A barque, barc, or bark is a type of sailing vessel with three or more masts and mainmasts rigged square and only the mizzen (the aftmost mast) rigged fore and aft. Sometimes, the mizzen is only partly fore-and-aft rigged, bearing a square-rigged sail above.
Etymology
The word "barque" entered English via the French term, which in turn came from the Latin barca by way of Occitan, Catalan, Spanish, or Italian.
The Latin barca may stem from Celtic barc (per Thurneysen) or Greek baris (per Diez), a term for an Egyptian boat. The Oxford English Dictionary, however, considers the latter improbable.
The word barc appears to have come from Celtic languages. The form adopted by English, perhaps from Irish, was "bark", while that adopted by Latin as barca very early, which gave rise to the French barge and barque.
In Latin, Spanish, and Italian, the term barca refers to a small boat, not a full-sized ship. French influence in England led to the use in English of both words, although their meanings now are not the same.
Well before the 19th century, a barge had become interpreted as a small vessel of coastal or inland waters, or a fast rowing boat carried by warships and normally reserved for the commanding officer. Somewhat later, a bark became a sailing vessel of a distinctive rig as detailed below. In Britain, by the mid-19th century, the spelling had taken on the French form of barque. Although Francis Bacon used this form of the word as early as 1592, Shakespeare still used the spelling "barke" in Sonnet 116 in 1609. Throughout the period of sail, the word was used also as a shortening of the barca-longa of the Mediterranean Sea.
The usual spelling convention is that, to distinguish between homophones, when spelled as barque it refers to a ship, and when spelled as bark it refers to either a sound or to a tree hide.
"Barcarole" in music shares the same etymology, being originally a folk song sung by Venetian gondolier and derived from barca — "boat" in Italian, or in Late Latin.
Bark
In the 18th century, the Royal Navy used the term bark for a nondescript vessel that did not fit any of its usual categories. Thus, when the British admiralty purchased a collier for use by James Cook in his journey of exploration, she was registered as to distinguish her from another Endeavour, a sloop already in service at the time. She happened to be a full-rigged ship with a plain bluff bow and a full stern with windows.
William Falconer's Dictionary of the Marine defined "bark", as "A general name given to small ships: it is however peculiarly appropriated by seamen to those which carry three masts without a mizzen topsail. Our Northern Mariners, who are trained in the coal-trade, apply this distinction to a broad-sterned ship, which carries no ornamental figure on the stem or prow."
The UK's National Archives state that a paper document surviving from the 16th century in the Cheshire and Chester Archives and Local Studies Service, notes the names of Robert Ratclyfe, owner of the bark Sunday and 10 mariners appointed to serve under Rt. Hon. the Earl of Sussex, Lord Deputy of Ireland.
Barque rig
By the end of the 18th century, the term barque (sometimes, particularly in the US, spelled bark) came to refer to any vessel with a particular type of sail plan. This comprises three (or more) masts, fore-and-aft sails on the aftermost mast and square sails on all other masts. Barques were the workhorse of the golden age of sail in the mid-19th century as they attained passages that nearly matched full-rigged ships, but could operate with smaller crews.
The advantage of these rigs was that they needed smaller (therefore cheaper) crews than a comparable full-rigged ship or brig-rigged vessel, as fewer of the labour-intensive square sails were used, and the rig itself is cheaper. Conversely, the ship rig tended to be retained for training vessels where the larger the crew, the more seamen were trained.
Another advantage is that, downwind, a barque can outperform a schooner or barkentine, and is both easier to handle and better at going to windward than a full-rigged ship. While a full-rigged ship is the best runner available, and while fore-and-aft rigged vessels are the best at going to windward, the barque and the barquentine, are compromises, which combine, in different proportions, the best elements of these two.
Whether square-rig, barque, barquentine or schooner is optimal depends on the degree to which the sailing-route and season can be chosen to achieve following-wind. Square-riggers predominated for intercontinental sailing on routes chosen for following-winds.