Freeze the Balls off a Brass Monkey

Freeze the Balls of a Brass Monkey

The Story goes:  Sailing ships often had to have cannon for protection. The Cannons of the time required round iron cannonballs. The master wanted to store the cannonballs such that they could be of instant use when needed, yet not roll around the gun deck. The solution was to stack them up in a square-based pyramid next to the cannon when they where needed. The top level of the stack had one ball, the next level down had four, the next had nine, the next had sixteen, and so on. Four levels would provide a stack of 30 cannonballs. The only real problem was how to keep the bottom level from sliding out from under the weight of the higher levels. To do this, they devised a small brass plate (“brass monkey”) with one rounded indentation for each cannonball in the bottom layer. The thought goes that brass was used because the cannonballs wouldn’t rust to the “brass monkey”, but would rust to an iron one.

The story is that when temperature falls, brass contracts in size faster than iron. As it got cold on the gun decks, the indentations in the brass monkey would get smaller than the iron cannonballs they were holding. If the temperature got cold enough, the bottom layer would pop out of the indentations spilling the entire pyramid over the deck. Thus it was, quite literally, cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey.

There are several problems with this story, as follows:

Cannonballs were not stored loose on the gun deck. You can imagine that havic that could be caused if heavy round objects were left willynilly on the deck of an active ship. They were in fact stored in shot racks—longitudinal wooden planks with holes bored into them, known as shot garlands in the Royal Navy, into which round shot was inserted for ready use by the gun crew.

The rate of contraction of brass in cold temperatures is unlikely to be fast enough to cause the reputed effect. The phrase is actually first recorded as ‘freeze the tail off a brass monkey’, which removes any essential connection with balls.

It therefore seems most likely that the phrase is simply a humorous reference to the fact that metal figures will become very cold to the touch in cold weather. The Brass Monkey was used by Cannoneer’s in shore settings, but unilkely on the heaving deck of a ship in battle. Sailors being Sailors, may have used a slightly modified version of the original phrase. I guess we have to forgive them. Aarrrrhhhh!