[f. TOP sb.1 + HAMPER sb.2 2.] Naut. Weight or encumbrance aloft: orig. said of the upper masts, sails, and rigging of a ship; later, also, weight or encumbrance on the deck, as in a steamer, ironclad, etc.
1791. Jrnl. Barth. James (Navy Rec. Soc.), 207. The ship being very uneasy from the loss of so much top hamper.
1800. Naval Chron., IV. 52. The objects of this invention are:… The great reduction in top-hamper, height, and size of masts.
1829. Marryat, F. Mildmay, xiv. To disengage this enormous top hamper, was to us an object more to be desired than expected.
1840. R. H. Dana, Bef. Mast, xxxi. 114. To see our noble ship dismantled of all her top-hamper of long tapering masts and yards.
1857. Maury, in Corbin Life (1888), 135. She was a side-wheel steamer, with not a little top hamper, and therefore an ugly thing to manage in such a situation.
1870. Daily News, 16 Sept. One cannot but suspect that the enormous top hamper, consisting of 4 25-ton guns with her immense turrets, had something to do with her heeling over.
transf. and fig. An encumbrance on the top or upper part of anything; something that makes it ‘top-heavy’; the ‘head-piece.’
1861. Smiles, Engineers, II. 269. Though the top-hamper of houses had long been removed, and the piers patched and strengthened at various times, the [London] bridge was becoming every year less and less adapted for accommodating the increasing traffic to and from the City.
1881. G. W. Cable, Mme. Delphine, viii. The returned rover was a trifle snarled in his top-hamper.
1894. Sala, Things I have seen, I. iv. 147. The luggage … was piled … on the roof of the machine; and the whole tophamper was covered with a thick tarpaulin.
1905. W. P. Ker, Ess. Mediæval Lit., i. 11. Many of Hakluyt’s men … carry more rhetorical top-hamper than Ohthere.
