Dictionary of Nautical Terms

This is a nicely-detailed dictionary of terms having to do with sailing and ships. Melville spent a full five years of his life as a young man "following the sea," as the expression goes: first on a merchant ship that sailed to England and back, then on a whaling ship that sailed around the world. After deserting the whale ship in the South Pacific, he eventually returned to the United States on a naval vessel. Much of his fiction is set in ships, and so one challenge of reading Melville is keeping up with the sailing vocabulary that, in his day, he could take for granted most of his audience would know. Indeed, Melville's use of this vocabulary is so indicative of him as a writer that some scholars have identified unsigned works as Melville's based merely on the extensive use of nautical terms.