Questions on names and terminology for ship's boats

This is a tough one, for a couple of reasons.  In the first place, the usage of such terms has changed quite a bit over time.  In the second place, even at a given moment in history they weren't by any means used consistently.

For what it's worth, here are some definitions from the glossary of The Line of Battle:  The Sailing Warship, 1650-1840, a volume in the excellent Conway's History of the Ship series.  This is a modern, well-researched volume - as good a place to start as any.

"barge...A long, light pulling boat, usually carvel-built, often associated with pomp and ceremony, as with the City of London livery company boats; a warship's barge was normally the transport of a senior officer or admiral.

"cutter....Ship's boat, usually clinker-built (qv), seaworthy and handier under sail than oars.

"dinghy.  Originally an Indian local craft but the name was adopted for a warship's smallest boat.

"gig. A light, narrow ship's boat, better under oars than sail.

"jollyboat. Often the smallest ship's boat, the all-purpose hack for light duties.  The term was common until the end of the seventeenth century but thereafter diedout in naval usage until a century later, when it was often applied to the smallest cutter.

"launch. A large relatively flat-sheered boat, initially employed in dockyard duties, but taken to sea from the 1780s as a substitute for the more seaworthy but less capacious longboat (qv).

"longboat.  The largest ship's boat, used for heavy duty carrying; seaworthy and strongly built but often complained of as too difficult to stow.  Replaced by the launch (qv) from the 1780s.

"pinnace.  In the sixteenth century a small fast vessel, often used as a scout, that could usually be rowed as well as sailed but was decked like a ship.  This usage survived into the mid-seventeenth century, in parallel with its application to a ship's boat; in the latter sense, a pinnace was a fairly seaworthy boat of up to 35 feet proportioned like a longboat, but by the eighteenth century it had become a narrower, lighter craft and in many respects a smaller version of a barge (qv), for the use of junior officers."

"Whaler" and "galley" aren't in that particular glossary.  I'm accustomed to seeing "whaler" used to describe a ship used for whaling; such a ship carries "whaleboats."  The U.S. Navy used the term "motor whaleboat" for a long time (and maybe still does) to describe a medium-sized, double-ended boat, with either a wood or metal hull, that was standard equipment on board most warship types during WWII.  With the demise of the sailing whaler/whaleship, the term "whaler" seems to have turned into a synonym for "whaleboat."

I'm accustomed to seeing the word "galley" used to refer to a sizeable ship (propelled at least partially by oars).  The smallest galleys I can recall encountering are the ones built by Benedict Arnold's force for use on Lake Champlain during the American Revolution.  (One of them the Philadelphia, is preserved in the Smithsonian.  She's also referred to as a gundalow (which term isn't in the Conway glossary). 

That's about how things stood during the great age of the sailing warship - in the English language.  A twentieth-century glossary undoubtedly would define some of those words differently.  And I suspect if you asked several eighteenth-century British naval officers to label a particular boat, they might well give you a couple of different answers.

There's a great little publication from NMM called The Boats of Men of War by W E May that discusses all the names and types of ships boats, and how they both evolved over the years.

The May work is indeed an excellent one.  It's appeared in several formats over the past forty years or so, and is undoubtedly the definitive work on that limited segment of the subject:  the boats of British warships.

Another one that's worth looking at is Chapman's Architectura Navalis Mercatoria.  Scattered around among the beautiful plates in that book are several dozen excellent plans of ships' boats from the mid- to lat-eighteenth century.

One point that maybe is worth making:  the word "lifeboat" apparently is a relatively new one.  I think it dates from the late nineteenth century, when passenger-carrying steamships made their appearance. It refers strictly to a boat that's designed for the specific purpose of saving lives if the ship carrying it sinks.  I confess I cringe when I hear a boat on board the Mayflower or the Victory referred to as a "lifeboat."

A little tip: If you are after a copy of May's book, make sure you get the 2003 edition, as this contains drawings and tables, which I believe were absent in the original.

Rick

Very interesting.  I've bought (I think) two copies of that work.  I got the first one in the NNM giftshop in (I think) 1978.  I'm not sure I could lay hands on it now, but I remember it as a pretty informal production - xeroxed from a typescript, on 8 1/2" x 11" paper, with a  colored paper cover.  The newer version I have is one I bought a year or two ago in the bookshop at an American museum.  It's a smaller, well-bound paperback, with a color cover.  My recollection is that the older edition had at least some drawings in it (mainly reproductions of old Navy Board plans, as I recall), but I'd have to compare the two to establish how much difference there is between them.

It's great that the money has become available to produce high-quality, durable editions of books like that.  We sometimes don't realize, I think, how fortunate we are to be building ship models at a time when so much reference material is available in such accessible formats.  In 1978 an American modeler almost literally had to travel to England in order to get hold of a copy of that book.

My 1974 edition has 16 pages of illustrations including sketches, plans and photographs of models.

My copy is a hardback, 128 pages, approx 7" x 10", published by Caxton Editions in 2003. It is illustrated throughout, on almost every page.

A "Publishers' Note" on the flyleaf reads: "This new edition preserves the late Commander May's original text and notes in their entirety, only obvious errors being corrected. The new material, assembled by Simon Stephen of the National Maritime Museum, comprises all the tabular data, the illustrations and their captions."

Rick