Dog guard

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Dog watch or dog watch is the name for a specific watch (working shift ) on board ships : A ship's crew is usually divided into two or three working groups ("guards") who work on the ship in shifts, whereby the individual shift times (usually 6 or 7 per day) are also called "guards".

There are different views as to which of these is the dog guard:

  • According to various sources, it is "the wake from midnight to four in the morning" (then synonymous with middle wake ), for which the time before and in the morning after is too short for a regular night's sleep. It is particularly unpopular and is therefore called "Hundewache" in the German Navy.
  • Sometimes two-hour watches between 4:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. are also called this; This “unbalanced” approach is intended to avoid that on ships with two or three watch shifts every 4 hours, all guards always have the same duty hours. ("The next two watches are divided into 'dog watches' - the first dog watch is from 16.00 to 18.00 and the last dog watch is from 18.00 to 20.00.")
  • Various older sources call this the "third watch of the night".
  • According to Palmatier, it used to be the name for the third work shift in factories from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m., when otherwise only watch dogs were "awake" at this time.

Derivations

  • In the German language, the derivation arises from the fact that in this case the dog is regarded as a companion of lesser rank, which one can confidently expect an inconvenience, in this case the most unpopular guard.
  • One of the explanations says in both English and German that the name refers to the "dog star" Sirius , who appeared in the sky during the first half of the dog watch. On the other hand, the time of the rising of Sirius varies within the year, which means that the Sirius is not always visible at the "dog watch". In summer and autumn - times when people used to go to sea rather than stormy winter - the Sirius does show up in the late night, but not in spring, when it has already sunk at the time.
  • An explanation for the English-speaking area says that the shortened watches between 4 and 8 pm were originally called dodge watch , whereby dodge in the sense of "bypass" or "trick" the purpose of this watch with the above-described shifting of the group sequences designated. Later this term was shortened to dog watch .
  • It also means: the term dog watch is very likely already a corruption of docked watch in English , whereby to dock was used in the sense of docking or "shortening".

Rat Guard

Another name for the same watch section is rat watch , for example in B. Traven's death ship .

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Dog watch . In: Heinrich August Pierer , Julius Löbe (Hrsg.): Universal Lexicon of the Present and the Past . 4th edition. tape 8 . Altenburg 1859, p. 620 ( zeno.org ).
  2. ↑ Middle Guard . In: Brockhaus' Kleines Konversations-Lexikon . 5th edition. Volume 2, F. A. Brockhaus, Leipzig 1911, p.  197. , Accessed on October 18, 2010
  3. ↑ Dog watch . In: Meyers Großes Konversations-Lexikon . 6th edition. Volume 9, Bibliographisches Institut, Leipzig / Vienna 1907, p.  653. , Accessed on October 18, 2010
  4. ↑ dogwatch (07.- 13.06.2009 Edinburgh - Albourg). Academic Sailing Association of RWTH Aachen University , accessed on October 18, 2010 .
  5. ↑ Dog watch . In: Brockhaus' Kleines Konversations-Lexikon . 5th edition. Volume 1, F. A. Brockhaus, Leipzig 1911, p.  837. , Accessed on October 18, 2010
  6. ↑ What are watches on board ship? Ships & vessels. In: FAQ. National Maritime Museum, London, 2008, accessed October 11, 2010 .
  7. ^ Economic Encyclopedia by JG Krünitz (around 1800). University of Trier , accessed on October 18, 2010 (search for "dogs = guard", unfortunately not directly linked; attention: many, many pop-up windows!).
  8. ↑ Hundewache in: Adelung, Grammatical-Critical Dictionary of High German Dialect, Volume 2. Leipzig 1796, p. 1322 .
  9. ↑ a b books.google.de: Palmatier, Robert A .: Speaking of animals - a dictionary of animal metaphors. 1995, p.119 , accessed October 13, 2010
  10. ^ HMS Victory, Ships time table
  11. ↑ LEO German-English dictionary, "dodge"
  12. ↑ LEO German-English dictionary, "dock"