The Collaborative International Dictionary
Schooner \Schoon"er\, n. [See the Note below. Cf. Shun.] (Naut.) Originally, a small, sharp-built vessel, with two masts and fore-and-aft rig. Sometimes it carried square topsails on one or both masts and was called a topsail schooner. About 1840, longer vessels with three masts, fore-and-aft rigged, came into use, and since that time vessels with four masts and even with six masts, so rigged, are built. Schooners with more than two masts are designated three-masted schooners, four-masted schooners, etc. See Illustration in Appendix.
Note: The first schooner ever constructed is said to have been built in Gloucester, Massachusetts, about the year 1713, by a Captain Andrew Robinson, and to have received its name from the following trivial circumstance: When the vessel went off the stocks into the water, a bystander cried out,``O, how she scoons!'' Robinson replied, `` A scooner let her be;'' and, from that time, vessels thus masted and rigged have gone by this name. The word scoon is popularly used in some parts of New England to denote the act of making stones skip along the surface of water. The Scottish scon means the same thing. Both words are probably allied to the Icel. skunda, skynda, to make haste, hurry, AS. scunian to avoid, shun, Prov. E. scun. In the New England records, the word appears to have been originally written scooner. Babson, in his ``History of Gloucester,'' gives the following extract from a letter written in that place Sept. 25, 1721, by Dr. Moses Prince, brother of the Rev. Thomas Prince, the annalist of New England: ``This gentleman (Captain Robinson) was first contriver of schooners, and built the first of that sort about eight years since.''
Usage examples of "topsail schooner".
Mould and Vaggers were once in this very spot with just such a blow in their topsail schooner, and they say with the breeze not half a point west of this there is a passage at high tide for a very weatherly craft.
She was a large topsail schooner, no flag, her hull showing the marks and stains of hard usage.
A topsail schooner sailing large: and some miles beyond her a ship, also standing north-north-east with topgallants and studdingsails abroad, a glorious sight.
Half an hour more and the sail resolved itself into a topsail schooner close hauled on the starboard tack, for shortly after sunrise the wind had veered round and now blew sou'west.
A topsail schooner, with a leering demon-mask figurehead under the long bowsprit.
The expressions and consternation of the Cove's grizzled captains as they watched the half-sized topsail schooner go bounding across the dark blue of the K'Vaernian Sea, leaving a ruler-straight wake of creamy white as she sailed almost twenty degrees closer to the wind than any other ship in the world could have, had been priceless.
Within another minute, my member--and again the Major has said it better than I can--my member had become stiff and erect as the mainmast of a topsail schooner.
He stopped and gazed at a topsail schooner, the only ship by the grass - grown quay of Lythe.