Grose's Dictionary of Buckish Slang, University Wit and Pickpocket Eloquence (1811) under 'Pay' gives: "The devil to pay and no pitch hot or ready. Sea term". The author does not offer a definition having anything to do with a seam, but under 'Devil' does list:
"A small thread in the King's ropes and cables, whereby they may be distinguished from all others. The Devil himself: a small streak of thread in the King's sails". [The Sailor's Word-Book does not give this, but lists "Rogue's yarn" with a very similar meaning."]
Next, as to 'Devil-bolts': The OED gives this 1873 citation from Samuel Plimsoll: "Oh devils are sham bolts. When they ought to be copper, the head and about an inch of shaft is copper, the rest is iron. Seventy three devils were found in one ship by the surveyors of Lloyds."
Although these three meanings are listed in the OED, none of them are well known, and it is a fourth and quite different nautical sense of the word that has generated threads on infonaut-l, searoom-l and the Norton patrickobrian lists.
Patrick O'Brian: Sea Devil p. 260:
Why, the devil, do you see,' said Jack, 'is the seam between the deck-planking and the timbers, and we call it the devil, because it is the 'devil' for the caulkers to come at: In full we say the devil to pay and no pitch hot; and what we mean is, that there is something hell-fire difficult to be done - must be done - and nothing to do it with. 'Timbers' in a technical sense means 'frames' so it is a bit uncertain exactly what particular seam Jack Aubrey (and Patrick O'Brian) are thinking of ....but no matter.The earliest authority to mention the word in this particular technical sense is Admiral W H Smyth in the Sailor's Word-Book (1867) : 'The seam which margins the waterways was called the 'devil', why only caulkers can tell, who perhaps found it sometimes difficult for their tools'.
Likewise, my edition (1978 reprint) of Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable gives:
"The devil is a seam between the garboard stake and the keel, and to 'pay' is to cover with pitch. In former times, when vessels were often careened for repairs, it was difficult to caulk and pay this seam before the tide turned. Hence the locution ...the ship is careened, the devil is exposed, but there is no hot pitch ready, and the tide will turn, before the work can be done (French 'payer', from 'paix', pitch.) Gershom Bradford's Mariner's Dictionary also defines 'devil' as the seam between the garboard and the keel.Likewise, Charles Earle Funk in Heaven's to Betsy, and Other Curious Sayings says:
..... among sailors 'the devil to pay' could mean to caulk the seam nearest the keel. This could be done in earlier days only when the vessel had been careened and tipped on its side. Such an operation between tides would be difficult, particularly so if the expanded form or the expression is considered ...'the devil to pay and no pitch hot' as we find it [used in a non-nautical context] in Walter Scott's The Pirate (1821) ....Proof is lacking that the nautical was the original sense, but this is the logical source of the phrase."Peter Kemp Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea refers to both the Smyth and the Brewer type of devil.
The word is not mentioned by R C Leslie in his Old Sea Wings, Ways, and Words, and it is significant that Joanna Colcord in Sea Language Comes Ashore (1945) doesn't mention 'devil' in this sense at all, but does say:
"....."hell" was a name for the seam next the waterway, because it was difficult to work on; but it seems more likely that a lively imagination conceived the difficulties of paying the seams of Hell itself.A Ansted: Dictionary of Sea Terms defines 'devil' as 'that seam which is about on the waterline'. And this is listed as an alternative meaning by Charles Funk in Heavens to Betsy: page 34 . More recently, some further interesting ideas have been putforward on the net ....for instance this from Tom Scott tscott@sci.nwfsc.noaa.gov:
"The devil is the last deck plank before the shear strake on the hull. The seam between these two planks, set at a nominal right angle to each other, is the devil seam. This seam is particularly difficult to pay (and caulk) because there is little support in the direction of the compression created during caulking and expansion of the wood when wet. Hence, this seam "works" a lot. It is also a seam that gets a fair amount of exposure, being the first one wet when she goes "rail down". Therefore a considerable amount of attention was paid (pun intended) to seeing that it was well payed. Because it worked, and was exposed it had to be payed often.In one thread, I suggested that a seam (if it is properly called a seam at all) which might be a candidate, would be the line between margin-plank (nibbing strake) and the deck-planks proper. At bow and stern the latter were 'nibbed' into the margin-plank, resulting in the seam being interrupted by a series of short elements ....a zigzag pattern which would have made for slow caulking and paying. And indeed in the same vein, Donald R. Morris drmorris@phoenix.phoenix.net said:
The devil was the zigzag seam between the curved outboard plank and the butt ends of the fore-and-aft planks of the deck; it had to be cut by hand and was wide, irregular and hard to pay with pitch. Thus a crisis or emergency could be described as "the devil to pay and no pitch hot." Landlubberly writers converted this to "hell to pay," which is now used not so much to describe an emergency as the resulting chaos.Charles Funk (in Heavens to Betsy) gives an example of 'The devil and all to pay' from a poem dated 1400, and the same version occurs in the Motteux translation (1703) of Cervantes Don Quixote (1615), while Thomas Moore (1821) describes R B Sheridan as:
Good at a fight, but better at playBesides the Sir Walter Scott citation above, other non-nautical references in the OED include quotes from Swift and Byron between 1711 and 1820,.and the Editor goes on to say: " Supposed to refer to the alleged bargain made by wizards with Satan, and the inevitable payment to be made to him in the end. It has also been attributed to the difficulty of paying or caulking the seam called the 'devil' near the ship's keel, whence the expanded version 'and no pitch hot'. But there is no evidence that this is the original sense, and it has never affected the general use of the proverb." If a seam really was so called, it seems clear that it was either very long, or very hard to get at. Taking Smyth's definition: The waterway was thicker than the general deck-planking, and it might have been awkward getting the pitch into the crevice between them, (or for that matter to horse in the oakum, which preceded the paying). Certainly some American vessels were built with a thick waterway, featuring an abrupt drop in level to the deck-plank (See midship sections in Charles Desmond's Wooden Shipbuilding :(1919).) A similar mismatch occurred where the wale met the planking, before the introduction of 'diminishing strakes' (c.1720), and Mossel describing practice in the Netherlands, whereby this was sometimes got over, by cutting a rabbet out of the heavier strake to form a so-called 'dead-seam', and giving a match in thickness between the remaining part of the wale and side plank next above it.
Godlike in giving, but ---the devil to pay!'
I must say my doubts about the authenticity of the nautical explanation, are not allayed by the lack of consensus as to which of five specific seams it was. Not only do we have all the non-nautical examples given above, but there is the non-appearance of the term in the marine dictionaries of Falconer and Roeding, in the late 1800s. One would be much happier, if examples of the word used in this sense were known, prior to its appearance out of the blue in Smyth. We need hardly emphasize that the story of Faust (and other folktales with a similar theme) go back much further than 1867..
If the English caulker found a particular seam troublesome enough to give it a special name, one might expect that tradesmen doing the same job in other lands would experience similar difficulty, and nominate the corresponding item in their own language. For what it is worth, there is no foreign equivalent. [Maybe this just confirms the difficulty of proving the non-existence of dragons.]
As to the etymology of the word 'pay': In one case, it goes back to Middle French 'peier', ultimately related to Latin 'pix' = pitch; in the other to French 'paier', ultimately related to Latin 'pax' = peace [The underlying thought is that one pacified an enemy by paying him off].
C E Funk in A Hog on Ice notes that the expression turns up in William Walker's Phraseologia Anglo-Latina (1631) suggesting that Walker had originally come across it in a Latin text of some sort. Funk wonders if it might in fact be of Scottish origin, since James Kelly included it in his Complete Collection of Scottish Proverbs (1721), and another Scot, Colonel Robert Munro, uses the phrase in a book about his military service with Gustavus Adolphus: His Expedition with the Worthy Scots Regiment called MacKeyes Regiment (1637). Describing an occasion, when he was subjected to enemy fire from in front ,and the 'friendly' Swedish guns ( which were firing low over his head) at his back, he says they found themselves 'as betwixt the devil and the deep sea'.
Anyone interested, will find some discussion in Mariner's Mirror, Vol. 66, p. 372-3; and Vol. 67, p.99 and 199-200.
As mentioned earlier, I am relying on the 1978 reprint of Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. I believe this to be the same as the 1894 edition, but if someone has access to the 1870 edition, I would be interested to know if the definition of devil seam given there is identical with the one quoted above. If anyone can help, get in touch off-line.
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