| TERMS | MEANING: |
|---|---|
| FAG OUT | The tendency of the strands of a rope to fray out at the ends. It is stopped either by holding them securely in place with a small whipping, by a back splice, or by pointing the rope. |
| FAG-END | The end of any rope, but particularly applied to the end of a rope where the strands have become unlayed and have frayed out. |
| FAIR | A term applied to the direction of the wind when it is favourable to the course being steered in a sailing vessel. It is more comprehensive than large, which indicates a wind which blows from the beam or abaft it, while a fair wind can blow from about four points on the bow to right astern. Any wind which will enable a sailing vessel to fetch a desired point without tacking or pinching is a fair wind. |
| FAIRLEAD | A means of leading a rope in the most convenient direction for working, perhaps with a leading block to alter its direction or with eyes or cringles to keep it clear of obstructions. In some older ships, a board with holes in it, through which various parts of the running rigging were rove, was used to provide fairleads. Similarly in these ships, the chesstrees were fairleads for the bowlines with which the main tacks were hauled down. |
| FAIRWAY | The navigable channel of a harbour for ships entering or leaving. It is, in all harbours of any size, marked by port and starboard hand buoys, and usually in the smaller harbours by withies or similar marks. Obstructions in a fairway, such as a middle ground, are also marked by buoys. |
| FAKE | A complete turn of a rope when it has been coiled either on deck or on a drum. When a rope has been properly faked down, it is clear for running, each fake running out without fouling those below it. The word is used as both a noun and a verb. |
| FALL | The handling end of a tackle, the end of the rope, rove through blocks, on which the pull is exerted in order to achieve power. When used in the plural the term refers to the complete tackles by which a ship’s boat or lifeboat is hoisted in or lowered from the davits. |
| FALL OFF | A ship falls off when she sags away to leeward or further off the wind. It is the opposite to griping, and similarly requires the movement of ballast inside the vessel to correct the tendency. The shifting of ballast forward to trim the vessel by the head gives a greater grip of the water in the bows and thus less tendency to sag away from the wind. |
| FALSE FIRE | A method of night signalling in most navies before the invention of electric light signals or wireless telegraphy. A composition which burned with a blue flame was packed into a wooden tube and when ignited would burn for several minutes. As well as being used for night signals, false fires were sometimes employed to deceive an enemy, either by setting one alight in a drifting boat for the enemy to follow or by burning one on board a fast frigate to draw the enemy away on a false course. |
| FALSE KEEL | An additional keel secured outside the main keel of a wooden ship, usually as a protection should the ship take the ground but sometimes also to increase her draught in order to improve her sailing qualities. In modern shipbuilding double bottoms provide the same protection to the hull when running aground as the false keel did for the older sailing ships. |
| FANCY LINE | (1) a line rove through a block at the jaws of a gaff and used as a downhaul when lowering the sail. It was only necessary in larger vessels setting a gaff-rigged sail.
(2) A line used for cross-hauling the lee topping-lift to hold it clear of the sail to leeward so that it would not beat or rub against the canvas or reduce the sail’s aerodynamic properties by creating a ridge in the sail when it stands taut. |
| FANTAIL | The overhanging part of a ship’s stern, a term used particularly in the case of large yachts and passenger liners. Although the correct word for the stern overhang of all ships, it is not often used in this connection except in the U.S.A. It has not quite the same meaning as counter, but comes very close to it. |
| FARDAGE | Loose wood or other substance used in the stowage of bulk cargoes to prevent them shifting in the holds of a ship in a seaway. |
| FARTHELL | An old nautical term meaning to furl, using gaskets at the bunt of the sails but rope yarns at the yardarms as the weight of the sail there was not so great. The word referred only to the mainsail, foresail, and spritsail of square-rigged ships, farthelling lines, small lines on the topsails and topgallant sails leading to the yardarms to furl those sails. The bunts of topsails required no line or gasket for furling as they were laid on the top and secured to the head of the mast. It is an oddity of old-time maritime phraseology that although topsails and topgallants were always described as furled and not farthelled, they were fitted with farthelling lines. |
| FASHION PIECES | The aftermost timbers in the run, or underwater body, of a ship which form the shape of the stern. |
| FAST | In terms of a ship, secured, attached, fixed. Thus, to make something fast is to secure it firmly; e.g., a ship alongside a mole or jetty, a boat to a boom, etc. It is also a word used to designate the lines or hawsers which secure a ship to a wharf or pier, generally indicated by the position in which they are used in relation to the ship, as bow-fast, breast-fast, stern-fast, etc. These particular terms are, however, very rarely used today. |
| FAST PATROL BOAT | A development, post-Second World War, of the motor torpedoboat or motor gunboat into an all-purpose small vessel for naval warfare in coastal waters. In most navies the original two or three petrol engines which produced speeds of 38-40 knots have now given way to gas turbines, and the torpedo tubes or small guns to small guided missiles with a range of 80-100 miles. |
| FATHOM | The unit of measurement in most maritime countries for the depths of the sea or the lengths of rope and cables. The word comes from the old English faedm, to embrace, and is a measurement across the outstretched arms of a man, approximately 6 feet in a man of average size; the length of a nautical fathom is therefore 6 feet. The term is becoming obsolete with the growing tendency in most countries to adopt a metric system of measurement. In most British charts the soundings are still shown in fathoms though gradually they are being replaced by soundings in metres. It is a process which will obviously take many years to complete on account of the great number of charts which must be altered. A fathom is equal to 1-8256 metres. When used as a measurement of ropes and cables, the length of a hawser-laid cable is 130 fathoms. As a measurement of distance a cable is 100 fathoms, and a chain anchor cable, made up of eight shackles, is the same length, although of course in large ships many more than eight shackles of cable are attached to the bower anchors. |
| FAY | The operation of fitting together two pieces of timber in ship- and boat-building so that they lie close to each other with no perceptible space between them. |
| FEATHER | (1) The operation of altering the angle of the blades of a propeller so that they lie with the leading edge more or less in the line of advance of the vessel, normally a sailing vessel, to which they are fitted. The object of feathering a propeller is to reduce the drag when the vessel is under sail alone.
(2) The turning of the blade of an oar from the vertical to the horizontal while it is being taken back for the next rowing stroke, performed by dropping the wrists at the end of the stroke. The object of feathering an oar is twofold: it lessens the effort by reducing the windage of the blade on the backstroke and it does not take the way off the boat if it hits the water during the backstroke, which may easily occur when rowing in a choppy sea. Feathering an oar is, however, much more practised in inland waters than at sea, and few seamen, when pulling an oar, bother to feather it. |
| FEAZE | An old word meaning to unlay old tarred rope and, by teasing it, convert it into oakum for use in caulking the sides and decks of wooden vessels. |
| FELUCCA | A small sailing or rowing vessel of the Mediterranean, used for coastal transport or trading. The larger feluccas were narrow, decked, galley-built vessels, with lateen sails carried on one or two masts, occasionally also with a small mizen. Smaller feluccas were propelled with six or eight oars, though some of the smaller sailing feluccas used oars and sail simultaneously. The sea-going type has almost completely died out, but they are still in use on many Eastern Mediterranean rivers, particularly the Nile. |
| FEND OFF | The operation of bearing a vessel off, by a spar, boathook, or fender, in order to prevent violent contact when coming alongside. |
| FENDER | An appliance let down between the side of a ship and a wharf or other ship to prevent chafing when ships are lying alongside or to take the shock of a bump when going alongside. They come in many shapes and sizes, such as large bundles of withies lashed together, large bags of granulated cork, the ends of large coir cables, or even old rubber motor tyres. Boats’ fenders used for the same purpose were traditionally made of canvas stuffed with granulated cork but are now more often formed of rubber or synthetic moulding. |
| FERRY | A vessel designed for the transport of persons and goods from one place to another on a regular schedule of sailings. They can vary from small boats used as ferries across rivers and estuaries, sometimes with a chain across the bottom by which they are hauled over either by hand or with the chain operated around a winch, to large specially built ships with roll-on. roll-off facilities for cars, lorries, and trains. |
| FID | (1) a square bar of wood or iron, with a wider shoulder at one end, which takes the weight of a topmast when stepped on a lower mast. The topmast is hoisted up through a guide hole in the cap of the lower mast until a square hole in its heel is in line with a similar hole in the head of the lower mast, when the fid is driven through both and the hoisting tackles slacked away until the fid is bearing the weight. The two masts are then generally secured firmly together with a parrel lashing. Similarly a fid would support the weight of a topgallant mast at the head of a topmast.
(2) A circular pin of hard wood, usually lignum vitae, tapering to a point and used for opening the strands of large cordage for splicing. It has a groove down one side used for feeding in the strand being tucked. (3) In the days of muzzle-loading guns the piece of oakum used to plug the vent to prevent it getting blocked when the gun was not in use was called a fid. |
| FIDDLE | A rack fixed to mess tables on board ships in rough weather to prevent crockery, glasses, knives and forks, etc., from sliding to the deck as the ship rolls and pitches. The simplest fiddles were merely battens fixed to the edges of the tables and projecting about an inch above the table level so that if the plates, etc., slid, they were brought up by the battens, but more elaborate fiddles, used in liners and other expensive ships, usually fitted the tables exactly and had compartments in them to hold each item firmly in position so that they were unable to move whatever the ship’s motion. |
| FIDDLE BLOCK | A double block in which the two sheaves lie in one plane one below the other instead of being mounted on the same central pin as in more normal double blocks. The upper sheave is larger than the lower so that it vaguely resembles a violin in shape. They were used chiefly for the lower-yard tackles of squarerigged ships as they lay flatter to the yards. |
| FIDDLEHEAD BOW | The stemhead of a vessel finished off with a scroll turning aft or inwards, as at the top of a violin. This form of stemhead was originally adopted in small sailing warships which had no figureheads as a piece of simple bow decoration; the term has remained to describe the termination of a clipper bow which has this inward-turning decorative ending. |
| FIDDLER’S GREEN | A sailor’s paradise, where public houses, dance halls, and other similar amusements are plentiful and the ladies are accommodating. It really had only a celestial and not a terrestrial connotation in the sailor’s mind, a sort of permanent sensual Elysium or sailor’s heaven but still vaguely related to the delights enjoyed by sailors ashore in such well-known FIGHTING INSTRUCTIONS 301 places as Wapping, in the east end of London, and Portsmouth Point, in the naval harbour of Portsmouth, and indeed in most other ports in the world which catered for the sailor who came ashore with money in his pockets. A sailor who died, and was known to have enjoyed such pleasures in his life, was often said to have gone aloft to Fiddler’s Green. |
| FIDDLEY | A raised grating on the decks of small steam or diesel vessels fixed over the hatches above the engine and boiler rooms to let the hot air and fumes escape. Fresh air enters the engine room through the ventilators and forces the hot air out through the fiddleys. In rough weather they are made watertight by tarpaulins spread over them and secured by battens. |
| FIFE RAILS | (1) The rails erected on the bulwarks which bounded the poop and quarterdeck of the old sailing men-of-war, East Indiamen, and the larger merchant vessels. As well as being decorative, they were useful in providing a convenient means of securing the clew lines of the sails when under sail.
(2) The circular or semi-circular rail around the base of a mast of a sailing vessel which holds the belaying pins to which the halyards of the sails are secured. The masts of modern yachts do not normally have fife rails as the halyards are brought down inside the hollow mast and secured below deck to avoid creating windage. |
| FIGURE OF EIGHT KNOT | A knot made in the end of a rope by passing the end of the rope over and round the standing part, over its own part and through the bight. Its purpose is to prevent a rope from unreeving when passed through a block. |
| FILL | To trim the sails of a fore-and-aft rigged ship, or to brace the yards of a squarerigged ship, so that the wind can fill the sails. In square-rigged ships it was possible to move ahead, to stop, or to move astern all on the same wind by bracing the yards so that the sails could fill, shiver, or back with the wind, i.e., with the wind blowing on the front of the sail. |
| FIRESHIP | A small vessel, usually of little particular value, filled with combustibles and fitted with special ventilating ducts in order to ensure rapid combustion. The charge was ignited by a slow match and train of powder, set to fire after a predetermined interval, and an armament of usually around eight small guns was provided for defence when not about to be used as a fireship. Their role in battle, or when attacking enemy ships at anchor, was to sail down as near to their victim as possible, lash the helm so that the fireship continued on her course, secure her to her victim with grappling irons, and at the last moment ignite the slow match, the captain and crew escaping in a boat towed astern or alongside. |
| FISH | A long piece of wood, concave on one side and convex on the other, used to strengthen a mast or a yard of a sailing vessel that has been sprung or otherwise damaged. Two such fish are placed one on each side of the weak point and secured either with metal bands or with a strong lashing known as a woolding. |
| FISH | (1) The operation of strengthening a yard or a mast in a sailing vessel by binding on fish with a lashing known as a woclding in those places where it has been sprung or otherwise damaged. Broken spars can also be temporarily repaired with fish in cases where no spare yard is carried.
(2) To fish an anchor, the operation of drawing up the flukes of a stocked anchor to the cat davit preparatory to its being stowed on an anchor bed. The modern stockless anchors have no need to be fished as their permanent stowage when weighed is in the hawseholes and not on anchor beds. |
| FISHING FLEET | (1) A collective term used to describe the fishing vessels owned by one individual or firm, or operating out of one port. It is also sometimes used, more loosely, to describe all the fishing vessels of one nation. Another use is to describe the fishing vessels of one type, e.g., the trawler fleet.
(2) A term used, particularly in the British Navy during the years when fleets and squadrons were maintained on foreign stations, to describe the unmarried young ladies who, usually with their families, sailed out to these stations in the hope of finding an eligible young officer who could be hooked in marriage. |
| FIX | The process of ascertaining the position of a ship from observations of land- or seamarks or by astronomical, radio, or electronic methods of navigation. The word ‘fix’ is often used as a noun to denote a position obtained from observations and is synonymous with the term ‘observed position’. |
| FIXED AND FLASHING LIGHT | A navi gational light in which a steady beam constantly visible is varied at fixed intervals by a flash of brighter intensity. |
| FIXED LIGHT | A navigational light displayed by a lighthouse, lightship, or lighted buoy in which the light exposed is a steady beam with no intervals of darkness. |
| FLAG OFFICER | A general term to embrace all officers of all navies of the rank of rear admiral or its equivalent and above, i.e., any officer who denotes his presence in command at sea by flying a flag, in distinction to commodores who fly broad pendants. ‘He has got his flag’, he has been promoted to flag rank. For ‘flag’ as a boat’s reply to a hail, |
| FLAGSHIP | In navies, the ship that carries an admiral’s flag, or in mercantile shipping lines, the ship of the commodore or senior captain of the line. |
| FLAKE | An old maritime name for a cradle or stage, suspended over a ship’s side, on which men could work in recaulking or repairing the ship’s side. |
| FLAKE | The operation of laying out the chain anchor cable of a ship on the forecastle deck for examination. It is hove up out of the cable lockers and ranged up and down the deck so that any weak or worn links can be located and the shackle of cable in which such a link occurs can be taken out of the cable and replaced with a new one. |
| FLARE | (1) The outward curve of the bows of a ship, which is designed to throw the water outwards when meeting a head sea, instead of letting it come straight up over the bows.
(2) A signal, often to indicate distress, used in ships at night. A proposal to use rockets or flares of different colours to indicate various other requirements or conditions of a ship, such as her position or the need for a pilot, has been put forward for international agreement but no firm decision has yet been reached. |
| FLASHING LIGHT | A navigational light displayed by a lighthouse, lightship, or lighted buoy in which the period of light is shorter than the period of darkness separating the flashes. |
| FLATBOAT | A large flat-bottomed pulling boat supplied during the 1 8th and early 1 9th centuries to warships which were to be engaged in amphibious operations and used for landing troops on open beaches. They carried up to thirty men and light field guns. |
| FLEET | (1) A company of vessels sailing together. The use of the word is sometimes expanded to embrace the whole of a national navy or all the ships owned by a shipping company. It is also used to describe fishing vessels, those owned by one company, those operating out of the same port, or occasionally those linked by function, e.g., the trawler fleet. In its naval use it can be used to describe either the whole of a national navy, e.g., the British fleet, Russian fleet, U.S. fleet, or a homogeneous assembly of some of the entirety of warships, such as the Home Fleet (British), 7th Fleet (U.S.), Black Sea Fleet (Russian), etc. It is also sometimes used to describe all warships of one nation with the same general function, such as U-boat fleet (German), etc.
(2) A creek or ditch which is tidal. |
| FLEMISH HORSE | The short foot rope at the end of a yard used by the man at the outer corner of a square sail when reefing or furling. The outer end of the Flemish horse is normally spliced round the gooseneck of the studdingsail boom iron and the inner end secured inside the braces. |
| FLENSE | The process of stripping the blubber from a whale when it has been caught and hauled up on the deck of a whale factory ship. The operation is performed by the use of flensing irons to cut the blubber loose and by tackles brought to the winches to haul it away from the carcass. The deck on which the operation is performed is known as the flensing deck. |
| FLOATING DOCK | A dock constructed in the main of watertight tanks. When these are flooded, the dock is immersed in the sea to a depth where it can receive the hull of a ship. As the tanks are then pumped out, the dock rises bringing the ship with it, until the hull is above water. The great value of a floating dock, vis-d-vis a graving dock which is a permanent structure, is that it can be towed to any place where its services are required. |
| FLOG THE GLASS | An expression used on board ship to indicate attempts to speed up the passage of a watch in the days when watches were timed by the half-hour sand glass. The run of the sand was supposed to be quickened by vibrating the glass, and when weary watchkeepers towards the end of their watches shook the glass to make the sand run out more quickly, they were said to flog the glass. |
| FLOGGING ROUND THE FLEET | A form of punishment in the old days of the British Navy for the more serious crimes committed on board. It could be awarded only by sentence of a court martial. The man undergoing sentence was placed in a boat in which a ship’s grating had been lashed upright across the thwarts, and rowed alongside each ship lying in harbour, where he was given twelve strokes with a cat-o’-nine-tails by a boatswain’s mate of the ship off which the boat was lying. After each infliction of a dozen strokes a blanket was thrown across his back while he was being rowed to the next ship. A naval doctor was always in attendance in the boat to make certain that the man undergoing punishment was fit to receive further instalments of his sentence as he came alongside each ship. In each ship visited the crew were mustered on deck and in the rigging to witness the punishment, drums on board beating out the ‘Rogue’s March’ as the boat approached. |
| FLOOD | The flow of the tidal stream as it rises from the ending of the period of slack water at low tide to the start of the period of slack water at high tide. Its period is about six hours which is divided into three parts of about two hours each, the first two hours being known as the young flood, the middle two hours as the main flood, and the last two as the last of the flood. An approximate rule both for the amount of the rise and the speed of the flow of a flood tide for each of the six hours of the period of tide is fe for the first hour, ^ for the second, fc for the third and fourth, ft for the fifth, and y, for the sixth. |
| FLOOR | The lower part of a transverse frame of a ship running each side of the keelson to the bilges. In the general run of shipbuilding, this part of the frame is usually approximately horizontal, so that the floor of a vessel, i.e., the lower section of its transverse frames, is a virtually horizontal platform extending to the ship’s sides at the point where they begin to turn up towards the vertical. |
| FLOTSAM | (1) Any part of the wreckage of a ship or her cargo which is found floating on the surface of the sea. It was originally in Britain a part of the perquisites of the Lord High Admiral, but is today considered as derelict property and goes to the finder or salvor. To be flotsam, however, it must be floating and not on the bottom of the sea, when other questions of ownership arise.
(2) The spat, or spawn, of the oyster is sometimes known as flotsam. |
| FLOWER OF THE WINDS | An old expression for the engraving of the wind-rose on the earliest charts and maps, and extended after the introduction of the magnetic compass to include the compass rose on charts. |
| FLOWING | (1) The situation of the sheets of a sail in fore-and-aft rigged ships when they are eased off as the wind comes from broad on or abaft the beam, and the yards of a squarerigged ship when they are braced more squarely to the mast. A ship is said to have a flowing sheet when the wind crosses her beam and the sails are trimmed to take the greatest advantage of it.
(2) A term used in connection with the tide. a synonym of flooding. |
| FLUKE | (1) The triangular shape at the end of each arm of an anchor immediately below the bill or point which, by digging into the ground when any strain or pull comes on it, gives an anchor its holding power. They are also sometimes called palms. Many seamen do not sound the ‘k’, pronouncing it as ‘flue’.
(2) The two triangular parts which make up the tail of a whale. It was this which gave the old whale fishers the expression of ‘fluking’ when their whalers, in those days under sail power only, were running free with a following wind with the foresail boomed out, or goose-winged, on the opposite side to the mainsail. |
| FLUKY | A description of a wind at sea when it is light and variable in direction and has not settled down to blow steadily from any one quarter. It is a term used more often in connection with sailing vessels than with other type of craft. |
| FLUSH DECK | A continuous deck of a ship laid from fore to aft without any break. Strictly speaking, the only true decks of a ship are those which continue from forward to aft without a break, the remainder being only part decks, but the generally accepted meaning of the word has been expanded to include every deck, whether whole or part. The term flush deck is also frequently used to denote a type of ship which has no forecastle or poop. |
| FLY | (1) The old maritime word for the compass card from the time it was pivoted in the compass bowl and thus able to revolve freely.
(2) The part of a flag or pendant farthest from the staff or halyard on which it is hoisted, i.e.. the part which flutters in the wind. |
| FLY-BOAT | A 16th- 19th century flat-bottomed Dutch vessel with a very high and ornate stern with broad buttocks, and with one or two masts either square-rigged on both or with a spritsail on the mainmast. They were of about 600 tons, and used mainly for local coastal traffic. |
| FLY-BY-NIGHT | The name given to an additional sail which acted as a sort of studdingsail set by naval sloops which were not issued with such sails, during the 18th and early 19th centuries. It was normally a square sail set on a temporary yard when the wind came from directly astern, but was occasionally a spare jib set from the topmast head and sheeted by tack and clew to the upper yardarms. |
| FOG SIGNALS | A series of sound signals in fog laid down in the international regulations for preventing collisions at sea. A steamship under way sounds one prolonged blast on her steam whistle or foghorn every two minutes, a vessel under way but stopped sounds two prolonged blasts, and a vessel towing, a cable ship at work, a fishing vessel engaged in fishing, or a vessel not under command sounds one prolonged and two short blasts. Ships at anchor ring a bell rapidly for five seconds every minute. Sailing ships give blasts on their foghorn every minute, one blast meaning that she is under way on the starboard tack, two blasts on the port tack, and three blasts running with the wind abaft the beam. Short blasts are used to indicate changes of course, one blast meaning altering course to starboard, two to port, and three going astern. |
| FOG-BUOY | A small buoy towed astern at the end of a long grass-line by naval vessels when steaming in line ahead in thick fog to give an indication to the next ship astern of the distance away of the ship next ahead in the line, thus providing a means of retaining formation. By keeping the fog-buoy of the next ahead in sight and close to the stem of the next following ship, there is no danger of collision in the fog. When fog-buoys are in use, they are said to be streamed. |
| FOGHORN | A sounding appliance fitted in ships, or a portable horn carried on board small craft, used for giving warning of a vessel’s presence in fog. Smaller ships may be fitted with a steam whistle in place of a foghorn, but use the same signals. Fog signals are also made by lighthouses and by lightships when they are in their correct position. |
| FOOT | The bottom side of a sail, whether triangular or four-sided. Thus, also, footrope, that part of a bolt rope, to which the sides of a sail are sewn, which bounds the foot of the sail. |
| ‘FOOT IT IN’ | An order given to the men furling the bunt of a square sail when it was required to stow the sail especially snugly. It entailed the topmen stamping this part of the sail in as hard as they could, supporting themselves by hanging on to a topsail tye. It was a process also known as ‘dancing it in’. |
| FOOTROPES | The ropes in square-rigged ships, supported at intervals by ropes from the yard known as stirrups, which hang below a yard and on which the topmen stand when aloft furling or reefing sail. They were sometimes also known as horses of the yard, possibly because of the connection with stirrups. |
| FOREBITTER | The sailors’ songs sung in the forecastle when the men of a watch were off duty. They were not in any way shanties, which were always working songs, but songs sung for recreation or entertainment. It is almost certain that the name arose because the sailors gathered around the fore bitts on the forecastle to sing them. In fact these songs were also known, more prosaically, as fo’c’sle songs. |
| FORECASTLE | The space beneath the short raised deck forward, known in sailing ships as the topgallant forecastle, to be seen usually in smaller ships. The origin of the name lies in the castle built up over the bows of the oldest fighting ships in which archers were stationed to attack the crews of enemy vessels or to repulse boarders entering in the waist of the ship. It used also to be the generic term to indicate the living space of the crew for many years in the forward end of the ship below the forecastle deck but this meaning has gradually died out as better living conditions for crews have made their way into all modern ships. In this connection, it was also the name given to the deckhouse on the upper deck of large sailing ships in which the seamen had their living quarters. |
| FOREFOOT | The point in a ship where the stem is joined to the forward end of the keel. |
| FORE-GANGER | (1) A length of 15 fathoms of chain, slightly heavier than the anchor cable, which in some ships used to be inserted in the cable between the anchor and the first shackle to take the additional wear on the cable as it lay in the hawsepipe when the anchors were secured for sea.
(2) In whaling, a short piece of rope connecting the line with the shank of the harpoon when spanned for killing. |
| FOREGUY | A rope leading forward from the end of a mainsail boom to the bitts to prevent the boom from swinging inboard when broadreaching or running before a following wind which is patchy in force or direction. It applies mainly to gaff-rigged vessels. |
| FORE-HOODS | The foremost outer and inner planks of a wooden-hulled vessel, those whose ends are rabbeted into the stem. |
| FORELOCK | A flat wedge or pin driven through the hole in an anchor shackle to secure the shackle pin, much in the nature of a cotter pin. They were usually held in place by a pellet of lead which, when struck with a sledge hammer, expanded to fill the cavity behind the head, but a more modern method is to insert a lead ring which fits into a cavity and holds the pin in position until removed with a shearing punch. |
| FORE-SHEETS | The forward part of a boat, right in the bows, the opposite end of the sternsheets. It has often been suggested that the origin of the term came from the fact that it was in that part of the boat that the sheets of the foresails, when spread, are handled, but, while this is true of stern-sheets, the sheets of foresails are almost invariably handled amidships or aft. It is more probable that because the after part of a boat is called the stern-sheets, someone decided that the forward part should be called by the opposite name. |
| FORETURN | The twist given to the strands of which rope is made, before they are laid up into rope. |
| FORGE OVER | A ship forges over a shoal or sandbank when she is forced over by the wind acting on a great press of sail. If the wind was fair it was often possible to free a ship which had been caught on a shoal by setting additional sails and using the wind to push or forge her over. |
| FORMER | A cylindrical piece of wood used for making the cartridges with which a naval gun was loaded in the days of sailing navies. It was slightly less than the diameter of the bore of the gun for which cartridges were to be made and paper or linen was wrapped round it as a container for the gunpowder required to fire the ball. It was of a size to take exactly the amount of powder required for the charge. |
| FORWARD | Towards the bows of a ship, or in the fore part of a ship. It has no particular boundary line in the ship, being used more in a relative or directional sense than as a definition of any area. |
| FOTHERING | A method of stopping a leak at sea. The old practice was to fill a basket with ashes and chopped ropeyarns and cover it loosely with canvas. The basket was then fixed to the end of a long pole and plunged repeatedly into the sea as near as possible to the leak. As the ropeyarns were gradually shaken through the sides of the basket or over the top, they were drawn into the leak with the water entering it, and so choked it. A more efficient method, developed later, was to draw a sail or similar piece of canvas, closely thrummed with yarns, under the bottom of the ship in the area of the leak, the pressure of water holding it close to the ship’s side and thus stopping the leak. This is the same principle as that on which the collision mat works, but is used in smaller vessels in which proper collision mats are not carried. |
| FOUL | An adjective with various nautical meanings, generally indicative of something wrong or difficult. Thus a foul hawse is the expression used when a ship lying to two anchors gets her cables crossed; a foul bottom is the condition of a ship’s underwater hull when weeds and barnacles restrict her way through the water; a foul wind is one which, being too much ahead, prevents a sailing ship from laying her desired course. When used as a verb it indicates much the same thing. One vessel can foul another when she drifts down on her, or can foul a ship’s hawse by letting go an anchor and cable across that of the other. In a yacht race, one can foul another by bumping into her. |
| FOUL, or FOULED, ANCHOR | An anchor which has become hooked in some impediment on the ground or, on weighing, has its cable wound round the stock or flukes. The fouled anchor is also the official seal of the Lord High Admiral of Britain and another version of it is the decorative device on his flag, which until the office of Admiralty was merged into the Ministry of Defence in 1964, was flown day and night from the Admiralty building in London. It is now the personal flag of the Queen, who assumed the title of Lord High Admiral in 1964. This flag, in conjunction with the Royal Standard and the Union flag, is traditionally flown when the sovereign of Britain proceeds to sea, indicating that it is from the sovereign that the office of Lord High Admiral derives. The only other occasion on which it is flown is at the launch of a British warship, being hoisted on a flagstaff on the hull as it goes down the launching ways. Its adoption as the official seal of the Lord High Admiral of England dates from the end of the 16th century when it was incorporated as part of the arms of Lord Howard of Effingham, then Lord High Admiral. A form of it, however. had been in use by the Lord High Admiral of Scotland about a century earlier. The use of the foul, or fouled, anchor, an abomination to seamen when it occurs in practice, as the seal of the highest office of maritime administration is purely on the grounds of its decorative effect, the rope cable around the shank of the anchor giving a pleasing finish to the stark design of an anchor on its own. |
| FOUNDER | The act of a ship which sinks at sea, generally understood to be by the flooding of her hull either through springing a leak or through striking a rock. Other causes of a ship sinking, such as explosion, etc., are not usually associated with the word. |
| FRAM | A three-masted schooner of 402 tons with auxiliary steam power, was the first vessel designed to winter in the polar pack ice, her hull being so shaped that no matter how strong the pressure of the ice she would be lifted free of it. The brain child of the Norwegian polar explorer, Fridtjof Nansen, she was first employed on his famous drift across the Arctic Ocean in 1893-6. In 1898-1902 Otto Sverdrup used her to explore the islands north-west of Greenland. In 1910 the Fram was taken by Roald Amundsen to the Antarctic where he and four companions successfully reached the South pole. |
| FRAME | A timber or rib of a ship, running from the keel to the side rail. A ship’s frames form the shape of the hull and provide the skeleton on which the hull planking or plating is secured. In a wooden ship the frames are built up of sections called futtocks, in steel ships they are normally of angle iron bent to the desired shape. A ship with her frames set up and ready for planking or plating is said to be ‘in frame’. |
| FRAP | The operation of binding together to increase tension or to prevent from blowing loose. Thus shrouds, if they have worked loose, are frapped together to increase their tension; a sail is frapped with turns of rope round it to prevent it from flapping in the wind. Frapping lines are passed across the tops of awnings to hold them secure in a high wind. In older days, ships’ hulls were sometimes frapped by passing four or five turns of cable-laid rope round them when it was thought that they might not be strong enough to resist the violence of the sea. |
| FREE | A ship is said to be sailing free when her sheets are eased, and running free when the wind is blowing from astern. ‘To free the sheets’, to ease them off to present a squarer aspect of the sails to the wind. |
| FREEBOARD | The distance, measured in the waist, or centre, of a ship, from the waterline to the upper deck level. |
| FREEING PORTS | Square ports cut in the bulwarks of a ship to allow seawater which has been shipped on deck to run away over the side. The doors on these ports are normally hinged on the top edge and situated outboard so that they can be forced open by the pressure of water on deck but held tightly closed against the bulwarks by the pressure of the sea if the ship rolls to an extent where they are under water. |
| FREEZING | A term sometimes used to describe the ornamental painting around the bows, stern, and quarters of the old sailing ships, most often in the form of arms and armour or maritime emblems. There can be little doubt that this was the contemporary shipwright’s method of spelling friezing. from frieze, a band of ornament. |
| FREIGHT | Goods transported in a ship, or the money paid for the transport of such goods. Freight, in its meaning of goods transported, is specified in the bill of lading and when shipped c.i.f.. remains the property of the consignor until delivery is taken by the consignee at the port of unloading. Where freight is shipped f.o.b., the goods become the property of the consignee immediately they arrive on board and he is responsible for the payment of insurance and freight charges. In older forms of commerce the shipowner often owned the goods loaded in his ship and carried them to foreign ports to sell to the best advantage, replacing them when sold with goods purchased abroad and brought home for sale at a profit. In this case there were of course no actual freight charges as such, this element of the cost coming from the overall profit from the sales of outward bound and inward bound goods. An alternative to this general pattern was for a merchant to charter a ship to carry his goods to foreign ports for the master, or an agent known as a supercargo or husband, to sell to the best advantage. In this case the actual freight charges would not be specifically determined but would be a part of the sum paid in chartering the ship. With the introduction of the steamship, and of more rapid means of communication such as undersea cables and, more recently, wireless, the telephone, and air mail, the old pattern of freight changed. Instead of a shipload of goods being adventured abroad to be sold to the best advantage at ports visited, sales of specific goods were arranged direct between merchants, and the freight was arranged with a shipowner or shipping line trading regularly to the port nearest to the consignee. As the overall volume of world trade expanded from the late 19th century, the pattern of freight again changed, especially in the design of ships to carry one particular product, such as coal, grain, oil, etc. The increasing volume of trade, taken in conjunction with the profits to be made from freight charges in handling larger cargoes, has resulted in the building of bulk carriers of increasing tonnage, ships designed to carry only containerized cargo, and very large tankers to carry hundreds of thousands of tons of crude oil in a single voyage. |
| FRENCHMAN | The name given to a left-handed loop when coiling down wire rope right-handed. Wire rope, especially in long lengths, does not absorb turns as easily as fibre rope, and if the wire being coiled is not free to revolve during coiling, it will become twisted. An occasional left-handed loop introduced into the coil will counteract the twists. |
| FRESHES | The name given to the fresh water which drains off the land after a period of heavy rain and increases the flow of the ebb tide as it recedes from estuaries and the mouths of large tidal rivers, carrying the land silt to a considerable distance out to sea and discolouring the water. Thus, the freshes of the Nile are well known for carrying sand many miles to seaward, turning the water yellow, and other rivers whose freshes are notorious for the distance they discolour the water are the Congo, Mississippi, Indus. Ganges, and Rhone. In the earlier days of navigation, these freshes were often used as a useful indication of a ship’s position, the navigator knowing, when he sailed into discoloured water, that his ship was off the mouth of a large river. |
| FRIENDSHIP SLOOP | Originally a type of fishing boat working offshore out of the port of Friendship on the coast of Maine, U.S.A. With fixed keel and deep draught, a wide beam and fiddlehead bow, and a broad counter stern. Friendship sloops have been built in sizes from about 20 up to 35 feet in length. Yachts have copied the workboats. and a Friendship Sloop Association is in existence. |
| FULL AND BY | The condition of a sailing vessel when she is held as close to the wind as possible with the sails full and not shivering. |
| “FULL SEA’ | An old term, temp. 15th- 16th centuries, used to describe the state of high water at the top of the flood tide in a port or harbour. |
| FURL | The operation of taking in the sails of a vessel and securing them with gaskets; in the case of square-rigged ships by hauling in on the clew-lines and buntlines and rolling them up to the yards; in the case of fore-and-aft rig, by lowering gaff-rigged sails and similarly securing them to the booms or rolling up triangular sails and securing them to the stays on which they are set. To take off the sails of a ship and stow them in sail lockers below decks is not, strictly, furling although the final result in respect of the ship is the same. To furl in a body, a method of furling sail in square-rigged ships occasionally practised when the ship is expected to remain for some time in harbour. It entailed gathering the sail into the top at the heel of the topmast by releasing the earings at the yardarms so that the sail could be drawn in towards the centre of the yard. |
| FURNITURE | The whole movable equipment of a ship—rigging, sails, spars, anchors, boats, and everything with which she is fitted out to operate her, but not including her consumable stores, such as fuel and victuals. |
| FURRING | An old term in shipwrightry meaning to replank a vessel to give her more beam and freeboard. ‘There are two kinds of furring, the one is after a ship is built, to lay on another plank upon the side of her (which is called plank upon plank). The other, which is more eminent, and more properly furring, is to rip off the first planks and to put other timbers upon the first, and so to put on the planks upon these timbers. The occasion of it is to make a ship bear a better sail, for when a ship is too narrow, and the bearing [freeboard] either not laid out enough, or too low, then they must make her broader, and lay out her bearing higher.’ Mainwaring, Seaman’s Dictionary (1644). Mainwaring’s strictures refer to errors in the original design of ships in that they were being built too narrow in the beam and with insufficient freeboard to carry the amount of sail for which they were designed. |
| FUTTOCK | The separate pieces of timber which form a frame or rib in a wooden ship. There are normally four, or occasionally five, futtocks to a rib in a ship of moderate size, the one nearest the keel being known as a ground or naval futtock, the remainder being called upper futtocks. |
| FUTTOCK SHROUDS | Originally short shrouds of chain or large hemp, but later metal rods, which give support to the top on a lower mast. They run from the futtock plates, secured to the sides of the top, downwards and inwards towards the lower mast being secured either to a stave in the lower shrouds close under the top, from which the catharpings are led to the mast, or to a futtock band round the mast itself. The futtock plates, to which the upper ends of the futtock shrouds are secured, carry the futtock chain plates to which the topmast shrouds are set up. The word would appear to be seaman’s pronunciation of foothook. |