I think Sam Llewellyn’s Marine Quarterly is a gem, as I hope most Intheboatshed.net readers will have gathered by now – and it seems particularly appropriate to write about it at a time when most of us are turning sadly to the task of hauling our boats out for the winter.
As always I greatly enjoyed reading my copy. Below are a couple of informative extracts from the autumn issue – there are more at this MQ web page. As usual, the pieces Sam has included are by turns entertaining, illuminating, amusing and surprising – and they’re all good reading.
Jonathon Green explains the lexicographer’s relationship with sea slang on a tour that takes in plenty of low life
Sea slang was first acknowledged in the eighteenth century – its origins must be older – and known as altumal, from Latin’s altum mare, the deep sea. Its abundance is daunting, and poses an important question: where does jargon, the local naming of parts, end, and where does the slang that seagoing has introduced in the non-seagoing language begin? Partridge, my lexicographical predecessor, offers Jimmy-the-One for a First Lieutenant, and Jimmy Ducks for the (early to mid-nineteenth century) rating in charge of the ships’ poultry. I have chosen to omit both, and many more representing what I see as limited usage. I have, on the other hand, included Jimmy Round, a Frenchman (from je me rends, I surrender, and attributed to the Napoleonic Wars).
Harry Browne takes a long, hard look at the insanity of EU fisheries policy
In the big courthouse off the main street of Tralee, Co Kerry, in front of just one spectator, José Francisco Santamaría and his trawler, the Monte San Roque, are getting bailed out.
A few days ago the ship was boarded and inspected by the Irish Navy nearly 200 miles off Ireland’s southwest coast. It was catching monkfish, hake and prawns. The Navy watchers believed its actual fishing locations over the previous several days did not correspond with the entries in its logbook, and they took the vessel into port at Fenit, Co Kerry.
Santamaría, an olive-skinned man in early middle age, is wearing a checked shirt and sports a Groucho Marx moustache-and-glasses combination. As everyone awaits the judge, he is chatting to the heavily pregnant translator. A Garda and a fisheries inspector are here too. The prosecuting solicitor, a local man, is engaged in an elaborate welcome-to-Kerry parley with the defence man, who has been sent up from Cork by the Spanish conglomerate that owns the Monte San Roque.When sufficient niceties have been observed, the prosecutor mutters that, you know, the bail amount is about €175,000, based on a formula derived from the value of the catch.
‘I think €174,768,’ the defence solicitor replies. ‘And it should be in the account within the next half-hour, if it’s not there already.’
