Note 48 — Chapter XII · PIDGIN AND CONGENERS
Reading edition
The etymology of this name is rather curious: Portuguese bicho de mar, from bicho ‘worm,’ the name of the sea slug or trepang, which is eaten as a luxury by the Chinese, was in French modified into bêche de mer, ‘sea-spade’; this by a second popular etymology was made into English beach-la-mar as if a compound of beach.
My sources are H. Schuchardt, KS v. (Wiener Academie, 1883); id. in ESt xiii. 158 ff., 1889; W. Churchill, Beach-la-Mar, the Jargon or Trade Speech of the Western Pacific (Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1911); Jack London, The Cruise of the Snark (Mills & Boon, London, 1911?), G. Landtman in Neuphilologische Mitteilungen (Helsingfors, 1918, p. 62 ff. Landtman calls it “the Pidgin-English of British New Guinea,” where he learnt it, though it really differs from Pidgin-English proper; see below); “The Jargon English of Torres Straits” in Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits, vol. iii. p. 251 ff., Cambridge, 1907.