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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 Please do NOT publish any part of the article or apply any part of it to any non-personal use without the express written concent of the author.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 the last article I focused on Sailor Talk that are the names of individuals. In this column I'll wrap that up, then bring our attention to terms that are the names of animals.
The Napier card was developed by Lord John Napier, a Scottish mathematician in the 17th century. The device was a diagram of the ships compass with bearings given in both magnetic and true. The Napier card was the ancestor of the compass rose that we find on modern charts.
McNamara's Lace is a slang term occasionally heard in modern merchant ships. It is the almost-disappeared "fancy work" such as macramé curtains that the sailors did to while away their time. Boats McNamara is said to have been an old bosun who was particularly adept at macramé.
We also have three relatively modern devices named for their inventors. The barber hauler, named for racing skipper Merrit Barber, is a line that controls the angle of a jib sheet. The cunningham, named for sailor Briggs Cunningham, is a line that attaches above the tack of a sail and is used to fine-tune the shape of that sail. The Very pistol, named for its inventor, Samuel W. Very, is used to fire a cartridge containing colored flares.
Some items carrying proper names of individuals are not seen on modern boats. The Jamie Green was a four-sided sail set under the bowsprit on clipper ships when the wind was aft, named for the clipper ship captain that first used it. Seen on racing boats early in this century, the Annie Oakley was a parachute spinnaker with a number of holes along its center seam, named for the sharpshooter in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show.
And finally we have the derrick, an on-board lever system for handling cargo. This device was developed in the 16th century, its name being whimsically derived from a well-known English hangman of the time named Derrick who plied his grisly trade at Tyburn, London in those days. This was presumably because in both cases, weights dangled from the ends of ropes.
That does it for Sailor Talk that are the names of individuals. Let's now look at terms that are the names of animals.
There are lots of animals around boats. If you look hard enough, you'll find cats, dogs, birds, baboons, camels, monkeys, horses, donkeys, sheep and dolphin. And if we stretch things a bit, we'll find a sphinx on every racing boat and many cruising boats as well.
Let's start with cats. The first one we'll talk about was the infamous cat -o'-nine-tails, known aboard ship simply as The Cat. The Cat was a whip with nine separate tails on a single handle. Its only use was to flog the sailors. Its origin is believed to date back to ancient Egypt, where the domestic cat was sacred and, even then, was said to have nine lives. The Egyptians believed that by scourging with cat hide, good passed from the whip to the victim.
The Cat was kept in a bag until needed. Once the victim was "over a barrel" (tied hand and foot, face down over a barrel to expose his back) the bosun would "let The Cat out of the bag" to begin his task. As the victim's back began to bleed, the nine tails would tend to stick together. A stroke with the tails matted together could cause serious and permanent injury. So the bosun, in the victim's best interest, would use his fingers to "comb the cat" between strokes to keep the tails separated.
The bosun needed room to lay on his strokes. He couldn't stand too close to rigging, spars or other men or he might get the tails caught. Thus, when quarters were especially tight, there would be "no room to swing a cat".
There were other cats aboard, most of unknown origin. The cathead was a heavy piece of timber projecting from each bow of a ship. This was used to secure, "to cat" the anchor prior to letting go, or at the completion of weighing the anchor before fastening it to its usual bed while underway. Catholes were small reinforced openings cut in the stern of sailing warships to feed hawsers when there was a need to haul the ship from astern. The stern gunports couldn't handle the strain.
The catspaw has two different definitions. First it is a twisting hitch made in the bight of a rope to form two eyes. The hook of a tackle is fed through the eyes for the hoisting of whatever was attached to the rope.
Most of us are familiar with the other definition of catspaw. It's the ripple on the water that is caused by a breath of air on a calm sea. The old time sailors, on seeing a catspaw, would stroke the backstay as if fondling a cat and whistle to induce the wind to come to the ship.
The catwalk is a narrow elevated passageway. While they can be found ashore today in such places as theater ceilings for use by the lighting technicians, they originated on the more recent sailing ships and earlier steam ships. A catwalk was a fore and aft passageway connecting the amidships bridge structure with the forecastle and the poop deck. Being elevated, it would provide a relatively safe and dry access to those areas from the bridge. Presumably the catwalk got its name from the need to be as nimble as a cat to use it.
We also find dogs aboard boats. Appearing in about the 15th century, dog was a term generally applied to something that overlaps or had other close connection with something else. Thus, a dog-and-bitch thimble was specially shaped to allow a block to be brought closer in to a fitting much like dogs mating. A dog is also a handle that, when turned, overlaps a frame to lock down a hatch, and dog shores are two blocks of timber which shore up the side of a ship on the launching ways and prevent her from starting down too soon. And, before the days of chain anchor rode, a dog stopper was a heavy rope wrapped around the mainmast and secured to the anchor cable as a backup to the main cable stopper.
There are two dogwatches, "first dog" and "last dog" (only landlubbers call them "first dog" and "second dog"). The two half-watches create an odd number of watches in a 24-hour period, so that the watchkeepers don't have the same watches every day. The origin of these terms is obscure. It has been said that, being shorter than normal four-hour watches, they are "cur-tailed". And it's a very short step to get from cur (a mongrel) to dog. However, a more likely explanation is that dog watches simply allow an overlap of watchkeeping schedules.
The "dog days of Summer" is a phrase that comes directly from the dogwatches. If sailors were not on watch, they were "below" in the forecastle. Eating, sleeping and maintaining their own clothing were tasks that they had to accomplish while below. When on watch, if they were not required for steering, keeping watch or adjusting sails, they would be assigned other maintenance tasks, such as assisting the Sails, the sailmaker, Chips, the carpenter, or any of the other "idlers". Certain watches were traditionally allocated as times of rest where non-essential tasks were not assigned. Traditionally, these rest periods were all of the night watches, the Wednesday afternoon watch, the Sunday afternoon watch, and the Dogwatches. During those watches they had to remain on deck in case they were needed for essential shipkeeping. So on the dog watches, sailors would often be seen laying about the deck, talking in small groups, snoozing, playing games, making scrimshaw and the like. The "dog days of Summer" are those carefree days between planting and harvest where, like the dogwatches, only the most essential of chores take place.
A doghouse is more directly related to the real quadruped. Originally it was a small, low deckhouse barely large enough to hold a dog, that was used to accommodate personnel when a vessel is overcrowded.
Hounds, on a modern boat, are the wooden or metal fittings by which the shrouds are secured to the mast. As with many of the other animal terms, this one has little to do with hound dogs. Rather, the term originates from Middle English hun and Icelandic hunn, the knob at the masthead.
What about the other animals, the birds, baboons, camels, monkeys, horses, donkeys, sheep, snakes, worms and dolphin? What about the sphinx? I've run out of room, so we'll have to wait for the next article to find out.
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