Garbling the Cargo

Many nautical expressions and descriptions passed into the [English] language - ‘the bitter end’, for example, which was the inboard end of an anchor cable. When it came on to blow, if the anchor dragged the only chance of setting it again was to pay out more cable, but there was only so much: eventually one came to the bitter end.

A ship was ‘taken aback’ when the wind was the wrong side of the sails and yards, pressing them back against the mast and trying to force the ship astern, instead of ahead. For a ship it was a dangerous situation which, in a strong wind, could smash the yards or even send the masts crashing. A dowager finding her daughter in a compromising situation with the newly arrived young curate would, similarly, be taken aback.

‘Brace up’ (trimming the yards so that the sails drew better), ‘cut and run’ (cutting the anchor cable and sailing off in a hurry), ‘put about’ (to tack, altering course by at least 130 degrees and thus making a considerable change in direction), ‘scuppered’ (in battle, when the dead and wounded at the guns were hurriedly put in the scuppers out of the way), ‘square up’ (when the bosun made sure the yards were squre after the ship anchored), ‘by and large’ (‘by the wind’ means going to windward; ‘large’ is off the wind, or running), are expressions which the sailor’s brother on shore understood and adapted to his own use, so that they and dozens are part of the language today.

Many others which were common in Nelson’s time are less popular today: ‘at loggerheads’ (a loggerhead was a solid iron ball with a long handle which was heated in the galley fire and then used to keep warm the pitch used to to pay deck seams, and was sometimes used as a weapon by quarrelling men), ‘try out his metal’ (‘metal’ was another word for guns: the surest way of testing the enemy’s strength was to get within range of his guns), ‘cut a fine feather’ (said of a ship which was sailing well, her bow wave looking like a white feather).

A seaman travelling in a coach was likely to ask a fellow traveller, ‘Caulk or yarn?’, meaning ‘Do you want to sleep or shall we talk?’ In describing an easterly gale (which tends to be long-lasting in northern Europe), he might say it was ‘going on forever, like the blacksmith’s bellows’. His ship was, no doubt, ‘snug as a duck in a ditch, never straining as much as a rope-yarn aloft and as tight as a bottle below’. After the gale the sea could be ‘as smooth as Poll Patterson’s tongue’.

In a reference to sail trimming on board his ship - the sheet being the rope holding the lower corner - he would boast: ‘Give her a foot o’the sheet and she’d go along like a witch.’ Praising his captain, and referring to the fact that a man to be flogged was tied to a wooden grating which was taken from on top of a hatch and lashed up vertically, he would remark that it ‘went against his grain to seize a grating up’. He would inspect the piece of tobacco he had been chewing for hours and remark sadly, ‘This is the fourth watch that this chew of baccy has been overhauled by my toothless gums, and now it’s as dry as a haddock.’

Just as ‘north’ meant neat rum and ‘west’ meant water, with anywhere in between indicating the dilution of the drink, so ‘southerly’ meant empty, and a seaman was likely to tell the mess cook, ‘Lock up the bread barge or we’ll soon have a southerly wind in it.’ A rope (especially if it had been coiled up neatly) could be ‘as long as today and tomorrow’, while an impatient man would be told that ‘what you lose on one tack you gain on t’other’.
Dutch ships tended to be very beamy, with rounded, apple-cheeked bows, so that a plump woman was ‘Dutch built’. When anyone was buried at sea, the body lashed in a hammock was slid over the side from a plank lashed temporarily at the point where one end of the foresheet (the ‘standing part’) was secured to the ship’s side, so that another expression for dying, in addition to ‘losing the number of your mess’, was ‘to go over the standing part of the foresheet’.

A depraved character could be ‘a gallows man’. Another person could be ‘so thin he could get under the lee of a rope yarn’, while ‘his coat fits him like a purser’s shirt on a handspike’. The purser’s assistant was usually ‘Jack in the bread room’, or ‘Jack in the dust’; the cook’s mate was nicknamed ‘Jack nasty-face’. A liar was usually ‘Tom Pepper’, a man with a hot tongue, while putting out the lantern or blowing out a candle was ‘topping the glim’, a phrase also used for executions. A man who was dangerously ill was ‘dragging his anchors for t’other world’.

‘Hold on too long’ is another nautical phrase in common use on land, and refers to shortening sail too late: ‘holding on too long to his topsails’, for instance. ‘No great shakes’, meaning of no great value, comes from the casks. When they were empty they were to be taken to pieces (‘shaken’) so that they could be stowed in as small a space as possible, and the parts were called shakes (the general word for the staves and the hoops). A ‘well set up’ young man was a common phrase but first referred to a ship’s rigging. The process of tightening or slackening the rigging to get the masts straight is called ‘setting it up’.

The Irish came in for a lot of teasing from the English, with a hole in the sail being a ‘Paddy’s reef’, an ‘Irish pendant’ a loose rope’s end (and sometimes one that was frayed and needed a whipping), and an ‘Irish hurricane’ was a calm. The Dutch, too ,came in for their share - a ship sailing along with sails badly trimmed was ‘jogging along, Dutch fashion’.

‘Press into service’ followed on the press gang, while ‘a clean sweep’ was something the sea did when it swept right over the deck. ‘Giving someone a wide berth’ came from anchoring far enough away from another ship so that they did not hit each other when they swung with wind or tide.

‘A roving commission’ was one granted to a captain which allowed him to cruise at will, while the meanings of ‘clear the deck’, ‘get one’s bearings’, ‘all in the same boat’, ‘stick your oar in’ and ‘even keel’ are obvious.

Some phrases with less obvious meanings include ‘hand over hand’ (the method of hauling on a rope), and ‘eat my hat’ (a sailor kept a quid of chewing tobacco in his hat; if he ran out of tobacco he would take out the lining - which was soaked in tobacco juice - and chew that).

‘Off and on’ described a ship beating along a coast, while ‘in the doldrums’ referred to a ship becalmed in the area between weather systems, the Doldrums or Horse Latitudes, where the wind was light. ‘Touch and go’ referred to a ship grounding and getting off, her keel touching the bottom. ‘On an even keel’ meant that provisions had been stowed so that the weights did not make the ship heel one way or the other, nor be down by the bow or stern.
‘Tide over’ was used when a ship took advantage of a tide (strictly speaking the tidal stream) to help reach a position in time. ‘Buoyed up’ came from using a buoy to lift up the bight of an anchor cable to prevent it chafing on a rough bottom. ‘Garbling’ was nefariously mixing rubbish with cargo, making it an excellent word to describe distorted or incomplete messages. A ‘first-rate’ ship was one with more than 98 guns, while sceond- and third-rate were progressively smaller, down to sixth-rate. ‘Another shot in the locker’, ‘stemming a tide’ and ‘sweeping into a room’ (sweeps were oars, used in small ships in a calm) were nautical phrases which fitted into the landman’s language.