Canals, Navigable Rivers and Commercial Ports That Were Accessible to Humber Sloops.
Humber sloop, a sailing barge of Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, seen from the starboard side. Humber sloops were merchant vessels that traded along the inland waterways of Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire as well as the East Coast of England. These flat-bottomed barges, able to beach on the sandbanks and mudflats at low tide, were designed to operate in the shallow waters of the Humber Estuary as well as the tidal sections of its tributaries. A typical sloop was equipped with a single mast, a triangular headsail, a quadrilateral mainsail, a pair of leeboards and a stern-mounted rudder that was steered by a tiller. Advances in metallurgy, occurring during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, made it possible to construct these vessels from iron while steel became the favoured building material at the turn of the twentieth century. Anti-fouling paint, containing toxic biocides such as black copper(II) oxide or red lead(II,IV) oxide, was used to discour