Settee (sail)

The settee sail requires a shorter yard than does the lateen, and both settee and lateen have shorter masts than square-rigged sails.

It can be traced back to Greco-Roman navigation in the Mediterranean in late antiquity; the oldest evidence is from a late-5th-century AD ship mosaic at Kelenderis, Cilicia.

[1][2] It lasted well into the 20th century as a common sail on Arab dhows.

Settees (or saëtia) then were a sharp-prowed, single-decked merchant sailing vessel found in the Mediterranean (more in the Levant than in the Western Mediterranean), in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Some polaccas carried a settee sail, giving rise to the polacca-settee (or polacre-settee).

Model of a sambuk with two settee sails
A Mediterranean settee , with two masts, both of which have lateen sails. William Pocock circa 1813