It has been suggested that “knot,” the sailor’s word for the nautical mile, springs from the small pieces of knotted stuff, called knots, inserted in the log-line for marking the progress of a ship through the water. It is worth noting, however, that in the old “Voyages” the word knot, as signifying a mile, never occurs. It seems reasonable to suppose that it is a word not much older than the close of the last century.
Amongst puzzling changes in the sea-language must be classed the names of vessels. “Yacht” has been variously defined: as “a small ship for carrying passengers;” as “a vessel of state.” The term is now understood to mean a pleasure craft. “Yawl” was formerly a small ship’s boat or a wherry: it has become the exclusive title of yachts rigged as cutters, but carrying also a small sail at the stern, called a mizzen. The “barge” was a vessel of state, furnished with sumptuous cabins, and canopies and cushions, decorated with flags and streamers, and propelled by a band of rowers. This hardly answers to the top-sail barges and dumb-barges of to-day! The word “bark” has been Gallicized into “barque,” possibly as a marine protest against the mis-application as shown in these lines of Byron—
“My boat is on the shore,
And my bark is on the sea;”
Or the—
“My bark is my bride!”
of the sea-song. By bark the poets intend any kind of ship you please: but to Jack it implies a particular rig. The Americans write “bark” for “barque,” and rightly; for though Falconer says that “bark is a general name given to small ships,” he also adds: “It is, however, peculiarly appropriated by seamen to those which carry three masts without a mizzen top-sail.” The “pink” is another craft that has “gone over.” Her very narrow stern supplied the name, pink having been used in the sense of small, as by Shakespeare, who speaks of “pink-eyne,” small eye. The “tartan,” likewise, belongs to the past as a rig: a single mast, lateen yard and bowsprit. The growth of our ancestors’ “frigott,” too, into the fire-eating Saucy Arethusas of comparatively recent times, is a story full of interest.
I have but skimmed a surface whose depths should honestly repay careful and laborious dredging. The language of the sea has entered so largely into common and familiar speech ashore,[[45]] that the philologist who neglects the mariner’s talk will struggle in vain in his search after a mass of paternities, derivatives, and the originals, and even the sense, of many every-day expressions. It is inevitable that a maritime nation should enlarge its shore vocabulary by sea terms. The eloquence of the forecastle is of no mean order, and in a hundred directions Jack’s expressions are matchless for brevity, sentiment and suggestion. But the origin and rise of the marine tongue is also the origin and rise of the British navy, and of the fleets which sail under the red ensign. The story of the British ship may be followed in the maritime glossaries, and perception of the delicate shades and lights, of the subtleties, niceties and discriminations of the ocean dialect is a revelation of the mysteries of the art of the shipwright, and the profession of the seaman.
[45]. Take as a single example the expression “The devil to pay.” To “pay” is to pour melted pitch into a seam for the purposes of caulking. The “devil” is a name given by caulkers to a particular seam hard to get at. Hence, “There is the devil to pay, and no pitch hot.”