A small, flat-bottomed boat; a fragile or unsteady vessel.
From 'cockle' (a shell, particularly the rounded shape) + 'boat'; the shell-like rounded shape of a small boat led to this name, documented since the 1500s.
A cockleboat was famously what carried souls to the afterlife in medieval poetry—the fragility of a small boat became a metaphor for the vulnerability of the human soul, showing how folk objects become spiritually loaded in literature.
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