By Captain Ray
Published: April, 2008
Anthropologists believe humans have been sailing intentionally for about 7,000 years, and there may well have been unintentional voyages before that.
Through the ages, a wonderfully rich and colorful vernacular has evolved around sailing in many languages. In English, many of these idioms have found their way ashore and are used in everyday speech, often without any awareness of their nautical origins. Here are a few examples of what I mean:
• The evolutionary peak of the sailing ship was the full rigged ship. This was a sailing vessel that had three masts, each mast having three yards—the horizontal poles from which the sails hung. This is the likely origin of the expression the whole nine yards.
• A full rigged ship had almost 300 different pieces of rope that moved and were used to raise, lower, and adjust the sails. Collectively, these were called the running rigging. This was in addition to the myriad of shrouds and stays that didn’t move—called the standing rigging—but just held everything up. When novice sailors learned the location and use of all these lines, they were promoted to able-bodied seamen. They were said to know the ropes, while their slower shipmates were still learning the ropes.
• If a square rigged ship anticipated a rapid departure, the sails would be secured to the yards with a light expendable line. When the time came for that hurried exit, these lines would be cut, and the sails would drop and fill with wind. The expression cut and run came ashore to mean any hasty or disorderly departure.
• On sailing vessels, the lines that control sails are called sheets. One end of the sheet is tied to the sail; the other is either pulled in or eased out to adjust the sail to the changing wind. If this inboard end of the sheet is lost, the sail blows out into the wind like a giant flag and provides no power to the boat. If this happens to one or two sails, the vessel is still able to be controlled, but by the time there are three sheets to the wind, the vessel may well be out of control.
• Until very recently it was impossible for a ship to sail into the wind. If a ship accidentally sailed past its destination, that port would have to be skipped. Similarly, if something fell off the ship while she was underway, it could not be recovered once it was past the stern. These missed opportunities were said to have gone by the boards.
• In the days of the sailing navy, cannonballs were stacked in a pyramid near each gun. To keep them in place as the ship rolled, these stacks were built up on top of a molded metal plate called a monkey. With the cannonballs made of iron and the monkey made of brass, the two metals would contract at different rates as temperatures dropped. Sometimes it got cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey.
Just imagine local villagers—people who had never been more than a few miles from where they were born—listening to the conversations of blue-water sailors. These colorful turns of phrase and interesting expressions must have seemed like a foreign language to them! We’ll examine a few more in another column.
Ray Wichmann,
is a US SAILING-certified Ocean Passagemaking Instructor, a US SAILING Instructor Trainer, and a member of US SAILING’s National Faculty. He holds a 100-Ton Master’s License, was a charter skipper in Hawai’i for 15 years, and has sailed on both coasts of the United States, in Mexico, the Caribbean, and Greece. He is presently employed as the Master Instructor at OCSC Sailing in the Berkeley Marina.
