Sailor Mouth Saturday: Break

While the word break generally makes lubbers think - when they think of the sea at all - of those rocks upon which the ocean waves so noisily crash, it has and had many more meanings to men and women who belong to the sea.

Breakers are indeed those reefs, rocks and so on that stop the mighty ocean waves, particularly at shallower points along the shore. Admiral Smyth describes this situation most poetically in The Sailor's Word Book:

... those billows which break violently over reefs, rocks, or shallows, lying immediately at, or under, the surface of the sea. They are distinguished both by their appearance and sound, as they cover that part of the sea with a perpetual foam, and produce loud roaring, very different from what the waves usually have over a deeper bottom. Also, a name given to those rocks which occasion the waves to break over them.

One imagines that, in a heavy sea, the rocks pictured above might become breakers. "Breakers ahead!" This call warns the helm of broken water in a ship's direct course.

A break water may be a natural bar or a man-made jetty or mole that protects a harbor or bay from the more violent roiling of the open ocean, thus keeping the ships there safe from being beaten up by waves and wind.

Breakers is also a term for the small barrels used to store water or other liquids, rum for instance. A crew might break such things out; breaking out meaning to pull up stores or cargo from stowage. Thus breakage was the empty spaces where nothing was stowed in a ship's hold. In ocean marine insurance, however, it is the part of the cargo that arrives damaged. Break bulk means to open and unload the hold of said cargo and can allude to the "disposal" of ill-gotten, perhaps piratical gains.

A sudden end to a deck's planking was called the break-beams. A break was the rise of a deck; the break of the poop was where that half-deck aft ended at its fore-point.

At sea, breaking ground means the beginning of the weighing process; breaking the anchor from the ground beneath the water. A ship may break sheer when she is forced toward her anchor rode, or sheer, by the wind.

A gale is said to break when it slows down and gives way to better weather. But the breaking of a gale can mean the mournful howling of the wind through shrouds and rigging. Those sailors familiar with the East Indies would speak of the "break-up of the monsoon", when winds would rage so violently as to literally break a ship caught off guard apart. A ship may break off her course when the wind is such that the direction intended cannot be maintained. Break off is also an order for a sailor or sailors to move swiftly from one chore to another.

A man is said to break liberty when he does not return to his mess after shore leave. To break a man is to "deprive him of his commission, warrant, or rating by court-martial." To break up a ship is to dismantle her when her parts are worth more to the service than she is. All of these instances may be a very sad time indeed.

And that is all for today, Brethren. Fair winds, following seas and full tankards to y'all!

Header: A Maine Windjammer from Isa Bella's Pics via Naval Architecture

Sailor Mouth Saturday: From Arm To Zulu

We're changing SMS up today because nothing is worse than a lack of deviation. At least in my opinion. So here, for your consideration, if a curious list from A Mariner's Miscellany by Peter H. Spectre. These are words that may be familiar to any lubber, but their meaning at sea might leave him or her scratching their land-bound head.

Arm: the portion of an anchor between the crown and the flukes.
Bank: a shoal which is full of enough deep water to navigate a ship through.
Caboose: a cook station on the deck of a sailing ship.
Dead head: a spar or log, usually floating on end, which is mostly submerged and therefore a dangerous obstacle to navigation.
Earing: a line used to bend a sail to a spar.
Fox: a group of rope yarns twisted together.
Groin: a breakwater.
Hog: that unfortunate state of a badly constructed vessel where her bow and stern drop down while her wait rises up.
Indian head: a type of New England fishing schooner first seen around 1900.
Jackass: a canvas bag filled with oakum and stuffed into the hawsehole to make it watertight.
Kid: a tub for serving out soups and stews.
Leech: the after side of a fore-and-aft sail or the outer sides of a square sail.
Mole: a man made breakwater, usually constructed of masonry, and used as a landing for ships.
Nose: the stem of a vessel.
Ordinary: naval term for a vessel that is not sailing and laid up in port, but still in commission.
Pea: the point of an anchor's palm.
Quarter: the side section of a vessel from the aftermost chainplate to the stern. Thus "the wind on her quarter." This should not be confused with the quarterdeck, which is the raised deck at the aft of most ships without a poop.
Roach: the curve in the side of a sail.
Sheets: lines used to control the sails.
Throat: the part of a gaff nearest to the mast.
Up: the position of the helm which allows the vessel to fall off the wind.
Vast!: short for avast; an order to stop as in "Vast fighting!"
Whack: a sailors food ration.
Yankee: a jib topsail. Probably so called because of its development by colonial sailors.
Zulu: a lug-rigged fishing boat used on the coast of Scotland.

There; a whole flock of useful words from one SMS courtesy of that expert in all things seafaring, Mr. Spectre.

Header: A Ship in Storm by an unknown artist via my good mates at Under The Black Flag's Facebook page

Sailor Mouth Saturday: Up

With the season upon us, and a New Year up for grabs, it seems there is no place to go but up. Or so we would like to think. Up is quite the popular word at sea, so let us take a look at it today.

"Up-and-down!" This is a call that would have been familiar on just about any ship of the Golden Age of Sail. They would all have some type of anchor or at least a kedge, after all. Up-and-down indicates the position of the cable when the ship, by the force of drawing in her anchor via a capstan or other like method, is situated directly over that anchor. This is the step before the anchor comes clean of the water and, once that is accomplished, the call of "Clean and dry for weighing!" might be heard.

Up and down can also refer to tackle. In this case it speaks to any combinations of same that will pull sails, anchors or payloads up or down.

Topgallant masts, topmasts and royal masts were sometimes referred to as upper masts. As Admiral Smyth notes, "any spars above these are termed poles." Upper works are the parts of a ship that stand above the water as she goes. The upper counter, or counter, lies between the transom and the railing, and the upper deck is, of course, the highest continuous deck on a ship.

The so called upper transit is spoken of in navigation. From The Sailor's Word Book:

The passage of a circumpolar star over the meridian above the pole...

Up is often part of an order, as one might reasonably imagine. Here is a by no means complete list of what you might hear in such regard aboard any ship from pirate schooner to 74 gun man-of-war:

Up anchor! To weigh the anchor; as Admiral Smyth notes, "every man to his station."

Up boats! Hoist the ship's boats to their davits, most probably in preparation for getting under weigh.

Up courses! Haul up the sails hanging on the lower yards: mainsail, foresail, mizzen et cetera.

Up her helm! Put the bow of the ship to windward. Also sometimes spoken as "Put her a-weather!" In such case it should be remembered that the rudder will need to answer to leeward to accomplish this maneuver.

I hope your mood is up, as is my tankard to honor all the Brethren. Huzzah!

Header: Two Ships at Anchor by Andries van Eertvelt via Under the Black Flag on Facebook

Tools of the Trade: Preparing for Battle

...Should time allow, preparation of a ship for action should follow the usual recommendations. Send topgallant masts and yards on deck, as well as all running rigging that can be spared, studding sail booms, topgallant rigging, wet the sails, get down fore and mizzen topsail yards, house the topmasts, lash them to the lower masts. Pass a hawser round outside the rigging ready for frapping in a wreck, grapnels on each quarter to prevent any gear fouling the stern, snake the stays and backstays, toggle the braces, yards braced sharp up, anchors lashed, boom boats ready for hoisting out, bowsprit and jibboom run in, spare wheel ropes rove, relieving tackles on, preventer stays on the masts, etc.

~ from A Midshipman's Manual c 1811, author unknown

Header: Pirates Watching a Ship Burn by Norman Mills Price via American Gallery

Sailor Mouth Saturday: Hove

According to our old friend Webster's, the word hove is either the alternative past tense and past participle of heave or an obscure word meaning to rise, to swell or to cause to rise or swell. Take your pick. At sea, though the term does have a bit of those definition's ring, hove is its own word all together.

When a ship is hove out she is ready for careening. In some cases this is referred to as careened or hove down. In this position, she is heeled on her side not necessarily for careening but for repairs as well. She may also land in a hove down position when wrecked, as in the above painting. A ship is hove up when she is brought into cradles on the docks and hove off when she is suspended completely above ground. She is hove keel out when she is virtually on her side at sea, with her keel above the water.

A ship is hove in stays when in the process of going about. Hove in sight means the ship's anchor is in view, but it can also mean that a sail has been spotted. Hove short indicates a taught anchor cable while hove well short refers to a ship drawn to her anchor be the action of men at her capstan.

Hove to, perhaps the most familiar sounding term of this batch, is synonymous with heaving to; i.e., the ship decelerating and coming to a halt at sea. Admiral Smyth makes a good point about this turn of phrase in The Sailor's Word Book:

It is curious to observe that seamen have retained an old word which has otherwise been long disused. It occurs in Grafton's Chronicle, where the mayor and aldermen of London, in 1256, understanding that Henry III was coming to Westminster from Windsor, went to Knightsbridge, "and hoved there to salute the king."

The term in this instance had nothing to do with seafaring. It simply described public figures waiting to see their King. Seamen, in some cases to this day, continue to use hove to or hoved to mean stopping.

Hovellers were boatmen or pilots, usually unlicensed, in the Cinque-Ports regions of England. Though they were, in theory, only ferrying people from ship to shore or piloting larger ships through dangerous shoals, much of their business was illegal. They engaged in the plundering of wrecked ships and in smuggling. In fact the act of smuggling was often referred to as hovering during the Tudor and Stuart eras.

With that, I'll hove to and wish all the Brethren a fair Saturday.

Header: The Wreckers by Charles Henry Gifford via American Gallery

History: New Finds Tell New Stories

For archaeologists studying maritime history, the lack of extant artifacts can be a massive frustration. Most of what our ancestors’ ships were made of – wood, rope, canvas and so on – was destined to deteriorate and disappear. Although an abundance of ship remains from the early modern era forward do exist, it is a rare thing to find a pre-modern or ancient ship in tact. Besides cargo in the form of things like pottery and metal, one vestige of almost any ship that can be relied on to stand the test of time is its anchor.


Two recent finds in the Middle East have proven that fact once again.

First, off the coast of Israel at the resort town of Bat Yam, lifeguards on the beach found three very old, encrusted anchors submerged in clear, shallow waters not far from where locals and tourists regularly frolic in the Mediterranean. According to this article at English News online, the anchors are similar in shape and size, approximately 300 kg (660 lbs) and 2 meters (6 and a half feet) tall, and between 1,700 and 1,400 years old. The lifeguards reported their find to the Israeli Antiquities Authority who immediately, and no doubt thankfully, recovered them for study. As the article notes, the area is full of ancient artifacts which are often appropriated by those who find them rather than being turned over to authorities.

IAA archaeologist Dror Felner speculated that a port may have existed near modern Bat Yam in Byzantine times, which until now was unknown. He points up another possibility very familiar to sailors: a vessel may have anchored in an uninhabited harbor when faced with dirty weather, hoping to ride out a storm. The fact that the ancient port of Jaffa was not far from the location where the anchors were found certainly makes either theory plausible.

Next, this piece at Novinite.com gives a short but tantalizing summation of an interesting find in the Black Sea. Off the coast of Sozopol, Bulgaria marine archaeologists found “beautifully ornamented” stone anchors. The anchors have two holes which, according to the article, were drilled for the anchor rope and a wooden stick. The importance of the stick is not mentioned but one imagines it was put in place either to catch hold of the sea floor or to aid in retrieving the anchor from the water, or both.

The anchors are 200 kg (440 lbs) and the article says they were:

… used for 150-200-ton ships that transported mainly wheat, but also dried and salted fish, skins, timber and metals from what now is Bulgaria’s coast.

Current speculation about the origin of the anchors is really the interesting part of this story, aside from their design of course. According to the piece the anchors appear to be “Creto-Mycanaean, Phoenician or Carian” and date to between the 15th and 12th centuries BCE. In what seems a significant leap of scholarly faith, the article goes on to say:

The anchors are also said to show that the Trojan war may have started because of excise duties imposed by the Trojans, who took advantage of their control over the Dardanelles – and not because of Helen of Troj [sic].

Who actually posited this theory is not revealed in the article, but it is certainly something for those with an historical appetite to chew on. As so many who study mute testaments to our collective history have imagined about a million little pieces of past lives, if only these anchors could talk.

Header: Black Sea anchor via sott.net

Sailor Mouth Saturday: Kedge

A kedge, as the Brethren are well aware, is a small anchor. Anything said of that most useful of ship’s accoutrements can also be said of a kedge. But, just as he is in the deep blue sea, so the Devil is in the details. Let’s shine a light on those, shall we?


In general usage, a kedge is thrown over the side to keep a ship clear of her bower anchor while she is in port. This is of particular concern when the tide is coming in or going out. A kedge anchor is also the go-to tool when the need arises to warp a ship out from one place to another, usually in port but also when the wind is unfavorable or nonexistent. The anchor, attached to a hawser, is rowed out to a point in the general direction one wants the ship to move. The kedge is then dropped and the ship is dragged toward it by means of the capstan, a windless or by men running along the length of the deck with hawser in hand. This last is probably the action that gave the kedge its name as kedg in Old English meant to move or run briskly and was the name of an Anglo-Saxon dance. Used as a verb, to kedge or kedging is this act of warping a ship out via a kedge.

A kedge rope, it probably goes without saying, is any such attached to or used with a kedge. Thus we also have a kedge cable or a kedge hawser.

Kedge anchors were particularly handy on small ships as they could usually be broken down for storage. In the 18th and early 19th century, this was done by means of an iron stock which unscrewed from the top and bottom. Later kedge anchors had joints that allowed them to be folded at various points.

Most interesting of all, at least to me, is the nautical term kedger. A person is said to be a kedger when he is both mean and nosey. As The Sailor’s Word Book puts it, such a man is “…in everybody’s mess but in no one’s watch.” This may be the origin of our modern word codger, a disagreeably grumpy person.

Happy Saturday, Brethren; may the wind and weather be with you all.

Header: Ships Entering Portsmouth, artist unknown, c 1798

Tools Of The Trade: Anchors Aweigh

Ah, anchors. They seem like straight forward tools. In fact, they originally were. The early Sea People (our old pirate friends) and even the technically advanced Ancient Egyptians originally used heavy rocks as anchors. Anything big you can wrap a rope (and later, a chain) around can technically be used to hold a boat relatively still.

Be that as it may, all one has to do is read an O’Brian novel and the terms for that simple anchor lose their simplicity all together. How, in fact, does one tell a kedge from the best bower? Or, for that matter the best from the small bower? Actually, what seems maddening on the face of it is deceptively simple. An anchor really is an anchor, after all.

Anchors are first referred to in writing in Ancient Greece. The poets referred to the anchors as dentes; teeth. No one is really sure where the reference came from but it may have to do with the fact that Greek anchors had only one fluke. The fluke is the curved piece at the bottom of the anchor that appears to have a flipper at the end. Greek anchors more closely resembled modern fluke or Danforth anchors that look like a plow and set nicely into the seabed. All Greek mono and bireme ships, and later Roman triremes, had several anchors for use in various seabeds and weathers. Each ship carried one very large anchor that was reserved for storms and nasty lee shores and was known as the sacra. From this, the Catholic Church brought forth sacram anchram solvere – the anchor of last refuge.

Anchors similar to the type we are most familiar with, as shown at the header, developed in the Iron Age and changed very little until 1801. In that year a clerk in the Royal Navy, Richard Pering, began playing around with the general design and came up with what became known as a Rodger’s anchor. Introduced for use in 1813, the eventual Rodger’s anchor had curved rather than straight flukes and arms at the top that pivoted on a bolt. These innovations made retrieval immensely easier than it had been previously saving navies a sizeable amount of money in lost iron. Rodger’s anchors, named after Royal Navy Lieutenant Rodger who added the pivot to Pering’s design, were in almost universal use by 1870.

As with Greek and Roman ships, the ships of the Great Age of sail carried a number of anchors. The larger the ship the more anchors in fact, particularly because a certain number of anchors lost was considered a cost of doing business. The most common anchors carried, from pirate schooner to 900 man ship of the line were as follows:

Bower-Anchors: There were two bower-anchors, the best and the small. The names have nothing to do with use or size but are simply indigenous to the lingua of sailing. The best bower rested (or, in seaman’s terms, was “catted”) on the outward starboard bow while the small was catted on the larboard (now port) bow.

Kedge: A small anchor used primarily to steady a ship and keep her clear of her bower-anchors in port or to warp a ship from one part of a harbor, bay or inlet to another without the need to set sail. Kedges could be partially dismantled or folded, making them easy to stow aboard.

Sheet and Spare: Reserved for large ships, these anchors were catted outward behind the foremast. These were assistance anchors that allowed more security and less strain on the bows when using the best and small bowers, particularly in high seas.

Smaller ships such as pirogues or periaugers and boats might use kedges or grapnels, depending on the size of the ship and the anchor.

This is, of necessity, a very general overview. How anchors work, their various modern types, and the many amazing things that can be done with a ship at anchor (warping is just the beginning) are subjects for another time. Until then remember Brethren: anchors aweigh is the signal to weigh, or pull up, the anchor. Drop anchor is the opposite. I told you it was simple.

Sailor Mouth Saturday: Foul

Foul is a word much loved at sea. Most people are familiar with foul weather and any seaman knows both the significance of the fouled anchor as a symbol (as on the place setting above) or it's pure annoyance as an actual happening. No one likes an anchor with her cable wrapped around her and who ever is to blame for that will never hear the end of it.

But there are other kinds of fouling at sea as well. A ship may run foul of another meaning that the rigging of one is entangled with the other. Ships anchored too closely may swing foul of one another with wind or tide. In this case, they are in a foul berth.

Foul air below decks is something to be guarded against and has been blamed for many an epidemic aboard ship. A crewman might receive a foul bill from the ship's surgeon, meaning that he is in some way physically or mentally unfit to serve; his bill of health is foul.

A foul wind blows a ship off her course. A foul coast is full of reefs, corals and ripping tides that can chew an ill-handled ship to shreds.

A foul bottom is a ship's hull encrusted with seaweeds and crustaceans that keep the ship from handling well and moving at top speed. Time for a careening. Foul bottom might also indicate a rocky sea floor which risks fouling the anchor. Another term for either of these is foul ground.

The Gulf Stream, too, can be foul. She is called a foul-weather breeder because of her propensity to cause hurricanes in the Atlantic. Finally, I shall simply mention that the Gulf herself is now unfortunately fouled thanks to exceedingly poor planning. The kind any seaman would deplore.

On another note, if you've an interest in the beautiful place setting above, you can purchase it today at The Pirates Lair here. I would in a heart beat, but it's a little beyond my means just now.

Happy Saturday, Brethren. See you tomorrow for Seafaring Sunday.

Tools of the Trade: You Wouldn't Want That to Happen

Here in the US today is an iconic day. Labor Day. A celebration of America's workforce and, traditionally, the last day of summer. Time for one more trip to the State Fair, one last cook out and one final warm night of star gazing. As the old sailors adage goes, Oh! That it were ever September.

So, with that in mind, I thought I'd mention an iconic sailing image and how odd it is that such a thing would be so iconic in the first place. The "foul anchor", an example of which is seen above on a piece of French copper, is one of the most recognizable nautical symbols around. It is used routinely in naval and merchant insignia - in fact, I still have my Dad's foul anchor pin from his time in the Merchant Marines, may he rest in peace. The symbol represents an anchor around which the rode - either rope or chain - to which it is attached has wrapped.

Although lovely to look at in representational form, there's a good reason why such an anchor is known as "foul". The entangled anchor is a pure nightmare for seaman. The anchor fouled by rope or chain loses its holding power, allowing the ship to drift. Retrieving the anchor is difficult at best and sometimes impossible. More than one cable has snapped and the anchor lost for fouling. This is an expensive proposition for the ship and frequently cause for disciplinary action on those responsible. Generally speaking, sailors see an anchor fouled as a sign of inattention to duty and just plain poor seamanship. Nobody likes a bad seaman, after all.

Enjoy the holiday, my American Brethren. Keep your anchor clear of rode, and smooth sailing to one and all.