A.B.C.'s and Zealous Y.M.C.A.'s: Schooner Days CCXVIII (218)

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WITH clean-swept hold the big freighter was all ready to leave the terminal elevator for winter quarters this cold and frosty Saturday morning. The skipper megaphoned from the bridge:

"Single up your lines, and stand by to cast off!"

"Single up them wires and stand by!" echoed the mate.

Thirty years ago there would have been a scattered chorus of "Single up and stand by!" punctuated by a few hearty "Ay, ay sirs." But what happened today was that a couple of young gentlemen pulled on their gloves and slid down the dock-ladder, one lisping "Okay," and the other "Oke."

Seagoing lingo, apart from its swear-words, was probably always unintelligible to shore-dwellers. In our time, with sailing vessels becoming curiosities, it is as much a dead language as Greek or Latin. Nobody uses it except scenario writers, and they don't know what it means. They are like the Hooghli leadsman, who, at regular intervals, hove his lead and hailed with great vehemence:

"Qwertyuiopasdfghjklpoiuy!"

"Tell im," said the shipmaster to the pilot, "to give us soundings in fathoms or I'll break his bloody neck."

This was translated in correct Hindustani by the pilot and the leadsman made reply to him in the same.

"What's 'e say?" demanded the master, expecting every moment to be engulfed in the quicksands.

"He say," said the pilot, salaaming, "he know the tune well but not at all the words of the song."

Steam and gasoline have had much to do with the destruction of the sea vocabulary. They employ so few men, and these are specialists in spanners rather than marlinespikes. Quartermasters are steering north two hundred and fifty and five-sixteenths degrees and being told "Left-right," like footsoldiers, where the old helmsman steered west-sou'-west-three-quarters-west and heard "Port" or "Starboard" when it wasn't "Larboard" and "Starboard." It is too late to do anything about it, but; to begin with the very A-B-C of the language, the word "ship" is almost vanishing. Landlubbers have substituted the word "boat," which means motor car, foot-wear, yacht, ocean liner, man-of-war, airplane and predicament. To the sailors of the sail, boat meant only one thing — an undecked craft of small dimensions, propelled by oars. You never heard a sailor say row-boat; he might say sail-boat or decked-boat or yawl-boat or even steamboat; but if he said just plain "boat" he meant an open one that was rowed, and nothing else.

It is curious that the Scotch skaffie, the French esquif, the German schiff, the Dutch schuyt, and the English skiff, are all referable to this parent word ship, and it in turn comes from some common Aryan root meaning to scoop or hollow, showing that the first ships were dugouts. It is again curious that sailors have strictly limited the meaning attached to the word ship. And it is curious again that even in the strictness of their limitation of the meanings they have included four but never five.

First of all, to a sailor a ship was a vessel with square-rigged [sails] on three masts. He extended the term, as a general description, to barques, which have three or more masts, but are only square-rigged on two, and to brigs, which have only two masts, both square-rigged; but he refuses it to barquentines, which may have five masts, but only one square-rigged, and to brigantines, which have two masts, one square-rigged and one fore-and-aft. Schooners and sloops and cutters, being mere fore-and-aft craft, and luggers and feluccas with their lateen rig, were sternly denied inclusion in the term ships, except in the fourth meaning, that is, a rather commendatory general term. An old tar might admit a fishing schooner or even a dinghy was a "tidy little ship," when the spirit moved him, but even in his most expansive moods, in the back of his head "ship" meant a three-masted square-rigger. That was what he intended when he used the term as a description; if he meant anything else he would specify "five-masted ship," "jackass brig," "ballahou schboner," and so forth.

Here on the lakes we had, as already pointed out, our own peculiarities. Schooners with three masts were not called three-masters but "three-'n'-afters," a compression of three-and-afters. Schooners with two masts were never called two-masters nor two-'n'-afters by our lake sailors, but fore-and-afters, and they got that name from the fact that they were fore-and-aft rigged. Fortunately we had very few four-masted schooners to complicate the dialect. Sloops, with only one mast, and tern schooners, with three, were also; fore-and-aft rigged, but our lake tars never called these fore-'n'-afters. They reserved that for two-masted schooners, and they used the word, quite inaccurately, even if the two-masted schooner had square topsails.

Now on salt water such a vessel is called a topsail-schooner, and in the Maritime Provinces of Canada and the New England coast (but never on the lakes) a three-master is called a tern schooner, or a tern. The other day a Canadian Press-despatch mentioned a tern schooner, and the newspapers, being far from the sounding sea, solemnly printed something about the schooner Tern, as though the poor three-master had been named after a bird. And not one reader in a thousand guessed the difference.

Speaking of "A-B-C of the language" recalls a passing hail recently from Harris Vennema, telegraph editor of the Menominee, Mich., Herald-Leader, who wanted to know if this compiler had ever heard of the picturesque A.B.C.F.M. and Z.Y.M.C.A., which were named by a Presbyterian churchman and shipowner, one Merrill, after the American Board of Christian Foreign Missions and the Zealous Young Men's Christian Association."

The answer is "not much"; but we'd like to hear more.

I have an idea that Mr. Merrill was the godfather of the Julia B. Merrill, which was burned at Sunnyside four years ago, after lingering out a broken-backed old age in Port Hope Harbor. She came from Michigan originally, having been built at Wenona in that state in 1872 according to her register, although Manitowoc also claimed the honor of being her launching place. She was owned and registered in Chicago and in Toledo before hailing from Port Hope.

L. E. Merrill was all the better for being a Presbyterian, a shipowner, and a supporter for foreign missions and zealous young Christians. I have a copy of a photograph of one of his schooners at Chicago in 1881, when zealous young Christians and American missionaries had plenty of raw material to work on, close at hand. The vessel was the Gilbert Knapp, and she was not new when the photograph was taken, having been even then re built at Racine, Wis., in 1872; so we may assume she was first launched before the American Civil War. She was lost in Lake Huron in 1896. She was a vessel of 186 tons register, American measurement; 119 feet long, 26 feet beam, 8 1/2 feet depth of hold, 208,000 feet board-measure capacity; just a typical little three 'n'-after in the lumber trade.

What makes her photograph remarkable is the collection of initials, above her name: B.S.O.A.M.A.I.H.M.S.A.B.C.O.F.M.S.S.W.C.T. & C.U.S.Y. M.C.A.," and the string of Scripture references below it. They don't show up in the picture reproduced, the engraver apparently not being able ––to get down to it, but there are sixteen of them, from the Old and New Testaments, and apart from a general piety they indicate that Mr. Merrill was a hot gospeller as far as the crown of pride, the drunkards of Ephraim were concerned, and that they didn't hold with working on Sunday or being a tightwad. So if Mr. Vennema can add to the picture, the latchstring is out, and more than that, the door is wide open. We can extend the Scripture references without help but the interpretation of the initials is another thing again.

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HERE IS A REAL "SHIP" - three-masted, square-rigged on all masts - showing what sailors meant by the word. This is the Harbinger, last ship built to carry passengers to Australia. In 1890 she carried an average of 200 per voyage. She was sold to Russia in 1897, after being used as a British mercantile training ship. The picture is from a painting by A.V. Gregory. A Toronto expert, Mr. Percy Elkington, has presented models to the Royal Ontario Museum and Royal Naval College at Greenwich, happens to be indulging his hobby upon a model of her at the present time.