floor, so that it could sit upright on the mud or sand when the tide went out, which mattered in harbours that dried out.
- It could manoeuvre in narrow channels and estuaries.
Ketches also worked alongside the craft of river and estuary trade. The Thames sailing barges, for instance, shared some features of rig and trade, though they were a distinct type. In the smaller ports, a coasting ketch might spend most of its life on a single regular route, picking up and delivering cargoes year after year.
Not every ketch was a trader. Fishing boats, including some of the trawlers that fished the North Sea and the Channel in the nineteenth century, were also ketch-rigged. The rig suited trawling, because the mizzen could be used to keep the vessel steady while a net was towed. These are better known as fishing vessels than as cargo carriers, but they illustrate how widely the rig was adopted.
Decline of the trading ketch
From the middle of the nineteenth century, railways took over a share of the cargoes that coastal sailing vessels had carried. Steam coasters, which could keep to a timetable regardless of the wind, gradually took more. By the twentieth century, the engine had replaced sail in most trades. Some sailing coasters survived by fitting auxiliary motors, and a few traded under sail into the 1930s and later in places where small cargoes and low costs still made sense.
Today, a small number of former trading ketches are preserved. Some have been restored and used as sail-training vessels, charter boats or museum ships. They offer a rare chance to see the size and shape of the working craft that once filled small harbours.
Bomb vessels
In a quite different role, ketches formed the basis of a specialised type of warship, the bomb vessel, sometimes called a bomb ketch. These vessels were built to carry heavy mortars, which fire shells in a high arc, so that they could bombard a fortress or a town from the sea. The rig was often a ketch, with the mainmast and mizzen placed to leave deck space for the mortars, and the hull was strongly built to take the shock of firing.
The French navy is generally credited with developing bomb vessels in the 1680s, and they were used in attacks on coastal towns including Algiers and Genoa. The Royal Navy and other navies followed, and bomb vessels were used during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in various bombardments. One of the best-known occasions was the British attack on Fort McHenry at Baltimore in 1814, in which bomb vessels took part. The shelling of the fort is remembered because it was the inspiration for the American national anthem.
Bomb vessels were not graceful, and they were not primarily fighting ships. They could not carry many ordinary guns, and they needed other ships to protect them. Their use also sometimes proved controversial, because bombarding a town could hurt civilians. Later, as rifled guns and steam power changed warfare, specialised bomb vessels gave way to other kinds of ship. Some vessels of the type were later converted for polar exploration, in part because of their strong construction.
Why one rig served so many ends
The ketch is a reminder that the same sail arrangement can serve very different tasks. For the coastal trader, it provided economy and handiness. For the navy, it provided a platform with deck space and a sturdy hull. The ketch’s later role as a cruising yacht, as a cruising yacht, drew on the same qualities of simplicity and divided sail area, though in the leisure setting the rig was chosen for convenience rather than profit.