"beril" of a ship?

[Landau, James]

On a sailing ship with square sails, a "brace" is a line ("rope", to
landlubbers) running from the deck to a yard (that horizontal wooden
thing from which the sail hangs) to move the yard in a horizontal plane.


It would seem that a group of sailors were hauling with great force on
the brace when it broke, and in this case for four of the men the sudden
end of resistance from the brace left them staggering backwards so
suddenly that they went overboard.  What then was a "beril"?  The "cask"
that broke loose from its lashings is described separately, so the
"beril" probably wasn't a barrel.  There was no mention of a gun
breaking loose, so it could not be the barrel of a gun.  It has to be
something that would be expected to be in motion when a brace broke, and
the only thing I can thing of is part of the brace itself, most likely
the broken end of the brace, which being a long cylinder might have been
referred to as the "barrel" of the rope.

But there is a quaint spelling, namely "Carthagena" for "Cartagena".
Not really incorrect, just quaint, being an English overcorrection of an
apparently Latin name meaning "descended from Carthage", Cartagena
having started out as a Carthaginian colony.

As Michael Quinion correctly points out, "barrel" does not mean "any
cylindrical container" or "any container made of wooden staves" but
rather is sometimes, particularly in sailing ship days, used to specify
a specific size of container.  "Keg", "cask", "barrel", "butt",
"hogshead" etc. were all specific sizes.  MWCD10 says that a "barrel" is
"31 gal. of fermented beverage or 42 gal. of petroleum".  Sailors, who
had to deal with finding space to stow these things, would be careful
not to confuse the sizes.

Remember the "butt of Malmsey" in which the Duke of Clarence was
supposed to have drowned?  A butt had the capacity of 108 Imperial
gallons (491 liters), easily big enough for Clarence to have had his
head and upper body pushed into.  On a ship there was a butt placed on
the scuttles that held drinking water for the sailors and was known as
the "scuttlebutt".  Just like modern office workers hanging out around
the water cooler, sailors getting a drink of water would gossip, hence
the term "scuttlebutt" for "gossip, grapevine, rumors".


-----Original Message-----
From: Joel S. Berson [mailto:Berson at ATT.NET]
Sent: Tuesday, April 24, 2007 1:24 PM
Subject: Re: "beril" of a ship?

I might have wondered about "barrel" also, but an earlier part of the
sentence explicitly describes a "cask of water [that] broke from its
lashings and maimed sixteen men before it could be staved"; and the
immediately preceding context is "one of the braces gave way with such a
shock, as threw four men over-board, two of whom were lost, while the
knee of a fifth was crushed in a terrible manner between the beril and
the mast".

So the cause seems to be the brace failing; Smollett uses the word
"cask" elsewhere, not "barrel"; and I don't observe quaint spellings in
this Smollett work ("Account of the Expedition Against Carthagena").

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