The Sailor's Word-Book / An Alphabetical Digest of Nautical Terms, including Some More Especially Military and Scientific, but Useful to Seamen; as well as Archaisms of Early Voyagers, etc.

by W. H. Smyth

SPARE SAILS. An obvious term. They should be pointed before stowing them away in the sail-room.

SPARLING. A name on the Lancashire coasts for the smelt (Osmerus eperlanus).

SPARTHE. An Anglo-Saxon term for a halbert or battle-axe.

SPAT. The spawn or ova of the oyster.

SPEAK A VESSEL, To. To pass within hail of her for that purpose.

SPECIFIC GRAVITY. The comparative weights of equal bulks of different bodies, water being generally represented as unity.

SPECK-BLOCKS. See [Flense].

SPECK-FALLS, or Purchase. Ropes rove through two large purchase-blocks at the mast-head of a whaler, and made fast to the blubber-guy, for hoisting the blubber from a whale.

SPECKTIONEER. The chief harpooner in a Greenland ship. He also directs the cutting operations in clearing the whale of its blubber and bones.

SPECTRUM. The variously coloured image into which a ray of light is divided on being passed through a prism.