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You are welcome to apply any part of this article to your own personal use. Please do NOT publish any part of the article or apply any part of it to any non-personal use without the express written concent of the author.
In this series of articles, we've been looking at the origin of nautical terms. Many of those we've discussed so far have made the transition to land use. Here are a couple of fun Sailor Talk which also made the transition: "cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey" and "you can't beat a dead horse."
I remember the first time I heard the "monkey" phrase. I was in the 7th grade, and sniggered with my friends at the vision of the poor monkey statue with the missing body parts. Here's the real story.
In the slang of the 16th through 18th centuries, the term "monkey" generally was applied to anything diminutive in size. A monkey was a small single-masted coastal trading vessel of about 40 tons. It was also a small cask in which grog was carried up for issue to the sailors and a small single block with a swivel. A "monkey jacket" was a short jacket worn by midshipmen and is still worn in some merchant navies. A "monkey's fist" was (and still is) a knot that resembled a small fist. A "monkey pump" was the straw or quill that sailors inserted into a small (usually hidden) hole in a cask to (usually surreptitiously) withdraw the (usually alcoholic) beverage directly into the sailor's mouth.
Not all "monkey" terms were due to the item's size. "Monkey's blood" and "sucking the monkey" are two of these. "Monkey's blood" was what the sailors laughingly called the red wine the officers drank and kept from the crew, the sailors preferring the blood of the sugar cane (rum). "Sucking the monkey" was a practice devised by English Navy sailors in the West Indies late in the 18th century and confounded their officers for more than 50 years. They would persuade native women to bring very special coconuts with them when they visited the ship (the milk would be removed and replaced with rum before being taken on board). To drink the rum, a seaman merely had to suck on the hole through which the milk/rum transfer had taken place.
How does all this relate to a brass monkey? Every sailing ship had to have cannon for protection. Cannon of the times required round iron cannonballs. The master wanted to store the cannonballs such that they could be of instant use when needed, yet not roll around the gun deck. The solution was to stack them up in a square-based pyramid next to the cannon. The top level of the stack had one ball, the next level down had four, the next had nine, the next had sixteen, and so on. Four levels would provide a stack of 30 cannonballs. The only real problem was how to keep the bottom level from sliding out from under the weight of the higher levels. To do this, they devised a small brass plate ("brass monkey") with one rounded indentation for each cannonball in the bottom layer. Brass was used because the cannonballs wouldn't rust to the "brass monkey", but would rust to an iron one.
When temperature falls, brass contracts in size faster than iron. As it got cold on the gun decks, the indentations in the brass monkey would get smaller than the iron cannonballs they were holding. If the temperature got cold enough, the bottom layer would pop out of the indentations spilling the entire pyramid over the deck. Thus it was, quite literally, cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey.
We've looked at brass monkeys. Now let's look at dead horses.
When sailors returned home from a voyage, they would be paid off in one lump sum. Most would then stay at shoreside establishments catering to sailors until their money ran out. When that happened, the owners ("crimps") would advance money so that the sailors could purchase more food, rum and "companionship" at that establishment at inflated prices.
For centuries, it was common practice to give a sailor one month's wage in advance when they signed on for a voyage. This advance was intended for the purchase of needed clothing and other gear before departure. Often times this money went to repay the crimps. By the middle of the 19th century, captains were paying the advances directly to crimps for providing crew, bypassing the poor sailor. Thus, most sailors would be working only for their food for the first month of a voyage.
This food was supposed to mostly consist of salt beef. Food provisioners, whenever they could get away with it (which was quite often), would substitute much cheaper and chewier salt horse for a portion of the salt beef. Even when salt beef was provided, some of it would have been in casks for years before being given to the crew to eat, making it as hard to chew as salt horse. It was quite usual for the crew to refer to their food as salt horse when it was bad, or dead horse if it was worse than bad.
So, for the first month the sailors were working only for their food, their salt horse, their dead horse. They were said to be "working off their dead horse," and were referred to as dead horses themselves. Flogging them to get them to work harder was a waste of energy. Thus, "you can't beat a dead horse" to get any more work done.
We're not through with dead horses yet. On merchant ships, there used to be a celebration of having worked off the dead horse. An effigy of a horse would be made of canvas and stuffed with straw. The crew would parade around the deck, dragging the effigy and singing a shanty: "Old man, your horse must die." The effigy would be hauled to the main yardarm, set afire and cut down into the sea. If the ship carried passengers, the effigy would be auctioned off to the passengers before casting it adrift and the crew would divide the proceeds.
Finally, let's look at "horse latitudes," the region of variable winds at about 30° to 35° North. There are several guesses as to the origin of that term. The most popular one is that ships carrying horses would have to throw them overboard to conserve water when becalmed for long periods; the bloated carcasses would be seen by following ships for months. Another guess is that the term is taken from El Golfo do las Yequas, the Gulf of the Mares in Spain, referencing the capricious behavior of an Arab mare being much like the winds of the region - mostly gentle, but quite wild when you least expect it. I favor a third guess. Given that most sailing vessels would take about 30 days to reach that region from northern ports, "horse latitudes" are where the sailors have finally worked off their dead horse.
That covers brass monkeys, dead horses and more. Hmmm... I wonder what I can dig up for the next article.
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