cockboat
English
[edit]Alternative forms
[edit]Etymology
[edit]From cog (“a small boat”).
Noun
[edit]cockboat (plural cockboats)
- (nautical) A small rowing boat, especially one pulled behind a larger ship, or used to ferry goods between a ship and the shore.
- 1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book III, Canto VIII”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC:
- Haue care, I pray, to guide the cock-bote well, / Least worse on sea then vs on land befell.
- 1874, Marcus Clarke, “Chapter V”, in For the Term of His Natural Life:
- The Malabar, that huge sea monster, in whose capacious belly so many human creatures lived and suffered, had dwindled to a walnut-shell, and yet beside her bulk how infinitely small had their own frail cockboat appeared as they shot out from under her towering stern!