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plural cockboats
(nautical) A small rowing boat, especially one pulled behind a larger ship, or used to ferry goods between a ship and the shore. quotations examples
Haue care, I pray, to guide the cock-bote well, / Least worse on sea then vs on land befell.
1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book III, Canto VIII”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie
The Malabar, that huge sea monster, in whose capacious belly so many human creatures lived and suffered, had dwindled to a walnut-shell, and yet beside her bulk how infinitely small had their own frail cockboat appeared as they shot out from under her towering stern!
1874, Marcus Clarke, “Chapter V”, in For the Term of His Natural Life