Tintinrulz:
What are some of Captain Haddock's swearwords in French and what do they mean?
In the original French, "Thundering typhoons!" was "Tonnerre de Brest" which literally translates as "Thunder of Brest". According to the French Wikipedia, it's a reference to the canon at the arsenal of Brest, a French coastal town. The canon was fired twice a day when the arsenal opened at 6am and when it shut at 7pm .
"Blistering barnacles" was originally "Mille sabords" which translates into a "thousand portholes"!
According to Wikipedia, a
bashi-bazouk was a soldier who served in the Turkish army under the Ottoman Empire.
They were renown for being ill-disciplined, engaged mainly in pillaging and looting. Such poor soldiers would be deemed suitable for insults. I expect that that was the image that Hergé was trying to convey.