Snow (ship): Meaning (information, definition, explanation, facts)

This article is about snow, the merchant vessel. For other meanings of snow, see Snow (disambiguation).

A snow was a two-masted merchant vessel of the 16th through the 19th centuries, the largest two-masted ship of her period with a tonnage of up to around 1,000 tons, primarily a merchant ship but also used at war. She carried square sails on both masts, but had a small trysail mast (also called a snowmast) stepped immediately abaft the mainmast from which a trysail with a boom was set, with the luff of the trysail hooped to it. At times the trysail mast was replaced by a horse on the mainmast, to which the luff of the trysail was attached by rings.