We’re a bully ship and a bully crew
Heigh, heave and go.
We’ve a bully mate and a captain too,
Heigh, heave and go’
US sea chanty 1858
Who’d go to sea for pleasure would go to hell for a pastime
Popular Marine Saying, often attributed to Samuel Johnson
Reading Tristram Jones’ World War II memoirs, Heart of Oak, with its tales of his training ‘aboard’ the ‘stone frigate’ HMS Ganges, all inedible food and ‘crushers’ chasing hapless boy sailors over the ‘Devil’s Elbow’ at the ‘gogger’s’ end, its officers who are unapproachably snotty and its ‘snotties’ who are invariably ‘twats’, it’s all pleasingly grand guignol. But while one need find no fault with his slang – crusher, from a policeman’s large and ‘beetle-crushing’ boots, snotty from the midshipman’s supposedly running nose (although Hunt and Pringle’s Service Slang is more circuitous, claiming him ‘to be so called after the buttons on his sleeve, which are said to be there for a purpose not unconnected with the nickname’), gogger, either from Scots gogar, a fish-hook or from the use of that rope’s-end whip to keep trainees ‘agog’ as they were driven up the Devil’s Elbow, a spar high on the mast that towered menacingly over the Ganges parade ground – by some standards he doesn’t know the meaning of the words. The standards particularly of another fleet, sailing for another country and in another century: the 19th century American merchant marine.
In the first place, unlike the Royal Navy, one didn’t usually volunteer. The 18th century Andrew had known and used its press gangs (known as sharks), but one has to await America, and the 19th, to encounter shanghai. The image may be of Fu Manchu and other avatars of the ‘yellow peril’, ambushing Jack as he progressed drunkenly along the Bund (the local waterfront, originally an embanked quay; it is now a protected historical site), but Shanghai’s role was as the destination, not the departure point. A voyage to Shanghai was long, years rather than months and few men volunteered. It was necessary to ‘encourage’ them, and thus the verb.
It is a term still crammed with a melodramatic baggage of hocused drinks (cut with laudanum; the Mickey Finn, using chloral hydrate and named for a Chicago barman, was a later invention), trapdoors yawning before the counters of such insalubrious pleasure-domes as the Bella Union or the Cowboy’s Rest in San Francisco’s Sailortown the Barbary Coast, and the dropping through them of unconscious victims straight into the notorious ‘Whitehall boats’ that took them out to waiting masters. Such craft were shallow, cedar-built rowboats developed in New York for harbour use during the war of 1812 and named for Whitehall Street in that city; they were used in San Francisco to ferry passengers or cargo from the quay to ships anchored in the bay) The story also encompasses the crimps (which ought to stem from crimp, to bend or press, but as the OED notes, since the original meaning seems to have been an agent or broker, may suggest a quite different root; unfortunately that root remains unspecified) who rejoiced in such names as ‘the Shanghai Chicken’ (his operations in no way diminished by the loss of a hand and its replacement by a large hook) , ‘Deacon Jones’ (a former prizefighter) and ‘Calico Jim’ who allegedly shanghaied each of the six policemen sent to arrest him (six others tracked him down to Peru and shot him dead, one bullet apiece).[1]
In truth the trapdoors may have been apocryphal and the sailors as often conned by the boarding-house keepers who earned kickbacks from captains whose discipline ensured that few crewman wanted a second voyage under their command as they were slugged. Nonetheless there were few who would choose to enlist ‘before the mast’ on the Yankee blood boats and hell ships of such as the Black Ball Line, plying the Atlantic packet trade (from the original cargoes: packets of mail) and widely known (and feared) as boasting the ‘hottest’ ships afloat. The ‘heat’ was delivered from a primary source: the bucko mate, whose name came from buck, in the sense of bullying swaggerer.[2] Like Jones’ drill instructors, his task was to whip a rabble into shape and like them he rose cheerfully if unsmilingly to the task. To the lowly packet rats, whose lives he controlled, he was a terrifying figure, violence in the all too substantial flesh, dishing out rations of belaying pin soup (a belaying pin was a stretcher, probably as in ‘stretch unconscious’ but perhaps, more prosaically, a reference to the wooden ‘stretcher’ or rowing-boat’s footrest that doubled as a club) or hand spike hash, and lighting them to bed with a rope lantern.
More formal punishments, using pussy, the cat-o’-nine-tails, were known as marrying the gunner’s daughter (coined by the Royal Navy, in which the sufferer was first lashed to a gun). The first recorded appearance of the cat is in the context of the African slave trade and the eponymous book that explained it that appeared in 1788. Its author laid down the basics, noting that ‘what is termed a cat [is] an instrument of correction which consists of a handle or stem, made of a rope three inches and a half in circumference, and about eighteen inches in length, at one end of which are fastened nine branches, or tails, composed of log line, with three or more knots upon each branch).’ It was wielded by the ship’s mate.
One such liked to superintend the queue for food, regularly knocking down the first man ‘for not getting there faster’ and the last ‘for being last.’ To deliver a blow was to give a haircut or a rubdown (British users sometimes added ‘with an oaken towel’). A general roughhouse was a Dublin quay jig, a seafarers’ variation on the better-known Donnybrook. For extreme cases there was an even more terrifying punishment: dipping, a euphemism that seems to have disguised a form of keelhauling. It should not be overlooked that these packets, hell ships or otherwise, also carried passengers. Eyes must have been willfully blind, or perhaps all that mattered was getting to one’s destination on time. You’d paid your money and didn’t enquire too closely what methods ensured that you took your choice.
Discipline, however harsh and arbitrary, always claims its justification in expediency. The bucko mate had no doubt that words would not have worked. Driving his webfoots to shim (climb without using the ratlines) upstairs to bend (tie on) the muslin (sails, also rags) and get her book open (raise the larger sails) in a Cape Horn snifter required obedience not debate. Caught between two terrors – the mate and the masthead – some might prove incompetent, plunging from the button (the topmost point of the mast) to the deck, or overboard where, after a desperate dog’s swim (a last despairing dog-paddle before drowning), they vanished into the tall water (the deep sea, a term also used for a long voyage). Mister, as the mate was known, was unmoved; through he might manage a purser’s smile, a strictly hollow grin.
Life aboard such ships, often known as hookers (from the older hook-boat, i.e. a Dutch fishing vessel) or the stick and string (metonymising the rigging and spars), seems devotedly Hobbesian: all against all and the toughest rules the roost. The Captain or old man was often a stern New England bluenoser (which could also mean his ship and came, in the case of its original role as a nickname for Nova Scotians from the local species of bluenose potatoes. Used of New Englanders in general the image is of a nose blue with chilly disapproval). He stood aloof but kept his pistols primed; the lions may have been mangy but they had to be kept tame. At a push every officer was ready with gun or club. The men might growl, all-purpose for complain, and might have fantasized about squaring their yards (getting even) with their rulers but it is remarkable how few such tyrants seemed to have been assassinated. Faced with no option until the voyage ended, there was a masochistic pride in taking the worst the brutes could deliver, which for the Scowegians (Scandinavians), Dutchmen (Germans), Dagos (Latins) and others of the crew set them above such weaklings as the British limejuicers, lemon pelters or lemonades, whose merchant ships, in the shadow of the Royal Navy, were seen as overly civilized. The British were also Johnny Bulls, the French Johnny Crapauds (i.e. ‘toads’, playing on the more common ‘frogs’) and the Chinese simply John (johnny, however, was a shark). Nigger, ever popular, dealt with anyone who was not white and sometimes simply not American.
Given the circumstances of their recruitment, the crew had varied abilities. There were the shellbacks, turtles and barnacle backs – veterans - who may still have been farmers or shoemakers or soldiers (as in come the old soldier but also a sneer at the landbound footslogger; a soldier’s whiskers were a short-cropped beard), which meant idlers. An actual farmer, shanghaied away from his innocent carouse in the big city, was a clodhopper or chaw-bacon; and in no sense did they know the ropes. Anything or anyone second-rate was decried as cabbagewood. (Cabbagewood seems to refer to the West Indian cabbage tree; the wood was good for decorative joinery but absolutely useless, for all that it stands straight and tall, for spars. Its light weight, however, did lend it to the building of rafts.) The most common term for a novice was rayneck, a term that is unrecorded in any dictionary – standard or specialist - but seems to equate with the original meaning of redneck, a term for peasant and referring to the farmer’s tan, and perhaps taken from the pronunciation of the Dutch synonym rooinek. (There is a possible link to rookie, a recruit, but rayneck seems to predate it).
A horse was energetic (though a hard horse pushed it too far and was synoymous with the bucko himself) while a corker was admirable and experienced men became known as the ship’s cousins. To take Tom Cox’s traverse was ‘to go three times round the boat and have a pull at the scuttle butt’ and was used of one who works deliberately slowly as a reaction to (supposed) ill treatment. The scuttlebutt was of course the water butt, which, from its role as a centre for conversation and rumour, doubled as a term for gossip (Australia’s furphy, originally a water cart, would play the same role for Anzac troops in World War I). On board gossip could also be the telegraph, the white mouse or the little bird (which had ‘told me’).
But if the packet rat had it tough, at least he was not on board a blackbirder or a blubber-hunter. The first had been coined for the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and can be found from the 1830s. Once the ‘Middle Passage’ was finally abandoned the word moved with the slavers to a new ocean: the Pacific. Now the trade focused on the recruitment – usually by force – of labourers, nicknamed Kanakas (from Hawaiian kanaka, a man), taken from Pacific islands and delivered to a variety of employers, sometimes as far away as the sugar plantations of Virginia. These workers, effectively slaves themselves, were known as a blackbirds, the trade blackbirding and the slaver or his ship as a blackbirder.
The second was a whaler, also known as a spouter; it was a world of its own with language to suit. For one whaler to meet another mid-ocean and there to socialise was to gam, from gammon, to spin a yarn. To galley was to scare off a whale, which may have linked to galley-west, skew-whiff, with its suggestion of sending the whale away and thus out of reach of the hunters, though that galley came not from the caboose, domain of the grub-spoiler or doctor (taken directly from Dutch kabuis, a galley) but from the English dialect colleywest (on), contrarily, askew, itself seemingly from Collyweston, an actual village in Northamptonshire, although sources do not specify any special slantindicularity. ‘At wood and blackskin’ was when the boat touched the whale, at which point it was time to use the lance, which could be twisted to mutilate a whale’s innards, known as ‘poking the fire’. A snuffbox was a small female whale and a noisy sailor has ‘more lip than a right whale’.
As for the galley itself, George Davis’s Recollections of a Sea Wanderer’s Life (1887) explained:
Flour, water, salt, and fat from cooked beef is called duff. Griddle cakes are flapjacks; biscuits are sea-cake. They are kept in a bread-barge, a small box, say two feet long by fifteen inches in breadth and depth, with a hole near one end of a side large enough to admit a hand and take out one. When the sailor in the fo'castle asks for a sea-cake one or two biscuits are taken out of the barge and pitched at him, and he catches with his hands or his nose, as the case may be. When the barge is empty some one calls out to the youngest of the watch, ‘There's a southerly wind in the bread barge,’ and the barge is taken to the cook's galley and stowed afresh. Potatoes are spuds, rice is swampseed, beans are tornadoes, snappers or band of music, and bean soup is snapper soup. Bread crumbs and other broken victuals from the cabin table are manavelins [in general slang, odds and ends, bits and pieces, typically of food or small change; naval slang had manarvel, to pilfer] Beef is generally salt-horse, at least in my day what appeared in the fo'castle had earned its dignity after several long voyages at sea. Pork was grunter, and mutton, when we had any, was simply mutton. Fish are moonstruck. Codfish and potatoes were twice-laid [i.e. leftovers], and the sailors had to spit out such bones as they'd rather not swallow. [...] Pot-pie is sea-pie, molasses leather-strap or black-strap. [...] When eight bells are struck the youngest in the watch goes to the cook's galley and gets a kid of salt horse and a kid of swampseed or snapper-soup, and a tin pot of black-strop, with the bread barge, which together form the sumptuous repast of Jack before the mast. In fine weather the sailors eat on deck, and literally the deck is their table, and they furnish their own tin plate, spoon, sheath-knife, and coffee- pot.’
In addition there might be water-whelps, swimmers, doughboys or sinkers, all of which were doughnuts. There was, in theory no liquor. The drink was the ocean (and its bottom was jokingly known as ‘the nearest land’). On the beach if you wanted to fire in and get a bit on there was tripa, drunk in Peru (tripa means tripe and the name perhaps refers not to its base, but to its effects on the human ‘tripes’) or samshaw (from sam-shiu, literally ‘thrice burnt’ and refers to a gin-like liquor distilled from rice and reputed to be made even more potent by the addition of arsenic and tobacco juice) in the Far East. In the pubs of London’s Ratcliff Highway the ‘outward bound corner’ was for those whose funds had long since disappeared.
Wholly absent, at least from the mainly fictionalised records, is sex. The bunk was a pew and the exhausted, comatose and gravy-eyed seaman tossed off his slippery clothes (oil-skins) and jumped into it to caulk but this was a solitary sleep and a women was rare on board and she only ever the Master’s wife or mistress.1 If there was ‘bum’ as in the British ‘rum, bum and concertina’ (or Churchill’s more explicit ‘run, sodomy and the lash’) then it was not on public offer and the matelots did not propose themselves as what a later generation of ‘out’ San Franciscans would term seafood nor were there allusions, as in Tristram Jones RN reminiscences, to the golden rivet. There are occasional instances of nancy, but merely as a weakling, whatever the origins. Nothing overt. There must have been whores on shore but such authors as Herbert Hamblen, whose seafaring tales included Yarns of a Bucko Mate (1899) carefully sidestepped such amusements.
In the end of course, and as Jones put it in explaining the language of his book, the sailors were rough men who used rough words. In 1984 they were just about acceptable; back when Adam was an oakum boy in Brooklyn Navy Yard, or at least in 19th century America, such honesty was impossible. We miss much, almost certainly. Fortunately we do not miss all.
In the Black Ball Lines 2
I served my time,
To me hoodah! To me hoodah!
In a full rigged ship
and in her prime,
To me hoodah, hoodah, day!
Oh, the mate he whacked me
around and around,
To me hoodah! To me hoodah!
And I wished I was home
all safe and sound,
To me hoodah, hoodah, day!
Blow, boys, blow.
US trad. to tune ‘Banks of Sacramento’
[1] for detail on the Barbary Coast and its trade in involuntary sailors I recommend Herbert Asbury, The Barbary Coast (1933, reprint 2002) and Bill Pickelhaupt Shanghaied in San Francisco (1996)
[2] P.G. Wodehouse, usually adding the phrase ‘of a tramp steamer’ for horrid emphasis, usually equated him with prep school headmasters and Aunts; the Master as ever knew of what he wrote.
One proposed etymology of the on-board wake-up call of ‘show a leg’ proposes a more general cohabitation below decks, with the leg to to be shown being a male one while his companion was permitted to sleep in, but stern expertise seems to have tossed this overboard.
The Black Ball Line was a transatlantic passenger line with a government contract to carry mail that lasted for 60 years from 1817. The line was known for its speed in crossing, for instance putting up a record 15 days and 23 hours for the Liverpool-New York trip (when th average time was around 45 days (and often longer). As the chanty suggests, discipline was harsh; thus too the lines in ‘Blow the Man Down’
When the Black Baller gets clear of the land,
'Tis then you will hear the great word of command.
'Lay aft here, ye lubbers, lay aft, one and all,
I'll none of your dodges on board the Black Ball'.
To see these poor devils, how they will all 'scoat,'
Assisted along by the toe of a boot.
[…]
But as soon as that packet was clear of the bar
The mate knocked me down with the end of a spar.
It's starboard and larboard on deck you will sprawl
For Kicking Jack Williams commands the Black Ball.
So I give you fair warning before we belay,
Don't ever take heed of what pretty girls say.
Portland (Oregon USA) has tours of the underground where Shainghaing and opium smoking we claimed to have taken place.