Talk:Whipstaff

Direction of movement

The text currently says: "To move the ship to port, the helmsman pushed the pole down and to the right; to move it to starboard, down and to the left." Is this correct? To turn to port the ship's rudder goes to port, and therefore the tiller goes to starboard. If the tiller is going to starboard the bottom of the whipstaff is also going that way, and since it is a centre-fulcrum lever the top must go to port. The animation clearly shows this. Martin of Sheffield (talk) 09:53, 14 August 2017 (UTC)

• You are right, this is confusing. If an observer thinks about where the end of the whipstaff is being pushed, "down and to the right" is correct (the whipstaff rides in the rowle, but is not attached to it) but in terms of where the handle of the whipstaff is, the handle goes the opposite direction. Let me take a stab at revising this in the text. KDS4444 (talk) 13:00, 14 August 2017 (UTC)

Ah, so you are saying the whipstaff slides through the rowle as well as pivoting there? I did wonder how slack the ring must have been on the tiller. Regards, Martin of Sheffield (talk) 13:06, 14 August 2017 (UTC)

You got it: if the staff was not pushed down, and if it pivoted in the rowle on, say, some kind of pin, then it would, of course, arc slightly upward at the end as it was turned. Instead, it was free to move vertically, and so was pushed down and only pivoted in a slot. The article still isn't super clear about that, but thank you for pointing out the bit that you did! KDS4444 (talk) 19:54, 14 August 2017 (UTC)