Putting up a good, clear, complete word list with nautical jargon is totally above me. So I won't even try. In the story, I tried to keep from overusing nautical terms not to obscure the narration, but you need some in this kind of story.
If you wanna speak like a true sailor and swearing like crazy doesn't do the trick, check seatalk.info or search for the Wikipedia article titled Glossary of Nautical Terms. And then you'll scare Davy Jones himself with your accuracy.
However, now that I got you onboard, I'm not letting you set sail without at least some basics. So here we go.
**Ye Olde Davy Jones**
On this list you'll find nouns, names of things.
For some verbs related to sailing, look below, at the end of the appendix.
Battery: group of guns operated in one place. E.g.: the starboard battery is all the cannons placed on that side of the ship.
Beam: A line from side to side that crosses the waist --the middle-- of the ship.
Bosun: boatswain. The leading seaman in charge of supervising the crewmembers when performing work on deck. I use it as the "third in command" on pirate ships. Like, first comes the captain, then the lieutenant and then the bosun.
Chasers: cannons set at the bows and the stern of the ships, in pairs, usually of a larger gauge than those along the sides, on and below deck.
Companionway: just like there are no ropes on ships, but lines, there are no stairs onboard. Any series of steps to go up and down anywhere on a ship is called companionway.
Crosstree: a way smaller platform than the tops, located above them --between the topsails and the topgallants.
Gangplank: A moveable ladder or ramp used for boarding a vessel from the dock. Also called brow.
Gangway: passageway on a ship. E.g.: at the maindeck, the space between the batteries, for the sailors to come and go.
Gunwale: the top of the side of a ship. Like, if you lean over the side to look over it, you're leaning over the gunwale.
Knot: A unit of speed = 1 nautical mile (1.8520 km; 1.1508 mi) per hour. Originally speed was measured by paying out a line from the stern of a moving boat; the line had a knot every 47 feet and 3 inches (14.40 m), and the number of knots passed out in 30 seconds gave the speed through the water in nautical miles per hour.
Lines: Just like there are no stairs, but companionways, there are no ropes on a ship: they're called lines. Most of them have their own names, but never mind.
Lookout: the sailors at the tops and crosstrees of the masts, looking out for other ships, land or whatever may come around.
Make Sail: raise sails while getting underway --with the ship in motion, not moored.
Moor: dropping anchor.
Rigging is all the masts, their thousand sails and the zillion lines.
Speaking of the lines to work the sails, you had two kinds of rigging:
*Standing rigging: the "fixed lines", like the long netish setting on the sides going up the masts.
Those were made by two different kinds of lines:
- Shrouds: were the vertical lines, running up and down.
- Ratlines: were the horizontal lines from shroud to shroud, that sailors used as steps to climb up and down the masts.
*Running rigging: the lines sailors loosened or pulled to furl/unfurl sails, drop/weigh the anchor, etc.
Sharpshooters: snipers that took posts at the tops or on the yardarms.
Taffrail: the tall gunwale around the stern.
Top: the platform for watching located right above the first yardarm of the masts from bottom up. They were identified with the name of the mast, e.g. foretop. Lookouts used it to keep an eye on the sea around, and shooters used it during battle.
Transom: the flat outboard stern structure of a ship from keel to deck. Meaning the bulk with the windows and nice carvings, where the name of the ship was painted.
Underway: in motion, having way on. Not at dock, or anchored or aground.
Waist: the middle of the ship on the line from bow to stern.
Wake: waves emanating from a vessel as it passes through the water. The track of disturbed water left behind by a moving ship. So if someone is following on your wake, you're being chased, mate.
Wind across the beam: when the wind blows from the side right across the waist of the ship, on a 90º angle with the line from bow to stern.
Yard or yardarms: the long horizontal beams across the masts from where the sails hung. They were called depending on the sail hanging from it. E.g. topsail yard.
**The Wind and the Ships**
When talking about the wind to sail, you have two sides:
*The side the wind blows from ---> WINWARD
*The side the wind blows toward ---> LEEWARD
They're not a particular, fixed direction like North and South. They work like left and right: they depend on a reference that can change at every instance.
E.g.: The Lesser Antilles, the arch of little islands between Puerto Rico and Trinidad y Tobago.
On the Caribbean Sea you have the Trade Winds, blowing constantly from Africa across the Atlantic Ocean and into the Caribbean from the east-southeast.
So the Windward Islands are the southeastern islands of this group.
And the Leeward Islands are the northern islands --the Virgin Islands.
Why? Because the Trade Winds reach the Windward Islands firts and blow toward the Leeward Islands.
The side of the ship, or a house or a rock or whatever, exposed to the way the wind blows from is called WEATHER.
The side of something on the opposite side from where the wind blows is called LEE.
If you want to order a move on any of these directions, you add an A before the side you want to turn to.
E.g.: You're sailing North with wind blowing from the East.
East is your windward and West is our leeward.
So if you wanna order the pilot to turn West, you're gonna order him to "turn alee."
And if you wanna tell him to turn East, you're gonna order him to "turn aweather."
I know it sounds stupid to say "alee" instead of "West". But this is thought to be used when the wind doesn't blow from one clean, straight direction. Alee is always shorter than west-by-southwest, right?
Helm's alee!
It's a warning to let the sailors know the ship is about to make a sharp turn into the wind, or aweather.
It also means, "Hey, guys, hold tight 'casue we're gonna teach those Fast & Furious pansies what veering really means."
The Weather Gauge
All this windward and leeward thing brings us to something crucial in naval battles: the weather gauge—or gage.
Long, long, long story short, it was having the best wind during a confrontation against another ship.
Because tailwinds —wind blowing from the stern— may not come around at sea when you need them most, sometimes you sailed with a side wind in some given angle that allowed your sails to pack it in and move the ship forward the way you wanna go.
So when you were to engage in a battle with another ship, and the wind blew even a little from a side, the one with the weather gauge had the upper hand. This meant placing your ship between the wind and the other ship.
Like, you're sailing North with wind from the southeast. Then you'd try to be east or southeast of the other ship. This could even come to a point, when the fighting ships were really close to each other, in which the ship with the weather gauge blocked most of the wind the other ship was getting, depriving it of any way to maneuver and slowing it down.
Search for it on Wikipedia, because it's super interesting.
For example, the wind made the ships lean alee, right? This way, the shots fired from the weather side were shot into the wind/upwind/against the wind and they would fly higher, but they'd lose speed faster, so the effective range was shorter. And the shots fired from the lee side were fired downwind, so they would fly lower but faster and further.
Meaning that if you had the weather gauge, your cannonshots go downwards and it'd be easier for you to shoot to the waterline of the other ship —lower than the height of your cannons from the water. But the other ship, if close enough, could hit your masts.
Darn, I love this crap! It's fascinating!
Here you can see how a frigate leans alee, and the guns on the weather side pointing up:
Tacking/beating
Okay, this is gonna take longer than the weather gauge, so bear with me —that's a pun you'll get by the end of this section. And here you'll find a lot of new vocabulary.
When sailing on sailing ships, you depend 100% on the wind, right? So what happened if you wanted to go against it? Like, you need to go from A to B, but the wind is blowing from B to A?
Answer: you tacked.
Sailing ships couldn't move straight into (against) the wind, so they moved in a zigzag, from side to side crossing before the wind, to load it from the side and be able to move forward. Like this:
Here you can also see the way sails must be trimmed (oriented) to get wind on each tack.
Every zig and every zag is called tack.
The moment of ending one tack and turning to start the next is called "coming about", so the sailors needed to get "ready about". This maneuver, simple as it seems, needed a lot of attention and coordination to trim the sails in the right angle and in the right order —because they couldn't be turned all at the same time. Else, the ship would end upwind (bow facing straight into the wind) and would be left in the irons (incapable of maneuvering due to contrary wind), taken aback (with the wind pushing it backwards and yeah, that's where this expression comes from).
So the bosun would shout out the instructions in the correct order, and the sailors would follow them down to the letter right when they were told to, while the pilot steered the helm.
You could go in long or short tacks.
Shorter tacks bring the bow close to the wind, or close hauled. It's faster than long tacks, but it also requires more sailsmanship (skill to sail).
Ha! I managed to throw in a lot of vocabulary! :D
More Vocabulary
Bear: this verb describes actions on a ship in relation to other things, like another ship or the wind.
Bear away: sail away from the wind —as in moving the bow away from the windward (the direction the wind blows from).
Bear off: the same as bear away. OR turning the ship to avoid a collision.
Bear down: head toward and close on another ship.
Bear up: change direction toward the wind.
As she/it bears: as another ship, headland or whatever passes by the side or across the bow of your ship. This was used mostly as a command for gunners. "Fire as she bears" means "Fire your cannon when you see the other ship sailing right outside your gunport."
Run with the wind/sail downwind: sailing with the wind on your tail/stern (blowing from behind your ship).
Full and by: making best speed to weather by keeping the sails full.
Put about: turning sails and sailing in the opposite direction.
**picture: Two Clippers, Montague Dawson**