3.29: Sail, Ahoy!

Sadly, Harl knew nothing about the oil or bitumen seeps beyond one crucial detail; they lay within the Queen’s own Duchy.

That alone made my pulse quicken. It meant there must be some oil deposits nearby. Oil that would solve my fuel anxiety. The remaining bitumen would make excellent road surfacing material. With almost twice the energy density of coal, oil would open the doors to cleaner lighting, steam ships with long ranges, and dare I dream it…

A pulse-jet engine.

I suppressed an evil grin.

Rein in your dreams, Jack.

Fractional distillation alone would take some time to figure out, but this was a nice first step. A very nice first step.

Wolmar broke me out of my thoughts.

“Here’s the cloth from the dismantled tents, my lord.” He pointed to the large bundle of white cloth being carried by four men. “The ship that went to Nordhaven hasn’t arrived yet.”

“This is fine. Please attach it to a spar.”

“Like the square sail?”

“Yes, but make the sail triangular.”

He tried his best to hide a grimace.

“I know. You don’t think it will work. I won’t blame you if it doesn’t. Now let’s be quick. It’s afternoon already.”

The men got to work immediately. They attached the stretched canvas underneath the spar with ropes, then under my imperfect direction hoisted the whole contraption on the boat’s mast at a steep angle.

My lack of knowledge about how it was supposed to be attached and operated clearly showed, but they kept trying things out. Their experience as shipbuilders and sailors covered for my shortcomings, as they had the sail rigged on the mast in a matter of minutes.

“My lord, a square sail can also sail at an angle to the wind,” Wolmar said cautiously, as though I were a half-feral dog who could bite him any moment.

“How much?”

“My lord?”

“How close can it turn into oncoming wind?”

He opened his arms to demonstrate.

“This much.”

“So, around 70 degrees. 65 at most. If your destination was in the direction wind was blowing from, you’d have to make a large circle to get there.”

He nodded.

“And if there’s land in the way, you don’t go anywhere.”

He looked at me puzzled, as to why I was stating the obvious.

“A triangular sail,” I continued, closing his arm, “when properly operated, can get close to 45 degrees, and its much easier to operate,” I said, moving my hand in the zig-zag motion of a fish swimming in water, “compared to a square sail.”

His eyebrows rose in disbelief.

“You mean tacking?”

“Yes, that, but much better than a square sail. Imagine how many sea routes it could open, or let you sail very close to the coast even in unfavorable winds.”

He still didn’t believe me.

“Let’s find out if this works.”

Once the men had tested the rigging and applied the final layer of pitch, they put logs as rollers underneath the boat, then removed the wedges keeping it in place. They all grunted in unison as they pushed the boat down.

It shifted slightly, then lurched forward, rumbling over the logs, gathering speed. It crashed into water with a booming splash, spraying water everywhere. The men whooped as it bobbed up and down on the waves of its own making, then stilled abruptly as they remembered I was there.

Removing that barrier between us would take time.

Let’s test it out,” I said, walking down, Aldren in tow.

The boat comfortably held a dozen men, who rowed it into the center of our large natural harbor. Its outer barrier wasn’t towering hills, but a spit and smaller outcroppings of stone, remnants of mountains that had been eroded over millennia, barely visible above the surface.

A curse and a blessing.

A light breeze began to blow from the ocean towards the coast, making the sail flap.

I had the boat and sail turned to catch it from behind.

As the boat lurched forward, Wolmar’s face fell. Its speed, I had to admit, was rather slow. The sailors didn’t look very happy either.

The lateen sail, with around half the area of a square sail for the same length of yard, obviously couldn’t utilize all the power of wind pushing it forward. If it was the only sail on a ship, it would be a serious downgrade in favorable winds.

“It’s just a demonstration, Master,” I said to the dejected shipwright. “We won’t be replacing all of our sails with this design, just the bow and stern ones, to give our ships better performance in unfavorable winds.”

He visibly relaxed.

I was no sailor in my past life, but I did remember from paintings of 19th century ships that even the pinnacle of sailing vessels, the clippers, had triangular sails at the front and the behind, but the masts in the middle still carried square sails, to take full advantage of favorable winds.

“Now let’s test that performance.”

I had the boat turned towards the wind.

As the boat surged forward, the sail ballooned outward, straining against its tethers. The more it strained, the more the boat accelerated forward. At the same time, it also slid to the side.

Aldren kept looking at the white wake it left in the blue water, turning and moving his stretched hand in different orientations.

He turned to look at me with a manic expression.

“I get it! So that’s how a wing turns incoming wind into—”

I put a finger on his lips.

“Not here,” I whispered.

He nodded in understanding.

The more we turned, the more the boat began to shudder, but it also picked up pace.

“Well, I’ll be damned…” one of the older sailors said close to me.

“My God, we’re—we’re sailing! We’re actually sailing into the wind,” one of the younger men exclaimed loudly.

We weren’t really, but we were turned more into it than a square sail could manage.

“Let’s turn more into it!” I said loudly.

Poor Aldren retched into the water beside me.

I would have too, if I wasn’t so excited about the experiment.

We got as close as 55 degrees, when the boat began to slide to the left.

The men’s brows came together in worry, but nobody said anything.

“Just a little more,” I said.

I wanted to know the design’s limits.

The more we turned inward, the more the boat began to slide and tilt. To my disappointment, the helmsman eased up.

Still, this wasn’t bad at all. Even this was a big improvement over a square sail.

“Why don’t we visit that sandbar over there?” I pointed to a distant bar at the boundary of our harbor.

The men stared at me in disbelief.

It lay directly in the direction of the wind.

“You’re supposed to turn the sail around, I think,” I said hesitantly.

The sail definitely wasn’t supposed to flap against the mast like a fish out of water.

The men looked at each other in confusion, then shrugged their shoulders and went to work.

After a lot of jostling, shouting and cursing, they lifted the yard vertically and set it up on the other side.

A few adjustments to the rigging, with the helmsman leaning in the opposite direction, and the boat swerved to the right with the grace of a dancer.

The men’s eyes widened, while their jaws fell to the floor.

They turned to look at me with reverent eyes.

I turned away from the uncomfortable stares and found Wolmar, who looked equally stunned.

“That’s how you go against the wind!” I said to him over the loud wind and the snapping sail.

The sailors were a lot more enthusiastic the next two times we had to repeat the maneuver.

Thunder ripped through the air as the already gray sky began to darken. As a light drizzle began serenading us, the wind picked up pace.

The boat quickly followed, with the acceleration of something with an engine. My heart fluttered as my lips quirked up on their own.

The sailors cheered.

Then the rigging creaked. The boat began to slide to the right at a dangerous pace. Acceleration to the side wasn’t as pleasant.

Our smiles vanished.

The helmsman grunted loudly as he struggled to maintain the heading. Two men stepped to help him.

“We need to turn back—”

Wolmar’s words were swallowed by a strong gust of wind. It slammed into us, buffeting the sail.

Our world suddenly tilted to the right with a jolt.

“Release the sail!” Wolmar shouted.

Two men tried to reel it in, but the boat lurched just at the wrong moment, tilting even further. Both men lost their balance and fell. They managed to grab the rigging before they were flung into the sea.

The rest quickly moved to the left lip of the boat, while I grabbed it with one hand and flattened myself to the floor, not knowing what to do, pulling the sickly Aldren down with my other arm.

Maybe it wasn’t the best idea to bring him along.

The potential discovery of oil had made me a little too excitable.

The sailors sat on the left edge, leaning their upper bodies back.

It didn’t help.

The boat kept tilting.

When it had tilted to a scary 45 degrees and still kept going, Wolmar shouted at the top of his lungs.

“Abandon ship!”

I grabbed Aldren by an arm and jumped away from the capsizing boat.

Cold water hit me like an electric shock.

“Fuck!”

A large splash sprayed water over us.

The boat had turned upside down.

Luckily, all the men aboard had been experienced sailors. They were treading water around our failed experiment. Everyone was fine.

“What happened?” I asked Wolmar.

“That sail makes a lot more leeway than the square sail!”

I looked at the boat’s underside. It had a keel, but not big enough to tackle the sideways force the lateen sail generated. Or maybe it was something else. I wasn’t a shipwright.

The one who was began talking to himself, while bobbing with the waves.

Wolmar’s eyes remained distant in thought, even as men on boats converged on us.

“We’ll need a deeper, heavier keel,” he said to me after we had been rescued by one of the boats.

“I’ll get you some lead.”

He shook his head, spraying me with water. “No, that’s a lot of work. Maybe just a board to the side, to manage the leeway, but the hull has to be thinner!”

He kept talking to me about terms I didn’t know, and I kept nodding as if I understood.

My lips curved upward in a smile.

My part was finished.

Now he would travel the rest of the path himself.