Yeah, this looks much more relevant, but it is a passenger ship, too small and moving too light cargo to be other than the first step towards sailing your new printer from China.
If fuel becomes intolerably expensive, there’ll be two competing concepts, an upwind sailing cargo ship with enormous keel and long, slender hull and then a robust huge sailing ship that needs to use the traditional trade wind routes because its bad up-wind.The latter will be much cheaper to build per cargo tonne (length is by far the most expensive dimension a the ship) and have either shallower draft or deeper cargo holds. It does not have any size restrictions not present with motor ships, while the former would be difficult to increase to the modern supercontainership size, so it would loose the economics of scale every time. So yes, a viable concept for short routes where small ships are useful and weather system impossible to use.
World trade will move to where it was before steam came along. Engines will be used to crawl thru transition zones between trade winds. Unless they just switch to uranium…
Exactly - the early ships and up to the time of the Bounty were small, roundish vessels. The later sailing ships that were very efficient, like the Cutty Sark - they were long and thin for less resistance cutting through the water. However, that ship is wood on an iron frame (from the later 1800’s IIRC). Building long, thin wooden vessels with decent cargo capacity was probably too difficult in the 1700’s. They accepted the poor shape and performance in return for simplicity and reliability of wood construction.
The last commercial square-riggers were built around the turn of the last century, at which time they certainly knew how to build fore-and-aft rigs. Square rigs were still more economical. In addition to the other points mentioned, a square rigged ship has a lot of smaller sails, while a fore-and-aft rig has (proportionally) fewer and larger sails, so the square rig is easier to handle (uses a smaller crew, especially before donkey engines were common for raising sails).
As others have mentioned, sailing ships followed trade routes that would have primarily favorable winds. The last commercial sailing ships carried wheat from Australia to Europe; they did that by sailing all the way around the world, west-to-east around the Cape of Good Hope to Australia and west-to-east around Cape Horn to Europe–specifically to use prevailing winds. There is a terrific book about it called The Last Grain Race.
Forgot to mention that there are several concepts being developed for harvesting some wind energy for large freighters. Sails will sneak into cargo carriers not as an alternative propulsion concept but as a fuel saver. One was interestingly more like a kite.
Not so, a gaffe rigged vessel requires a far smaller crew. Setting sail with gaffe rig requires a few strong men on the block-and-tackles at each end of the gaffe, while each yard on a square rigged vessel needs to be fully manned. Naturally, you need enough men to man each yard on each mast if anything is to be done in a hurry.
Likewise, dropping sails on a gaffe-rigged vessel is merely a question of letting gravity do its work, while square rigged sails need to be furled by men standing up on the yard, tugging the sail up by hand.
Tacking is another issue where a fore-and-aft rig has the advantage. Where a tack on a square rigged vessel requires more steps and men than I care to remember, a gaffe rigged vessel is tacked by merely securing the boom with a block-and-tackle and shifting the running backstays.
So no, crew efficiency is not an argument for square rigged vessels.
Well, you don’t need to really furl and unfurl in a hurry. In fact, in a strong wind you don’t even set all the sails.
Bracing requires more people. With five yards on a mast, you need to haul on one side and ease on the other, but for the upper yards you can probably have one person handling two lines.
Sailing off the hook, where you’re raising the anchor and bracing the yards at the same time is probably where you need the most crew.
On the other hand, I’ve heard of schooners that used to be fishing tenders. The schooner would take a large crew out to the fishing grounds and then launch them in smaller boats to go out and bring in the catch. So they’d have lots of crew available when they needed to raise or lower the sail.
You can heave to, or haul on the clews and bunts to bring the sails up to their yards. If they’re not furled, they’ll flap around in the wind, maybe even tear, but you don’t send people up the mast if it’s not safe.