Sentence examples for merchantman from inspiring English sources
noun
A cargo ship -- engaged in commercial activities, as opposed to a warship
1 The Bridgewater, another merchantman, was also in company with the Porpoise at the time of the wreck, and narrowly escaped sharing the same fate.
In the United States, where speed became a premium in the China trade and the California gold trade in the mid-19th century, the schooner design was married to that of the old full-rigged, three-masted merchantman, resulting in the famous clipper ships.
It came eventually to distinguish the warship from the merchantman and, more specifically, the warship in commission from the warship laid up in harbour.
The following year he converted a captured French merchantman into a 40-gun warship, Queen Anne's Revenge, and soon became notorious for outrages along the Virginia and Carolina coasts and in the Caribbean Sea.
A pirate crew numbered on average eighty, whereas it took only sixteen to staff a merchantman, so pirates shouldered a much lighter share of work, a fortunate state of affairs because, as a contemporary observed, "they mortally hate it".
So, after the fall of the short-lived Roman Republic, she had to borrow the money for a cheap ticket home on the Elizabeth, an American merchantman.
Perhaps the most notorious case of a private, armed vigilante force was the British ship Spec, used in 1846 to protect convoys of Chinese merchantmen against the coast's famous pirates.
They also did no harm to the ability of British merchantmen to navigate the world and of British warships to dominate it.Viewed from that perspective, China's southern neighbours might be slightly nervous about a meeting held in Shanghai on January 26th and 27th, which gathered the country's oceanographers (including several who work abroad) to discuss a project called South China Sea-Deep.
If the motive had been simply to stop the fighting and to save British shipping from harm, the first obvious course would have been to order merchantmen to stay away, and the second to aim the intervention at positions not on the canal but nearer the violated armistice line.
Six armed German raiders disguised as merchantmen, with orders to leave convoys alone and to confine their attacks to unescorted ships, roamed the oceans with practical impunity from the spring of 1940 and had sunk 366,644 tons of shipping by the end of the year.
Wilson severed diplomatic relations between the United States and Germany on Feb. 3, 1917, and asked Congress, on February 26, for power to arm merchantmen and to take all other measures to protect U.S. commerce.
