Originally Posted by barsoomcore
I saw two guys sail what looked like a schooner or a brigantine. I saw somebody take seriously the suggestion that throwing out the anchor was a clever tactic in naval combat.
It was a
brig, actually - two masts, square-rigged on both. Schooner is fore'n'aft rigged on all masts and a brigantine is two masted and square-rigged on only one mast.
But I digress. If it was a schooner, then two men actually could have sailed it themselves. You'd be surprised at how few people were needed to sail a schooner - one man per mast was the usual rule of thumb.
And Jack and Will weren't actually doing much work sailing, if you noticed. The sails were already set, so all they did was point the ship in the right direction and lash the helm.
Granted, they were lucky they didn't run into a situation where they would have had to shorten sail, or they would have been screwed. But otherwise, it's not entirely outside the realm of possibility. I believe in the 1880s there was a case of a German bark where the entire crew was killed by fever or some such and the ship was brought into port skippered by the Captain's wife, with the second mate and the carpenter (the only other survivors) working the sails.
Furthermore, the maneuver with the anchor was a valid action for a Captain to take. It's called club-hauling, where the anchor is lowered on one side to bring the ship around in a hurry.
Granted, club-hauling is usually only used in crowded harbors at slow speeds (the speeds the INTERCEPTOR was travelling at would have put some serious strain on the hawse-timbers), but it is a valid maneuver if a ship needs to be tacked around in a hurry.
Of course, such situations are still highly unlikely to happen IRL, and they have been exaggerated into heroic feats, but I don't find this too reprehensible in a swashbuckling movie, where the characters by definion are supposed to be larger than life. If PotC boasted Master&Commander levels of historical realism, I'd inclined to be more nitpicky. As it is, however, I'm satisfied as long as the action in the movie isn't entirely outside the realm of possibility.
