BECKET. A piece of rope placed so as to confine a spar or another rope; anything used to keep loose ropes, tackles, or spars in a convenient place; hence, beckets are either large hooks or short pieces of rope with a knot at one end and an eye in the other; or formed like a circular wreath for handles; as with cutlass hilts, boarding pikes, tomahawks, &c.; or they are wooden brackets, and probably from a corruption and misapplication of this last term arose the word becket, which seems often to be confounded with bracket. Also, a grummet either of rope or iron, fixed to the bottom of a block, for making fast the standing end of the fall. BECKET, THE TACKS AND SHEETS IN THE. The order to hang up the weather-main and fore-sheet, and the lee-main and fore-tack, to the small knot and eye becket on the foremost-main and fore-shrouds, when the ship is close hauled, to prevent them from hanging in the water. A kind of large cleat seized on a vessel's fore or main rigging for the sheets and tacks to lie in when not required. Cant term for pockets--"Hands out of beckets, sir." BED. Flat thick pieces of wood, lodged under the quarters of casks containing any liquid, and stowed in a ship's hold, in order to keep them bilge-free; being steadied upon the beds by means of wedges called quoins. The impression made by a ship's bottom on the mud on having been left by an ebb-tide. The bite made in the ground by the fluke of an anchor. A kind of false deck, or platform, placed on those decks where the guns were too low for the ports.--_Bed of a gun-carriage_, or _stool-bed_. The piece of wood between the cheeks or brackets which, with the intervention of the quoin, supports the breech of the gun. It is itself supported, forward, on the bed-bolt, and aft, generally with the intervention of an elevating-screw, on the rear axle-tree. BED OR BARREL SCREWS. A powerful machine for lifting large bodies, and placed against the gripe of a ship to be launched for starting her. BED-BOLT. A horizontal bolt passing through both brackets of a gun-carriage near their centres, and on which the forward end of the stool-bed rests. BEDDING A CASK. Placing dunnage round it. BEDLAMERS. Young Labrador seals, which set up a dismal cry when they cannot escape their pursuers--and go madly after each other in the sea. BED OF A MORTAR. The solid frame on which a mortar is mounted for firing. For sea-service it is generally made of wood; for land-service, of iron, except in the smaller natures. In mortar vessels as latterly fitted, the bed traverses on a central pivot over a large table or platform of wood, having under it massive india-rubber buffers, to moderate the jar from the discharge.--_Bed of a river_, that part of the channel of a stream over which the water generally flows, as also that part of the basin of a sea or lake on which the water lies. BED-OF-GUNS. A nautical phrase implying ordnance too heavy for a ship's scantling, or a fort over-gunned.