Basically, pirates would use the term À l’abordage! as a battle cry when boarding enemy ships like described in the phrase’s Wiktionary entry.
Is there a English translation for this, or is it an expression that has no direct English equivalent and should be used in its French form?
"Away boarders!!!!' is a classic cry.
Or, "Away all boarders" in US Navy use.
Wikipedia - Danile V Gallery - the last man to use it officially. They say:
Drawing from sources such as Robert Louis Stevensons pirate fiction, you may be more likely to here terms such as "Avast lubbers" or "Them what dies will be the lucky ones" :-).
The plausibility of "Away Boarders!" is somewhat increased (somewhat) by sites such as:
War artisans workshop - Away Boarders
Volume II of Allan Cunningham’s Paul Jones; A Romance, 1826 (still in the Age of Sail, and less than 50 years after the events ‘novelized’) has the following passages:
He saw John Paul dappled with blood from head to heel, and smeared with gunpowder; a sword in ae hand and a pistol in the other, flying from deck to deck, and crying, with a voice as loud as a carronade, ‘Board, board!’ (29)
When Corbie, waving his cutlass, cried out,—“Board! board!” fifty men were at his back in a moment; and so close were the ships to each other that a score and upwards leaped on board without waiting. (162)
“Remember, not a shot must be fired till I give the word; and when I cry, Board! you must board, from the cabin-boy to the captain.” (322-3)
Cunningham was a landsman his entire life, but practiced as a journalist, novelist and popular poet in London at the height of the Napoleonic wars. It is likely that his characters say, if not what sailors of the day actually said, what a novel-reading public avid for tales of nautical derring-do expected them to say.
Similar in spirit/tone, I'm sure, to what the officers said during The Great War to get the men up, over & out of the trenches in France. Well, then, their is that whole 'Geronimo' thing.
