Why is it called a cockpit?

For today's word, internecine, I found a quote from 1893, "When we speak of the struggle for existence, the popular view seems to construe this into the theory that the world is a mere cockpit, in which one race carries on an internecine struggle with the other," ten years before the Wright Brothers first successful flight.

Naturally cockpit here is meant in the sense of, "a pit or enclosure for cockfights." But that took me a moment.

Which begs the question, why do we call the pilots' cabin a cockpit?

Sometime around 1700 a compartment belowdecks on a British naval vessel started to be called a cockpit. "The often cramped and confined compartment was placed below the waterline and served as quarters for junior officers as well as for treating the wounded during battle." Hence, the name for the compartment: the association with blood in a tight confined space. While "the purpose of this compartment evolved over time, its name did not. Even today, a room on the lower deck of a yacht or motor boat where the crew quarters are located is often called a cockpit. In addition, the rudder control space from which a vessel is steered is sometimes called a cockpit since a watchman in the highest position is called a cock, and a cavity in any vessel is called a pit.

"This sense of the word, as an often confined space used for control purposes, was first applied to an aircraft around 1914 by pilots during World War I. In keeping with this same meaning, the tightly confined control space of a racing automobile also became known as a cockpit by about 1935."