Avast, me hearties!
Every trade, craft, and endeavor that’s complex enough to warrant specialized skills and tools also generates its own jargon, as practitioners invent ways to communicate with one another about things that wouldn’t necessarily mean anything to anyone else. You could make an excellent case that for centuries, the most complex human activity was building and sailing ships; they were certainly the most complex machines in the world for a long time. It’s no surprise that the jargon that grew up around ships and sailing is so rich.
Sometimes jargon includes terms that seem to be arbitrarily unique. On a ship left is “port” and right is “starboard.” The front is the “bow” and the back is the “stern.” These are nothing more than alternative terms. But you’ll never find a “binnacle” anywhere but a ship, which needs a watertight case to keep the compass, nor will you need to know that a “roband” is a length of yarn that fastens a sail to a “spar” (any of those big sticks that hold the sails).
A great many nautical terms have to do with the means of propulsion — a steamship has a “stokehold,” which is the furnace chamber, but it probably doesn’t have a “yardarm,” which is either end of the “yard.” The “yard” is the horizontal spar that keeps the sail spread on a “square-rigged” ship. “Square-rigged” refers to the shape of the sails; most modern sailboats use triangular sails, but for centuries most large vessels built in the European manner used square ones.
Regardless of whether they’re moved by wind, oar, or engine, though, any ship can have a “wardroom.” That has to do not with the type of ship but the organization of the crew. The wardroom is where the officers’ quarters are — in a ship that has officers, at least. If the ship does organize its crew by specialization and hierarchy — that is, if it has officers — one of them might be the “boatswain” (“bo’sun”), the one in charge of equipment. When a ship is in port, it might engage a bargemaster (the owner of a barge) to bring a “ballaster” and his load — the ballaster being the one who supplies ballast for the ship. If the ballast is a load of iron, it’s called “kentledge.” Other cargo is loaded by “stevedores.” When a ship runs into trouble and has to dump some cargo overboard, but fastens it to some buoys in the hope of coming back later, the floating stuff is “lagan.” If the ship is wrecked, the floating cargo is “waveson.” If the ship is large enough that the crew is organized into “teams” given specific responsibilities, the “starbolins” would be the sailors responsible for taking care of the starboard side of the ship. Oddly enough there doesn’t seem to be a corresponding term for the sailors who watch out for the port side.
There are even specialized terms for some nautical business dealings; while “collateral” has nothing specific to do with ships, if you use your ship as collateral to finance a voyage, that’s called “bottomry.” Shipping is one of the main reasons governments created “customs” regulations about what you can and can’t bring in and out of a country — but the customs form, if it involves a ship and its cargo, is called not a “form” but a “cocket.” The ship’s warrant for carrying goods would be a “bill of lading” if it were a wagon, truck, or train, but because it’s a ship, that paperwork is called a “transire.” When stevedores load a ship, they’re paid not “wages” but “primage.” And they’d be paid not by the ship’s bookkeeper but by the “purser,” which is really the same thing.
Then of course there are the terms for ships themselves. Just like wagons, and later automobiles, spawned a specialized vocabulary, you might find a harbor filled with a zabra, a yawl, a xebec, or (depending on the era of your visit), a balener, cog, lugger, junk, wherry, tireme, nao, launch, ketch, clipper, cutter, caravel, schooner, or, if you’re really lucky, a Brighton Hog Boat (which had nothing to do with actual hogs). Many of those ships might have had a couple of structures with terms that live on in other contexts: a “skyscraper” is a particular sail mounted very high on a mast, and a “moonraker” is the sail above even that one. That mast is probably secured in place by a “mainstay.” But don’t bother looking for non-nautical applications of a “loxodograph;” that’s a device for recording a ship’s travel, and nothing else at all.
Oh and by the way, a “snotty” is (or was) a naval midshipman.
