Luff & Bluff: The Sneaky, Lying Bastard’s Guide To Tricky Sailing and Sailing Trickery
‘We are sailing under false colours,’ whispered
Stephen. ‘Is not that very heinous?’ ‘Eh?’ ‘Wicked, morally indefensible?’ ‘Bless you, sir, we always do that at sea. But
we’ll show our own at the last minute, you may be sure, before ever we fire a
gun. That’s justice. Look at him, now — he’s throwing out a Danish waft, and as
like as not he’s no more a Dane than my grandmam.’
– Master & Commander, by Patrick O’Brian
This is a
subject near and dear to my heart. We are now also getting into deeper waters, technically-speaking. If I’ve failed to explain anything, my ask box is always open.
Ready? OK! Anchors aweigh!
I’ve encountered quite a few systems that
propose various naval combat rules. But very few seem to take into account the spectacular trickery and subterfuge that is the bread and butter of your average Age of
Sail engagement. Big battles between multiple ships don’t have much room for deception, but the most common interactions at sea would be between single ships. In these situations, deception is everything.
Why are you pretending?
Here are just a few potential reasons:
Enemy is stronger than you, and you want to appear to be a harmless neutral or allied ship of little or no interest to them, like a merchantman or whaler, so you can sail away and flee with minimal interaction.
Enemy is stronger than you or of equal strength, and you want to appear to be a harmless neutral or allied ship of little or no interest to them in order to lure them closer so you can suddenly unleash your broadside on them, ideally taking out their masts and doing a lot of damage in the first round.
Enemy is stronger than you or of equal strength, but you have friends or allies nearby. Pretending to flee in alarm (especially if you look wounded and vulnerable – easy pickings) will draw them after you, and then you and your ally can take them on together.
Enemy is stronger or same strength as you, but you know of a shoal or hidden reef that you could trick them into sailing over. Then you can capture them at your leisure.
Enemy is same strength as you, and might only be half-heartedly interested in fighting you while you very much want to fight them. Lure them into a chase by looking like easy prey, but try to use your long guns to take out their spars and masts.
There’s also the ultimate reason. The most important tactical feature in all of Age of Sail/wooden sailing ship combat:
🌟The weather gage.🌟
Now, it’s not a real gage. Having the weather gage describes being upwind of your opponent. Why is this important? Imma quote Wikipedia on this one:
The weather gage (sometimes spelled weather gauge) is the advantageous position of a fighting sailing vessel relative to another. … A ship at sea is said to possess the weather gage if it is in any position upwind of the other vessel. Close proximity with the land, tidal and stream effects, and wind variability due to geography (hills, cliffs, etc.) may also come into play.
An upwind vessel is able to manoeuvre at will toward any downwind point, since in doing so the relative wind moves aft. A vessel downwind of another, however, in attempting to attack upwind, is constrained to trim sail as the relative wind moves forward and cannot point too far into the wind for fear of being headed (Captain’s Note: i.e. losing the ability to steer because your bow/nose is pointing straight into the wind).
In sailing warfare, when beating to windward (CN: the direction the wind is coming from), the vessel experiences heeling under the sideward pressure of the wind. This restricts gunnery, as cannon on the windward side are now elevated, while the leeward (CN: the direction the wind is going to) gun ports aim into the sea, or in heavy weather may be awash. A ship with the weather gage, turning downwind to attack, may alter course at will in order to bring starboard and port guns to appropriate elevations. Ships seeking to evade capture or attack, however, have the advantage being downwind if they are faster vessels or are close to friendly land.
So the most important tactical advantage you can get is being upwind of your enemy. So no matter how strong you are, you always want the weather gage.
Sea battles are actually pretty slow: opposing ships, more or less willing to fight, manoeuvring over hours (and even days!) to try to get within gunshot of each other, and to shoot the other ship’s masts well before they’re close enough for broadsides. But these are moments of incredible suspense, as each captain pitches their skill in their profession against the other.
There’s more in “Profession: Sailor” than just making ur bote go fast. Sure, knowing how to get every bit of speed out of your ship is crucial, but if you’re not giving an experienced tall ship captain some hefty ranks in Bluff and some kind of equally burly Spot/Perception/Sense (Nautical) Motive, YOU ARE MISSING OUT ON ALL THE FUN.
As mentioned in the opening quote, flying under false colours was standard ops, and perfectly legal as long as you raised your own colours before you actually fired.
Any Lawful Good captain
would be 100% comfortable doing everything in their power to disguise
themselves as an enemy-aligned ship until the very last moment. You only crossed the line if you fired on the other person while under those false colours, or faked requests for aid. An Evil captain
might even go so far as to send up signals of distress and requests for aid and, when the other ship
is close enough, or even sending a boat over with food, water, and a healer, the Evil captain could spring their trap and blow the other ship to smithereens.
Nota Bene: Firing on an enemy vessel while you are flying false colours usually immediately makes you a pirate, legally speaking. We Are Captain officially condemns such behaviour, obviously @we-are-pirate.
What you should take away from this is that the vast majority of nautical combat involved cunning bulllshit designed
to fool your opponent. Here’s an example:
Say you know your enemy is a hungry privateer and you are a naval captain.
Now imagine a hypothetical merchantman. Merchantmen are less well-armed than naval ships. But a merchantmen trying to scare off enemies might hang a piece of painted canvas along their sides. This canvas
would be painted to look like an impressive array of gunports – gunports that a
navy/privateer/pirate ship would possess, but a merchant
couldn’t (due to weight, space, lack of crew, and the fact that businesspeople
have always been cheapskates). The enemy privateer might look at this disguised merchantman, assume they were a fighting ship, and decide not to engage. But, if said
privateer has a captain aboard with superior ranks in Profession: Sailor + Spot,
they might notice the slovenly decks and slow manoeuvring typical of a
merchantman, and see through the subterfuge.
However, if you are very, very cunning naval captain, you might hang a strip of canvas sloppily painted with gunports over your own, very real gunports, to
make yourself look like a merchantman trying to disguise themselves as a
naval ship. This will lure your enemy in close, and then you can catch them unawares. And it only gets wilder if you have magical illusions and deceptions added into the bargain.
You see how much
crazy shit you can get up to here?
Other fun games to play, to fuck with the other person:
Real Basic:
Fly the flag of another country. Bog-standard false colours.
If they send up secret signals because you’re
pretending to be on their side, answer with a lot of gibberish flags, miscellaneous
signal guns, and buy even more time by pretending that the response hoist got jammed as you are trying to haul it up.
If you’re alone, but want to seem like you have
reinforcements over the horizon where the other guy can’t see them, raise a lot
of random signals and fire signal guns as soon as you see your enemy. It might just scare them off, if they think you’re not alone.
Pretend to be more naval and martial by having super-clean
decks, with ropes coiled neatly down, neat rigging, and see if you can’t find
some pseudo-uniform stuff. Carry out manoeuvres briskly. You might scare off an enemy.
Pretend to be more like a merchantman/whaler/pirate by
being generally dirty and grimy, with random barrels and rope sitting about on
deck, with the ends of rigging rope put away any which way, and everyone dressed kinda scruffy. Carry out manoeuvres slowly, and have your sailors run around in a merry show of chaos. If you have guns, fire them off at random with no coordination.
Paint/prestidigitate yourself to be a different colour, etc. so you don’t match your nautical “wanted” poster.
Naval/privateer/pirate ships had more numerous crews, because
their M.O. is to both fight and sail at the same time. So assume the appearance
of being a more dangerous foe by having literally everyone on your ship on
deck.
^Want to do the reverse? Keep the majority of your people under hatches.
Medium Level:
Pretend to be fleeing your opponent by covertly spilling wind from
your sail, or putting a dragsail over the side underwater on the side of your
ship opposite the enemy (so they can’t see it). This will make you go slower,
but make you seem like you’re fleeing at top speed, even as you lure your
opponent closer. Combine this with looking like a merchantman to lure in hungry
naval ships, privateers, or pirates.
Look like you’re throwing stores over the side in a desperate
attempt to sail faster. Don’t throw your real food, just get rid of whatever
empty barrels you have. If you want to look like you’re dumping your fresh
water, you can just let seawater into the bilge and then have your sailors pump
it out again. All the appearance of desperate haste, with no loss of stores.
Pretend that your mast is
wounded by attaching supports to it. (These supports would be used if your mast
had a crack in it or some other kind of damage.) That way, you can “flee” more
slowly, because it looks like you’re trying to favour your wounded mast.
More advanced:
A sailor would be keenly aware of the difference between
rigs ^. Forget strips of canvas and painting: you could hang a big cable vertically
off your mainstay, put some sails on it, and make it look like you had an extra
mast. Remember all the different rigs I talked about last time? If you look like you have a new rig, to the nautical eye, you’d suddenly look like an
entirely different kind of ship! And even changing your rig very slightly might
still deceive your opponent.
Your enemy would be shooting at your masts in a chase, since
they want to stop you running away, not sink their loot! But if you want to
pretend that they’re doing better than they really are, you can fake being damaged:
sailors could let various yards and upper masts of your ship go crashing down
on deck on purpose, and it would make it seem like you’re wounded.
Same as above, but spread more
sails, like your top masts or royals. If you were really trying to escape, you’d
spread all the canvas you had. By straining the masts by spreading more sail in
a stronger wind than the mast could really support, the masts might break and
the whole yard + sail might blow away. But if you’re very cunning, you could
spread these sails, and then deliberately cut them loose to make it look as
though they’d carried away.
There are, frankly, a million tricky things you can
try to make a hungry enemy believe you’re wounded, panicking, or otherwise
trying to get away, while in fact you’re getting them exactly where you want them. Likewise, you should be on the lookout for people who are out there to hoodwink you!
And, just off the top of my head, here are some misc. tricks of the trade:
If you want to be able to sneak up on your enemy, keep your topsails furled in the morning, and be to the westward of where you think your enemy is cruising. As the sun lights up the east, you’ll have a better chance of spotting them. Then you can begin to make your manoeuvres to try to get the weather gage.
If you’re being chased by someone you don’t want to fight, be on the lookout for storms or fog you can try to lose them in.
If you’re fleeing two enemies, and you’re the smaller ship, you can do a sudden 180 and sail back between them. If you fire your broadsides, there’s always the chance that they might not fire at you because they won’t be able to see you clearly, and they wouldn’t want to accidentally fire at their buddy.
Flee your enemy until night-time, then pull the ol’ “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World” and then rig up a raft with sails and put lanterns on it so it looks like your own stern lanterns. Flee in the opposite direction from the way the raft is going.
Just before a ship begins to turn, a person with high ranks in Spot/Perception would be able to notice the sudden change in the other ship’s wake as the rudder moves. If you spot this in time, you can react accordingly.
I’m sure I’ll think of more tricky stuff later, but, for now, this is probably the single greatest example of tricky sailing paying off in naval history:
^ Just trick after trick. It’s amazing. Like, I’m going to stop here because nothing I could write or post will ever be cooler than that. Know that everyone with a ship is based off of Lord Cochrane when he pulls stunts like this: Jack Aubrey, Horatio Hornblower, Honor Harrington, and Captain Kirk (who was based off of Horatio Hornblower who was based off of Cochrane and Pellew).
There are a
lot of reasons to put your party on a ship: adventure, exploration, raiding, saucy pirates, running into cyclopean ruins in which elder gods sleep, and just plain getting from Point A to B. Plus, the only thing stupider/more amazing than mixing boating and alcohol is mixing PCs, boating, and alcohol.
Obviously there are lots of books like Stormwrackthat can give you all the mechanics you’d need, but I thought I’d outline the kinds of fundamentals that give you access to all the most exciting parts of shipboard adventuring. I want you guys to be able to have thrilling sea chases, cunning deceptions, perilous storms, sneaky attacks, and some of the goddam sexiest ships afloat. I haven’t really found a book that gives good examples of this stuff, so here I go!
(Nota Bene: the basic rule of thumb for the difference between a “boat” and a “ship” is that you can put a boat onto a ship, but not the other way around.)
There are two
very important things to know about ships:
1. They
make leeway. When the wind blows on a ship, it will push the ship sideways in
the direction the wind is going. The deeper and sharper the bottom of your ship,
the less leeway it will make. The shallower and smaller the bottom of your ship
– or, rather, the less draught (UK/CA)/ draft (US) she has, the more leeway she’ll
make.
2. They
can’t go directly into the wind.
If you try sail a ship directly into the wind, she’ll eventually just stop and begin to drift backwards. This is called being “in irons”. If a sailing ship is trying to go in the direction
that the wind is blowing from, she has to zig-zag back and forth across the wind. Depending on the type of
sails she has, the ship makes broader or more acute-angled zig-zags.
The bigger the zig-zag, the less actual progress the ship is making towards her
goal (especially with leeway in operation!).
Got it?
Bitchin’.
Holding fast to your sparkly, new-found knowledge, prepare for the next thing you need to know:
There are two(-ish) types of sails.
1. Fore-and-aft
sails: These are what you usually see on the average sailboat these days. They
run from front to back of a ship, and their design lets a ship point closer
towards the wind (i.e. where the wind is blowing from). These sails are attached to supporting poles called “booms”. If you pull in your
fore-and-aft sails close to the centre line of your ship, it’s called sailing “close-hauled”
or “full and by the wind”.
2. Square
sails: Think Pirates of the Caribbean and Treasure Island. These sails sit
roughly athwartships a.k.a. at right angles to the centre line of the ship. These sails are attached to horizontal poles known as “yards”. They
are extremely effective at sailing generally downwind-ish, which is known as “sailing
large”.
(3. Jibs: technically run fore-and-aft, but they don’t go on masts or booms, but rather the “stays”, which are ropes that hold masts in place so they don’t fall out. )
Fun fact: if a ship is good with both styles, you’d say that “she sails well, both by and large”. And that, shipmates, is where the expression “by and large” came from. 🌟NOW YOU KNOW.
With most tall ships (by which I mean wooden ships from the Age of Sail), you get a mix of these sails:
Also: note that, when we’re being technical, a ship in the general sense of “it r a big boat” may not be “ship-rigged. Because nautical jargon is like, 90% things being confusing.
Now, let’s boil all this down to some broad generalisations:
Big draught/draft/fat-bottomed girls ≈ makes less leeway, but can’t go in shallows.
Smaller draught/draft ≈ makes more leeway, but can zoom into rivers and shallow waters.
Fore-and-aft sails
≈ sails better going upwind.
Square sails ≈
sails better going downwind.
Big ship
≈ can carry more/bigger guns, which can shoot farther, but goes slower. Hard to row in a calm, if at all.
Little ship ≈
zippy like a bunny on crack, but smaller/fewer guns. Plus, being lower to the water, in heavy seas (storms, big swell/waves), she may not be able to open her gunports without getting her guns soaked so they can’t fire. Easier to row in a calm.
You can add magic sails that go directly into the wind. You can shape wood to change draught/draft. You can have guns that fire underwater, or can get wet. You can give a ship harpoon guns to pull the other guy in. You can make your ship fireproof. You can do anything you want, because magic.
But before you even begin to indulge in fantasy ship fantasies, you need the ship you’re going to modify.
Because you’re not just limited to the basic, Golden Age of Piracy galleon:
You can get a galleass, and row your way to ramming the other ship when they’re becalmed:
You can have a party-sized crew, and cross oceans in a Polynesian proa (feat. outrigger):
Forget putting your junk in the trunk, put your trunk in a junk (Zheng He’s junk!):
And much, much more!
_________________________
But let’s talk pretty simple shopping, and what you can do with it:
Say you
have Big Ship, which is a larger, heavy draughted/drafted mostly square-rigged
ship. Playing the role of Big Ship today is a smallish frigate:
Big Ship is chasing Little Ship, a sharp-hulled but shallow-draughted/drafted, mostly
fore-and-aft ship. Meet the sexy, sexy xebec[pronounced: /ˈziːbɛk/ or /zᵻˈbɛk/], feat. lateen sails, which are the hottest kind of fore-and-aft sail, IMHO, if not always practical:
There are so many ways this encounter can go, even if you don’t drop a kraken, mutinies, fires, and/or huge storms on them:
If Little
Ship wants to escape and is upwind of Big Ship, she can point herself as close to the wind as possible,
and her zippy fore-and-aft rig will help her escape the lumbering foe, and she
can show the Big Ship her ass with a cheeky wink and a wave.
Or, if
Little Ship knows there are underwater obstacles around like reefs or
sandbanks, or a shallow channel between islands, Little Ship can lure Big Ship
towards those obstacles and cause Big Ship to run aground. Then Little Ship can zoom around and rake Big Ship with cannonfire at her leisure until Big Ship surrenders.
However, Big Ship will be able to carry heavier guns that can shoot further away: at any moment, Big Ship could blast away one of Little Ship’s masts, and then Little Ship is seriously boned. Superior gunnery and training in aiming prevail, and the rewards of hard work are repaid with $$$.
And what if
Big Ship has Little Ship downwind? What if there are very light winds, which
Big Ship’s taller masts allow her to catch, since she can spread more sail?
Then Little Ship is in serious fucking trouble, and will need to start throwing her guns, water, food, and possibly even (*sob) treasure! overboard to survive. And if she gets away, she will now find herself without the ability to fight, probably in the middle of the ocean, with nothing to eat or drink. This is usually about when bigass white whales and elder gods can add a little zest to your time afloat.
This is just one scenario, with two ships, no magic, no monsters, and no inclement weather.
Plus, I’ve left out my most favouritest part of sailing ships, like, ever: deception, disguise, and generally outsmarting the other guy.
Next time on Captain Doesn’t Shut Up About Boats:
Luff & Bluff: The Sneaky, Lying Bastard’s Guide To Tricky Sailing and Sailing Trickery
A Quiet Respite 
