Brig

In Royal Navy use, brigs were retained for training use when the battle fleets consisted almost entirely of iron-hulled steamships.

[1]: 49 In sailing, a full-rigged brig is a vessel with two square rigged masts (fore and main).

[4] A brig is "generally built on a larger scale than a schooner, and may approach the magnitude of a full-sized, three-masted ship.

[3][better source needed] The word brig has been used in the past as an abbreviation of brigantine (which is the name for a two-masted vessel with foremast fully square rigged and her mainmast rigged with both a fore-and-aft mainsail, square topsails and possibly topgallant sails).

The square-rigged brig's advantage over the fore-and-aft rigged brigantine was "that the sails, being smaller and more numerous, are more easily managed, and require fewer men or 'hands' to work them.

[8] By the 17th century the British Royal Navy defined "brig" as having two square rigged masts.

The ability to stop the ship quickly (by backing sails) was particularly important for a vessel doing survey work.

[11]: 82  The windward ability of brigs (which depends as much on hull shape as the rig) could be comparable to or better than contemporary schooners.

The author and naval officer Frederick Marryat characterised brigs as having superior windward performance to the schooners of that time.

They were replaced in commercial traffic by gaffsail schooners (which needed fewer personnel) and steam boats.