When I first read Louis Norton's essay, "Baffling Briny Babble;' I immediately thought of a letter I read, many years ago, at the end of Samuel Eliot Morison's The Maritime History of Massachusetts. The letter pokes fun at the minutiae of nautical commands and expressions, and its author, Lincoln Ross Colcord (1883-1947), spun a yarn describing the way it was done, on a proper square-rigger. Colcord hailed from Searsport, Maine, and came from five generations of Down East seafarers. He was a professional writer who published several books about the sea. He was born on board a square-rigger during a fierce Cape Horn storm and spent the first part of his life at sea on the ship his father commanded. In this letter, he had written to Rear Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison (1887-1976), a professor of history at Harvard, in response to his newly published book, The Maritime History of Massachusetts, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1921. In subsequent printings Houghton Mifflin published his letter and others in a "Supplement of Letters" at the back of the book. -DO'R (Reprinted with permission from Houghton Mifflin Company)
by Lincoln Colcord, Searsport, Maine, 1921
I
have received from yo u a copy of rhe book, and another from Houghton Mifflin, for which many thanks. You shouldn't have depleted yo ur own stock, however; I merely was growling at the inefficiency of publishers who, because they haven't the abi lity to develop a proper sales system, must charge twice as much for books as they are worth, in order to make both ends meet. This enables me to advise yo u that the Stupendous Error occurs on page 268, second paragraph, fourth line - "and put to sea in a sou'easter." A Puritan and the son of Puritans, inheritor of a quick eye and a ready chuckle for the downfall of others, it gives me a great glee to find this afrer all; for, to tell the truth, I'd begun to fear that the error might be my own. And that, of course, would have made it an entirely different matter. Searching through the bookwhich, let me ass ure yo u, makes fine reading wherever you pick it up, so that I was considerably bothered and led astray from my main purpose last evening-I came upon another slip of rhe tongue, which I had passed in rhe first reading. This lies on page 82, second paragraph, fifth line - "Within ten minutes she had made a running moor, brailed up her sails, and warped into the best berth." I think there is no circumstance under which a square-rigged ship could be said to "brail up" her sails. There are so many ways, you know, in which the various sails of a square-rigger are taken from rhe breeze: the courses are either "hauled
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up" or "taken in"; the lower topsails are "clewed up,'' bur never "hauled up"; the upper topsails are "lowered away"; the ropgallantsails, royals and skysails are "clewed up,'' but never "lowered away" (except in a derail-command to the man who is handling the halyards); the jibs and sraysails are "hauled down,'' bur never, of course, "clewed up" or "lowered away"; the spanker, however, is "lowered away," and nothing else; and all these sails, irrespectively, can be "taken in": there are so many ways, in fact, that only a most liberally general term could properly be used to cover rhe whole operation. All things considered, I would say that "taken in" would be the proper term ro use in this case. "Furled" also is properly used to designate rhe operation of stripping a ship of her sails. "She has made a running moor,furledher sails, and warped into the best berth," would be entirely correct; yet "furled" seems to signify a more complete operation than "taken in." At the same time, the word "furled," by professional usage, has considerable poetic latitude. While it specifically defines the completed operation on the sail, it also, correctly used, has a more general application; to rhe mind of a sailor it does nor by any means invariably suggest the actual stowing of the sail, but often signifies merely its "raki ng in." "Doused" would be another general term that yo u could have used, although I have never liked it. Ir suggests to my mind baggy sails and clumsy, wall-sided hulls, the pompous days of the East India Com-
pany; it's a lazy, leisurely word, a romantic, landlubberish word, a word for poets and fancy novelists, a word archaic and unreal. "She doused her sails"-bah! No spruce ship ever did such a thing, no proper sailor-man ever wet his lips with such a puling phrase. The word was never current in the American merchant marine; I don't remember ever to have heard it. A word for travelers and lexicographers-and damned historians. Strange to say, you also could have said with propriety, "She made a running moor, clewed up her sails, and warped into the best berth," although the term specifically cannot be applied to more than half of the sails in question. Like all such matters of usage and latitude, there are no rules broad enough to cover the ground; all is exception. The point I am coming at is, of course, that "brailing up," the term you used, is not a general term at all. On the contrary, iris highly specific. According to my sense of nautical phraseology, "brailing" defines rhe operation of raking in a sail which travels on a horizontal spar; and a "brail" is one of the ropes which haul it in against rhe mast. The spanker on an English bark or ship commonly "brails in"; rhar is, it travels by hoops on rhe boom and gaff, and the gaff is a stationary spar. Square-rigged American ships of my day often carried a main-spencer or rrysail for use in heaving the ship to in heavy weather; this sail traveled on a stationary gaff just below the main-top, and was "brailed in" against rhe lower mast when nor set;
SEA HISTORY 108, AUTUMN 2004