topsail schooner

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. [1913 Webster]

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.'' [1913 Webster]