Examples
“And the kelson is the piece of wood that connects the rudder to the frame of the boat.”
“Another place he says, the kelson of creation is love.”
“Philopator was properly built, with a kelson, and bilges, and a flat-bottomed hull.”
“Is not the main-truck higher than the kelson is low?”
“But in either case, the needle never again, of itself, recovers the original virtue thus marred or lost; and if the binnacle compasses be affected, the same fate reaches all the others that may be in the ship; even were the lowermost one inserted into the kelson.”
“But before his eyes were closed, Mr. Fox came to inform him that the carpenter had found the water above the kelson, and that the ship had certainly sprung a leak; he immediately rose and took the carpenter down to the hold along with him, when, to his infinite surprise, he heard the water roaring in dreadfully.”
“Her hold contained sixteen twenty-four carronades, while her magazine was stocked with abundance of ammunition, and her kelson lined, fore and aft, with round shot and grape.”
“This, Mr Shrapnel, our gunner, trained right across the slaver's bows, and at the word of command, ` Fire! 'let drive with a bang that shook the steamer right down to her kelson and seemed to stop her way for the moment, sending her back, as it were, with the recoil.”
“The mast did not go within four feet of the bottom -- the ship having no kelson -- but, to use the technical term, was "toggled" to two large pieces of wood which answered as partners.”
Under the Dragon Flag My Experiences in the Chino-Japanese War
“Why, they took him down to the cock-pit, as they called the midshipmen's berth on the lower deck, where we're going now," replied the Captain, leading the way down the companion and an interminable series of other ladders afterwards, as if they were descending to the kelson, the space getting all the narrower and darker as they went down.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘kelson’.
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Mobying Along
looks like there's not an open Moby Dick list. So now there is.
hypos, Manhattoes, circumambulate, mole, grapnels, bowsprit, asphaltic, mazy, tranced, cataract, ungraspable, judgmatically and 227 more...
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The Whiteness of the Whale
Words in Melville's "Moby Dick"
grapnels, spile, pea coffee, farrago, grego, bosky, bombazine, brevet, cenotaph, cupidity, kelson, obliquity and 164 more...
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whitmanian
from the poetry and prose of walt whitman
celebrate, assume, loafe, grass, summer, distillation, atmosphere, undisguised, naked, mad, breath, loveroot and 291 more...
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Moby-Dick
Interesting words and usages.
hypo, spile, hunks, grapnel, squitchy, skrimshander, monkey jacket, direful, grego, wrapall, dreadnaught, bosky and 158 more...
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...a list from a notebook...
I found several pages of words in an old notebook. By the looks of it, they were words I learnt some time ago (and subsequently wrote down) from books by Patrick O'Brian and China Mieville, two aut...
trabacaloes, jocosity, ordnance, transom, douceur, purser, nostrum, gaby, sea-lawyer, bowsprit, officious, hobnailed and 124 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for kelson.

yarb "Is not the main-truck higher than the kelson is low?"
- Melville, Moby-Dick, ch. 9 Jul 23, 2008