English Nautical Vocabulary 1295-1831

My work for the OED has been primarily in two areas: nautical and related terminology, and North American tribal names. I offer here a few examples from my readings in nautical history; an article dealing with tribal names will appear in a future issue.

I have long been fascinated by words, and in my work as a stevedoring superintendent, my curiosity about nautical language was piqued by my contact with Greek sailors. A growing acquaintance with Modern Greek nautical language revealed the pervasive influence of Italian terminology, and I gradually learned the historical importance of nautical lexical exchange throughout the Mediterranean.

In my studies, I accumulated a large amount of Mediterranean nautical material which I believed would constitute a valuable dictionary if it could be assembled properly. Though that goal has not been achieved, I was pleased to make contact with the OED when I wrote to Edmund Weiner asking whether he would be interested in data that would shed some Mediterranean light on a few English etymologies. I soon found myself doing maritime historical reading.

Medieval manuscripts, especially the accounts kept of the building of ships for the Crown, are a rich source of material for the OED, often providing striking antedatings: buoy (OED 1466), for instance, appears in 1295 as 'boye', and pitch-pot (OED 1719) in the same year as an inventory entry 'in vii. ollis que dicuntur "Pichpottes" ad galeam predictam' [for 7 jars called 'pitch-pots' for the said galley], where it occurs in the scribal Latin context common to official documents of the period.

Captain William Keeling, in his East India Journal of 1614-5, displays a facility with language, using a number of expressive words new to the OED; for instance: 'I recd. that extreamlie unkind l[ette]re from Sr. Tho. Smith, never obliviable'; and 'About 12 we were 2 l[eague]s from the west point of Zocatora..having formerlye cloudishlie seene the Dos Hermanos to windward'.

He uses spleen (already in the OED) in a lively simile: 'The water continuallye smoakes there by the winds violence, as if the spleene of hellish witchcraft were there raging'. Keeling's subordinate, Thomas Bonner, antedates the OED by 54 years for an important cartographic term while mastering the art of understatement: 'This daye at no[o]ne by Mercators projecktion I am ashore: but by plano I finde my ship to be 87 leags of[f], a great difference'. (The old plano projection was correct: he was not aground.) Nicholas Buckeridge, another East India master who wrote c1653, uses the word incher which is not known to the OED till 1885: 'I have yett a ffurther request to yow that you would leave us A Cable & anchor if yow can possible spare it, ye cable about 11 or 12 Incher'.

Timoteo O'Scanlan, whose name leads one to suspect an Anglophone heritage, wrote an excellent nautical dictionary (Diccionario Maritimo Espanol, 1831) to which he appends glossaries in English, French, and Italian. The English terms are a rich source of early 19th century technical vocabulary, and some yield deeper insights: at the entry glass, he gives the phrase to flay or sweat the glass, the equivalent of the Spanish robar la ampolleta, which he says is 'to turn it before all the sand has run out; a malicious action by the helmsman..done to shorten his watch' [my translation]. The action is malicious because it makes inaccurate the dead-reckoning based on the time as measured by the hour-glass.

Readings in disparate subject-areas sometimes produce interesting convergences. The use of the word plano in the quotation from Bonner, for instance, is new to the OED, even though the technical term in plano occurs several times in the text of the Dictionary (from 1527 to 1903). Also new to the OED is plano in the sense of a type of stone projectile-point important in North American archaeology (and of the cultural tradition named for the point): there are many twentieth-century instances of the word in this sense, none of which is cited in the OED.

Finds like these nurture in OED readers the same anticipation of the unexpected that archaeologists must feel during an excavation: we dig for precious verbal artifacts in the deep strata of printed English.