To sail directly downwind was to RUN, sometimes to SCUD or to carry BOTH SHEETS AFT, and was also known as a "Landsman's Breeze."
Winds, by the way, are named for the direction from which they blow, not the direction in which they blow. The northeast trade winds in the Caribbean come principally from the northeast; they do not blow toward the northeast.
To change course while sailing off the wind is now called a GYBE but in the eighteenth century was termed WEARING SHIP. It was easier to perform shorthanded, so many captains preferred, even when going to WINDWARD, to make a complete circle in the water, falling off the wind, WEARING the wind from one quarter of the stern to the other, then hardening back up to the wind on the opposite TACK CLOSE-HAULED.
The pointy end up front is called the BOW; that is FORWARD, corrupted to FOR'RD. The wide end at the back is the STERN-AFT.
A ship has two sides. The right-hand side of the ship is always the STARBOARD side. The left-hand side back in the eighteenth century was called the LARBOARD side. It's simple when you're facing the BOW, but when you turn and face AFT, they don't change places!
Sailors back then were more concerned with which side was the WEATHER side and which was the LEEWARD side, depending on where the wind was coming from, anyway. Steering commands were issued with that as the prime concern.
Here we reach another of those pesky posers created by the contrariness and conservatism of seafarers. In the very old days, every ship (they weren't so big back then) was steered by a rudder that was controlled by a TILLER, a wooden bar that sticks out from the top of the rudder like a lever. You still see them on smaller boats.
Boats do not steer like a car. To make a boat turn to the right, to STARBOARD, the tiller has to be pushed over to the left-hand side, to LARBOARD. This angles the rudder so that the force of the water across it swings the stern out in the opposite direction and swings the bows the way you want to go.
That's why Lieutenant Lewrie would order "helm alee" when he really wanted the ship to head up closer to the wind. Putting the helm down turns the bows up! Putting the helm up turns the bows away from the wind: "helm aweather." By his time, most ships had a wheel on the quarterdeck to steer with, but the wheel controlled ropes and pulleys connected to a TILLER HEAD below decks that did the same thing that a small boat's tiller did. When Lewrie said "helm up" or "helm aweather," the helmsman would turn the wheel a few spokes to either the LEEWARD side to put the helm "down" or turn it to the WINDWARD side to put the helm "up" or "aweather." But even if the addition of the wheel made it seem more like driving a car, the deck officer and the man on the wheel knew what they were really referring to was what was happening with that TILLER hidden below decks and what the rudder was doing, not which way the wheel was turning.
There were no auxiliary engines back then, no motive power except the wind and sometimes an "ash breeze," when the ship's boats were used to tow a vessel in light air. When the wind came FOUL so that there was no way to work out of harbor, no matter how well drilled a crew was in TACKING, ships sat in harbor until the wind shifted. In the Indian Ocean, South China Seas, and the Bay of Bengal, the monsoon winds shifted FAIR or FOUL by six-month seasons. While it might be fine for a ship bound south and west for the Cape of Good Hope and a homeward voyage, it would be almost impossible for a ship to make a journey in the opposite direction, beating into the teeth of that same wind from the Cape of Good Hope to Calcutta, which lay to the northeast.
Further, no naval captain would willingly cede the WINDWARD advantage to a foe. Staying up to windward and making the other fellow come to you was known as keeping the wind gauge. Choundas could not operate against the principal sea-lanes to and from Canton from LEEWARD. He had to be up to WINDWARD, from which he could strike and then dance away if he ran into some ship stronger than he was. I hope I have related the limitations and advantages of wind position in The King's Privateer.
The harbor I invented at Spratly Island was a right bastard-easy to get into with a southeast trade wind, almost impossible to exit-and I hope I showed how near Lewrie was to losing Culverin in his attempt to get to sea and chase those pirates. Harbors were always carefully selected so the entrance was not blocked with a headwind, a "dead muzzier," most of the time. A ship trying to work its way out, short-tacking across a narrow entrance channel, would end up stuck on a lee shore and pounded to bits by the waves and rocks. That's why most harbors in the Caribbean are on the lee side of the islands-not just for protection from gales.
I could get into a lot more detail shown on the sketch of a full-rigged ship-what the braces, lifts, jears, and halyards did and all that-but that would take an entire book in itself. Let me recommend, instead, "the" guide: John Harland's Seamanship in the Age of Sail, U.S. Naval Institute Press, lavishly illustrated by Mark Myers, Royal Society of Marine Artists, Fellow of the American Society of Marine Artists. The U.S. Naval Institute also has Bryan Lavery's The Arming and Fitting of English Ships of War, 1600-1815 and Peter Goodwin's The Construction and Fitting of the English Man of War, 1650-1850. Interesting, too, is The Fighting Ship of the Royal Navy: 1897-1984 by E. H. H. Archibald. Time-Life's Seafarers series is out of print, I believe, but most libraries should have Fighting Sail, which covers the American Revolution and the high points of the Napoleonic Wars-the Great Age of Sail.
Speaking of the Napoleonic Wars… there's Alan Lewrie, bound for the Bahamas after a few months' rest ashore. I expect that he shall have a rather peaceful time of it during his three-year commission. That should put him back in England, should he outrun any more irate husbands or furious daddies, in 1789. Just in time for…
… but as they used to say at summer camp when they shooed us off to our cabins so the counselors could cavort with the girls across the lake, "That's a story for another night's campfire."