Balanced Lug History

[Milli]

I am curious about the history of the balanced lugsail?? Where did they originate and what kind of boats/conditions where they used for ??

I have seen the applications for the english sailing canoes but I wonder if the balanced lug was adapted for this and had another origin?

[ahp]

The Balance Lug, and the other subspecies of lug long predate sailing canoes. The rig is many centuries old and was used on fishing vessels and small cargo carriers, and sometimes, privateers, especially French.

[Todd Bradshaw]

The Chinese usually get the credit for inventing them, since the ancient Chinese lugs were a form of balanced lugsails. Western cultures generally omitted the battens, added some shape and replaced the Chinese mainsheet bridle systems with more typical sheeting systems. The early canoe people added some of the battens back into the design, primarily to facilitate quick reefing on the fly.

Independently of all this, somebody, somewhere, likely figured out that shifting the halyard tie-off point on the yard and the mast/boom intersection on his small-boat, boomed squaresail allowed it to be swiveled to a more fore-and-aft orientation and would increase his ability to sail to windward. In that configuration, it would basically be a balanced lug. The same thing was done on some primitive non-boomed squaresails, temporarily converting them essentially into dipping lugs. The Voyageurs in their fur trade canoes with makeshift spars and oiled tarps for sails sometimes did this for better windward performance.