Falling to with our hoes again, we worked singly, or together, as occasion required, until “Nooning Time” came.
The period, so called by the planters, embraced about three hours in the middle of the day; during which it was so excessively hot, in this still, brooding valley, shut out from the Trades, and only open toward the leeward side of the island, that labour in the sun was out of the question. To use a hyperbolical phrase of Shorty’s, “It was ’ot enough to melt the nose h’off a brass monkey.”

Herman Melville: Omoo

When the Boon Companion and I travelled to the Marquesas and the Society Islands, back in 2017, I carried along Herman Melville’s semi-autobiographical narratives, Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847). The quotation above is Melville’s description of farming on an island he calls Imeeo—presumably a reference to Eimeo, another name for Mo’orea in the Society Islands. You can see its characteristic skyline, silhouetted against the tropical sunset clouds, in this view from Tahiti:

As the humid noonday heat in Tahiti nudged over 30°C, we could sympathize with Melville’s Nooning Time rest period, but were amused by how very different his brass monkey weather was from the modern interpretation of the phrase.

A decade later, a reference to brass monkeys and cold weather turns up in the diary of Charles A. Abbey, a teenage seaman crossing the Atlantic in the clipper Charmer (“a very fine crew & no Chinamen”). Abbey’s diaries, written between 1856 and 1860, were annotated and published in 1937, and deserve an extensive footnote*, if not an entire other post. He is often misquoted, or at least paraphrased, even by the Oxford English Dictionary, so here’s what he actually wrote on 16 January 1857, in all its erratic and near-incomprehensible glory:

Boo! Boo! Boo! Whew aint it a blowing “Jehosaphat Bumstead” & cold,” it would freeze the tail off from a braſs monkey.

(See my footnote for a partial explanation.)

Wikipedia has a whole list of nineteenth-century references to brass monkeys suffering under various extreme conditions, gleaned from the Australian government’s excellent newspaper archive at Trove. There are winds that would blow the nose off, or shave the whiskers off, a brass monkey; and people who could talk the tail off a brass monkey.

So the nineteenth-century brass monkey seems to have been an epitome of robustness under the onslaught of heat, cold, winds, and even loquacity. It evidently took a while for common usage to settle on cold as the standard simian stressor, and even longer to decide on which peripheral appendage was at risk. Here’s the Google Ngram for a selection of cold-related phrases:

The monkey’s ears and tail were deemed most at risk, at least in published English, until about 1960, when the now-familiar “balls” usage became the dominant form. And the OED‘s first citation for the coy expression brass monkey weather, meaning “very cold”, dates from 1981.

Which brings us, with weary inevitability, to this piece of nonsense, which was doing the rounds long before social media was invented, but has been popularized by it:

(If anyone can tell me where the photograph was taken, I’ll gladly acknowledge the source. And perhaps phone up the people responsible for the sign.)

I remember how I first encountered this bit of folk etymology back in the late 1970s, and how thrilled I was for all of five seconds before thinking Hang on a minute, though… The story is, alas, a product of the CANOE, the mythical Committee to Ascribe a Nautical Origin to Everything. While English is replete with phrases that do originate from the long maritime traditions of the UK and USA, this just isn’t one of them. Here’s why:

• Neither the Oxford English Dictionary nor Admiral Smyth’s Sailor’s Word-Book (1867) offers any support for the usage of the word monkey in reference to a frame or tray supporting cannonballs.
• These spherical iron objects were referred to as round shot, not balls.
• They were generally kept below decks in shot lockers. When they were required for immediate use they were set, singly, into wooden or iron frames called shot garlands, either along the ship’s rail or around the hatches.
• Only an actual idiot would pile up round shot in the way illustrated, on the deck of a ship that could roll or heel dramatically on heavy seas or under strong winds.
• Only an actual idiot would leave iron shot exposed to the elements on deck for any longer than necessary. There were already enough problems with rust (which would be intermittently chipped off by the gunners), just because of humid conditions.

And, if all that isn’t enough, the physics doesn’t remotely hold up. Admiralty Brass (which contains a smidgen of tin to improve its resistance to seawater corrosion) contracts by a linear factor of about 0.00002 per Centigrade degree. Cast iron contracts by about half as much. So if the temperature were to fall by 100°C, from a sweltering 40°C to a life-threatening -60°C, the mismatch in contraction between iron and brass would amount to 0.001, or just 0.1%.

As a concrete example, let’s take a couple of 32-pound iron round shot, diameter about 15cm, and set them in a brass frame, like so:

(I’ve “designed” the frame to be open at the bottom, because only an actual idiot would want to leave their iron shot sitting in a puddle of rain or seawater.) While the pair span 30 centimetres, the important part is where they’re in tight contact with the frame, about 25 centimetres wide in my design. Under the ludicrous change in temperature I’ve just described, the frame will squeeze in, relative to the shot, by a quarter of a millimetre overall, lifting them an eighth of a millimetre off the deck. Which is way below the tolerance with which round shot were made—any stack rendered unstable by such a minute change in size would have been impossible to assemble in the first place, because of the variation in size of the round shot themselves.

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