specifically the 1710-1720 range, assuming nautical language and English jargon has changed before or after that.
I'm having a lot of trouble reading up on anatomy of ships (a great example here), the vocabularic exchanges between sailors aboard a ship, and that general category in general, and so on. Usually I find bits and pieces of these in other sources, but unfortunately the diction is rarely ever translated, like this example for instance, from The Sea Rover's Practice: Pirate Tactics and Techniques, 1630-1730 by Benerson Little:
The following was typical of the exchange between lookout above and captain below. “A sail! A sail!” shouted the lookout. “Where?” “Fair by us.” “How stands she?” “To the Eastward, and is two points upon her weather bow, and hath her larboard tacks aboard.”
For example, what would "two points upon" and "hath" and "tacks aboard" mean? These are the things I'm want to find out.
Benerson Little explains most of this stuff if you read the rest of the book and the chapter about ships and sailing (chapter 5), but it is very complicated and I don't even claim to be a sailing expert.
Basically what you have to understand about sailing is that the wind and the direction of the wind is extremely important. No sailing ship can sail directly into the wind so what they have to do if they want to sail in that direction is sail obliquely toward it at right or left angles. The terminology used to describe this has to do with the points of a 360 degree compass where sailing directly into the wind would be 0 degrees and sailing before the wind or with the wind directly to your back would be 180 degrees (there is a diagram illustrating this in the book). For simplicity, the compass is usually divided into 32 sections or points of 11.25 degrees each. Therefore, if the starting point is 0 degrees facing the wind, two points is 22.5 degrees at an oblique angle to the wind. We furthermore know the starting point is facing the wind since it says "upon her weather bow" which means the front of the ship facing the wind.
Tacking refers to the sailing technique when sailing at an angle into the wind of maneuvering the ship so that wind blows on both sides of the sail by sailing in a zig-zag fashion, thus propelling the ship forward. "Larboard/port tacks aboard" just means sailing on a larboard tack which means to the right. If it was a starboard tack then that would mean the bow was angled to the left facing the wind. The word "aboard" here is euphemistic and just basically means "in use" like you might say someone is "onboard" with a plan. And hath just means have or has. You can easily look that up in a dictionary.
So what all this means is that there is a ship to eastward of the lookout that is sailing toward the wind at an approximately 22.5 degree angle to right/port side/larboard.
