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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 Please do NOT publish any part of the article or apply any part of it to any non-personal use without the express written concent of the author.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 we talked about some of the Sailor Talk that carried the names of animals, such as dogwatches and catwalks. I didn't have enough space to cover all the birds, baboons, camels, monkeys, horses, donkeys, sheep, snakes, worms and dolphin we find around boats. And I suppose I had better not forget the sphinx.
Let's start with birds aboard ship. All sailing vessels had a crow's nest aloft for a lookout. Many whalers also had an even more precarious bird's nest situated higher than the usual crow's nest. The extra height of the bird's nest would enable the lookout to see the whale's spume from a greater distance.
Crow's nests and bird's nests have their origins in Old Norse vessels. These often carried ravens in cages. When in doubt as to the whereabouts of the nearest land, the captain would have a cage sent aloft. The door would be opened, freeing the bird. It would circle and head for land, pointing the way.
Another bird sometimes found aboard ships was the skylark. A skylark was someone who skylarked, who romped high in the rigging of a sailing ship, such as might be portrayed in an old Errol Flynn swashbuckler movie. As a related phrase, the lad might even have done his romping "on a lark". But what does this have to do with our feathered friend? In truth, nothing. The origin of both skylark and "on a lark" goes back to Anglo-Saxon lac, to play.
What about baboons? Being detailed to keep watch aboard ship in a harbor while the rest of the ship's company relaxed or went ashore on liberty was, and sometimes still is called the baboon watch. The "baboon" that had to stand the watch was usually the newest crew aboard.
A camel is a type of floating dock that's used to lift a ship over shallows on entering or leaving port. The device was first used in Amsterdam as early as the 14th century. The origin of the term appears to have nothing to do with the carrying capacity of a camel. Rather, it is believed to originate from the name of an early dock in Amsterdam, Camel Dock.
Donkeys were hard to find aboard the old sailing ships, but you could always find his breakfast. The donkey's breakfast was what the sailor's whimsically called the straw that served as the stuffing for their bedding. On the longer voyages, their bedding would loose any padding qualities and provide good hiding places for critters that made sleeping an unpleasant task. On the last morning of the voyage the sailors would ceremoniously and gratefully toss the remnants of their bedding overboard.
In the latter days of commercial sail and early days of steam, donkeys made a more direct presence. The donkey engine was used in the early days of steam for all kinds of heavy hauling to replace the need for manpower. A donkey boat was a small powered vessel that the sailing ship would launch to do towing when tugs were not available.
I discussed monkeys and dead horses in detail in a previous article (4. Brass Monkeys, Dead Horses, and More), so I won't rehash that all here. To refresh your memory a bit, I'll remind you that if the item were termed a monkey, then it was generally, but not always, diminutive in size. Brass monkeys, monkey casks, monkey jackets, monkey's fists and monkey pumps were diminutive. Monkey's blood and "sucking the monkey" were not. Monkey's blood was what the sailors called the officers' wine, and "sucking the monkey" was the act of drinking rum from a coconut.
Likewise I won't rehash the dead horse, the poor sailor who has to work free for his first thirty days outbound. But there are other horses worth mentioning. A horse was an earlier name for a fore-and-aft sail's traveler track. It was also an older name for a footrope, the rope suspended just under the yard that the sailors would stand on when doing sail tasks such as furling. A horse was also found in caulking seams. One would "horse up", pound the caulking into the seam with a horsing iron. We know that all of these uses originate with Old English, from Old Norse, hross. What is unknown is the actual connection between the animal and these uses.
For the last of the horses and our only look at sheep, we look to waves at sea breaking into white foam. For obvious reasons, the sailors called these waves either white horses or Neptune's sheep.
By the way, Irish seafarers in times past gave these breaking waves another name loosely related to animals. They identified the waves with their version of Neptune, and called them Otho's Beard. Irish tradition held that all sea animals were born from Otho's Beard.
The Irish and the lack of snakes in Ireland notwithstanding, there were snakes aboard the taller and faster ships. Clipper ships had a snake line, a line rove through grommets on the topmast shrouds. When the snake line was tensioned, it had the effect of reducing slack in the upper rigging.
As lowly as the snake is the worm. There were worms in every sailing vessel until relatively recently. Since this article is about Sailor Talk, I'm not talking about the Toredo worms that eat into wooden hulls. I'm talking about the process called "worm, parcel and serving". Shipboard ropes were made of twisted fiber. Anchor cables were made by twisting together several twisted fiber ropes. Almost all ropes and cables had to be protected from the elements to prevent rot. Some, such as anchor cables, had to be waterproofed, or they would rot when stored. The twisting of the fibers in the rope making process created deep groves in the ropes. These grooves were even deeper between ropes making up anchor cable. These grooves made the ropes difficult to weatherproof or waterproof. To reduce the size of the groves, marlin was laid into them. Once this was completed, the cable was wrapped with tarpaulin (tarred canvas) or leather depending on its intended use, then very tightly wound with more marlin. Laying marlin into the groves was called worming, and the marlin was the worm. Wrapping the cable with tarpaulin or leather was called parceling (is not a wrapped package called a parcel?), and the final windings was called serving.
By the way, the groves in twisted line had a special name. In these days of political correctness, they are called "cant lines". To find the real name used by the old time sailors, change the first vowel and you'll find a slang term for a part of the female anatomy.
Now we'll check out dolphins. The dolphin striker is a nickname for the martingale boom on the bow of a sailing vessel. As dolphins are known to play in the bow wave of boats, and the martingale boom is located such that it goes deep into the water as the bow falls, we can see how a sailor would give the martingale boom its nickname.
Dolphins are also pilings in a harbor to aid in mooring a boat. The earliest were highly decorated, most likely with dolphins.
And finally, by stretching things a bit we can look for that elusive sphinx, the mythical creature with the body of an animal and the head of a man. In the mid 1870s, a schooner yacht named Sphinx popped a new sail for a downwind leg of a race in the Solent and blew the competition away. The sail was shaped like a huge full bellied foresail. The competition claimed that the sail covered nearly an acre, calling it Sphinx's Acre. Practically overnight all the competition carried a similar sail. By the end of the decade the name was corrupted to spinnaker, the name we still use today.
That completes it for Sailor Talk that carried the names of animals. While I've been writing these articles, I've been collecting terms that don't seem to fit any particular category. These are terms like galley, stateroom, "a (fill in the blank) can ruin your whole day", slop chest, jury rig and rosebox. I'll cover those terms and more in the next article.
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