BEFORE an anchor can ever be raised, it must be let go; and this
perfectly obvious truism brings me at once to the subject of the
degradation of the sea language in the daily press of this country.
Your journalist, whether he takes charge of a ship or a fleet, almost
invariably “casts” his anchor. Now, an anchor is never cast, and to take
a liberty with technical language is a crime against the clearness,
precision, and beauty of perfected speech.
An anchor is a forged piece of iron, admirably adapted to its end, and
technical language is an instrument wrought into perfection by ages of
experience, a flawless thing for its purpose. An anchor of yesterday
(because nowadays there are contrivances like mushrooms and things like
claws, of no particular expression or shape—just hooks)—an anchor of
yesterday is in its way a most efficient instrument. To its perfection
its size bears witness, for there is no other appliance so small for the
great work it has to do. Look at the anchors hanging from the cat-heads
of a big ship! How tiny they are in proportion to the great size of the
hull! Were they made of gold they would look like trinkets, like
ornamental toys, no bigger in proportion than a jewelled drop in a
woman’s ear. And yet upon them will depend, more than once, the very
life of the ship.
An anchor is forged and fashioned for faithfulness; give it ground that
it can bite, and it will hold till the cable parts, and then, whatever
may afterwards befall its ship, that anchor is “lost.” The honest, rough
piece of iron, so simple in appearance, has more parts than the human
body has limbs: the ring, the stock, the crown, the flukes, the palms,
the shank. All this, according to the journalist, is “cast” when a ship
arriving at an anchorage is brought up.
This insistence in using the odious word arises from the fact that a
particularly benighted landsman must imagine the act of anchoring as a
process of throwing something overboard, whereas the anchor ready for its
work is already overboard, and is not thrown over, but simply allowed to
fall. It hangs from the ship’s side at the end of a heavy, projecting
timber called the cat-head, in the bight of a short, thick chain whose
end link is suddenly released by a blow from a top-maul or the pull of a
lever when the order is given. And the order is not “Heave over!” as the
paragraphist seems to imagine, but “Let go!”
As a matter of fact, nothing is ever cast in that sense on board ship but
the lead, of which a cast is taken to search the depth of water on which
she floats. A lashed boat, a spare spar, a cask or what not secured
about the decks, is “cast adrift” when it is untied. Also the ship
herself is “cast to port or starboard” when getting under way. She,
however, never “casts” her anchor.
To speak with severe technicality, a ship or a fleet is “brought up”—the
complementary words unpronounced and unwritten being, of course, “to an
anchor.” Less technically, but not less correctly, the word “anchored,”
with its characteristic appearance and resolute sound, ought to be good
enough for the newspapers of the greatest maritime country in the world.
“The fleet anchored at Spithead”: can anyone want a better sentence for
brevity and seamanlike ring? But the “cast-anchor” trick, with its
affectation of being a sea-phrase—for why not write just as well “threw
anchor,” “flung anchor,” or “shied anchor”?—is intolerably odious to a
sailor’s ear. I remember a coasting pilot of my early acquaintance (he
used to read the papers assiduously) who, to define the utmost degree of
lubberliness in a landsman, used to say, “He’s one of them poor,
miserable ‘cast-anchor’ devils.”