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Our friends at World Wide Wrods have this to say:
This is one of those supposedly nautical expressions that seem to be better known through a couple of appearances in fiction than by any actual sailor's usage.
It's an exclamation that may allude to a ship striking some rock or other obstacle so hard that her timbers shiver, or shake, so implying a calamity has occurred. It is first recorded as being used by Captain Frederick Marryat in Jacob Faithful in 1835: I won�t thrash you Tom. Shiver my timbers if I do.
It has gained a firm place in the language because almost fifty years later Robert Louis Stevenson found it to be just the kind of old-salt saying that fitted the character of Long John Silver in Treasure Island: Cross me, and you'll go where many a good man's gone before you ... some to the yard-arm, shiver my timbers, and some by the board, and all to feed the fishes. Since then, it's mainly been the preserve of second-rate seafaring yarns.
An aside... the timbers of a wooden sailing ship are the "ribs" that support the rest of the structure. They are firmly attached to the keel. Any sudden motion, such as running aground, striking an ice floe or the ship being struck by a cannon ball can shake the entire ship by imposing loads on the "timbers"...
This is one of those supposedly nautical expressions that seem to be better known through a couple of appearances in fiction than by any actual sailor's usage.
It's an exclamation that may allude to a ship striking some rock or other obstacle so hard that her timbers shiver, or shake, so implying a calamity has occurred. It is first recorded as being used by Captain Frederick Marryat in Jacob Faithful in 1835: I won�t thrash you Tom. Shiver my timbers if I do.
It has gained a firm place in the language because almost fifty years later Robert Louis Stevenson found it to be just the kind of old-salt saying that fitted the character of Long John Silver in Treasure Island: Cross me, and you'll go where many a good man's gone before you ... some to the yard-arm, shiver my timbers, and some by the board, and all to feed the fishes. Since then, it's mainly been the preserve of second-rate seafaring yarns.
An aside... the timbers of a wooden sailing ship are the "ribs" that support the rest of the structure. They are firmly attached to the keel. Any sudden motion, such as running aground, striking an ice floe or the ship being struck by a cannon ball can shake the entire ship by imposing loads on the "timbers"...
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