Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Mast (sailing)
Summary
The mast of a sailing vessel is a tall spar, or arrangement of spars, erected more or less vertically on the centre-line of a ship or boat. Its purposes include carrying sails, spars, and derricks, giving necessary height to a navigation light, look-out position, signal yard, control position, radio aerial or signal lamp. Large ships have several masts, with the size and configuration depending on the style of ship. Nearly all sailing masts are guyed.
Until the mid-19th century, all vessels' masts were made of wood formed from a single or several pieces of timber which typically consisted of the trunk of a conifer tree. From the 16th century, vessels were often built of a size requiring masts taller and thicker than from single tree trunks. On these larger vessels, to achieve the required height, the masts were built from up to four sections (also called masts). From lowest to highest, these were called: lower, top, topgallant, and royal masts. Giving the lower sections sufficient thickness necessitated building them up from separate pieces of wood. Such a section was known as a made mast, as opposed to sections formed from single pieces of timber, which were known as pole masts.
Those who specialised in making masts were known as mastmakers.
For square-sail carrying ships, masts in their standard names in bow to stern (front to back) order, are:
Sprit topmast: a small mast set on the end of the bowsprit (discontinued after the early 18th century); not usually counted as a mast, however, when identifying a ship as "two-masted" or "three-masted"
Fore-mast: the mast nearest the bow, or the mast forward of the main-mast. As it is the furthest afore, it may be rigged to the bowsprit.
Sections: fore-mast lower, fore topmast, fore topgallant mast
Main-mast: the tallest mast, usually located near the center of the ship
Sections: main-mast lower, main topmast, main topgallant mast, royal mast (if fitted)
Mizzen-mast: the aft-most mast. Typically shorter than the fore-mast.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.