TANBARK

Before the days of Dacron, cotton canvas was the common material for sails. Cotton is heavy, and stretches, and, when left furled too long, provides a perfect place for mold and mildew to form. To combat those destructive growths, sailors used to treat the sails by "tanning" them with the bark of the Acacia catechu tree. The sails were boiled in water filled with the tree bark, or else the mixture was swabbed on, giving the sails some protection from mildew, and turning them a handsome reddish-brown colour. That colour became known as "tanbark".

LEADLINE

In this electronics age, the leadline is nearly forgotten. Today when a mariner wants to know the depth of the water he simply looks at an electronic readout. But in the old days, a crewman would go forward and swing a leadline, a heavy lead weight fastened to a line marked in fathoms. When heaved properly, the weight would hit the water far in advance of the ship, and plummet to the bottom touching down just as the line went vertical. The man would read the marking on the line where it touched the water and call out the depth to the deck officer.

DORY

The dory is a flat-bottom straight-sided fishing boat that was carried on schooners and whalers during the 18th and 19th Century. The design was probably prompted by the bateaux of the trappers and fur traders of Canada and Maine. They were built in Lowell's Boat Shop at Amesbury, Massachusetts, and cost $15. As many as a quarter million were built in production methods along the Merrimack River. Having no thwarts, the dories could be nested on the deck of a larger fishing vessel, and were respected for their sturdiness and cargo capacity. (Ref. Yankee Magazine, August 1986, p. 96)

FATHOM

This term comes from the Anglo-Saxon term "faetm" and was originally a land term meaning "embrace". As with many of the measurements from those old days, this one was adapted from the proportions of the human body. A "hand" (still used to measure horses) was about four inches, and a "foot" about 12 inches. The "faetm" or "fathom" was the distance between the fingertips of the outstretched hands, (an embrace), which is about six feet. This was perfect for measuring rope, so the term was adopted by seamen. Since the leadline is marked with a tag every six feet, the depth of the water was described in fathoms too. The symbolic meaning of the term, to discover or understand, comes from this use of the leadline to find the bottom.