[f. FLOAT sb. + -AGE. Cf. Fr. flottage.]
1. The action or state of floating.
1626. in 4th Rep. Hist. MSS. Comm., 11/1. [The ship ‘being taken at floatage’ by … a Dutch captain … was seized for the Lord High Admiral of England.]
1868. Gladstone, Juv. Mundi (1869), xiii. 487. Ten days of floatage from the Bosphorus will give five hundred miles, or thereabouts, from that point.
2. concr. Anything that floats.
a. = FLOTSAM; also the right to appropriate flotsam.
1672. Cowell’s Interpr., Flotages … are such things as swim on the top of the Sea, or other great Rivers.
1858. in W. White, Month in Yorkshire, xv. 166. Free fisheries, plantage, floatage, lagan, jetsom, derelict, and other maritime franchises.
1867. Smyth, Sailor’s Word-bk., Floatage, synonymous with flotsam.
b. collect. Vessels that float on or pass up and down a river.
1854. Michigan Rep., II. 524. All streams susceptible of any valuable floatage.
1881. Echo, 8 Dec., 2/4. The Government recouped itself out of tolls taken on the floatage.
c. A floating mass (of weeds).
1891. J. Winsor, Columbus, ix. 204. They found around the ships much green floatage of weeds, which led them to think some island must be near.
3. Floating power, buoyancy.
1877. Blackmore, Erema, I. ix. 102. Behind it also came all the ruin of the mill that had any floatage, and bodies of bears, and great hogs, and cattle, some of them alive, but the most part dead.
1883. Daily News, 5 July, 3/1. The metal pontoons giving floatage.
attrib. 1881. W. C. Russell, Sailor’s Sweetheart, II. v. 240. I was satisfied that by throwing the deck-load overboard I should lighten the brig without imperilling the floatage power of the timber in the hold.
4. The part of a ship above the water-line.
1839. Marryat, Phantom Ship, III. xli. 248. At last the whole of her floatage was above water.
1847. Illustr. Lond. News, 24 July, 59/1. Nine inches more of floatage are required for the purpose of allowing the repairs to be made.
