The word schooner likely comes from an old Scots term for skipping stones across water. A schooner has two or more masts, all fore and aft rigged, with the foremast no taller than the mainmast. Instead of pushing like a square sail parachute, its sails work like a sideways wing while the keel resists sliding, so the ship can sail much closer to the wind and zigzag against it. Gaff rigs, staysail rigs, and topsail schooners all appear. Dutch paintings show the layout on Amsterdam yachts in the early 1600s, it reached New Amsterdam by 1627, the British launched the Royal Transport in 1695, and from about 1713 New England and Atlantic Canada refined and named it. Pirates, privateers, blockade runners, and slavers loved it because it could slip away upwind and needed only a small crew working from deck.

Pilot boats, opium clippers, packet boats, and fruit schooners racing oranges and lemons from the Azores to Britain relied on the rig, as did Grand Banks fishermen and flat bottomed British coasters that sat on the beach at low tide. Then the Industrial Revolution supersized it. Tern schooners like the Wawona hauled timber, and yards in Bath, Maine and on Penobscot Bay built 45 five masters and 10 six masters between 1880 and 1920. The six masted Wyoming, the largest wooden ship ever built, bent with every wave, a stress called hogging and sagging, and leaked so badly that steam pumps ran around the clock. Steam donkey engines raised the sails for crews of 11 to 14. The steel Thomas W. Lawson was the only seven masted schooner, 395 feet long with 43,000 square feet of canvas.

• Baltimore Clippers raked their masts backward to make the boats faster and more responsive.
• The yacht America, namesake of the America’s Cup, was a schooner built for racing.
• The three masted Atlantic crossed the ocean in 12 days and 4 hours in the 1905 Kaiser’s Cup, a monohull record that stood nearly a century.
• Bluenose, a working Nova Scotia fishing schooner from 1921 to 1946, beat purpose built racing yachts.
• The polar schooner Fram carried Fridtjof Nansen and Roald Amundsen into the ice.