From the book "Word Struck"
by Robert MacNeil

The sea was so familiar a part of Western life from the Elizabethans to the twentieth century that expressions relating to it became metaphors for activities on the land. Such expressions filled the language I heard or read in the books about the sea that I began devouring at twelve or thirteen.

 

Everybody depended on his ship coming in. They were all in the same boat, waiting till the bitter end. In everyday life, they would back and fill, or be taken down a peg or two if they didn’t know the ropes. They had to keep a weather eye open and give a stranger a wide berth if he was bearing down on them and they didn’t like the cut of his jib, because he might be armed to the teeth, at least until he showed his true colours or nailed his colours to the mast. If he spliced the main-brace before the sun was over the yardarm, put too much grog on the rocks and down the hatch, got three sheets to the wind and keeled over, he might have to trim his sails and pour oil on troubled waters to get on an even keel, or risk being keel-hauled. If they slacked off or rested on their oars, or weren’t pulling their own weight, or sailed too close to the wind, someone might lower the boom and take the wind out of their sails, forcing them to chart a new course. In the doldrums,if they didn’t make headway and were dead in the water, they might be all at sea and long for a safe harbour, because time and tide wait for no man. If landlubbers shoved off and ventured on the high seas, come hell or high water, where it wasn’t all plain sailing, they’d have to hit the decks and haul it or be half seas over and even pooped before they could drop anchor or barge in to put their port side alongside the dock for the longshoremen to discharge cargo. If some tar listened to too much scuttlebutt and talked a lot of bilge, they might give him some leeway or tell him to pipe down or put him in the booby hatch if he and the captain were at logger-heads. If a ship was first-rate, and the captain no figurehead, he’d have her shipshape from stem to stern, so by and large she’d get a clean bill of health. Then the swab could clear the decks, stow it, lower the gangway, don his middy blouse and peajacket, and, if he wasn't too hard up, go off on his own hook and see whether the broad-beamed lady pacing the widow's walk still liked him or was just a fair-weather friend.