| TERMS | MEANING: |
|---|---|
| L.C.A. | The short title for Landing Craft Assault, small landing craft used during the Second World War in military or marine assaults on enemy beaches. |
| L.C.I. | An abbreviation for Landing Craft, Infantry, small craft used during the Second World War in which infantry carried in L.S.I.s were put ashore on coasts for assault purposes. They were normally carried at the davits of L.S.I.s and lowered into the water for the assault, being fitted with bow doors which were opened when the craft grounded. |
| L.C.P. | Landing Craft Personnel, small wooden landing craft of the Second World War used for transporting personnel on assault operations. |
| L.C.S. | The short title for Landing Craft Support, small landing craft armed with Oerlikon guns used as supporting vessels in assault operations in the Second World War. |
| L.C.T. | An abbreviation for Landing Craft, Tank, small vessels used during the Second World War in which tanks carried in L.S.T.s were landed on an assault beach. They were normally carried at the davits of L.S.T.s and lowered into the water with their tanks on board, being fitted with bow doors and a ramp down which the tank was driven either to land dryshod direct on to a beach if conditions allowed or else to swim ashore if the L.C.T. grounded too far out to reach the beach herself. Larger L.C.T.s, carrying up to four tanks, were self-propelled and made passages to the assault area independently, either grounding on the beach to launch the tanks dryshod or letting down the ramp offshore for the tanks to swim ashore. |
| L.S.I. | An abbreviation for Landing Ship, Infantry, large vessels converted and used during the Second World War to carry infantry for assault purposes in amphibious operations. Either they carried small landing craft at their davits in which the infantry were ferried to the beach under assault (see also l.c.i.) or, where beach conditions were suitable, they were grounded on the assault beach and the infantry landed directly through bow doors and down a ramp. |
| L.S.T. | An abbreviation for Landing Ship, Tank, a large merchant ship converted to carry tanks and used during the Second World War for assault purposes in amphibious operations. They usually carried tank landing craft at their davits in which the tanks were ferried close to the beach under assault, but where beach conditions were suitable they could be grounded close in and the tanks landed through bow doors and down a ramp, either directly on to the beach if the beach contours were suitable or swimming ashore. |
| LABOUR | The description of a ship when she rolls or pitches excessively in a rough sea. The expression, though applied to all ships, is most apt in its application to sailing ships since pronounced rolling produces a great strain on masts and rigging and may lead, in sailing vessels with wooden hull subjected to such a strain, to an opening of the seams. |
| LACE | Also known as gold lace or distinctive lace, the rings denoting rank worn on the sleeves of an officer’s coat or on the shoulder-straps of tropical uniform and greatcoats. |
| LACE | The act of attaching, in a sailing vessel, a sail to a gaff or boom by passing a rope or cord alternately through eyelet holes and round the spar. In the case of a boom the eyelet holes are in the foot of the sail, in the case of a gaff they are in the head. The rope or cord itself is known as a lacing. Similarly, in square-rigged ships, a sail is laced to a yard, a bonnet to a course, and a drabler to a bonnet. |
| LADDER | (1) The general nautical term for what on shore would be called a staircase. Ladders leading from deck to deck are known as accommodation ladders; gangway ladders, rigged over the side when a ship is anchored or at a mooring, extend from a small platform level with the upper deck down to the level of the water for use when embarking or disembarking from small boats.
(2) It is also a term used in the control of naval gunnery when finding the range of an enemy vessel. Up or down ladders are fired according to the fall of shot; if a salvo of shells is seen to fall short by its splashes, the range is corrected upwards by steps of, say, 400 yards until the splashes caused by the fall of shot are seen to cross the target, thus forming an up ladder. Similarly, a down ladder is ordered when the splashes are seen initially beyond the target. |
| LADE | The older equivalent of to load, in relation to a ship and her cargo or a warship and her guns, the present participle being used as a noun to denote the whole of the cargo on board. There was an ancient superstition of sailors that if, while the cargo was being brought on board, the ship heeled to port (or ladeboard) the voyage would be successful, if to starboard (or steerboard), storms would blow up. ladeboard, an old term for the side of a vessel across which the cargo was carried on board. It was the left hand, or port, side of the ship, as the steering oar projected from the right-hand, or starboard, side and thus made it awkward to lie alongside a loading wharf starboard side to. Ladeboard, which developed into larboard, was thus the old term for port in its meaning of left-hand side. |
| LAGAN | A term in maritime law for goods which are cast overboard from a ship with a buoy and buoy rope attached so that they may be later recovered. It is a term also sometimes used to refer to articles still within a sunken ship as she lies on the bottom. The word comes from the old French lagand, lying. By extension, the term has now come to mean any goods lying on the bottom of the sea, whether buoyed, inside the hull of a ship, or loose on the bottom. |
| LAGOON | A stretch of water enclosed, or mainly enclosed, by coral islands, atolls, and reefs. As the coral polyps flourish and die, they form reefs, which can eventually develop into islands, and as these grow, so an area of sea water becomes enclosed and forms a lagoon. The conditions of life of the polyps accentuate this tendency, as those on the inside, or sheltered, edge of a reef are brought no food by the action of the sea and thus die without breeding, while those on the outside edge, to which the sea brings food, continue to multiply and, as they die, build up the reef on its outer edge so that it continually grows higher, and extends further, thus forming a lagoon. |
| LAID | A term associated with rope-making, from lay, meaning the twist of the rope. Single-laid rope is one strand of rope, the strand consisting of fibres twisted up. Hawser-laid rope consists of three strands twisted together into a rope against the lay of the strands; cable-laid rope is three hawser-laid ropes twisted up together to form a cable. Cable-laid rope was also frequently known as water-laid rope. |
| LAMINATED CONSTRUCTION | A method of construction of many parts of small wooden vessels when suitable planks and crooks, in which the grain of the wood follows the required curve, are not readily available. With this method such members of the hull as the stem, the sternpost, the keel, fore-and-aft stringers, frames, knees, deck beams, etc., are formed of several thin layers of timber which are bound together with water-resistant glue into the various curves required. By means of prefabricated jigs or rigid patterns, various parts of the hull can thus be laminated in large numbers, enabling production of identical wooden hulls to be carried out with a reduction in time and labour costs. A familiar form of laminated construction is plywood which is formed of three or more thin layers or veneers of wood bonded together with glue. |
| LANBY BUOY | A special buoy developed to take the place of a lightship. It is a very large buoy with a diameter of 12 metres (40 ft) and a depth of 2 5 metres (8 ft), surmounted by a lattice mast which carries a characteristic light at a height of 12 metres (40 ft) above sea level with a visibility of 16 miles in clear weather. In addition to the light, Lanby buoys are fitted with a sound fog signal and a radar beacon. They can be moored in position in any depth of water up to 90 metres (300 ft) and are designed to operate for up to six months without attention. At all times their performance and position are monitored by a shore station. As they are unmanned, they can operate much more economically than a lightship, which normally has a crew of three or four, and it has been estimated that the ratio of cost of Lanby buoy to lightship is one-tenth. The name comes from the initials of large automatic navigational buoy. |
| LAND BREEZE | An evening wind which blows from the land to seaward when the temperature of the land falls below that of the sea. As the sun sets, areas of land cool more quickly than the sea adjoining them, the air over the land thus becomes heavier and flows out to sea to establish an equilibrium with the lighter air over the sea. |
| LANDMARK | Any fixed object on the land whose position is marked on a chart. Some, such as lighthouses, beacons, leading-marks, are set up specifically as guides to navigation or warnings to seamen; others, such as prominent buildings or church towers, can be used as navigational guides if the chart in use shows their positions. Cross-* bearings of any landmarks will fix a ship’s position in coastal waters with complete accuracy. |
| LANTERN | The means by which the ships of a fleet could remain in company throughout the night during the early days of sailing navies. Most ships of war in these navies used to carry three great lanterns mounted on thepoop rail which at night were lit by large candles so that the next ship astern could keep station on them. Some of the larger ships carried as many as seven. In his diary for 1 7 January 1661. During a visit to the Royal Sovereign, SamuelPepys wrote: “my Lady Sandwich, my Lady Jemimah, Mrs. Browne, Mrs. Grace, and Mary and the page, my lady’s servants, and myself all went into the Lanthorne together’. According to James Howell (Epist. Ho-Elianae) the largest ships’ lanterns would hold ten people. |
| LANYARD | A short length of rope or small stuff used for a variety of purposes on board. In sailing vessels, before the introduction of “bottle screws and similar modern fittings, the shrouds of all masts were set up taut by means of lanyards rove through the deadeyes. A sailor carries his knife on a lanyard. And when flintlocks were introduced into navies as the firing mechanism of a warship’s guns, they were fired with a lanyard which released the hammer. |
| LARBOARD | The old term for the left-hand side of a ship when facing forward, now known as port. During the early years of the 19th century the term larboard began to give way to port as a helm order in order to avoid confusion with the similar sounding starboard, and the change was made official in 1844. Opinions differ as to how larboard originated as describing the left-hand side of a ship. The most favoured theory is that larboard derives from ladeboard, as many of the old merchant ships had a loading, or lading, port on their left-hand side. |
| LARGE | A point of sailing where the sheets which control the sails in a sailing vessel can be eased well away to make the most of a quartering wind. In square-rigged ships it was the point where studding-sails would draw if set. The term does not refer to a wind from dead astern but to one from abaft the beam. To sail large, to ease away the sheets and sail further off the wind. |
| LASH | To secure anything with a rope or cord. Hammocks, with the bedclothes inside, are lashed up every morning before being stowed away; Ulysses had himself lashed to the mast of his ship so that he could listen to the songs of the sirens without being able to leap overboard to join them. Lash, as a noun, a stroke with the cat-o’-nine-tails. |
| LATITUDE | From the Latin latitudo, breadth. It is one of the spherical co-ordinates used to describe a terrestrial position, the other being longitude. Treating the earth as a perfect sphere the latitude of a point on its surface is the angular measure between the point and the plane of the equator along the meridian on which the point is located. This is equivalent to the corresponding angle at the earth’s centre. The earth’s shape, however, is not that of an exact sphere so that these two angles do not coincide exactly except for points on the equator (latitude 0°) or the poles of the earth (latitude 90°). Geographical latitude, also called true latitude, is equivalent to the true altitude of the elevated celestial pole at the place. This is always greater (except at latitude 0° or 90°) than the corresponding angle at the earth’s centre, which latter angle is called the geocentric latitude of the place. |
| LAUNCH | (1) A type of vessel used as a gunboat in the Mediterranean during the 18th and 19th centuries by the navies of France, Spain, the Italian States, and Turkey. They were largely flat-bottomed craft with comparatively little freeboard and built long for their beam, a design which gave them a poor performance under sail. Smaller craft of similar design, also called launches, were used under oars in shoal coastal waters for a variety of purposes, such as underrunning cables, laying out anchors, etc.
(2) The largest ship’s boat of a sailing man-of-war, also known as a longboat. They were carvel built and carried a mast and sails for short cruises independently of the ship which carried them. It was from this ship’s boat that, in the steam battleship era, the modern launch was developed, the largest sailing and pulling boat carried in warships of this size. They were 42 feet long and pulled eighteen oars, nine each side. Diagonal built and later fitted with a paraffin engine and screw propeller, they were capable of laying out a bower anchor, or mounting a light gun in the bows. They had one mast with a de Horsey rig, gaff mainsail without a boom, and a fore staysail. With the virtual disappearance from all navies of the battleship and large armoured cruiser, this particular ship’s boat is now obsolete. (3) The generic name for the small steam or power boat carried as a tender in the larger cruising yachts. Although most of these were at first steam propelled, in present times the use of petrol engines, either inboard or outboard, or small diesels is virtually universal. |
| LAUNCHING WAYS | The beds of timber blocks, sloping gradually down towards the water, on which the bilge-keels of a ship rest after she has been constructed in a building slip, sometimes also known as bilge ways. When a vessel is launched they support the sliding ways, a sort of cradle which goes down with the ship into the water. |
| LAY | A verb much used by seamen with a variety of meanings. A sailing vessel lays her course when, if close-hauled, she can reach her objective without tacking; a ship lays-to when she is hove-to; top men lay out on the yards in square-rigged ships when handling the sails; a ship is laid up when she is placed out of commission. To lay aft or forward, an order to seamen to move in the direction indicated. |
| LAZARETTO | (1) A compartment set aside in smaller ships for the stowage of provisions and stores. It was frequently in the stern of the ship, under the direct eye and control of the master to make pilfering more difficult, but was by no means unknown at the fore part of the ‘tween decks. In modern days, with ships spending less time over a voyage and much better conditions of messing, both in quantity and variety, this type of lazaretto in a ship no longer exists.
(2) An isolation hospital for men who may have infections or contagious diseases from ships which have been placed in quarantine. |
| LAZY GUY | A small tackle or rope used to prevent the boom of a sail swinging unduly when a sailing vessel is rolling heavily. |
| LAZY PAINTER | (1) A small rope for securing a boat lying alongside a ship in fine weather when her own painter is unnecessarily large for the job.
(2) A rope or wire with a thimble in the end hanging vertically from a lower boom rigged out from a ship’s side to which her boats are made fast when in harbour, the boat’s own painter being rove through the thimble and brought back inboard and secured. This form of lazy painter is necessary since the boom is rig several feet” above the level of the water and out of reach from a boat. |
| LEAD LINE | A means of finding the depth of water near coasts and probably the earliest of the devices used by coastal navigators to facilitate safe navigation, especially in thick or hazy weather. It consists of a hemp line to which is attached, by means of a leather becket or a rope strop, a lead weight or plummet of about seven pounds. The lower end of the plummet is cup-shaped to accommodate the arming of the lead, this being a lump of tallow pressed into the hollow at the base of the lead to indicate the nature of the bottom deposits. Sand, mud, shingle, etc., adheres to the tallow and tells the leadsman the type of bottom he is finding; when the tallow comes up clean, he is finding rock. |
| LEADING BLOCK | A single block, frequently a snatch block, used as a fairlead to bring the hauling part of a rope or the fall of a tackle into a more convenient direction, or to lead it on to the barrel of a winch. In the case of a tackle, the fall is known, after it has been led through a leading block, as the leading part. |
| LEADING MARK | A mark sometimes set up on shore or fixed on the bottom in shallow water which, when brought into line with another mark or prominent object ashore, will lead a ship clear of a local danger, such as a rock or shoal, when approaching the shore. They are sometimes lighted at night, displaying the light to seaward, for the same purpose. |
| LEADING WIND | The description given to a wind which is blowing free in relation to the desired course of a sailing vessel; i.e., any wind which enables the sheets of a sail to be eased off to present a square aspect of the sail to the wind. |
| LEAGUE | A measurement of distance, long out of use. A league at sea measured 318 nautical miles, the equivalent of four Roman miles, but those on land had different values according to the country, ranging from a minimum of 2 4 to a maximum of 4 6 statute miles. Usually at sea, for practical purposes, the league was taken as three nautical miles, the odd fraction being omitted. |
| LEECH | The after side, or lee edge, of a fore and aft sail and the outer edges of a square sail: in the case of square sails they are known as port and starboard leeches according to which side of the ship they are nearest. The leech rope is that part of the boltrope which borders the leech of a sail. |
| LEE-FANG | The older name for a vang. It was ‘a rope which is reeved into the cringles of the courses when we would haul in the bottom of the sail to lace on the bonnet’ (Mainwaring, Seaman’s Dictionary, 1644), and was also used in fore-and-aft rigged ships, after Mainwaring’s time, to prevent the peak of a gaff sagging away to leeward when sailing close-hauled. |
| LEEWARD | A term denoting a direction at sea in relation to the wind, i.e., downwind as opposed to windward, up wind. |
| LEEWAY | The distance a ship is set down to leeward of her course by the action of wind or tide. A vessel can make a lot of leeway if a strong cross tide is running or if her keel is not long enough or deep enough to give her a good grip of the water and hold her up to the wind. The word has also a colloquial meaning as having fallen behind in something: “He has a lot of leeway to catch up’ to reach the required position or standard. |
| LEG | The seaman’s term for the run or distance made on a single tack by a sailing vessel. Thus, when making for a point directly to windward, a sailing vessel will sail legs of equal length on each tack alternately; if the required course is not directly to windward but still higher than she can fetch on a single tack, she will sail by means of long and short legs alternately. |
| LEGS | Wooden supports lashed each side of a deep-keeled vessel, such as a yacht, to hold her upright when she takes the ground either for cleaning or repair. They extend to the depth of the keel. |
| LET GO AND HAUL’ or ‘AFORE HAUL’ | One of the orders given during the process of tacking a square-rigged ship, being given when the bow of the ship has just passed across the wind and is about to pay off. “Let go’ refers to the fore bowline and what are now, after crossing the wind, the weather braces, and ‘haul’ refers to the lee braces. |
| LEVANTER | A strong, raw wind from the east or north-east which blows in the Mediterranean. |
| LIBERTY | The sailor’s name for short leave from his ship. Sailors with permission to go ashore for the day or night are known as liberty men. |
| LIE A-TRY | The operation of a sailing vessel in a very high sea to lie head to the wind, or as near to it as possible, keeping a slight forward motion in order to remain within a trough of the waves. It involves taking in all sails except, perhaps, a mizen topsail or trysail, though it is also a possibility under bare poles. She keeps her head as steady as possible about six points off the wind, making a little way ahead as she falls off away from the wind to avoid drifting down to leeward. For this purpose just enough sail is set to give her forward motion as she falls away from the wind, bringing her back up to it. The main objective in lying-to is to keep the vessel in such a position with the wind on the bow that heavy seas do not break aboard. |
| LIFEBOAT and LIFE SAVING. | A reasonable definition of a lifeboat would be a boat specifically designed for saving life at sea, although ordinary ships’ boats are called lifeboats when engaged in saving life. They are normally known as sea boats when employed for other purposes. Britain enjoys the reputation of being the first nation in the world to adopt a comprehensive organization for saving life at sea. Admiral Graves is credited with building a lifeboat in about 1760, but a better claim for being the real initiator is usually given to Lionel Lukin, a coachbuilder, who in 1785 converted a Norwegian yawl by giving her a projecting cork gunwale, air-chambers at bow and stern, and a false keel of iron, to provide buoyancy and stability. This he called his ‘insubmergible boat’, but although he took out a patent for it, the invention had no success. He did. however, design an •unimmergible’ coble for use at Bamborough. Yorkshire, which saved many lives. |
| LIFEBUOY or LIFEBELT | A buoy designed to support a human body in the water. The majority of lifebuoys are circular rings of cork covered with canvas, but some are cruciform, made of copper, and fitted with a calcium flare which burns for 20 minutes when it comes in contact with seawater. These lifebuoys can support the weight of two men in water. At one period in the history of the British Navy these lifebuoys, which were carried one on each quarter of the ship on a sloping platform ready for instantaneous letting go, were also fitted with a container holding one gill of brandy, but the temptation was found to be too great even for those who did not fall overboard. In most small craft, including many yachts, one lifebuoy is attached to the vessel by a line to make it easier to haul back on board when supporting a man overboard. In many racing yachts, international rules require, in addition, a dan buoy to be carried to mark the position when a member of the crew falls overboard. |
| LIFE-JACKET | A short jacket worn across the chest and back for saving life at sea by holding a body upright in the water. The old-fashioned type, still in wide use today, consists of sections of cork enclosed in canvas and fashioned to slip over the head, being secured by tapes tied round the waist. Under Board of Trade regulations every British ship must carry one for every person on board and similar regulations are enforced in the ships of other nations by their national authorities. A more modern design of life-jacket is the inflatable type, where air is held between layers of the jacket sufficient to support a body in the water. They are often inflated automatically by a carbon dioxide cylinder. |
| LIFELINES | Ropes or wires stretched fore and aft along the decks of a ship in rough weather, so that men can hang on to them in heavy seas as a safety measure against being washed overboard. In yachts, they are the lines rigged fore and aft on to which harnesses are clipped. |
| LIFERAFT | Originally any raft made on board ship from any available timber and used for saving life in shipwreck or other calamity. More recently, many ships carry inflatable rubber rafts for the same purpose. |
| LIFTS | The hemp ropes, later replaced by wire ropes or chains, which in square-rigged ships are led from the various mastheads to the two ends of the corresponding yards to support them. In the days of sailing navies’ ships going into battle used to supplement these rope lifts with chain lifts as a precaution against the yards being shot away by chain or bar shot. |
| LIGHT TO | An order, when belaying a hawser round a bollard and the first turn has been made, to fleet the hawser back along the deck to provide enough slack for additional turns round the bollard to be made. When there is tension on the hawser, the first turn round a bollard will hold it momentarily, but additional turns are then required to make it secure, and enough rope to make these additional turns is provided by the order ‘Light to’. |
| LIGHTHOUSE | A building or other construction erected to display a characteristic light as a warning of danger at sea and an aid to navigation. |
| LIGHTSHIP | Normally a dumb vessel (i.e., non-navigable) though in some countries lightships are fitted with diesel engines for self-propulsion, moored over a shoal or bank where, because of the distance from the shore or constructional difficulties, a lighthouse is impracticable. Its purpose is exactly the same as that of a lighthouse, a warning to seamen of danger and an aid to navigation. Like lighthouses they display at night a characteristic light, carried on a tripod mast, and by day a special mark, both easily identifiable and marked on every chart which covers the waters in which they are moored. They are also equipped with fog and submarine signaling equipment and radar beacons. Again like lighthouses they come under the control of the national authorities on whom has been placed the responsibility for all coastal lights or navigational marks, in English waters. Trinity House, in Scottish waters the Commissioners of Northern Lights. In British and many other waters, lightships are always painted red. |
| LIGNUM VITAE | The hard smooth wood of the guaiacum tree, grown in the West Indies and often thought in older days to have medicinal qualities, also widely used for the manufacture of drinking vessels. It had many maritime uses, particularly for the deadeyes and chess trees of sailing vessels and the sheaves of wooden blocks, its hardness standing up well to wear caused by ropes and its smoothness allowing a rope to render through it easily. One principal marine use during the 19th century was as a seawater self-lubricating bush for the stern tubes of early screw steamships. It was first introduced for this purpose by John Penn, marine engine builder, in 1854, and until the introduction of more modern metallic packings, solved the serious problem of leaking stern bearings for some forty years. |
| LIMBERS | Holes cut in the floor timbers of wooden ships on either side of the keelson to allow a free passage for the bilge water to run down to the pump well. In the larger ships a small chain or rope, known as a limber-rope, was threaded through the limbers extending the whole length of the bottom; by pulling it backward and forwards any blockages of the limbers LINE OF BATTLE 485 by dirt or other obstructions was cleared. As bilge water normally stank and was often a breeder of disease, it was most important to keep the limber-ways ‘clear so that the bilges would drain themselves of an accumulation of water. Smaller ships which had no limber-rope were fitted with limber-boards, which were short removable boards, part of the lining of a ship’s floor close to the keelson and directly above the limbers so that they could be freed of dirt when required. |
| LINER | (1) A ship belonging to a shipping company which carries passengers on scheduled routes. The older sailing packet ships were occasionally known as liners, but the name generally came into wider circulation with the change from sail to steam, roughly about 1840. With the recent rapid growth of air traffic and its consequent competition with liners for the available passengers, the number of liners in commission today has been considerably reduced, and many of them can only make a profit for their owners by becoming cruise liners catering for holiday traffic. A cargo liner is a cargo-carrying vessel with accommodation for a few passengers.
(2) A word often used in the days of sailing warships to describe a ship of the line. (3) A fishing vessel engaged in fishing at sea with lines. Before the use of trawls or purse seine netting in sea-fishing, cod and ling were almost entirely caught by line with baited hooks. |
| LININGS | Additional pieces of canvas sewn to a sail to prevent chafe. They are used mainly in such places as the reef-bands, buntlines, etc. And are generally only to be seen in the sails of square-rigged ships where the chances of chafing are much greater, due to the multiplicity of rigging, than in fore-and-aft rigged ships. |
| LIVERPOOL PENNANTS | Originally the name given to rope yarns used in place of buttons on a sailor’s coat, and now occasionally used to describe the beckets and wooden toggles with which duffel coats are fastened. |
| LLOYD’S | An association of underwriters which traces its origin to daily meetings of London merchants in Edward Lloyd’s Coffee House in the City of London. It has a continuous history of marine underwriting from 1601. As well as its main business of marine and other insurance, it is also a centre of maritime intelligence of the daily movements of merchant ships, marine casualties, etc. Lloyd’s is also the leading international authority on the specification of ships in relation to the strength of building and cargo capacity, and in this respect its specifications are acknowledged and accepted by every maritime country of the world. Lloyd’s List is a daily publication of shipping movements, and Lloyd’s Register of Shipping is an annual publication giving a list of all merchant ships, with details of their tonnage, engine power, and owners, which have been built to the specifications laid down by Lloyd’s Register of Shipping, the society which publishes the annual of the same name. Lloyd’s Register of Yachts does the same for the world’s yachts. |
| LOBSCOUSE | A well-known dish at sea, particularly among the crews of sailing ships, in the days before refrigeration. It was a mixture of salt meat cut small, broken biscuit, potatoes, onions, and such spices as were available, boiled up into a stew. |
| LOG | (1) The name given to any device for measuring the speed of a vessel through the water or the distance she has sailed in a given time,
(2) the short name by which the log book or deck log is generally known. |
| LOG BOOK | Usually referred to as a log, a compulsory document which must be kept by all ships in which is recorded information relating to the navigation of the ship, the organization of her crew, and all other relevant activities on board. It is a watch-to-watch record of meteorological conditions, courses and speeds, punishments, deaths, etc. Log books kept by British naval ships are sent monthly to the Ministry of Defence, those kept by British merchant ships to the Superintendent of the Mercantile Marine office before whom the ship’s crew is paid off and discharged and from him to the Registrar-General of Shipping and Seamen, a department of the Ministry of the Environment. The log books kept by ships of other nations are sent to their appropriate authorities. The usual practice is to write up this official log book from the day-to-day deck and engine-room log books. |
| LOGGERHEAD | (1) The wooden bin in the stem of a whaling boat around which the harpoon line was controlled as it ran out after striking a whale in the days when harpoons were launched by hand.
(2) A ball of iron attached to a long handle used for the melting of tar or pitch. The ball was heated in a fire to red heat and then plunged into the tar or pitch bucket. |
| LOG-LINE | A specially woven line of contra-laid cotton used for towing a patent log from the taffrail of a ship. The reason for the special weaving is to prevent twist, so that it will faithfully repeat the number of revolutions made by the patent log as it is towed through the water. |
| LONG SPLICE | A method of splicing two ropes by unlaying the ends to a distance of eight times the circumference of the rope and then laying up the strands in the space left where the opposite strand has been unlayed. By this means the two ropes are joined without increasing the thickness over the area of the splice. A long splice is used where the rope is required, to reeve through a block after it has been spliced. |
| LONGBOAT | The largest boat carried on board a full-rigged ship, particularly in warships of the 18th century. It was carvel built with a full bow and high sides, and furnished with a mast and sails for short cruises where required. A ship’s gun could also be mounted in the bows. Its principal uses on board were to transport heavy stores to and from the ship and to take empty water casks ashore to be refilled whenever fresh drinking water was required. It was also the principal lifeboat carried on board and was kept fully provisioned for use in any case of emergency. It was from the longboat that the launch was developed as the major warship’s boat during the 19th and early 20th centuries. |
| LONGITUDE | From the Latin longitudo, length. It is one of the spherical co-ordinates used to describe a terrestrial position, the other being latitude. It is the arc of the equator or the angle at either pole between the planes of the prime meridian and the meridian of the places measured eastwards or westwards from the prime meridian. The longitude of a ship at sea may be found from the methods of nautical astronomy or by calculating the local time of noon on the longitude of Greenwich, the difference in time giving the longitude east or west of Greenwich. Because the earth rotates uniformly on its polar axis, the longitude of a place is proportional to the time the earth takes to rotate through the angle contained between the planes of the prime meridian and the meridian of the place, and thus the measurement of this time is bound to give the longitude. Originally this was done by a ship’s chronometer, but it is today more easily achieved by means of the many time checks broadcast throughout the day and night by radio stations. |
| LONG-JAWED | The term used to describe rope which, through much use, had had the twist, or lay, in its strands straightened or pulled out and has no longer the resilience to resume its normal tightness of lay after use. |
| LOOF | (1) The after part of the bow of a square-rigged ship just before the chess trees, at the point where the side planking—or, when iron or steel was used for the hulls of large sailing ships, the plates—begins to curve in towards the stem of the ship. The term is now almost completely obsolete, and was never applied to ships propelled otherwise than by sail.
(2) The old word, sometimes also written as loofe, meaning luff. |
| LOOSE | A term applicable to the sails of a square-rigged ship when the gaskets, or stops, of a furled sail are cast loose so that the sail may be set. |
| LOOSE-FOOTED | A fore-and-aft sail which is set without a boom, as in the mainsail of a barge, or in the de Horsey naval cutter rig. A sail which is set on a boom but with only the tack and clew secured, the foot of the sail not being laced to the boom, is also said to be loose footed. Although at one time it was not uncommon to see sails set in this way on a boom in small craft, it is a practice which has almost completely died out. |
| LORAN | A hyperbolic navigation system, the name derived from the initial letters of LOng RAnge Navigation. It was developed in the U.S.A. in 1940-3 and uses pulsed transmissions from master and slave stations. Measurement of the time interval between the arrival of the pulsed transmissions at the ship makes it possible to obtain a position line and plot it on a lattice chart. A second reading from another pair of stations produces a second position line, and so a fix is obtained. The low frequency used gives a groundwave coverage of about 700 miles over the sea in the day, and the sky wave reflections from the ionosphere, provided sky wave corrections are applied, increase the range to 1,400 miles at night. |
| LOW AND ALOFT | A nautical expression describing a sailing ship with sail spread from deck to truck; every stitch that she can carry. Many people are inclined to think that the phrase is an abbreviation of a low and aloft, but it is in fact the other way round, a low and aloft being an expansion of the correct term. |
| LOWER DECK | The deck of a ship next above the or lop deck. It is also a term frequently used to indicate the ratings of naval ships, e.g. Officers belong to the quarterdeck, ratings to the lower deck. This expression possibly comes from the order “Clear lower deck’, given when all seamen are required on the upper deck for some purpose, either in an emergency or to hear some important announcement by the captain. |
| LUBBER’S HOLE | An opening in the floor of the tops on the fore, main, and mizen-mast of square-rigged ships, just abaft the heads of the lower masts, to give access to the tops from below. It was so termed because timid climbers up the rigging preferred to go through this hole to reach the top rather than over the futtock shrouds, the way the experienced sailor went. |
| LUBBER’S LINE or POINT | The black vertical line or mark on the inside of a compass bowl which represents the bow of the ship and thus enables a course to be steered by bringing the lubber’s line to the point on the compass card which shows the desired course. |
| LUFF TACKLE | A purchase which has a single and a double block, the standing part of the rope being secured to the strop of the single block, and the hauling part coming from the double block. It increases the power by four times when rove to advantage. It was originally used for hauling down the tack of a fore-and-aft sail to tauten the luff, but the term is now used to describe any tackle rove through a single and a double block in which the size of the rope is 3 inches in circumference or greater, luff upon luff, one luff tackle hooked on to the fall of another in order to double the increase in power. |
| LUG | (1) The name, rarely used, of the yard on which a lugsail is set but more often employed to describe the sail of a small boat (see lugsail).
(2) A projection on a mast or bowsprit fitting with an eye to take a shackle of a stay or shroud. |
| LUGSAIL | A four-sided sail set on a lug or yard, used mainly in small craft. The sail is very similar to a gaff sail but with a wider throat, and depends on its luff for its stability. The yard, or lug, by which the sail is hoisted is normally two-thirds the length of the foot of the sail and carries a strop one-fourth of the way from throat to peak. This strop is hooked to a traveler on the mast and is hoisted in the normal way until the luff is as taut as possible. |
| LUNAR OBSERVATION | The observation of a lunar distance for finding longitude at sea before chronometers were perfected. The moon has a relatively rapid motion across the heavens in relation to the fixed stars, so that the angular distance between the moon and any fixed star which lies in the moon’s path changes comparatively rapidly. The earlier Nautical Almanacs provided the navigator with tables of predicted lunar distances (the angles between the moon and certain fixed stars, as well as the sun) against Greenwich Time. By observing a lunar distance it was possible to ascertain, by interpolation between tabulated values of lunar distances against Greenwich Time, the precise Greenwich Time of the observation. By comparing this with the local time of the observation, the longitude of the ship could be ascertained. The introduction of the chronometer, bringing Greenwich Time permanently on board, made lunar observations no longer necessary for the accurate determination of longitude. |
| LUTCHET | A mast fitting in the form of a tabernacle used in spritsail barges and wherries to enable the mast to be lowered to deck level when passing under bridges, etc. The mast, stepped on deck, is held in place by the lutchet. The after side of which is left open to allow free passage of the mast when it is lowered. It differs from a tabernacle, whose forward side is left open, in that with a lutchet the mast is pivoted at the base and not at the top of the fitting. |