Belaying-pins.—Bars of iron or hard wood to which running rigging may be secured or belayed. Belaying-pins, from their handiness and peculiar club-shape, are sometimes used as bludgeons.
Bloody.—An intensive derived from the substantive ‘blood,’ a name applied to the Bucks, Scowrers, and Mohocks of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Blue Peter.—A blue and white flag hoisted at the fore-trucks of ships about to sail.
Bollard.—From bōl or bole, the round trunk of a tree. A phallic or ‘sparklet’-shaped ornament of the dockside, of assistance to mariners in warping into or out of dock.
Bonded Jacky.—Negro-head tobacco or sweet cake.
Bull of Barney.—A beast mentioned in an unquotable sea-proverb.
Bumpkin.—An iron bar (projecting out-board from the ship’s side) to which the lower and topsail brace blocks are sometimes hooked.
Cape Horn fever.—The illness proper to malingerers.
Catted.—Said of an anchor when weighed and secured to the ‘cat-head.’
Chanty.—A song sung to lighten labour at the capstan sheets, and halliards. The soloist is known as the chanty-man, and is usually a person of some authority in the fo’c’s’le. Many chanties are of great beauty and extreme antiquity.