A ship at sea must be as complete a community as possible. Many miles from land, and probably without another vessel in sight, her crew must be able to care for themselves and their vessel through a wide range of dangerous possibilities.
The crew is there to see to it that their ship gets from point A to point B. Some of them also attend to what are called “hotel services”: preparing meals, doing laundry, providing minimal medical care, and the like. Still others spend a part of their waking hours maintaining machinery and preserving the ship’s structure. The sum total is a team of multi-skilled individuals who can ensure the ship’s arrival somewhere, even despite the occasional near-catastrophic occurrence.
In the days of sail, ships would carry an assortment of spare spars and timbers—whatever the skipper thought appropriate—as a hedge against losing some portion of the existing arrangement of masts and yardarms. Should storm or other causes result in the severe damage to, or loss of, one or more of these vital elements in the ship’s propulsion system, a piece of similar characteristics could be selected from the assortment and adapted to function in lieu of the original until port was reached and a proper replacement found.
The act of creating this “injury rig” has come to us in the abbreviated form “jury-rig”: to use whatever is at hand to make it possible to achieve a goal despite adversity.