Dictionary

West Indiaman en · NOUN

Etymology

From West Indies + -man.

Meanings

1. (historical, uncountable) A merchant vessel trading between Europe and the West Indies (including the Americas), generally smaller than the similar East Indiamen.
   • [P]iloted down the Thames, drifting with the tides along that central highway of trade, she floated past West Indiamen loaded with sugar and rum from the Caribbean[.]) 2023, David Grann, chapter 1, in The Wager, Doubleday:
   • In Joshua Kelly's Treatise on Navigation, of the former date [1757], an instance is related of a West Indiaman drifted, during two days of dead calm, forty-six miles northward, across the mouth of the British Channel. 1815, James Rennell, “Some Farther Observations on the Current That Often Prevails to the Westward of the Scilly Islands”, in Abstracts of the Papers Printed in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, volume 2, page 18:

Forms

Relateds

Guineaman · Greenlandman · East Indiaman

Translations (1)

pl westindiaman (ship sailing for a European West India company)