kayık

The English word 'caique' (also spelled 'caïque') comes directly from French caïque, which was borrowed from Italian caicco, which in turn came from Ottoman Turkish kayık — a light, narrow rowing boat used extensively on the Bosphorus, the Golden Horn, and throughout the inland waterways of the Ottoman Empire. The Turkish root kayık likely comes from the verb kaymak, meaning 'to slip' or 'to glide,' which gives an immediate sense of the boat's character: it slips across the water with minimal resistance, propelled by standing oarsmen using long oars. Ottoman kayıks were the primary means of transportation across the Bosphorus before the first bridge was built in 1973. The imperial caique was an elaborately decorated version — the Sultan's caique had a gilded stern, silk awnings, and a crew of uniformed oarsmen — while working caiques were plain wooden craft plying trade and passenger routes.

European travelers to Istanbul from the sixteenth century onward were immediately struck by the caique culture of the Bosphorus. The strait between Europe and Asia was perpetually alive with these light boats — carrying passengers between the Asian and European shores, ferrying goods between ships anchored in the harbor and the quays of Galata and the Golden Horn, and conveying imperial personages on formal visits. The Ottoman court maintained a fleet of imperial caiques, and the position of chief oarsman (Kayıkçıbaşı) was a court office. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, writing from Istanbul in 1717, described the caiques in her Turkish Embassy Letters with admiration, noting their speed and the skill of the oarsmen. European sailors and naval officers absorbed the word into maritime vocabulary as they operated in the eastern Mediterranean, and by the eighteenth century 'caique' had settled into English and French as the standard term for this class of light eastern Mediterranean vessel.

In modern usage, 'caique' has broadened somewhat in English maritime terminology to describe not just the Turkish rowing boat but any of various small boats used in the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East, including lateen-rigged sailing vessels. The spelling 'caïque' (with diaeresis) is preferred in French and sometimes used in formal English nautical writing to signal the word's foreign origin and the separate pronunciation of the two vowels. In Turkey, the kayık culture has largely been supplanted by motorized ferries (vapur) and later by the fast catamaran ferries that now cross the Bosphorus in minutes, but traditional kayıks are still used by fishermen and are preserved as cultural artifacts. The word itself carries the layered history of three languages — Turkish, Italian, French — each of which passed it along the maritime trade routes before it reached English.