wind or in dead calms blazes at the end of yards, or hovers in bulbous
shinings upon the mastheads. One readily sympathizes with the old
superstitions here. To the ancient mariner it could be nothing else than
some spirit hand issuing out of the dusk that kindled those magic lamps.
What should they portend to the startled hearts of the Columbian and
Magellanic sailors lost in the deepest solitudes of oceans whose wastes
their keels were the first to furrow? Happily they were found
propitious, and superstition devised a saintly origin for them. “On
Saturday,” we read in the second voyage of Columbus, “at night, the body
of St. Elmo was seen, with seven lighted candles in the round top, and
there followed mighty rain and frightful thunder. I mean the lights were
seen which the seamen affirm to be the body of St. Elmo, and they sang
litanies and prayers to him, looking upon it as most certain that in
these storms, when he appears, there can be no danger.”[5] The sign that
admits of an auspicious interpretation is always useful. The most
literal-minded of men even in these days of hard facts is pleased when
something befalls him which people say is a sign of good luck. There is
a famous instance of a ship having been saved by allowing a Lascar to
discharge a superstitious obligation by securing a bag of rice and a few
rupees in the rigging as a votive offering to some hobgoblin. His black
companions, worn out with pumping, had tumbled down into the scuppers,
saying that the ship was doomed, and heaven must have its way; but when
the Lascar descended the rigging and pointed to the bag swinging up
there, they cried out for joy, fell to the pumps till they sucked, and
enabled the master to carry his ship home. That stout old buccaneer,
Dampier, tells of a tempest in the midst of which a corposant flamed out
from the masthead. “The sight rejoiced our men exceedingly,” says he;
“for the height of the storm is commonly over when the Corpos Sant is
seen aloft, but when they are seen lying on the deck, it is generally
accounted a bad sign.” Anything that heartens men in extremity is good;
and in olden times there were superstitions aboard ship which did more
for the salvation and deliverance of mariners than all the rum punch
that was ever swallowed out of capacious jacks.
Footnote 5:
Erasmus in his Dialogues, tells of a certain Englishman who, in a
storm, promised mountains of gold to our Lady of Walsingham if he
touched land again! Another fellow promised St. Christopher a wax
candle _as big as himself_. When he had bawled out this offer, a man
standing near said, “Have a care what you promise, though you make an
auction of all your goods you’ll not be able to pay.” “Hold your
tongue,” whispered the other, “you fool! do you think I speak from my
heart? If once I touch land I’ll not give him a tallow candle!”
Cardinal de Retz in describing a storm says, “A Sicilian Observantine
monk was preaching at the foot of the great mast, that St. Francis had
appeared to him and had assured him that we should not perish.”
One might go even further, and commit an apparent indiscretion by
declaring that—so far as the sea goes—there may even be a virtue in
lies. A vast amount of early marine enthusiasm is due to fibbing. The
amazing yarns the old voyagers spun on their return sent others off in
hot haste; and they took care not to come back without a plentiful stock
of more exciting tales yet. Distinct impulse was given to Arctic
exploration by an old Dutchman’s grave, schnapps-smelling twister. The
story is told by Mr. Joseph Moxon,[6] who, in the seventeenth century,
was member of the Royal Society. “Being about twenty-two years ago in
Amsterdam,” says he, “I went into a public house to drink a cup of beer
for my thirst, and sitting by the public fire among several people,
there happened a seaman to come in, who, seeing a friend of his there
who he knew went in the Greenland voyage, wondered to see him, for it
was not yet time for the Greenland fleet to come home; and asked him
what accident brought him home so soon.” This question the other
answered by saying “the ship went not out to fish as usual, but only to
take in the lading of the whole fleet,” and that “before the fleet had
caught fish enough to lade us, we, by order of the Greenland Company,
sailed unto the North Pole and came back again.” This greatly amazed Mr.
Joseph Moxon, of the Royal Society, and he earnestly questioned the man,
who declared that he had sailed two degrees beyond the pole, and could
produce the whole body of sailors belonging to the ship to prove it. “I
believe this story,” says the Royal Society man, and he delivers it to
the world as a fact, disproving all that has been recorded by the
Frobishers, the Willoughbys, the Davises, and the rest of those who had
steered north. One Dutchman may give rise to many superstitions—does not
the world owe the legend of the Phantom Ship to the Batavian genius?—and
who shall tell the extent of the impulse contained in the fable of an
old Dutch whaleman yarning over a cup of beer in an Amsterdam ale-house?
Footnote 6:
In Harris’s Collection.
It is not clear, however, that any possible good can result from such
marine credulity as that to which that notable prodigy, for instance,
called the sea-serpent owes what life it has. It is interesting indeed
to find one of the most amazing of the ancient myths vital in
forecastles some thousands of years younger than the legend; but it is
not evident that the Kraken, the Leviathan, the Titanic worm that dieth
not, the monstrous snake of the deep, ever led the way into a wholesome
and worthy issue, such as the discovery of lands or of fishermen’s
hunting-fields.[7] How often the sea-serpent has been seen it would be
hard to say. If there be weight in human testimony there are surely
witnesses enough to its existence. Dr. Samuel Johnson could not have
pointed to a larger cloud of testifiers in favour of those shadowy
beings which he believed in. “All seamen,” says Olaus Magnus in his
“History of the Goths,” “say there is a sea-serpent two hundred feet
long and twenty feet thick, who comes out at night to devour cattle. It
has long black hair hanging down from its head, and flaming eyes, with
sharp scales on its body.” Other early writers describe its body as
resembling a string of hogsheads, and affirm it to be at least six
hundred feet long. Sir Walter Scott, who found the tradition he speaks
of among the Shetland and Orkney fishermen, speaks of the sea-snake as a
monster that rises out of the depth of the ocean, stretches to the skies
his enormous neck covered with a mane like that of a war-horse, and
“with his broad glittering eyes raised mast high, looks out as it seems
for plunder or for victims.”
Footnote 7:
“The steward relates,” I find in a book of travels, “that in a vessel
he once sailed in, a hand aloft asserted that he saw land ahead. The
captain knew this to be a mistake; and on nearing it the land turned
out to be the carcase of a huge whale left by the fishery, with a
number of albatrosses preying on it.”
A writer in the _British Merchant Service Journal_ in 1879 seems to have
satisfactorily solved this perplexing ocean enigma. He saw the
sea-serpent three times. First in 1851, during a voyage to Tasmania. The
terrifying wonder lay right in the ship’s path, but the captain would
not shift his helm, with the result that he sailed close past a long log
of wood covered with barnacles of great length—“so long that, being
attached to the logs, they necessarily took all the undulations of the
waves, which gave it the appearance of a sinuous motion.” Again, in
1853, bound for the Cape of Good Hope; the monster lay on the weather
bow with his capacious jaws open; but for the second time the creature
proved no more than the trunk of an old tree, a branch of which nicely
expressed the beast’s jaw. Once again in 1869, this time in seven
degrees north of the equator; on this occasion the serpent exhibited
long, sleek, variegated sides as the sun shone upon him. “He turned out
the veriest old buck of a sea-serpent I have met with in my long career
at sea. There he lay alongside from eleven a.m. until nine p.m., unable
to leave such good company (we had many passengers from New Zealand);
but he left with us, in token of his great regard, 186 fine large rock
cod, averaging at least five pounds each. We hoped to meet him again,
although he was only an old log of timber.”
Many curious sea superstitions can be traced to noises which, when heard
by the old navigators, were found unusual and terrifying. There is a
curious passage bearing on this in the voyage of J. S. Stavorinus to the
East Indies in 1768. He heard a sound just like the groaning of a man
out of the sea, near the ship’s side. It was repeated a dozen times
over, but seemed to recede proportionally as the ship advanced until it
died away at the stern. An hour afterwards the gunner came to the author
and said that on one of his Indian voyages he had met with the same
occurrence, and that a dreadful storm had succeeded, which forced them
to hand all their sails and drive at the mercy of the wind for
twenty-four hours. The author adds that when the gunner told him this
there was no sign of bad weather, yet before four o’clock in the
afternoon they were scudding under bare poles before a violent tempest.
Upon so singular an experience the sufferers might claim a right to base
a superstition; and from that time any sound resembling that of a man
bawling in the water over a ship’s side must take a barometrical
character, and prove an exhortation to the mariner to see all snug.
The nervous system need be suffering from no debilitation of
superstition to find in the approaching and bursting of the cyclone much
that is too terrific to leave room for the display of the qualities of
sublimity, though than these revolving tempests few passionate outbreaks
of nature yield more. First there is the alarming indication of the
barometer, with the slow and sullen glooming over of the heavens, the
wan and beamless aspect of the sun or moon, the light of all the
stars—even to the most piercing of the planets—being shrouded, along
with the sulky heaving of the sea, whose oppressed breathing, as it
comes in clogged and thickish draughts of air from the slope of each
sullen fold will often be charged with a weedy, fish-like, and decaying
odour. Then there is the noise of the approaching storm, that has been
described as a rising and falling sound, of a moaning and complaining
nature, as though the nearer deep were something sentient and crying to
be hidden from the coming furious tormentor. Some have it that this
melancholy and malignant echo may be heard as far off as two hundred
miles, that it is caused by the actual raging of the hurricane at that
distance, and that it is not directly borne to the ear by the wind, but
obliquely reverberated by the clouds. A single sentence written by a
sailor taking his notes from nature will have in it a suggestion of the
ominousness of storm-imports beyond the reach of the finest imaginative
description, as, for instance, when the captain of the ship _Ida_,
quoted by Reid, in his interesting work, says: “Fresh gales and squally
weather; at four, handed the foretopsail and foresail; at intervals the
wind came in gusts, then suddenly dying away, and continued so for four
hours.” Here, in a sentence, is fully described the advent of the
cyclone, leaving to the fancy to make out for itself all that is
comprised of expectation, watchfulness, and even fear in the dull and
sudden dying away of the gusts and the silence of the four hours
following. Then enter, very often, other formidable conditions, features
of livid magnificence, and oppressive because of the confusion they
import into aspects of nature familiar to the eye. Of such are the red
skies, not the strong westerly glowings following the sinking of the
sun, but spaces of blood red witnessed in the midnight zenith, sheets of
purple splendour in the east and the like. One testimony speaks of a
crimson sky beheld late at night both east and west, for three days
before the gale came down; another of the sky catching a red light at
sunset, and continuing to glow all over, as though incandescent till
past midnight, the smooth breast of the sea reflecting the frightful and
wondrous irradiation, so that the ship seemed to rest upon a floor of
fire with a red-hot dome above. When finally the storm bursts, it comes
in the manner faithfully described in “Purchas,” in the passage
referring to the tempest that wrecked one hundred Spanish ships at
Tercera: “This storme continued not onely a day or two with one winde,
but seven or eight days continually, the winde turninge round about in
all places of the compasse at the least twice or thrice during that
time, and all alike with a continuall storme and tempest most terrible
to beholde, even to us that were on shore much more then to such as were
at sea.” In weather-aspects of the cyclonic kind we may safely seek for
the origin of many a wild superstition of the ship and the sailor.
Amongst the most enduring of salt superstitions are those connected with
the wind. In a dead calm to whistle for a breeze is but one illustration
of an ever-abiding faith. “Scratch the foremast with a nail: you will
get a good breeze,” is among forecastle saws and instances. You may
raise the wind, too, by sticking a knife into the mizzen-mast, taking
care that the haft points to the quarter whence you desire the breeze to
blow. The cat, as we all know, is a sort of wind-broker. It is believed
that pussy carries a gale in her tail. To throw a cat overboard is a
storm-prescription never known to fail. In some parts of the north of
England it is said it was a custom for sailors’ wives to keep a black
cat in the house as a guarantee of their husband’s safety whilst away.
At the same time it is a cherished article of Jack’s creed that if you
have a cat on board and a heavy storm arises you may appease the wrath
of the Fiend of the Weather by throwing the cat into the sea.
Wonderful stories are related of people who sold winds. Baxter, in his
“World of Spirits,” gravely tells of an old parson, who, before being
hanged, confessed that he had two imps, one of which “was always putting
him on doing mischief, and (being near the sea) as he saw a ship under
sail it moved him to send him to sink the ship, and he consented and saw
the ship sink before him.” This imp would have done better had he
advised the parson to sell the winds. The mariner was a credulous
creature then, and a prosperous gale to the Spice Islands was surely
worth more ducats than a cure of souls was likely to yield. Of all the
wind-brokers mentioned in history the Russian Finn has ever been
accounted the most famous. In a narrative of a voyage to the north,
included in Harris’s voluminous collection, it is excellently told how
the master of the ship in which the author of the narrative sailed,
finding himself beset with calms and baffling airs on the coast of
Finland, agreed to buy a prosperous wind from a wizard. The price was
ten Kronen, about one pound sixteen shillings, and a pound of tobacco.
The wizard presented the skipper with a woollen rag containing three
knots, the rag to be attached to the foremast. Each knot held a gale of
wind, the third rising to a tempest “so furious that we thought the
heavens would fall down upon us; and that God would justly punish us
with destruction for dealing with infernal wizards, and not trusting to
his providence.” So recently as 1857 a sailor was tried for the murder
of a mulatto, the man’s defence being that he thought the coloured
fellow a Finn, and so put him out of the way of doing harm. In “Two
Years Before the Mast” Dana has stated the case of the Finn
delightfully, by representing a sea-cook and an old ignorant sailor
talking of a wizard they knew; how he raised an unfavourable wind until
the captain starved him into shifting the breeze by locking him up in
the forepeak; how he got drunk every night on a bottle of rum, which,
nevertheless, remained full throughout the voyage; and so forth. The
capriciousness of the wind renders it a very suitable agency for
diabolic influence. The causes which stagnate or fix it in an
unfavourable quarter are wonderfully numerous. Holcroft, the comedian,
tells us in his memoirs that during a trip to Sunderland the sailors,
knowing him to be an actor, concluded that he must therefore be a Jonah.
Happening on an Easter Sunday to be walking the deck with a book in his
hand, he was approached by some seamen, who advised him to read a
prayer-book, instead of a book of plays. “By the Holy Father!” cried one
of them; “I know you are the Jonas; and by Jasus the ship will never see
land till you are tossed overboard—you and your plays wid ye.” The
origin of Jack’s notorious objection to sailing with a parson on board
probably lies in the old superstition that the devil, who is the
greatest of storm raisers, hates priests, and whenever he can catch one
at sea will send a storm to destroy him.
It is not very long ago (1886) that the people on board a ship which was
then off the Horn, running before a small westerly gale, noticed an
immense albatross following in the vessel’s wake. This bird clung so
obstinately to the skirts of the running ship that its identity became,
in a day or two, a distinguishable thing amongst the other sea-fowl of a
like kind that pursued the vessel. One day, as this huge bird was
hovering at a short elevation above the taffrail, it was noticed that an
object about the size of a dollar was suspended from its neck. Glasses
were brought to bear, but nothing could be made of the great bird’s
embellishment. Thereupon everybody grew eager to catch the creature, and
a hook was forthwith baited with a piece of pork and towed astern. Some
of the other albatrosses were caught, but the desired one was not to be
entrapped. It would sail with a sweep to over the bait that hissed
through the water, poise itself on a magnificent length of tremulous
pinion, whilst its eyes, glowing like Cairngorm stones, inspected the
greasy dainty, and then, with a scream that might have passed very well
for an expression of scorn, slide away athwart the path of the wind, and
fall to its old gyrations, narrowing down at last into steady pursuit.
But on the third day the noble fowl took the hook, and was triumphantly
dragged on board, straining and flapping like a huge Chinese kite in a
squall. It was then found that the object hanging at its neck was a
brass pocket-compass case, secured to the bird by three stout strands of
copper wire. Two of these wires had been severed by wear, and the box
itself was thickly coated with verdigris. On opening it a piece of paper
was discovered on which was written in faded ink, “Caught May 3, 1848,
in lat. 38 deg. S. 40 deg. 14 min. W., by Ambrose Cocharn, of American
ship Columbus.” A fresh label, with the old and new dates of capture,
was fastened round the bird’s neck, and the great seagull was then
released. Before the men let the bird fly they measured its wings, and
found them to be 12 ft. 2 in. between the tips. It is perfectly
reasonable to assume, with the captors, that this albatross, when taken
and labelled by the people of the American ship Columbus, was four or
five years old, and the story, therefore conclusively proves that the
natural life of these birds is at least fifty years, though how much
longer they may go on living after that period is attained has yet to be
determined. For thirty-eight years this bird had been flying about with
a brass pocket-compass case dangling at its throat! A writer once
calculated the distance traversed by a little pilot-fish that
accompanied the vessel he was in. It joined the ship off the Cape de
Verd Islands, and it followed her right away round Cape Horn to as far
as Callao; the whole distance accomplished having been about 14,000
miles, the time 122 days, showing a daily average of 115 miles.[8] But
what should be thought of the leagues covered by that winged postman of
the old Yankee ship Columbus in a flight extending over a period of
thirty-eight years?
Footnote 8:
Davis, in the “Nimrod of the Seas,” a finely-told whaling story.
It is somewhat strange that Cornelius Vanderdecken, the well-known if
not popular commander of the _Flying Dutchman_, should never have used
the seabird as a messenger to his wife and children in old Amsterdam. It
is part and parcel of his unhappy destiny that he shall not be able to
persuade sailors to carry a letter home for him, Jack very well knowing
that, airy as may be one of these phantom missives, it has weight enough
of fatality in it to sink his ship. It was an old custom among seamen on
catching an albatross to secure a bundle of letters for wives and
sweethearts under his wing and despatch him with a loud hurrah. Not
impossibly his usefulness in this direction may have suggested that his
presence signified good luck.
“At length did cross an albatross.
Through the fog it came,
As if it had been a Christian soul
We hailed it in God’s name.”
So sings the Ancient Mariner, with this result:
“And a good south wind sprung up behind.
The albatross did follow.”
The famous old buccaneering skipper Shelvocke writes, in his voyages,
“We had not the sight of one fish of any kind since we were come to the
south-west of the Straits of Le Maire, nor one sea-bird, except a
disconsolate black albatross who accompanied us several days, hovering
about us as if he had lost himself, until Sam Huntley, my second
officer, observed in one of his melancholy fits that the bird was always
hovering near us, and imagined from its colour that it might be an
ill-omen, and, being encouraged in his impression by the continued
season of contrary weather which had opposed us ever since we had got
into these seas, he, after some fruitless attempts, shot the albatross.”
Who will question that in those olden times of marine superstitions the
mariners of Shelvocke attributed the failure of their expedition to the
shooting of that disconsolate fowl? But these birds do not appear to
have inspired maritime fancy to any marked degree. The belief of old
sailors that if an albatross be slaughtered it at once becomes necessary
to keep one’s “weather eye lifting” for squalls, but that no harm
follows if the bird be caught with a piece of fat pork, and is allowed
to die a “natural” death on deck, about sums up the traditionary
apprehensions in respect of the bird. Yet this meagreness of forecastle
imagination is strange, for assuredly the albatross is the pinioned
monarch of the deep, the majestic and beautiful eagle of the liquid,
foam-capped crags and steeps of the ocean, and will for days so haunt
the wakes of ships as to impart just that element of the familiar into
the wild and desolate freedom of the cold grey skies and snow-swept
billows of dominion which especially fertilizes the fancy of the
mariner, who needs something of the prosaic to hold on by just in the
same way that he swings by a rope high aloft in the middle air.
Nevertheless it is true that there are scores of comparatively
insignificant sea and land birds whose feathers are supposed to cover
larger powers for good or evil than even the spacious-winged albatross.
The common house-sparrow: here surely is a strange little fowl of the
air to parallel, nay to surpass the wizard powers of the shrieking
monarch of the Horn and the Southern Ocean; and yet it is gravely
asserted that should sparrows be blown away to sea and alight upon a
ship they are not to be taken or even chased, for in proportion as the
birds are molested must sail be shortened to provide against the storm
that will certainly come. In the interests of humanity nothing could be
better than such superstitions. The harmless and beautiful gull, whose
lovely sweepings and curvings through the air, whose exquisite
self-balancing capacity in the teeth of a living gale, whose bright
eyes, salt, shrewd voice, and webbed feet folded in bosom of ermine, it
is impossible to sufficiently admire, though there be unhappily no lack
of sea-side Nathaniel Winkles who regard this pretty creature as a mark
set up by Nature for cockneys to shoot at, has a commercial virtue that
sets it high in the long shoreman’s catalogue of things to be approved;
for when this bird appears in great numbers then is its presence
accepted as an infallible sign of the neighbourhood of herring shoals.
Herman Melville has somewhere said that in his time it was reckoned a
bad omen for ravens to perch on the mast of a ship, at the Cape of Good
Hope. We know that the raven himself was hoarse that croaked the fatal
entrance of Duncan, and there is no reason, no forecastle reason at
least, why the Storm-Fiend should not have ravens harnessed to his
chariot after the manner of the doves of Venus, though why these plumed
steeds are peculiarly obnoxious to mariners at or off the Cape of Good
Hope is not certainly known.