"The Elements and Practice of Rigging and Seamanship" Topic

"The Elements and Practice of Rigging And Seamanship, 1794, by David Steel, is a comprehensive English textbook of rigging, seamanship and naval tactics. A key reference for those interested in the age of Nelson. Although at times difficult because of its fine detail, it will reward those that search through it to understand the technology of the era.The fonts in the 1794 original created unusual challenges to its conversion from images to text. Its s, f, S, F and l characters are not easily distinguished. Even in reprint, this is an expensive book and so we used photography rather than flatbed scanning to capture the document. Finally, each of the copies we had available had faded pages. All of this is to explain that even after quite a lot of work, this manual required more proof-reading and correction than any we have previously attempted. We really appreciate your reporting any errors that you find. We would especially like to thank Scott Weller for his thorough and accurate 2011 proofreading and reporting.Please note that the page numbers in the tables jump from 138 to 141. This accurately reflects the 1794 original and the reprint from a different original.In this online version of the manual we have attempted to keep the flavour of the original layout while taking advantage of the Web's universal accessibility. Different browsers and fonts will cause the text to move, but the text will remain roughly where it is in the original manual. We have not attempted to correct any errors found in the original document. However, this text was captured by optical character recognition and then encoded for the Web which has added new errors we wish to correct. We wish to thank United States Naval Academy Museum for letting us photograph an original of the 1794 manuscript. Thank you also to San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park‘s J. Porter Shaw Library for the access to a reprint of this manual. Finally, we wish to acknowledge Sim Comfort Associates for creating the really nice 1978 reprint. Please report any typos, or particularly annoying layout issues with the Mail Feedback Form for correction. Richard Pekelney Webmaster…"
Main page
link

Amicalement
Armand

Wow, now that is helpful. I'm not doing any of this right now, but when I come back to it this will be a great foundation.

Happy you enjoyed it my friend!. (smile)

Amicalement
Armand

Wow what a reference.

Glad you enjoyed it too my friend.

Amicalement
Armand

Wow! Don't know how I missed this. Here is this expensive rare book in its entirety! Thank you Armand!

It looks like a A class find. Thanks Aemand
Be safe
Rory

Great find, Armand! Thank you for sharing it!

~MwT