Part 11
To _sag_ used to mean “to hang as a bag on one side.” I cannot find anything in this definition to correspond with the sea-term. It suggests the etymology, however, of the phrase “to sag to leeward,” applicable to a ship trending leewardly through the action of waves and wind whilst sailing.
Footnote 41:
Since this was written I find in Bailey, “To swag: to force or bear downwards as a weight does to hang on.” This settles the paternity of “swig.”
Blocks, a very distinctive feature in the equipment of a vessel, get their names in numerous cases from their shape or conveniency. A _cant_-block is so called because in whalers it is used for the tackles which cant or turn the whale over when it is being stripped of its blubber; a _fiddle_-block, because it has the shape of that instrument; a _fly_-block, because it shifts its position when the tackle it forms a part of is hauled upon; _leading_-blocks, because they are used for guiding the direction of any purchase; _hook_-blocks, because they have a hook at one end; _sister_-blocks, because they are two blocks formed out of one piece of wood, and suggest a sentimental character by intimate association; _snatch_-blocks, because a rope can be _snatched_ or whipped through the sheave without the trouble of reeving; _tail_-blocks, because they are fitted with a short length or _tail_ of rope by which they are lashed to the gear; _shoulder_-blocks, because their shape hints at a _shoulder_, there being a projection left on one side of the shell to prevent the falls from jamming. In this direction the marine philologist will find his work all plain sailing. The sources whence the sails, or most of them, take their appellations are readily grasped when the leading features of the apparently complicated fabric on high are understood. The _stay-sails_ obtain their names from the stays on which they travel. “Top-sail” was so entitled when it was literally the top or uppermost sail. The origin of the word “royal”[42] for the sail above the topgallant-sail we must seek in the fancy that found the noble superstructure of white cloths _crowned_ by that heaven-seeking space of canvas.
Footnote 42:
This sail was, on its introduction, called “topgallant-royal.”
The etymology of “hitches” is not far to seek. But first of the “hitch” itself. “_To hitch_, to catch, to move by jerks.” I know not where it is used but in the following passage—nor here know well what it means:
‘Whoe’er offends, at some unlucky time Slides in a verse, or _hitches_ in a rhyme.’—POPE.
So writes Dr. Johnson. Had he looked into the old “Voyages,” he would have found “hitch” repeated very often indeed.[43] From the nautical standpoint, he defines it accurately enough as “to catch.” Pope’s use of the term puzzled the Doctor, and he blundered into “to move by jerks.” But Pope employs it as a sailor would; he _hitches_ the culprit in a line—that is, takes an intellectual “turn” with his verse about him, or, as the poet puts it, suffers the person to “hitch” himself. To hitch is to fasten, to secure a rope so that it can run out no further. From “hitch” proceed a number of terms whose paternity is very easily distinguished. The “Blackwall hitch” takes its name from the famous point of departure of the vanished procession of Indiamen and Australian liners;[44] the “harness hitch,” from its form, which suggests a bit and reins; “midshipman’s hitch,” from the facility with which it may be made; “rolling hitch,” because it is formed of a series of rolling turns round the object it is intended to secure, and other rolling turns yet over its own part; a “timber hitch,” because of its usefulness in hoisting spars and the like through the ease of its fashioning and the security of its jamming. The etymology of knots, again, is largely found in their forms. “The figure-of-eight knot” is of the shape of the figure eight; the diamond readily suggests the knots which bear its name (single and double diamond-knots); the “Turk’s-head knot” excellently imitates a turban. To some knots and splices the inventors have given their names, such as “Elliot’s splice” and “Matthew Walker” knot. The origin of this knot is thus related by a contributor to the _Newcastle Weekly Chronicle_:—
Footnote 43:
Indeed, any old Dictionary would have supplied the meaning.
Footnote 44:
As does the “Blackwall lead,” signifying a rope taken under a pin.
“Over sixty years ago an old sailor, then drawing near to eighty years of age, said that when he was a sailor-boy there was an old rigger, named Matthew Walker, who, with his wife, lived on board an old covered hulk, moored near the Folly End, Monkwearmouth Shore; that new ships when launched were laid alongside of this hulk to be rigged by Walker and his gang of riggers; that also old ships had their rigging refitted at the same place; and that Matthew Walker was the inventor of the lanyard knot, now known by the inventor’s name wherever a ship floats.”
It has been suggested that “knot,” the sailor’s word for the nautical mile, springs from the small pieces of knotted stuff, called _knots_, inserted in the log-line for marking the progress of a ship through the water. It is worth noting, however, that in the old “Voyages” the word _knot_, as signifying a mile, never occurs. It seems reasonable to suppose that it is a word not much older than the close of the last century.
Amongst puzzling changes in the sea-language must be classed the names of vessels. “Yacht” has been variously defined: as “a small ship for carrying passengers;” as “a vessel of state.” The term is now understood to mean a pleasure craft. “Yawl” was formerly a small ship’s boat or a wherry: it has become the exclusive title of yachts rigged as cutters, but carrying also a small sail at the stern, called a mizzen. The “barge” was a vessel of state, furnished with sumptuous cabins, and canopies and cushions, decorated with flags and streamers, and propelled by a band of rowers. This hardly answers to the top-sail barges and dumb-barges of to-day! The word “bark” has been Gallicized into “barque,” possibly as a marine protest against the mis-application as shown in these lines of Byron—
“My boat is on the shore, And my bark is on the sea;”
Or the—
“My bark is my bride!”
of the sea-song. By bark the poets intend any kind of ship you please: but to Jack it implies a particular rig. The Americans write “bark” for “barque,” and rightly; for though Falconer says that “bark is a general name given to small ships,” he also adds: “It is, however, peculiarly appropriated by seamen to those which carry three masts without a mizzen top-sail.” The “pink” is another craft that has “gone over.” Her very narrow stern supplied the name, pink having been used in the sense of small, as by Shakespeare, who speaks of “pink-eyne,” small eye. The “tartan,” likewise, belongs to the past as a rig: a single mast, lateen yard and bowsprit. The growth of our ancestors’ “frigott,” too, into the fire-eating _Saucy Arethusas_ of comparatively recent times, is a story full of interest.
I have but skimmed a surface whose depths should honestly repay careful and laborious dredging. The language of the sea has entered so largely into common and familiar speech ashore,[45] that the philologist who neglects the mariner’s talk will struggle in vain in his search after a mass of paternities, derivatives, and the originals, and even the sense, of many every-day expressions. It is inevitable that a maritime nation should enlarge its shore vocabulary by sea terms. The eloquence of the forecastle is of no mean order, and in a hundred directions Jack’s expressions are matchless for brevity, sentiment and suggestion. But the origin and rise of the marine tongue is also the origin and rise of the British navy, and of the fleets which sail under the red ensign. The story of the British ship may be followed in the maritime glossaries, and perception of the delicate shades and lights, of the subtleties, niceties and discriminations of the ocean dialect is a revelation of the mysteries of the art of the shipwright, and the profession of the seaman.
Footnote 45:
Take as a single example the expression “The devil to pay.” To “pay” is to pour melted pitch into a seam for the purposes of caulking. The “devil” is a name given by caulkers to a particular seam hard to get at. Hence, “There is the devil to pay, and no pitch hot.”
_THEN AND NOW._
The occasional stranding of an ocean steamer, and the consequent transhipment or landing of the passengers, furnishes about the best illustration to be found of the extraordinary inconvenience that delay, in these days of swift and sure despatch, carries with it. The immense discomfort experienced is really a tribute to the management of the people who undertake to convey passengers. We are so habituated to precision, we are so used to confidently count not only on the hour but on the moment even of our arrival and departure, that a single failure is as much felt as though something had gone wrong in nature; and a small shock of earthquake is not more startling than detention for a day in a voyage round the world.
I was in the neighbourhood of the Downs not long since; it was blowing a fresh breeze from the westward, and I believe there could not have been less than three hundred vessels at anchor: ships of all kinds, from the large three-masted vessel down to the billyboy, from the high, light, slate-coloured steamer, down to the little schooner loaded to her ways with salt. There they lay, and there a goodly number of them had lain for some days. When they should start for their three hundred destinations depended entirely upon the wind. It was like a picture out of an ancient sea-book, an old-world pageant, with something of irony in what you could not but regard as its affected correspondence with times whose true spirit found interpretation in a large steamer of the National line majestically stemming at ten knots into the wind’s eye. Taking the first volume that comes to hand from a row of maritime records, and opening it at hazard, my eye lights on this: “Jan. 6, 1771.—The wind having shifted to the East, upwards of four hundred and fifty sail of ships, outward bound, which had been detained by the westerly winds many weeks, sailed from the Downs.” 1771, and I, writing this in the close of 1886, am fresh from beholding just such another spectacle! How eloquent are time’s comments! how everywhere, throughout all things, is old human nature breaking out! No need to wade through history to remark the character of survivals and recurrences, to note where the echoes die or where the reverberations gather fresh volume. Study the mighty page of the sea. The years, to be sure, write no wrinkles on its azure brow, but every ripple is a library, and there are more meanings in it than herrings. But to be windbound! The traveller scarcely knows the meaning of the word in this age. To lie off Deal for a space of time longer than a New Zealand steamer occupies in measuring the distance betwixt Tilbury and Wellington! Why, in these days you may be stranded thrice, thrice transhipped, and yet reach your destination in the time a ship took in the age of the fine old English gentleman to drop down to Gravesend and let go her anchor in the Downs.
Henry Fielding, when he started on his voyage to Lisbon, left his house on Wednesday, June 26, 1754. He arrived at Rotherhithe in two hours, and immediately went on board, expecting to sail next morning. On Sunday, June 30, the ship “fell down” to Gravesend. Next day she got as far as the Nore, and brought up. Tuesday, July 2, they again set sail, and anchored off Deal; weighed on the 4th, and after a short struggle anchored again off Deal. Started on the 6th, and on the 11th “came to an anchor at a place called Ryde.” On the 22nd they fell down to St. Helen’s, and on the 25th were off the island of Portland, “so famous for the smallness and sweetness of its mutton,” and anchored in Torbay. Started again August 1. On the 3rd the captain took an observation, and discovered that Ushant bore some leagues northward from him. So that it took Fielding thirty-eight days to sail from Rotherhithe to Ushant! The voyage to New Zealand is now performed in two days less.[46]
Footnote 46:
It does not seem that the _Lisbon Packet_ forty-eight years later was much superior to the vessel described by Fielding, to judge from Byron’s verses written in 1809.
“Hey day! call you that a cabin? Why ’tis hardly three feet square! Not enough to stow Queen Mab in: Who the deuce can harbour there? ‘Who, sir? plenty— Nobles twenty Did at once my vessel fill’— Did they? Jesus, How you squeeze us! Would to God they did so still! Then I’d ’scape the heat and racket Of the good ship _Lisbon Packet_.”
But the singular slowness of this journey down the Channel is by no means the strangest feature of Fielding’s voyage, in respect, I mean, of the contrasts established by the great master’s narrative. A man proposing a trip to Lisbon nowadays, can, if he likes, choose as a ship a fabric of above three thousand tons, with a spacious and richly decorated saloon illuminated by electric lights, a table as elegantly and hospitably furnished as that of any first-rate hotel ashore, numerous waiters to fly at his bidding, a comfortable bedroom fitted with a wire-wove mattrass and a hair bed. He may quench his thirst with choice of twenty refreshing drinks at a bar. The captain and officers are as much distinguished for their courtesy as for their seafaring qualities. The ship is despatched with the punctuality of a mail train; there is nothing in head winds or boisterous weather to detain her, and she commonly arrives at her destination before she is due. Fielding’s ship was a vessel not at all unlike one of the scores of sailing colliers which to this day go on staggering down the North Sea, laden with coals from Newcastle or Sunderland. Her master was so great a ruffian that Fielding has drawn the figure of no completer character of that kind in any of his novels, not excepting “Jonathan Wild.” When the novelist ventured mildly to complain of the long detention at Rotherhithe, this brutal skipper, in whose mouth every other word was an oath, declared that had he known Mr. and Mrs. Fielding were not to be pleased he would not have carried them for five hundred pounds. “He added,” says Fielding, “many asseverations that he was a gentleman, and despised money, not forgetting several hints of the presents which had been made him for his cabin, of twenty, thirty, and forty guineas, by several gentlemen, over and above the sum for which they had contracted.” The size and comfort of the accommodation may be conjectured from what Fielding says of the captain’s snoring: “he loved to indulge himself in morning slumbers, which were attended with a wind-music much more agreeable to the performer than to the hearers, especially such as have, as I had, the privilege of sitting in the orchestra.” The passage money was five pounds a head, and it was expected that passengers fed themselves. Fielding provided tea and wine, hams and tongues, and a number of live chickens and sheep; in truth, says he, “treble the quantity of provisions which could have supported the persons I took with me.” A sample is given of the captain’s politeness. I omit the wicked words. Fielding had objected to his cabin being littered with bottles. “Your cabin!” repeated he many times; “no, ’tis my cabin! Your cabin! I have brought my hogs to a fair market. I suppose, indeed, you think it your cabin and your ship, by your commanding in it! but I will command in it! I will show the world I am the commander, and nobody but I! Did you think I sold you the command of the ship for that pitiful thirty pounds? I wish I had not seen you nor your thirty pounds aboard of her.” To appreciate all this it is necessary the reader should imagine himself dying of dropsy as Fielding was, seeking in poverty a brief prolongation of life in a more genial climate than that of England, his wife prostrated with sea-sickness and the agonies of tooth-ache! It is well that those days are dead and gone. Hundreds of us are every year going abroad for health;—think of embarking on that painful quest as the invalid of a century ago did—in a ship of probably a hundred tons burden, commanded by a pitiless, foul-mouthed bully, and worked by men who, to use Fielding’s own expression, seemed “to glory in the language and behaviour of savages!”
It is fair to admit, however, that much of the misery endured by the sea-borne passenger was, in those and later times, limited to the short service ships. It is true that on the American route the vessels continued small and wretched down to the present century. For instance, you read of two hundred Highland emigrants embarking for Boston in a snow—a kind of brig—of one hundred and forty tons. A few years ago I was in company with an old gentleman who, pointing to a small barque lying moored alongside a wharf, told me that he sailed to New York in her in 1836, and that she was esteemed a high-class commodious passenger-vessel even in those days.[47] But it must be admitted that at the period of Fielding’s voyage there were ships trading to the East and West Indies of a bulk and beauty which might justly entitle them still to admiration. The craft of both the Dutch and East India Companies were as capacious and seaworthy as ships of the State: their forecastle companies were abundantly and highly disciplined; their commanders of the roughly polite type, excellently represented by the heroic old Commodore Dance. Their round-houses, or great cabins, were exceedingly handsome apartments, plentifully embellished with carpets, mirrors, flowers, hand-painted panels, and in other ways richly decorated. Such were the ships which carried Clive and Hastings, and such they remained down to the time of the fine old Earl of Balcarres.
Footnote 47:
The following lines, published in 1832, and therefore referring to shipboard life of a date comparatively recent, illustrate the sufferings of passengers in the direction of the accommodation supplied:
“Soon as the twilight closed and I was able, I left the cuddy and the folks at table Reading the news; and heard not what they read, For all I wanted was to find my bed: Which, after searching ’tween decks all around, Under a pile of hammocks there I found All my clean sheets were scattered ’mongst the boxes, My blankets, too, that I had bought at Cox’s, Laid in a corner where a dog had lain, And, curse the dogs! they’d stole my counterpane. I managed to obtain a berth that night To sleep in, but they woke me ere ’twas light; A noise above, and from below a groan, I heard a voice say, ‘Hang that holy-stone!’”
It was reserved apparently for the days of the application of steam to ships for owners of vessels to discover that passengers embarking on a short voyage stood in as much need of comfort and security as passengers embarking on a long voyage; and that more misery could be packed into the run between Dover and Calais than could be found in a journey of three years round the globe.[48] How much of suffering went to such a trip as that from Rotherhithe to Lisbon may be read, very much at large, in Fielding’s wonderful narrative—the more wonderful when we reflect that the hand that penned it was a dying man’s. Nor is it hard to collect similar experiences of the old passages to Ireland, to Scotland, or to near ports, such as from London to Yarmouth or from Southampton to Plymouth. The risks, the horrors, were increased by the character of the people who had charge of the vessels. There were no Board of Trade examinations in those days; no standards of excellence; no special qualifications insisted upon. That the British mariner was always a good seaman I should be the last to deny; but he swore, he drank, he was rude, tempestuous, ruffianly, and little fitted—I am speaking of the coasting trade—to do the honours of the cabin table, or to provide by his attention and courtesy for the needs of ladies and children. Henry Taylor, writing in 1811, says, “The ship in which I engaged belonged to Hull. The captain was one who indulged himself in bed during night, in every situation; the mate—a middle-aged man—was much addicted to strong liquor. In the middle of the night, when the ship was in a perilous place, the master went to bed, and the chief mate invited the crew into the cabin to drink. In a short time he fell stupidly drunk down into the steerage. The sailors dared not arouse the master, and so took their chance of letting the ship run on until the watch was out.” On another occasion Taylor was seaman in a ship in stormy weather. The captain went below to his cabin and “turned in;” the mate, standing on the windlass end, fell asleep; a young man at the helm suddenly cried out, “We are running too far in!” Taylor seized the lead, found little more than three fathoms, and sung out to the other to put the helm hard down. “So stupidly drunk and asleep was the mate that we were hauling the head yards about before he awoke.” Such mariners must stand as representatives, and how passengers suffered when they took passage in vessels commanded by men of this pattern is only too painfully told in the relations of shipwrecks.
Footnote 48:
The duration of the Channel passage depended of course upon the wind. Prince Charles and Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, sailed at six in the morning and arrived at two in the afternoon. Sometimes the passage occupied twelve hours, sometimes twenty-four. A fresh favourable breeze made the journey a comparatively rapid one. There is a quaint entry touching this passage in Dr. Ed. Browne’s Journal (1663–4). “April 6. Betimes in the morning, wee set sayle for Calais in the packet boat; wee gave five shillings a piece for our passage and having a fair winde, wee got in four houres’ time, into Calais roade, from whence a shallop fetch’d us to shoare. At our entryng of the port wee pay’d threepence a piece for our heads; they searched my portmantle at the gate and the custom house, for which I was to pay 5 sols.”
Take a single incident of a gale a century ago. A vessel was proceeding on her voyage from Chester to Dublin. Her provisions, which at the start had been all too scanty for “the vast number of souls she took out with her”—as the record describes them—had been stowed on deck, to make room below for the passengers. In a very short while the sea washed them overboard. “What followed may be better imagined than expressed. The wretches were crammed into the hold, without light or air, and all on board the ship without bread or water, with scarce any other prospect of seeing an end to their sufferings but by the ship’s foundering.” After forty-eight hours of misery the captain made shift to enter a small Welsh port, but the distress of the passengers continued, for the village or hamlet was too small to afford them either provisions or accommodation. What became of them is not told.