The well-worked ship, the gallant fight,
The lov’d commander’s praise!
Will Watch has flung down his hanger and pistols, and appears in the more amiable and less hazardous part of a ship’s steward, a lascar, a foremast seaman, with a few pounds of cigars in his shirt or a cube of honeydew under his bunk boards. The coastguard, it is true, still keeps a look-out; but if it were not for the gardens and lawn-tennis grounds which his superior officer sets him to work upon, he would find his calling very dull and uneventful.
SEA PHRASES.
“The sea-language,” says Sir William Monson in his “Naval Tracts,” “is not soon learned, and much less understood, being only proper to him that has served his apprenticeship; besides that, a boisterous sea and stormy weather will make a man not bred to it so sick that it bereaves him of legs, stomach, and courage so much as to fight with his meat; and in such weather, when he hears the seamen cry starboard or port, or to bide aloof,[[33]] or flat a sheet, or haul home a clew-line, he thinks he hears a barbarous speech, which he conceives not the meaning of.” This is as true now as then. But the landsman is not to blame. There is no dialect peculiar to a calling so crowded with strange words as the language of the sea. Dr. Samuel Johnson, who is never more diverting than when he thunders forth his abhorrence of naval life and of sailors as a community of persons, has in some cases perpetuated, and in some cases created, the most ludicrous errors regarding ships, their furniture and crews. If, as Macaulay declares, the Doctor was at the mercy of Junius and Skinner in many of his shore-going derivatives, he was equally at the mercy of Bailey and Harris when he came to the ocean. A few samples will suffice.
[33]. “Keep your luff!”
“Topgallant, the highest sail.” “Topsail, the highest sail.” The word topgallant, as Johnson prints it, is not a sail at all. Had Johnson defined the “topgallant-sail” as the highest sail, he would have been right; for in his day there was no canvas set above the topgallant yard. But it is manifest that if the “topgallant-sail” was the highest sail, the top-sail could not be the highest too. “Tiller, the rudder of a boat.” The proverbial schoolboy knows better than that. “Shrouds, the sail-ropes. It seems to be taken sometimes for the sails.” It is hardly necessary to say that the shrouds have nothing whatever to do with the sails. They are ropes—in Johnson’s day of hemp, in our time of wire—for the support of lower, top, and topgallant masts. “Sheets.” This word he correctly defines, borrowing his definition from a dictionary. But he adds, “Dryden seems to understand it otherwise;” and quotes—
“Fierce Boreas drove against his flying sails,
And rent the sheets.”