| TERMS | MEANING: |
|---|---|
| DAGGER | A steel bar which plays an essential part in the launching mechanism of a ship. When the dog shore is knocked out. the dagger acts as a trigger which releases the vessel and starts her down the launching ways. Although in modern ship launches the whole operation is performed by power, and men with sledge hammers no longer knock out the dog shores, the principle and mechanics of a launch remain unaltered. |
| DAGGER-BOARD | A drop keel. or sliding centreboard of wood or metal which can be raised or lowered inside a case through a slot in a shallow draught boat’s keel, to increase the effective draught and thereby reduce leeway when sailing close-hauled. It was one of the earliest types of sliding keel and originally used by the Chinese in some of their river junks. It is so called because it is generally narrow in proportion to its length and, not being pivoted like a true centreboard, slides down from its case like a dagger from a sheath. |
| DAN BUOY | A small, temporary buoy used for marking a position at sea. It consists of a float, made of cork or similar substance, with a staff passing through it, to the top of which a small flag is attached for ease in recognition, and it is anchored on the bottom by a weight and lines. Dan buoys are used extensively for marking the position of fishermen’s nets, for marking wrecks until permanent wreck buoys can be moored in position, and in all such similar cases at sea. Dan buoys are also required equipment for yachts racing under I.Y.R.U. rules, to mark the position if any member of the crew should fall overboard. |
| DANDY-RIG | Another name for the ketch and yawl rigs, but sometimes used to describe the rig when the mizen-sail is about one-third the size of the mainsail, the true ketch rig having a mizensail about half the size of the mainsail and the true yawl rig having its mizen-sail a quarter or less. In some English west country (Devon and Cornwall) craft the mizen-mast was stepped just forward of the transom stern either to one side of the tiller or with an iron tiller crooked around the mast. The sail, of triangular or ‘leg o’ mutton’ shape, sheeted to an outrigger or bumpkin, was called the dandy, and a boat so rigged, such as the Falmouth Quay punt, was called dandy-rigged. The term is very rarely used today. |
| DANFORTH ANCHOR | An Americandesigned anchor in which the two pivoting flukes are placed close together with the shank between them. The stock is across the crown of the anchor instead of in the more usual place at the top of the shank, and this makes it impossible for the anchor to be fouled by the cable. It has great holding power for its weight, though slightly less than that of the CQR anchor, but has the advantage that it stows flatter on deck. It is deservedly popular for small craft such as yachts. |
| DAVIT | Small cast-iron cranes, fitted with hoisting and lowering gear in the form of blocks and tackles and placed along both sides of the upper deck of passenger liners and ferries, from which a ship’s lifeboats are slung. The olderfashioned radial davits were manoeuvrable by twisting in their base sockets so that, when hoisted, the boats could be swung inboard so that they did not project beyond the side of the ship. Many modern davits, known as luffing davits, have a geared quadrant fitted to their inboard end so that boats can now hang at the davits inboard of the ship’s side though still suspended to seaward of the davits, a great saving of time and labour if the boats have to be used in an emergency. In another modern pattern, known as gravity-type, the davit consists of two parts, the upper, which holds the lifeboat on its falls, being mounted on rollers on the lower part. When the lifeboat is not in use, the upper part is hauled up by a wire and the lifeboat lies inboard. When it is to be used, the wire is released and the upper part slides down the lower part, bringing the lifeboat level with the deck and ready for lowering directly into the sea. Most vessels carry at least one or more of their boats at davits, either along their sides or, in the case of very small vessels, over the stern. |
| DEAD FREIGHT | The freight charges for which a merchant is liable when he fails to ship cargo on board a merchant vessel for which he has reserved space in the holds. |
| DEAD HORSE | The term used by seamen to describe the period of work on board ship for which they have been paid in advance when signing on, usually a month’s wages. In merchant ships there used to be a custom of celebrating having worked off the dead horse by parading an effigy of a horse stuffed with straw around the decks, to the song ‘Old man, your horse must die’, then hoisting it to the yardarm and cutting it adrift to fall into the sea. In ships where passengers were carried, the stuffed horse was often put up to auction among them before being cut adrift, the money being divided among the crew. To flog a dead horse, to expect, vainly, to get extra work out of a ship’s crew while they are working off the dead horse. |
| DEAD MARINE | An empty wine bottle after its contents have been drunk. The aphorism is supposed to have been first employed by William IV when Duke of Clarence at a dinner on board one of his ships when he ordered the steward to remove the ‘dead marines’. On expostulation by a marine officer, he remarked that he had used the expression in the sense that, like the marines, it had done its duty nobly and was ready to do it again. |
| DEAD MEN | Reef and gasket ends left flapping instead of being tucked in out of sight when a sail has been furled. |
| DEAD RECKONING POSITION | Usually ab breviated to D.R., a position which is obtained by applying courses and distances made through the water from the last known observed position. The origin of the term, which has been used for at least four centuries, is obscure, although it has been suggested by some that it is a corruption of ded. reckoning, deduced from the reckoning. In view of its very long period of use, however, this origin of the term is improbable; it has too much of a modern ring about it. Possibly the term originally came into use from the much older custom of seamen of describing unknown seas as ‘dead’ seas, in the sense that there was no body of knowledge about the extent, or even of the actual existence, of these seas, shown by many early geographers on their world maps. Dead reckoning, as a system of navigation, implies charting the position of a ship without the use of any astronomical observation whatever; merely arriving at the ship’s position by laying off on the chart courses steered and distances run. with due allowance for currents, tidal streams, and leeway, from the last fixed position. Before the days of modern navigational aids, such as the hyperbolic systems of navigation, there were always likely to be periods of storm and overcast during a voyage during which the navigator was unable to see sun, moon, or stars, and his only means of reckoning his ship’s position was by dead reckoning. When at last he did see the sun or stars again and was able to take an observation, he had to use his D.R. position as the basis for working out his sight, having no position more accurate on which to work. In the great days of discovery, particularly before the perfection of the ship’s chronometer and thus the accurate determination of longitude, dead reckoning was the main method of navigation, though it was fairly early on refined slightly by the introduction of the traverse board, which converted the day’s run of the ship into difference of latitude (d.lat.) and departure (easily converted into d.long.), which enable the navigator to plot his new dead reckoning position by measuring off the day’s differences on the longitude and latitude scales of his chart. Dead reckoning is still a useful adjunct of navigation, though with the number of modern navigational aids available, such as radio direction finding aerials, depth recorders, it is becoming less important. But it remains a useful guide to a vessel’s position between fixes and also serves as a permanent check on the reliability of bearings obtained by direction finders, which can be erratic; particularly around dawn and dusk. The Inertial Navigation System gives virtually a continuous dead reckoning position, as each movement measured is automatically resolved into its co-ordinates and translated into speeds and distances to be applied to the initial position, which is the basis of all dead reckoning. |
| DEAD SHARES | An additional allowance of pay enjoyed by the officers and warrant officers of the British Navy of the 16th and 17th centuries and achieved by the entry in the ship’s muster book of fictitious names, for whom sea pay and victuals were drawn and the proceeds divided among the officers of the ship. The scale of payment ranged from fifty shares for an admiral to half a share for the cook’s mate. It was introduced during the reign of Henry VIII (1509-47) and remained in force until 1733, though from 1695 the proceeds were diverted from the officers and given to Greenwich Royal Hospital for the provision of pensions to the widows of seamen killed in action. |
| DEAD WATER | The eddy formed under the counter of a ship by the angle of her run aft as she passes through the water. It is so called because it passes away more slowly than the water along her sides. |
| DEAD WORK | An old maritime expression meaning all that part of a ship above the waterline when she is fully laden. It is what we would today call the ship’s freeboard. |
| DEADEYE, orig. DEAD MAN’S EYE | A circular block usually of lignum vitae, though sometimes of elm, grooved around the circumference and pierced with three holes. In older sailing DECATUR 235 vessels they were used in pairs to secure the end of a shroud to the chain plate. A lanyard was threaded through the holes in the deadeyes and by this means a purchase was created whereby the shroud could be set up taut. The triangular block of wood with a single large hole in the centre and known as a heart, which was used to set up a stay, was also at one time called a deadeye. |
| DEADLIGHT | A metal plate, today usually of brass but originally of wood or iron, which is hinged inboard above a scuttle or port and can be let down and secured by a butterfly nut to protect the glass of the scuttle in heavy weather. An additional use of deadlights in warships was to darken ship at night in wartime so that no light was visible to an enemy. |
| DEADWEIGHT | A measurement of a ship’s tonnage which indicates the actual carrying capacity of a merchant ship expressed in tons weight. The figure is arrived at by calculating the amount of water displaced by a ship when she is unloaded, but with her fuel tanks full and stores on board, and the amount of water similarly displaced when she is fully loaded with her cargo holds full. The difference expressed in tons (35 cubic ft of seawater = one ton) gives the ship’s deadweight tonnage. It is usually expressed in shortened form as d.w.t. |
| DEADWOOD | The solid timbering in bow and stern of a sailing vessel just above the keel where the lines narrow down to such an extent that the separate side timbers cannot each be accommodated. Generally the fore deadwood extends from the stem to the foremost frame, the after deadwood from the sternpost to the after balance frame. Both deadwoods are firmly fixed to the keel to add strength to the ship’s structure. |
| DECK | The horizontal platforms in ships which correspond to floors in houses. Starting from the bottom, the decks in an average large ship are the orlop, lower (though the two are now sometimes combined in a single deck known as the lower), main, upper, shelter, bridge, and boat. These, however, may vary considerably from ship to ship according to her function. Smaller ships, of course, have fewer decks; larger vessels have more, the Cunard liner Queen Elizabeth II having as many as thirteen. In some types of ships, these decks have other names; in large liners, for example, the shelter deck is frequently known as the promenade deck and other names are coined to denote different decks according to their main purpose, such as hurricane deck, cabin deck, etc. In the days of the sailing navy, the upper deck was often known as the spar deck, and the main deck as a gundeck. Properly speaking, a deck is only one which extends the full length of the ship, but in cases where they do not extend the full length, the word is still used, if improperly, to describe the DEEP 237 built-up portions forward and aft of a ship, the fore portion being known as the forecastle deck and the after portion as the poop deck. That portion of the upper deck which lies between forecastle and poop is often known in merchant ships as the well deck, and in many other types of ship as the waist. The origin of the term is obscure but probably comes from the old Dutch dec, a covering, cloak, or horse-cloth, although in its nautical meaning the word was in use in England at least a century and a half earlier than in Holland. |
| DECK HOUSE | A square or oblong cabin erected on the deck of a ship. In the sailing warships of the Royal Navy it was known, in a perverse sort of way, as the ’round house’ because one could walk round it. Originally, in the 17th and 18th centuries, it was the name given to the upper coach but by the end of the 18th century the term round house was used to describe the lavatory fitted in the sick bay of warships for men who were unable because of illness or wounds to get forward to the normal place in the head of the ship. In many merchant vessels, particularly sailing ships in the days of the clipper ships and the later big trading barques, a large deck house was erected just abaft the foremast to house the galley and to provide quarters for the watchkeeping crew, while a smaller deck house abaft the mainmast provided accommodation for the daymen and apprentices. |
| DECKER | A term used in the old sailing navies to describe the number of gundecks, and therefore the size, of warships, such as a two-decker, three-decker, etc. It referred only to the decks on which batteries of guns were mounted and not to the total number of decks in the ship. The gundecks of a three-decker, in ascending order, were the lower gundeck, main gundeck, and upper gundeck, even though this upper gundeck was on the deck next below the upper deck. |
| DECLINATION | A term used in celestial navigation to indicate the angular distance of a celestial body north or south of the equator measured from the centre of the earth. It corresponds, therefore, to the geographical latitude of the body. Tables of declination for those bodies used by navigators in working out positions by celestial navigation are included in nautical almanacs. |
| DEEP | A position in the oceans, often also known as a trench, where the water is of exceptional depth in comparison with adjacent areas. Depths of over 3,000 fathoms in the oceans are given the generic name of deeps. |
| DEGREE | A unit of measurement applied to the surface of the earth, the length subtended at the equator by one degree of longitude. This form of measurement owes its origin to Pythagoras (6th century B.C.), the Greek mathematician who first set out the theory that the earth was a sphere and not a flat surface, and its implementation to Eratosthenes, the first man to make a calculation of the circumference of the earth based on accurate measurement of the length of shadows cast simultaneously by the sun at two points a known distance apart. |
| DEMURRAGE | The compensation payable to a shipowner when his ship is held up in port beyond the time specified in the charter-party in cases where it is the fault of the consignee through non-arrival of the cargo for which space in the holds has been reserved. It is also legally liable when, in time of war, a vessel has been detained in prize but later is not condemned by the prize court. |
| DEPARTURE | (1) The last position on a chart, when a ship is leaving the land, fixed from observations of shore stations. Thus a ship, when starting on a voyage, takes her departure not from the port from which she sails but from the position where the last bearings of points ashore intersect on the chart. It is the correlative of landfall at the end of the voyage.
(2) The number of nautical miles that one place is eastwards or westwards of another. Where the two places are on the same parallel of latitude the departure between them is equivalent to the difference of longitude in minutes of arc multiplied by the cosine of the latitude. In the 16th, 17th, and early 18th centuries, the general system of navigation over long voyages was to convert the various courses sailed during a day into their two components of difference of latitude and difference of longitude, converting the departure by means of a traverse table, and thus to plot the ship’s new position after her day’s run by measuring off so many miles north or south and so many miles east or west from the previous position. A well-known contemporary example of this navigational system exists in the manuscript log of Bartholomew Sharp, the buccaneer, now in the Naval Library of the Ministry of Defence, London (MSS 4). It contains pages of these calculations made during Sharp’s voyage from the Pacific, round Cape Horn, and to the West Indies in 1681, the whole voyage being made without sight of land. |
| DEPRESSION | An area of low barometric pressure around which the wind circulates in an anticlockwise direction in the northern hemisphere and clockwise in the southern. Depressions are basically bad-weather systems in which the strength of the wind increases considerably towards the centre of low pressure, frequently giving gales and storms, often with heavy rain. They are relatively fast moving, the average rate being about 25 miles an hour. |
| DERELICT | Any vessel abandoned at sea. When a ship is abandoned, whether by consent, compulsion, or stress of weather, she is a derelict, although legally if any live domestic animal, such as a cat or dog, is on board when found, the owner may recover the ship within a year and a day by paying salvage if he so wishes. |
| DERRICK | A large single spar fixed on board ship pivoted at the lower or inboard end and fitted with stays and guy pendants, and to which a topping-lift and a purchase is attached, used like a crane for hoisting boats, cargo, and other heavy weights. It is controlled laterally by the guy pendants, which allow it to swing through a wide arc, and vertically by the topping-lift, by means of which the hook of the purchase can be positioned directly over the object to be lifted. With the development of modern cargo handling methods, the derrick as a principal lifting agent on board ship is now rarely fitted. The name comes from a 17th century hangman named Derrick who was employed in his grisly trade at Tyburn, London, presumably because in both cases weights dangle from the ends of ropes. |
| DEVIATION | An error of a magnetic compass caused by a ship’s own residual magnetism. If a ship had no residual magnetism, the needle of her magnetic compass would point direct towards the north magnetic pole, but as every modern ship has metal fittings which affect the compass, there is always some error. Deviation varies according to the heading of the ship because as a ship changes course, the metal in her changes its position in relation to the compass as the ship swings round. Deviation is therefore read off for every quarter point (about 4°) as the ship is swung through 360° and is tabulated on a deviation card so that it can be applied, together with variation, to every compass course or bearing to convert them to true courses or bearings. It can rarely be completely eliminated in a ship’s magnetic compass though it can be very considerably reduced by the use of soft iron balls mounted on each side of the compass and by bar magnets, known as Flinders bars, hung in the binnacle below the compass bowl. |
| DEVIL | The caulker’s name for the seam in the upper deck planking next to a ship’s waterways. No doubt they gave it that name as there was very little space to get at this seam with a caulking iron, making it a particularly difficult and awkward job. This is the origin of the saying ‘Between the devil and the deep blue sea’, since there is only the thickness of the ship’s hull planking between this seam and the sea. It is also the name given by caulkers to the garboard seam, which was always, when a ship was careened, not only the most awkward to get at but usually the wettest and most difficult to keep above water and caulk. |
| DIAMOND SHROUDS | Masthead stays in the rigging of some yachts, made of steel wire or rod and carried in pairs over short struts to a lower position on the mast, thereby forming a diamond outline to support the upper part of a yacht’s mast. They are used only with the Bermuda rig, and not necessarily in all yachts so rigged. |
| DIAPHONE | A type of sound signal emitted from lighthouses and light vessels in fog, characterized by a powerful low note ending with a sharply descending tone known as the grunt. |
| DICKIES | The two small seats in large squaresterned rowing boats, such as naval cutters, fitted in the angles between the transom and gunwale, on which the coxswain sits when the boat is under oars. |
| DIP of the horizon | The allowance which must be made when observing the altitude of any heavenly body with a sextant for (a) the refraction of light passing through the atmosphere from the horizon to the observer, and (b) the height of the observer’s eye above the level of the sea. The effect of these two is to increase the observed altitude and the correction is made by subtracting from the observed angle the angular distance of dip. which is calculated and given in dip tables included in all compilations of nautical tables. The result is known as the apparent altitude. |
| DIPPING LUG | A rig in which the forward end of the yard carrying a lugsail projects forward of the mast of a sailing vessel, entailing lowering the sail two or three feet and dipping the yard round the mast whenever the vessel goes about and rehoisting the sail on the other tack. For this purpose dipping lines are secured to the end of the yard, one on either side of the sail, by which the yard is pulled down and dipped round the mast as the sail is lowered. |
| DIRECTOR SIGHT | A means of directing and controlling the gunfire of warships introduced into the British Navy in 1912 following much research and experiment by Admiral Sir Percy Scott, one of the greatest gunnery experts in the Royal Navy of those years. Guns had originally been laid and fired individually by a gunlayer at each gun. but in the heat of firing it was always difficult to make sure that each gunlayer in a ship was firing at the same target. Funnel smoke, cordite smoke, and mist and haze were additional hazards militating against accurate gunnery. Scott’s system involved a single telescopic sight mounted in the fore-top of the warships, well above funnel and cordite smoke, and connected electrically to the sights of each gun, so that individual gunlayers had only to line up their gunsights with a pointer on a dial to ensure that all fired at the target selected by the director sight with the same elevation and allowance for deflection. The guns were all fired simultaneously by electric contact by the single gunlayer in the foretop so that their shells always fell together and were thus easier to spot. |
| DISTANT SIGNALS | Objects, such as balls, cones, etc., which were hoisted instead of flags when the distance at which they were to be read was too great to distinguish the colours of the flags. Before the battle of Trafalgar in 1805, information of the sailing of the Franco-Spanish fleet from Cadiz was transmitted to Lord Nelson some 40 miles away and below the horizon by distant signals through a relay of three ships, reaching him in less than ten minutes. In these days of wireless and radio telephones, distant signals at sea have little relevance except in the case of small craft in distress or distinguishing signs to indicate vessels engaged in fishing, laying telegraph cables, towing, etc., although from shore stations distant signals in the form of cones are still hoisted to indicate forecasts of gales. At sea, a vessel not under control hoists a signal of two balls vertically six feet apart to warn other ships to keep clear of her, though more for the purpose of easy recognition than as a true distant signal. |
| DITTY BOX | A small wooden box in which a sailor kept his valuables, such as letters from home, photographs, etc. |
| DOCK | The area of water in a port or harbour totally enclosed by piers or wharves. Some sailors refer to the wharves themselves as the dock, but in the strict meaning of the term it is the area of water in between. In the U.S.A., however, the word is always used to mean the wharf or pier and does not refer to the enclosed water. |
| DOCKING KEELS | Also known as bilge keels, are small subsidiary keels projecting downwards from the hull of a ship at about the turn of the bilge, and run parallel with the main keel. They support the weight of the ship on the launching ways when she is ready to take the water after building, and also assist in supporting the weight of a ship when she is lying on the blocks in dry-dock. Additionally, they provide extra hull resistance when a ship is rolling in a heavy sea. |
| DOCKYARD | In its naval sense an establishment in a strategic position ashore which serves not only as a base for warships but also provides all services they can require, such as repair, refit, replenishment, etc. Most naval dockyards of any size also have building slips for the construction of warships, and dry-docks for their servicing. In Britain the naval dockyards are known as the Royal dockyards, probably an abbreviation of Royal Naval dockyards. Civilian dockyards exist around the world to provide the same services for merchant ships, though often without the building facilities, being geared more to the repair and refit of ships than to their construction. Yet all building yards, where ships are built, normally have their own dockyards where the ships they launch are completed with machinery, necessary fittings, etc. |
| DODGER | A painted canvas screen erected at chest height around the forward side and wing ends of a ship’s bridge as a protection against the weather before the days of glass-enclosed bridges. All small steamships, and indeed some large ones, used dodgers for protection up to the 1920s, when strengthened glass was introduced which would not shatter under the weight of water thrown up by the motion of the ship in rough weather. The totally protected bridge did not come into general use in small vessels, such as fishing trawlers and drifters, tugs, etc., until after the Second World War and some older passenger ferries plying in sheltered waters still have open bridges protected by dodgers. |
| DOG | The operation of backing the tail of a block with several turns around a stay or shroud, with the tail going with the lay of the rope. This is one way of clapping on a purchase where additional hauling power is required. |
| DOG SHORES | Two blocks of timber which support either side of a ship on the launching ways when she is being built and which prevent the ship from starting down the ways when the keel blocks, on which she rests while building, are being removed ready for launching. When they are knocked out, the ship begins to slide down the ways into the water. |
| DOG VANE | A small temporary vane, often of cork and feathers threaded on a thin line and attached to a short staff, fixed on the weather gunwale of sailing ships to enable the helmsman to judge the direction of the wind. |
| DOG WATCHES | The two half watches of two hours each into which the period from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. is divided. The purpose of dividing this watch into two is to produce an uneven number of watches in the 24 hours, seven instead of six, thereby ensuring that watchkeepers in ships, whether organized in two or three watches, do not keep the same watches every day. These two watches are known as the First Dog and Last Dog, and never, except by landlubbers, as First Dog and Second Dog. How they came by these names is not known; they were certainly in use by the 17th century. One suggestion that they were called dog watches because they were curtailed, though ingenious, does not appear to have any foundation in fact. |
| DOGS | (1) The metal hand clips fitted to •bulkheads and decks around watertight doors, small hatch covers, etc., which when turned, force the rubber gasket lining the doors and hatches hard up against the sealing to ensure a watertight seal.
(2) Metal bars, with their ends turned down and ending in a point, are also known as dogs. They were used for holding a baulk of timber steady while carpenters shaped it with an adze. They are, of course, still in use for temporarily securing timber against unwanted movement, as much ashore as at sea. |
| DOG-STOPPER | A heavy rope, secured round the mainmast of a sailing ship and used to back up the deck stopper on the anchor cable when the ship rode in a heavy sea in the days before chain cable and cable-holders. It was not in any way a permanent fitting and was used only as an additional safety measure to secure the ship when anchored in very rough weather. |
| DOLDRUMS | The belt ofcalm which lies inside the trade winds of the northern and southern hemisphere. This area, which lies close to the equator except in the western Pacific where it is south of the equator, had great significance during those years when the trade of the world was carried by sailing ships; today they are of no significance except, perhaps, for occasional yachts. The areas immediately north and south of the trade winds also used to be known as doldrums but are now known as variables. The term is also used to signify a state of depression or stagnation, an analogy of the general depression of the crews of ships lying motionless while in the areas of the doldrums, unable to find wind to fill their sails. |
| DOLLY | A timber similar to a single bollard which is set horizontally in the bulwarks of a ship and used as a convenient means for securing temporarily the fall of a purchase by taking a jamming turn round it when there was no cleat conveniently placed. With the growing mechanization of modern ship handling and the simpler rigging plan following the decline of the square rig, dollies are rarely to be found in ships today. |
| DOLPHIN | (1) a sea mammal of the genus Delphinus, small cetaceous animals resembling porpoises which inhabit the warmer seas and have the engaging and spectacular habit of leaping clean out of the water. Brass castings in the form of a dolphin standing on its head have for centuries been a favourite form of naval decoration, and by some are held to be a symbol of admiralty. Admirals’ barges, in the Royal and some other navies, always had these brass castings as supporters of the canopy in the sternsheets.
(2) A large wooden pile, or collection of piles, serving as a mooring post for ships, or occasionally as a beacon. (3) Small brass guns carried in a ship and fitted with two lifting handles over the trunnions. They were used mainly as anti-personnel guns during the 15th, 16th, and early 17th centuries, much like a murderer or robinet. (4) The plaited rope strap (also known as dolphin of the mast) round the mast of a square-rigged ship to prevent nip between the lower yard and the mast and at the same time to secure the puddening round the mast which prevented the lower yard falling to the deck if the jeers and slings were both shot away.(5) A small light rowing boat of ancient times. It was from this name that arose the story recounted by Pliny of a boy going daily to school across the Lake of Lucerne on a dolphin. |
| DONKEY FRIGATE | A class of small ships built for the Royal Navy at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries. They carried twenty-eight guns and were, more accurately, ship-rigged sloops built frigate-fashion, having guns protected by the upper deck, i.e., on a single gundeck, with additional guns on forecastle and quarterdeck. |
| DONKEY-HOUSE | The name of the structure on deck in which the donkey engine is contained. It is only in smaller merchant ships that such an engine-house is fitted as in all larger steamships there is normally enough auxiliary machinery requiring steam to warrant firing up one of the ship’s main boilers. |
| DONKEY’S BREAKFAST | The merchant seaman’s name for his mattress in the days when it was normally stuffed with straw. Such rudimentary conditions for seamen existed right up into the 20th century in a majority of ships and it was mainly the growth in power of trade unions of seamen, aided by the passage of Merchant Shipping Acts or their equivalents in the various maritime countries, which led to an improvement in the conditions on board, making such ship-board economies as straw-filled mattresses things of the past. Straw-filled mattresses pertained only to the wooden bunks, lining the forecastle or deckhouse, in which merchant seamen were accommodated; they were not used in the hammocks in which naval seamen slept, these having a thin tick stuffed with horsehair as mattress. |
| DORY | (1) A small flat-bottomed boat associated with the coast of New England and used widely for line fishing on the Grand Banks off the coast of Newfoundland. One of their great advantages for this purpose was that they could be stacked on board fishing craft one within the other, the collective noun being a nest of dories.
(2) A fish, Zeus faber, known as a John Dory. This name comes from the French jaune d’oree, by which name it was known to the French fishermen of the Banks on account of its goldencoloured scales. (3) More recently the name given to a type of hard-chine dinghy with flared sides, suitable for an outboard motor and widely used by yachtsmen and amateur fishermen, being properly considered as a useful weight-carrying work-boat. |
| DOUBLE or DOUBLING | The operation of covering a ship with extra planking or plates when the original skin is weak or worn. In wooden ships the term was only used when the new planking was more than two inches in thickness. To double a cape or other point of land, to sail a vessel round it so that on completion the land is between the ship and her original position. |
| DOUBLE BOTTOM | The space between the outer skin on the bottom of a ship and the watertight plating over the floors. A double bottom serves two purposes, first as a protection against disaster when the outer bottom is holed by running aground or striking some object in the sea, and second as a convenient stowage for liquid ballast. The construction of double bottoms is now standard design practice in the building of all ships of any size. The first ship in which double bottoms were incorporated in the original design was the Great Eastern, I. K. Brunei’s great ship launched in 1858. |
| DOUBLE CAPSTAN | Two capstan barrels on the same central shaft designed to provide a capstan on two adjacent decks. In the old sailing ships of the line double capstans were almost always fitted to provide lifting power on an upper and a lower deck with a single installation. |
| DOUBLE CLEWS or CLUES | An old sea term for getting married. Clews, with their nettles, are the cords which support a seaman’s hammock and thus a double set of clews, in seamen’s humour, would be required to support the weight of two people, a man and his wife, in the same hammock. Double clews were also supposed to give a wider spread to a hammock and the extra width thus obtained may also have had something to do with the origin of this seaman’s term. A seaman entered, or embarked, in double clews when he got married. |
| DOUBLED-CLEWED JIB | A sail introduced in 1 934 by Mr. (later Sir) Thomas Sopwith for the America’s Cup races in that year between his yacht Endeavour and the American Rainbow with Mr. Harold Vanderbilt at the helm. The sail consisted virtually of an extra large jib with the clew cut off to form a four-sided foresail sheeted with two sheets. The new fourth side, corresponding to the leech of a normal foursided fore-and-aft sail, was either loose or laced to a small boom sheeted at either end. It proved to be a powerful sail and was thought during the Endeavour’?, trial races to be more efficient than the normal triangular jib, but in the first of the Cup races the Rainbow set a single Genoa jib in place of the normal jib and staysail and more than held her own against Mr. Sopwith’s new rig. The double-clewed jib was given the slang name ‘Greta Garbo’. It never caught on as a racing sail. |
| DOUBLING | The name given to that portion of the mast of a large sailing vessel where an upper mast overlaps the lower, as a topmast with a lower mast, a topgallant mast with a topmast. It is a word more often used in the plural than in the singular, as in normal square-rig each mast will have two doublings. |
| DRAG CHAINS | Lengths of chain shackled to weighted drags which act as a brake and bring a ship to a halt after she has been launched into the water down the ways. They are mostly used when the building slip is in a narrow waterway where there is not sufficient room for the ship to be launched without stopping her, for fear of her running ashore on the opposite bank. |
| DRAKE’S DRUM | A drum said to have been in the possession of Sir Francis Drake and carried by him on board his ships to beat the crews to quarters, and now at Buckland Abbey, Devon, Drake’s old home. According to legend, the drum gives a drumbeat whenever England is in danger of invasion from the sea. Some doubts have been cast on its authenticity. |
| DRAUGHT | (1) Sometimes written as draft, the depth of water which a ship draws, which of course varies with the state of her loading. Her maximum draught, known as her deep load draught, occurs when she is fully loaded down to her Plimsoll line. Normally a ship has draught marks painted on her sides both on the stem and the sternpost from which the depth of water she draws forward and aft at the time can be read. Draught marks are normally painted in roman figures, one to each foot of draught, the depth of water a ship is drawing being indicated by the lower end of the painted figures.
(2) The drawings or lines, prepared by a marine architect in the design of a vessel, from which the shipbuilder works. |
| DRAW | (1) The condition of a sail when it is full of wind, the sail being said to be drawing. To let draw, to trim the jib of a small sailing vessel with the lee sheet after it has been held to windward by the weather sheet in order to assist in forcing the bows across the wind when tacking. In very light winds, where the vessel may not have sufficient way to make tacking easy, the jib is held out to windward when the vessel is head to wind to assist the bows across. As soon as this is achieved, the order to let draw ensures the jib being sheeted normally on the new tack. After a ship is hove-to at sea, in which condition the jib is permanently sheeted to windward, the order to let draw gets her sailing again.
(2) Said of a ship to indicate her draught, e.g., ‘the ship draws, or is drawing, so many feet forward and so many •aft’. |
| DREDGE | An iron wedge-shaped contrivance with a small net in the fashion of a trawl attached, by means of which oysters and other molluscs are brought up from their beds. Towed along the bottom by a smack, the iron wedge loosens the hold of the shellfish and guides them into the net. |
| DREDGER | A self-propelled vessel fitted with mechanical means for deepening harbours or clearing the entrances to rivers by removing part of the bottom. The commonest form of dredger is fitted with an endless chain of buckets which scoops up the bottom and discharges the contents of the buckets into lighters secured alongside. The endless chain, driven by machinery, normally operates through a central well so that the area of the bottom being dredged is immediately below the vessel, although side and stern dredges are not unknown. Where the area to be dredged consists of silt or soft mud, a suction dredger can be used, the bottom being removed by means of a vacuum pipe which sucks up the silt or mud and similarly discharges it either into a lighter or hopper, or alternatively into tanks on board. Some modern suction dredgers employ cutters to loosen the bottom which can then be sucked up. The hovercraft principle has also recently been developed for small dredgers of up to 150 tons for use in very shallow waters and along the banks of rivers and estuaries. |
| DRESS SHIP | The operation of decorating a ship with flags on occasions of national or local celebration, and in the case of yachts on the day when their club holds its annual regatta. A ship is dressed when she flies flags at her mastheads; she is dressed overall when she displays a continuous array of flags from her jackstaff via the mastheads to her ensign staff. On naval occasions when ships are dressed overall the order in which the flags are displayed is, in most navies, laid down in regulations and is never haphazard; in merchant vessels and yachts there is a recommended order in which flags of the International Code of Signals are displayed. |
| DRIFT | (1) The distance a vessel makes to leeward, by the action of either the tide or the wind.
(2) The term used to indicate the rate in knots of ocean currents, as for example the ‘west wind drift’ which circles the globe in southern latitudes under the influence of the Roaring Forties. (3) The distance a shell fired from a rifled barrel deviates from its aimed trajectory because of the rotation imparted to it by the rifling, a matter of considerable importance in the long ranges at which big naval guns are fired at sea. (4) The accumulation of pieces of wood, trunks of trees, etc., or of small ice broken away from the edges of icefields, collected together by the action of wind or current and lying on the surface in a mass. |
| DRIVE | A ship drives when her anchor fails to hold the ground and she is at the mercy of wind and tide. In the case of a sailing vessel, a ship drives to leeward when the force of the wind is so great that she cannot be controlled by sails or rudder. In a full gale, too violent for the sails to be hoisted, she drives under bare poles before the wind. Similarly, a steam vessel will drive before the wind if her engines are broken down or not powerful enough to hold her against the wind. One of the best known examples of ships driving before the wind was during a hurricane at Apia, Samoa, in 1889, when only one ship, H.M.S. Calliope. escaped, six other warships and several merchant vessels driving ashore before the wind. The word is often connected with maritime disaster, as of ships driven by storms on to rocks, etc. |
| DROGUE | Usually an improvised contraption by which a sailing vessel is slowed down in a following sea to prevent her from being pooped by waves coming up astern. It can vary from a long warp towed astern in small sailing craft to a spar with a weighted sail in larger sailing ships. A drogue is very widely confused with a sea anchor, but in fact the two serve different purposes. Sir Francis Drake used a drogue comprised of wineskins in the Golden Hind when chasing the treasure ship Cacafuego in the Pacific as he did not wish to alarm her by coming up with her too fast. |
| DROP KEEL | (1) A portion of the keel in early submarines which could be detached in emergency to give additional buoyancy. By releasing this portion of the keel, usually weighing up to about 20 tons, a submerged submarine had a chance of returning to the surface if she could not regain positive buoyancy by any other means. It was released by a mechanism within the pressure hull. As the submarine developed into more reliable forms, the original drop keel was omitted from the design.
(2) A term often used, though erroneously, to describe a centreboard or dagger plate. |
| DRUMHEAD | The top part of the barrel of a capstan, in which are the square pigeon-holes to take the ends of the capstan bars when an anchor has to be weighed, or a heavy weight lifted, by hand. In modern ships with plenty of auxiliary power and relatively small crews, the operation of weighing an anchor by hand is virtually a thing of the past. |
| DRY-DOCK | A watertight basin, with one end, which can be closed and sealed by a caisson, open to the sea, in which ships can be docked for repair, examination, or cleaning of the underwater body. When a ship is to enter a dry-dock, the dock is flooded, the caisson withdrawn, and the ship floated in and held in position so that her keel and docking keels are immediately above the lines of blocks prearranged on the floor of the dock. The caisson is replaced and the water in the dock pumped out, the ship’s keels settling on the blocks as the water level falls to support the weight of her hull. After her repair or cleaning, the dock is flooded up, lifting her off the blocks, the caisson withdrawn, and she is floated out. |
| DUCK UP | An order used in the sailing navies to haul on the clew-garnets and clew lines of the mainsail and foresail so that the man on the helm or at the wheel could see where the ship was going. The same term was used in the case of a spritsail when a warship was chasing an enemy and wished to fire her forward chase guns, as the spritsail would obscure the line of sight. ‘Duck up the clew lines’, hoist the clews (bottom corners) of the lower sails to provide a clear view forward. |
| DUG-OUT | The primitive form of a canoe consisting of a tree-trunk hollowed out by burning or other means. The two ends were sometimes roughly pointed. They were propelled in the earliest days presumably by the hands of the occupant, later by paddles when these were developed during the third millennium b.c. Such primitive canoes were in existence in some of the islands of the South Pacific until quite recent years, and may well still be used by some of the less-developed riverine peoples of central South America. |
| DUNNAGE | Loose wood or wooden blocks used in the holds of a merchant ship to secure the cargo above the floors and away from the sides to protect it from any sweating of the plates and also to wedge it firmly so that it does not get thrown about by the motion of the ship at sea. |