original rendering of a snow brig by @kris_tinsart
Tall Ships from 1700 to 1721
The decades of the Great Northern War were a time of change in the design of tall ships. Most well-known books featuring tall ships are set a hundred years later during the Napoleonic Wars of 1803 to 1815. Horatio Hornblower, Captain Jack Aubrey, and Nathaniel Drinkwater come to mind when a tall ship is mentioned, but all those fictional heroes sailed during the Napoleonic Wars.
One hundred years before the legendary Hornblower sailed the English Channel, sailors in the Great Northern War sailed ships with technology a century older. Shipbuilding developed rapidly during the eighteenth century. Industrial espionage was common in European ports, with spies creeping aboard ships at anchor to report on the latest developments in ship design (Jøregensen). Prizes, the name for a captured enemy ship, were also a source of ship design innovations.
Steering
The first ship’s wheel appeared in the first decades of the eighteenth century. Medieval ships were steered by a simple tiller, a long beam of wood directly attached to the rudder, moved side to side by a helmsman. From the fourteenth to the eighteenth century, ships and their rudders grew too large for a simple tiller, so a ring with a long pole was attached to the tiller to allow steering from an upper deck in a compartment aptly named steerage. The helmsman could move the long pole, or whipstaff, in view of the captain on the quarterdeck.
If the whipstaff broke or the ring attaching it to the tiller came loose, as often happened in storms, the tiller was attached to the walls of steerage with a set of ropes and pulleys. The invention of the wheel made steering less precarious.
Depending on the age of the ship, tall ships sailed during the two decades of the Great Northern War would have had either a whip staff or a wheel.
Navigation
The sextant wasn’t invented until 1757, so navigation during the Great Northern War would have been with one of several types of cross staffs. A long stick was aimed at the sun or a star, and a wooden cross piece was aligned with the bottom edge at the horizon and the top edge just covering the celestial body. The stick gave a reading for the angle of inclination of the celestial body to the horizon. Formulas were applied depending on whether the reading was taking with the sun or a star. The result gave the latitude of the ship.
SOURCE: Jørgensen, Ida Christine. “National Shipbuilding, International Technology: Technological Exchange in 18th Century European Shipyards.” Archaeonautica, 2021. doi:10.4000/ARCHAEONAUTICA.1135. (read via academia.edu)