Avast!

"Shipmates, have ye shipped in that ship?"

I always assumed our perception of old seafaring language, as celebrated on National Talk Like a Pirate Day for example, came from 'Treasure Island' - never having read it of course. But now I've getting into 'Moby Dick', which was written 40 or 50 years before that, and it's absolutely wonderful. And the first part of the book is stuffed with this language, which seems to be biblically inspired, and also taken from the Quaker idiom of Nantucket. So I've changed my conception of where it's all come from - Long John Silver was a fraud!