History of flexible dolphins
When Arion of Lesbos, the world's most famous lyre player, was doomed by the sailors and forced to cast himself into the sea, a dolphin, charmed by the music of his funeral dirge, carried him on its back and bore him to safety. It was this act of philanthropy and friendliness to man that earned the dolphin, Delphinus, a place among the stars [1.1].
The word dolphin is related to the Greek word Delphina, which means 'woman from Delphi'. The city of Delphi is connected with Delph, which means hollow and is cognate with the word delve, from Old English delfan, meaning 'to search deeply or to dig the ground, as with a spade', and comes from the Indo-European root dhelbh, which means 'to dig or excavate' [1.2]. The city of Delft in Holland is related to this root, from where we get Delft glazed earthenware.
Embedded breasting and mooring piles are also installed deeply into the soil. But this does not explain why mooring and berthing structures were called dolphins – but there are a couple of plausible explanations. It should be noted that the old English word for dolphin was delfin and refers in Latin to the shape of a womb, which shows similarities with the shape of a dolphin. From a distance, the shape of a piled offshore structure combined with movements of the water around it typically looks like a diving dolphin. It is most likely that in Germany, the Latin word delfin evolved into the word dalben. Another less plausible explanation is that piled mooring structures were equipped with artillery (e.g. canons) and the shadow of these canons on the water looked like dolphins. In French and Dutch, piled berthing structures are often called duc-d'albe and dukdalf, respectively. Both words seem to refer to the Duke of Alba (1507–82), who was not very popular among the French and Dutch during this period. There are several plausible reasons why people started using this corruption as a synonym for dolphins [1.3]:
- The duke was as rigid and unbending as a multiple-pile berthing structure.
- The duke attached his opponents or insurgents, the Watergeuzen ('Sea beggars'), to these types of berthing structures at low tide and they were drowned when the tide came in [2.3].
- The duke introduced these types of structures in France and the Netherlands.
- The mooring lines attached to the berthing structure represent a death by hanging – a rope around the neck of the duke.
- Due to the movement of the water, the piles look like diving dolphins – representing the Duke of Alba avoiding crucial battles.
- To humiliate the duke, because from a distance the dolphin looked like the slender head of the duke with a coat. The people would like to use the driving on the head of the duke.
Pile berthing structures were frequently installed adjacent to docks, locks and waterways. The terms d'alba and dalf in the words duc-d'albe or dukdalf seem to refer to the word dolphin and the term duc or duk was most likely related to the words 'dock' or 'docking of vessels'. Therefore the name of the duke was used (or rather, misused) to denominate breasting dolphins for docking vessels. Later in Holland, the berthing piles were also called Koningspalen, which means piles for a king.