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calendar   Monday - October 27, 2014

etymology

Once upon a time, long before in days of yore, when ships were made of wood and men were made of iron ...

and rope was total crap, made from hemp. A nice natural fiber, hemp has every positive thing going for it except for strength. So if you wanted a rope that could hold a lot, it had to be mighty thick. Mighty thick. Insanely thick.

Now in those far off times, boys as young as 7 or 8 went to sea. To war. As a job. Drummer boys. Mess servants. Message runners. The ones who brought bags of black powder to the cannons in the middle of battles were called powder monkeys. Those who did other tasks earned other names.

image

This is the lower end of one of the capstans on the HMS Victory. A capstan is a kind of winch, a giant vertical axle turned by hand, to pull on ropes to lift heavy loads. Like massive canvas sails, big iron cannons, and giant oak spars, and all the heavy things on one of those old sailing ships. The one in the picture has a hemp rope on it that’s 15” in diameter. The other end of the capstan is above the deck, so two teams of men could work the thing at once - 280 of them! - inserting large poles into the sockets and pulling away with all their might. Probably while singing some appropriate sea chanty or something salty. Anyway, for its day, the Victory was a very large ship, and it had very large capstans. But to hold a large ship in place, you need a really large anchor. And Victory’s anchor was too big for 15” rope. (Rope of rather massive diameter is called a hawser. Sailors speak their own language) It needed 24” diameter rope. Problem was, that hawser was too fat for the capstan. So they came up with a neat solution.

What they did, see, was to take a good length of the 15” diameter rope, and splice the ends together so that it formed a big endless loop. One part of it would be wrapped a few times around the capstan’s axle, and the other part would be tied, temporarily, to the anchor hawser where it came aboard the ship, through the orifice in the hull appropriately called the hawse-hole. Tie them together, pull a bit, tie together the next section, untie the first section, pull some more. And slowly but surely, the massive anchor would get hauled up. Sailors called the whole process weighing the anchor, as in “anchors aweigh”. That seems a bit silly, as they knew how much the bloody thing did weigh. And it was many, many tons. We’re talking about a chunk of forged iron nearly a foot thick and a good sixteen feet long. Plus flukes! But I digress. The act of tying the two heavy ropes together temporarily in the close confines under the decks behind the hawse hole fell to the ship’s boys. The process was called nipping (which could be a sailor’s pun, because to nip something is to take a bite out of it, and a turn of rope is called a bight. This could have been the big joke of 1805.) And the boys that nipped became known as little nippers. There you go, etymology. And you thought it was from RCA’s little doggie mascot.

I have this on the highest authority: Pitkin’s souvenir Guide to the HMS Victory, made with the tacit approval of the Admiralty. Harumph, harumph.  (He polished up the brasses so carefully ...)

See? Life is a never ending learning process.

And what I learned today is that sailors have probably been telling lies out their hawse holes since mankind first climbed aboard a fallen tree in a river and didn’t immediately drown.

Except not always


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Posted by Drew458   United States  on 10/27/2014 at 04:54 PM   
Filed Under: • Fun-StuffUK •  
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