shipmate

   One of the more interesting uses of this vocative in literature occurs in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Ishmael attends the Whalemen’s Chapel in New Bedford and hears the sermon delivered by Father Mapple, a former sailor and harpooneer turned minister. He addresses his congregation as ‘shipmates’, or ‘beloved shipmates’, and bases his sermon, naturally enough, on the story of Jonah and the whale. For Father Mapple the chapel is a ship, the aisles being gangways.

   The Oxford English Dictionary cites a nineteenth-century novel which uses ‘old ship’ as a term of address to a fellow sailor, though it calls the usage ‘jocular’. Wilfred Granville, in A Dictionary of Sailor’s Slang, more precisely limits this expression to the Royal Navy, fishermen, and others using ‘shippie/shippy’, and says that it abbreviates ‘shipmate’. He thinks that the ‘old’ refers to a former messmate, as it may well do in third person reference.

   In direct address, however, ‘old’ would have its usual friendly meaning.