CLERK. Any naval officer doing the duty of a clerk.
CLETT. A northern or Erse word to express a rock broken from a cliff, as the holm in Orkney and Shetland.
CLEUGH. A precipice, a cliff. Also, a ravine or cleft.
CLEW. Of a hammock or cot. (See [Clue].)
CLICKS. Small pieces of iron falling into a notched wheel attached to the winches in cutters, &c., and thereby serving the office of pauls. (See [Ratchet, or Ratchet-paul], in machinery.) It more peculiarly belongs to inferior clock-work, hence click.
CLIFF [from the Anglo-Saxon cleof]. A precipitous termination of the land, whatever be the soil. (See [Crag].)
CLIMATE. Formerly meant a zone of the earth parallel to the equator, in which the days are of a certain length at the summer solstice. The term has now passed to the physical branch of geography, and means the general character of the weather.
CLINCH. A particular method of fastening large ropes by a half hitch, with the end stopped back to its own part by seizings; it is chiefly to fasten the hawsers suddenly to the rings of the kedges or small anchors; and the breechings of guns to the ring-bolts in the ship's side. Those parts of a rope or cable which are clinched. Thus the outer end is "bent" by the clinch to the ring of the anchor. The inner or tier-clinch in the good old times was clinched to the main-mast, passing under the tier beams (where it was unlawfully, as regards the custom of the navy, clinched). Thus "the cable runs out to the clinch," means, there is no more to veer.—To clinch is to batter or rivet a bolt's end upon a ring or piece of plate iron; or to turn back the point of a nail that it may hold fast. (See [Clench].)
CLINCH A BUSINESS, To. To finish it; to settle it beyond further dispute, as the recruit taking the shilling.
CLINCH-BUILT. Clinker, or overlapping edges.