Well, it's that time of year again, time to renew the web hosting. And for those of you that don't know, that has become a lot more expensive than it used to be. Fifty dollars a year is now several hundred. Not to mention the price of domain names has gone up ten-fold.
And I just found out that the nice folks at PayPal disabled all my Support buttons, and I never got a notice (although that may be my fault.) In any case, it is all working again now, so if you would like to make a small donation to help defray these costs, it would be greatly appreciated.
A steam-powered winch on a schooner barge. Note the various drums for drawing up anchor chain, towing hawsers, etc, and the anchor chains themselves going down through the deck into the chain locker below.
Prior to steam power, the only force available on a sailing ship to perform all the necessary work was the men on board. For some tasks, such as raising the anchor, it might be necessary to yoke the entire crew to a multi-deck manual capstan. On the largest vessels, even with every available man, this might take several hours to complete. With the advent of steam power, a "donkey engine" and a single engineer could do the work of many men, in less time, and these were soon installed in almost all vessels.
In layman's terms, the difference between a capstan or windlass and a winch is that a capstan or windlass has a vertical axis of rotation, while a winch has a horizontal axis of rotation.
Modern sailors turn the capstan on the preserved sailing frigate USS Constitution. The capstan bars are removable when not in use. The vertical shaft runs down to the keel of the ship, with similar hubs on decks below.
2 decks x 8 arms per deck x 4 men per arm = 64 men, and the Constitution was not a very big vessel, even for her day.
A remarkably similar winch in the bow of the Sea Girt wreck. The anchor, chain pile, a small boiler, and a large towing bit are nearby.One of several enormous winches on the Oregon.A more modern winch near the bow of the Mohawk.A winch on the Macedonia.
