Shipbuilding

The fourth entry is a marca de bordo livre, and English does not translate it at all: it names it after a person. The circle and the horizontal bars painted on a ship’s side are the Plimsoll line, or the Plimsoll mark, after Samuel Plimsoll, a Member of Parliament who spent the eighteen-seventies campaigning against vessels sent to sea so deeply laden that their crews did not expect to come home — what the campaign called « coffin ships ». The Merchant Shipping Act of 1876 was the result, and with it a compulsory mark showing how far a hull might lawfully sink. Then the name made a jump nobody plans. In the same decade a canvas shoe reached the shops with a band of rubber joining the upper to the sole, running round the foot at one constant height, and the likeness was close enough that the shoes were called « plimsolls »; British children have worn them under that name ever since. One surname therefore sits in a classification society’s rule book and on a school kit list, and only the ship still remembers why.