Customer Reviews

The Schooner: Its Design and Development from 1600 to the Present

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1 star:		(1)

 

 

It is indeed a wonder how Mr. MacGregor managed to make the rich and fascinating subject of the schooner into a dull, almost unreadable book. There are few plans, and there is little explanation of how the vessels progressed or in what way later ones differed from early ones. There is little discussion of sail plans, as for example the advantages and/or disadvantages of the topsail schooner sail plan. Why were the fishermen on the Grand Banks the success that they were--or were they? What made the fruit schooners that serviced the XVIIII century tables of Britain so fast, and were they faster than other rigs of the same size? What was interesting about hull design, and what was perhaps fatal? These are only a few of the questions that come to mind.
Not a very good book.

I found this book to be most interesting from the standpoint of differences between the development and rigging of schooners on different sides of the Atlantic. Mr. MacGregor has done a thorough job of scaling the wall of schooner development over the years and gives some fine details of various vessels. Artist conceptions, photos, facts and specs all make this book one of my favorites regarding the subject.

This book fits in well with Greenhill's "The Merchant Schooners" and Bennet's "Schooner Sunset". Almost every page is illustrated by photos or plans. There are just a handful of technical/historical books on schooners, this is one of them, and a good one at that. The text is a kind of design history, mostly from an English perspective, until the final chapters where the focus turns to Europe, then the American 'big schooners' and aspects of current-day schooners. I must admit, like all my technical or non-fiction books, I have never tried reading it cover to cover; so I can't comment on a previous reviewer's idea that it is dull if read in that way. I'm usually searching for something I want an answer to, or browsing to discover something I don't know; and I found a lot that interested me in this book, with many eye-catching details in the illustrations and an intelligently written, well-researched text.