mizzentopman

See also: mizzen-top man

English

Etymology

From mizzentop +‎ man.

Noun

mizzentopman (plural mizzentopmen)

1. A sailor assigned to the mizzentop on a sailing ship
   • 1840, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Two Years Before the Mast‎^[1], New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1909-14, Chapter XXIV:

     Soon after, the foresail was reefed, and we mizen-top men were sent up to take another reef in the mizen topsail.

   • 1924, Herman Melville, chapter 16, in Billy Budd‎^[2], London: Constable & Co.:

     […] since the mizzentopmen having not to handle such breadths of heavy canvas as the lower sails on the main-mast and fore-mast, a young man if of the right stuff not only seems best adapted to duty there, but in fact is generally selected for the captaincy of that top, and the company under him are light hands and often but striplings.

   • 2011, Leon Fink, Sweatshops at Sea: Merchant Seamen in the World's First Globalized Industry, from 1812 to the Present‎^[3], University of North Carolina Press, caption, Chapter 2, p. 46:

     This illustration for Herman Melville's White Jacket (1850) of the flogging of a nineteen-year-old mizzen-top man […] on a U.S. naval ship—based on Melville's own Pacific voyage of 1843-44—helped stoke a humanitarian campaign against such physical punishment.

Alternative forms

• mizen-top man
• mizzen-top man