a

The Sailor's Word-Book

As for example the word alarm, alarum, a bell, from the German lärm; but the military alarm on a drum is the Italian all'arme.


Finally, Natural History, a taste for which is a substantial blessing to the sailor, is too vast a department for our professional pages. However, a few requisite definitions of the familiar products of the air, earth, and water are introduced. Numbers of marine birds and many fishes so often misnamed

are entered upon the muster; and especially those which the blue-jackets vote to be very good eating; yet, as a reverend author has well observed, we should, in such cases, recur to the probable state of their appetites at the time of experiment. The most general nautic dishes and refections are likewise cited, to the making of which most of our sea-cooks are competent

there being no purée, entremet, or fricandeau to trouble them. But though they are at times libelled as being sent from the infernal regions, they are pretty fair in their way; and though no great shakes in domestic chemistry, they can enter the lists against any white-aproned artiste at pea-soup, beef-steak, lobscouse, pillau, curried shark, twice-laid, or savoury sea-pie. Still, a more luxurious tendency in this department is casting its shadow before; and there are Sybarites invading the ocean to whom the taste of junk is all but unknown.

[Illustration: Signature of W. H. Smyth]

A DIGEST OF SEA TERMS AND PHRASES

A. The highest class of the excellence of merchant ships on Lloyd's books, subdivided into A 1 and A 2, after which they descend by the vowels: A 1 being the very best of the first class. Formerly a river-built (Thames) ship took the first rate for 12 years, a Bristol one for 11, and those of the northern ports 10. Some of the out-port built ships keep their rating 6 to 8 years, and inferior ones only 4. But improvements in ship-building, and the large introduction of iron, are now claiming longer life.

A is an Anglo-Saxonism for in or on; as a'board, a'going, &c.

A.B. The rating of Able Seamen on the ship's books: these two letters are often used as an epithet for the person so rated. He must be equal to all the duties required of a seaman in a ship

not only as regards the saying to "hand, reef, and steer," but also to strop a block, splice, knot, turn in rigging, raise a mouse on the main-stay, and be an example to the ordinary seamen and landsmen.

Related Words