The Tortugas thing is a bit more complicated. There are the Dry Tortugas, which are the outermost of the Florida Keys and a US National Park. Then, there are the Cayman Islands, which were originally known as the (not-dry) Tortugas. The Cayman Island/Tortugas were a major pirate base; I don’t know about the Dry Tortugas but suppose they may have been as well. (The unofficial symbol of the Cayman Islands is a Turtle/Pirate known as “Sir. Turtle”)
Another use of “belay”. In rock climbing, if you are holding the rope to hold another climber while they are climbing, you are “on belay” and are “belaying” the climber.
Aha… Belay that comes from the use off belaying pins which were stuck i holes along the boat at various points to tie ropes off on… I know I was a little slow coming up with that…
Shiver me timbers refers to cannon fire hitting the wood ships. The splinters became very deadly.
Mythbusters tested this with a wooden wall and cannon fire. It was amazing how much damage those splinters caused. Obvious mortal wounds in the test dummies.
Arrrr! Ye be a couple of months late for Talk Like a Pirate Day, Matey!
A pirate walks into a bar with a ship’s wheel sticking out the fly of his trousers. The bartender says, “Do you know you have a ship’s wheel sticking out the front of your trousers?” And the pirate replies, “Aye, and it be drivin’ me nuts!”
War be th’ continuation 'o politics by other means.
Look, matey, I be knowin’ a in-Davy-Jones’-treasure-chest trusty parrot when I spy wit’ ye eye one, ‘n I be lookin’ at one right now.
Th’ unauthorized reproduction or distribution ‘o a copyrighted set-the-sails be illegal. Criminal copyright infrin’ement, includin’ infrin’ement without monetary gain, be investigated by th’ FBI 'n be punishable by fines 'n federal imprisonment.
On a sailing ship, the sailors would always be hauling on ropes to change the configuration of the sails.
‘Avast’ means stop hauling on the rope and hold it where it is.
‘Belay’ means tie the rope round a fixed object, usually a ‘belaying pin’, in the current position. It means ‘finish off the current task’ with that rope.
The terms simply became used in a metaphorical way to apply to other things as well.
I think the “Aargh” idea comes from Robert Newton hamming everyone else off the screen as Long John Silver in the 1950 movie of Treasure Island, which he repeated in other performances as pirates.
“aaaarrrrhhh” sounds to me like its “avast” yelled out.
Its just “stop” in otherwords … “stop because we want you to be think you might survive that way”.
::goes to reference library:: aka: ::Opens powder room door::
::Picks up When A Loose Cannon Flogs A Dead Horse There’s the Devil To Pay from the [del]shelf[/del] tank lid:: Avast: possibly from basta (Italian) / enough. OED cites the derivation as Old Dutch hound vast (to hold fast).
Tobias Smollett was among the first to use the word colloquially in his 1748 novel The Adventures of Roderick Random.
Landluber: From the Old English word londloper, meaning one who runs up & down the land, the word landloper* was originally applied to a vagabond.
*Yes, first one is spelled with an ‘o’ vs. an ‘a’
This article traces the “pirate accent” through Newton back to Stevenson–then back to history. Treasure Island begins in the West Country, home of many a British seaman, pirate or not. Newton came from Dorset, so he used that accent.
Some of the pirate vocabulary comes from British nautical terms & slang.
Yep variations of the West Country accent used to cover a large area of England, covering the whole of the South West and South Central England and parts of the West Midlands and South East England. In fact the West Country accent used to extend as far east as only a few miles from the City of London. This covered some of the major historic ports of England such as Bristol, Southampton and Portsmouth as well as areas like Cornwall, Devon and the Isle of Wight which have strong seafaring traditions.
