A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1367 entries
lagan
Lagan is goods deliberately thrown overboard from a ship and sunk with a buoy or a marker attached, so that whoever put them there can come back and recover them. It is a legal category rather than a description, and the marker is what defines it: The owner has signaled an intention to return, which changes who may claim it.
Etymology
The word came into English from a Norse root meaning to lie or to lay, so lagan is what has been laid down. It sits in a set of four terms that maritime law still uses and still distinguishes: flotsam is what floats free from a wreck, jetsam is what was thrown over to lighten a ship, lagan is what was sunk with a marker, and derelict is what was given up on entirely.
Notes
The distinctions were not academic. Under English law the four categories carried different rules about who owned the goods, what the finder was entitled to, and whether the Crown had a claim, and disputes over them fill the records of the admiralty courts. Modern salvage law has largely collapsed the categories, but the vocabulary survives because it is precise.