gripsack

plural gripsacks

1. colloquialdatedA traveller's bag.

   “Well,” drawled Nares, “there's sixty pounds of niggerhead on the quay, isn't there? and twenty pounds of salts; and I never travel without some pain-killer in my gripsack.”

   1892, Robert Louis Stevenson, Lloyd Osbourne, chapter 11, in The Wrecker, London; Paris: Cassell & Company, […], →OCLC

   1 more example

   As for Bondell's gripsack, it was inconceivable that forty pounds could weigh so much. It pressed him down like a mountain, and he looked back with unbelief to the year before, when he had climbed that same pass with a hundred and fifty pounds on his back. If those loads had weighed a hundred and fifty pounds, then Bondell's grip weighed five hundred.

   1910, Jack London, “Trust”, in Lost Face