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

BUNT-GASKET. See [Gasket].

BUNTING. A name on our southern shores for the shrimp.

BUNTING, or Buntin. A thin woollen stuff, of which the ship's colours, flags, and signals are usually made.

BUNT-JIGGER. A small gun-tackle purchase, of two single blocks, one fitted with two tails, used in large vessels for bowsing up the bunt of a sail when furling: a peculiar combination of two points, fitted to a spar to which it is hooked.

BUNTLINE-CLOTH. The lining sewed up the fore-part of the sail in the direction of the buntline to prevent that rope from chafing the sail.

BUNTLINE-CRINGLE. An eye worked into the bolt-rope of a sail, to receive a buntline. This is only in top-gallant sails, and is seldom used now. In the merchant service all buntlines are generally passed through an eyelet-hole in the sail, and clinched round its own part.

BUNTLINES. Ropes attached to the foot-ropes of top-sails and courses, which, passing over and before the canvas, turn it up forward, and thus disarm the force of the wind; at one-third from each clue, eyelet-holes are worked in the canvas, and by grummets passed through, a toggle is secured on both bights: to this buntline-toggle the buntline attaches by an eye or loop. When the sails are loosed to dry, the bowlines, unbent from the bridles, are attached to these toggles, and haul out the sails by the foot-ropes like table-cloths. The buntline is rove through a block at the mast-head, passes through the buntline span attached to the tye-blocks on the yard to retain them in the bunt, or amidships, down before all, and looped to the toggles aforesaid. By aid of the clue-lines, reef-tackles, and buntlines, a top-sail is taken in or quieted if the sheets carry away, but more especially by the buntlines, as the wind has no hold then to belly the canvas.

BUNTLINE-SPANS. Short pieces of rope with a thimble in one end, the other whipped; the buntlines are rove through these thimbles: they are attached to the tie-blocks to keep the sail in the bunt when hauled up.

BUNTLINE-TOGGLES. See [Buntlines] and [Toggle].

BUNT SLAB-LINES. Reeve through a block on the slings of the yard or under the top, and pass abaft the sail, making fast to its foot. Their object is to lift the foot of a course so as to see underneath it, or to prevent it from chafing. Something of the same kind is used for top-sails, to keep them from rubbing on the stays when flapping in a calm.