AFLOAT. "Think of our schooners, our clippers, and our monitors." A NATION So eminently successful in all matters pertaining to navigation, having built the fastest clipper, the first monitor, and the largest river-boat, and owning a continent bordering upon two oceans, while gigantic streams and countless watercourses traverse it in all directions, and the largest lakes on earth afford ample sea-room within its own bounds,--such a nation cannot but have numerous terms and phrases referring to the life on the water and in the waters. Her sailors are found in every part of the globe, her fishermen on every bank and in every sea where daring energy and unconquerable perseverance find a reward, and throughout the whole land there is scarcely a district where boats are not handled, and fishing-lines thrown, by the boy already. Nevertheless the number of new words coined, or of old words used in a new meaning and form, for things connected with the sea and its tributaries, and the life in the waters, is but small. English terms, used for such purposes, are so abundant and so well suited to all the details of the profession, of sport, and even of accidental variations, that there arises but rarely a necessity for a new name. American sailors-not often of American birth in our day-and American fishermen, use almost exclusively the language of their British cousins, and Isaak Walton is perhaps more generally read and known and quoted in America than in his native land. It is only where names have been supplied by French or Spanish settlers before the time of American rule, that words like Canoe or Pirogue have made good their place in our speech; these and their kindred have been mentioned under their appropriate head. Of English forms a few refer to the peculiar shape or use of vessels. Such are the bankers, vessels employed in fishing on the Banks of Newfoundland, and deriving their name from the locality. J. Q. Adams, in his report on the fisheries, speaks in high terms of their value in a pecuniary aspect, and their usefulness in training admirable seamen; while a recent work on "Newfoundland Fisheries," tells us that "the crew of a banker is generally composed of twelve men, including the skipper or captain, who exercises no direct control over the others, but is recognized by them as the principal personage on board." The name must not, however, be confounded with the bankers of North Carolina, people living near that part of the Atlantic coast which there also is called the "banks," and who used to be wreckers of doubtful repute. They now combine the vocations of farming, fishing, and wrecking, but it is said that their kindness and hospitality to wrecked seamen is unfailing and unlimited. The Chebacco boat, bearing the old Indian name of a town in Massachusetts, now called Essex, where they were formerly built, is another class of vessels engaged in the Newfoundland fisheries, and characterized by a very narrow stern, from which feature they also derive the name of Pinkstern, after the Dutch pink, a vessel with such a stern. These and similar boats are often propelled by a Setting-Pole, a pole much heavier than the canoe-pole, and hence used very differently. It is a stout pole, shod with a heavy-pointed “socket," and has on the other end a knob, to place against the shoulder. "The poles are set upon the bottom by the boatmen standing on each side of the bow, and as the boat advances the men move along the running boards with the stationary poles at their shoulder, sometimes walking bent almost on all-fours, until they have arrived at the stern, when they draw the poles up and set them again, the headway keeping the boat from receding. In more rapid water, the men reset alternately." (S. S. Haldeman.) A battery is the odd name given in Chesapeake Bay to a heavy boat, not unlike a coffin in shape, and hence also known as coffinboat, used in duck-shooting. Its peculiar build enables the hunter to float gently down upon his unsuspecting game, lying below the surface of the water, while the heavy calibre of his gun, and the fact that he fires it from a kind of miniature embrasure, have, no doubt, led to the use of the word battery. The Monitor, finally, a word beyond all question belonging to America, as well as the formidable vessel to which, under various forms, it has since given the name, is well known as the famous invention of Captain Ericsson-the first ship built with a revolving turret. The principles of her construction were altogether new in the history of naval architecture, and, after the signal victory of the first monitor in Hampton Roads, the name became a household word at the North. The great inventor has not made it known what induced him to choose the name: hence etymologists have evolved it out of their inner consciousness that he must have borrowed it from Gray's Monitor Dracena, a large lizard covered with impenetrable armor. Irreverend Confederates called the hideouslooking vessels cheese-boxes, and apparently one designation is, etymologically, though not æsthetically, as good as the other. Their own unsuccessful imitations they still more disrespectfully called Tinclads. In speaking of the proceeds of deep-sea fisheries, at least one new term has become sufficiently familiar to the general public to take it out of the class of merely technical terms, and entitle it to the honor of an Americanism. This is the dunfish, cod prepared so as to give it a dun-color, from which the name is derived. For this purpose the fish are salted, and then laid in piles in a dark room, covered with salt-hay or some similar substance. After two or three months the piles are opened and the fish examined, after which they are piled up once more in a compact mass and left to ripen for another two or three months. In July or August they are ready for use, and command a high price, being far superior to ordinary codfish. J. G. Whittier describes an old puritan's outfit thus: "They had loaded his shallop with dunfish and ball, Another term connected with the cod is the name of the scaffolding on which they are dried, the flakes, as the long poles are called, which are laid upon crotched posts and covered with brush, so that the codfish can be spread upon the platform and dried. But the word is not American; it is found in the singular, at least, in Wright's Collection as in use in the north of England, and meaning a hurdle or a paling. In Whitbourne's Discourse |