in “The Daily Express” as recently as 23 August 1904. One Grimsby man born
with the caul has kept it to this day. When he joined the Royal Navy during
World War 11 his mother insisted that he take the caul with him. Various
other sailors offered him up to L20 – a large sum for those days – if he
would part with it, but he declined.
For over two hundred years now a bun has been added every Good Friday
to a collection preserved at the Widow’s Son Tavern, Bromley – by –Bow,
London. The name and the custom derive from an eighteenth – century widow
who hoped that her missing sailor son would eventually come home safely if
she continued to save a bun every Easter. Some seamen had their own version
of this, and would touch their sweetheart’s bun (pudenda) for luck before
sailing.
Other things had to be avoided because they brought ill-luck.
For example:
- meeting a pig, a priest or a woman on the way to one’s ship
- having a priest or a woman aboard
- saying the words: pig, priest, rabbit, fox, weasel, hare
- dropping a bucket overboard
- leaving a hatch cover upside down
- leaving a broom, a mop or a squeegee with the head upwards
- spitting in the sea
- whistling
- handing anything down a companionway
- sailing on a Friday
- finding a drowned body in the trawl (in the case of Yorkshire
fisherman)
Although many of these beliefs are obscure in origin, others can be
explained.
For example, the pig had the devil’s mark on his feet – cloven hoofs –
and was a bringer of storms; furthermore the drowning of the Gadarene swine
was a dangerous precedent. Then the priest was associated with funerals,
and so taking him aboard was perhaps too blatant a challenge to the malign
powers – if he were to be designated in conversation he was always “The
gentleman in black”. The pig was curly tail, or in Scotland “cauld iron
beastie” since if it were inadvertently mentioned the speaker and hearers
had to touch cold iron to avoid evil consequences; if no cold iron were
available, the studs to one’s boots would do. The other four animals were
taboo because they were thought to be the shapes assumed by witches who
were notorious for summoning storms.
Perhaps women were also shunned because they were considered potential
witches, although a good way to make a storm abate was for a woman to
expose her naked body to the elements. Bare - breasted figure – heads
were designed to achieve the same result. Nevertheless, during HMS “Durban”
’s South American tour in the 1930s the captain allowed his wife to take
passage on the ship. Before the tour was halfway through there were two
accidental deaths on board, besides a series of mishaps, and feeling
amongst the crew began to run high. At one port of call a group of men
returning to the ship on a liberty boat were freely discussing the run of
bad luck, attributing it to “having that bloody woman on board”. They did
not realize that the captain was separated from them by only a thin
bulkhead and had overheard the whole conversation. But instead of taking
disciplinary action, he put his wife ashore the next day; she travelled by
land to other ports, and the ship’s luck immediately changed for the
better.
Fridays were anathema – “Friday sail, Friday fail” was the saying –
since the temtation of Adam, the banishment from the Garden of Eden, and
the crucifixion of Christ had all taken place on a Friday. One old story,
probably apocryphal, tells of a royal navy ship called HMS “Friday” which
was launched, first sailed and then lost on a Friday; moreover her captain
was also called Friday. Oddly enough, a ship of this name does appear in
the admiralty records in 1919, but the story was in circulation some fifty
years earlier. This fear of Friday dies hard. A certain Paul Sibellas,
seaman, was aboard the “Port Invercargill” in the 1960s when on one
occasion she was ready to sail for home from New Zealand at 10pm on Friday
the thirteenth. The skipper, however, delayed his departure until midnight
had passed and Saturday the fourteenth had arrived.
Whistling is preferably avoided because it can conjure up a wind,
which might be acceptable aboard a becalmed sailing ship, but not
otherwise. Another way of getting a wind was to stick a knife in the mast
with its handle pointing in the direction from which a blow was required –
this was done on the “Dreadnaught” in 1869, in jury rig after being
dismasted off Cape Horn.
In 1588 Francis Drake is said to have met the devil and various
wizards to whistle up tempests to disrupt the Spanish Armada. The spot near
Plymouth were they gathered is now called Devil’s Point. He is also said to
have whittled a stick, of which the pieces became fireships as they fell
into the sea; and his house at Buckland Abbey was apparently built with
unaccountable speed, thanks to the devil’s help. Drake’s drum is preserved
in the house and is believed to beat of its own accord when the country
faces danger.
DENIZENS OF THE DEEP
With the mirror and comb, her ling hair, bare breasts and fish tail,
the mermaid is instantly recognisable, but nowadays only as an amusing
convention. However, she once inspired real fear as well as fascination and
sailors firmly believed she gave warning of tempest of calamity.
As recently as seventy years ago, Sandy Gunn, a Cape Wrath shepherd,
claimed he saw a mermaid on a spur of rock at Sandwood Bay. Other coastal
dwellers also recall such encounters, even naming various landmarks. In
Corwall there are several tales invilving mermaids: at Patstow the harbour
entrance is all but blocked by the Doom Bar, a sandbank put there by
mermaid, we are told, in relation for being fired at by a man of the town.
And the southern Cornish coast between the villages of Down Derry and Looe,
the former town of Seaton was overwhelmed by sand because it was cursed by
a mermaid injured by a sailor from the port.
Mermaid’s Rock near Lamorna Cove was the haunt of a mermaid who would
sing before a storm and then swim out to sea – her beauty was such that
young men would follow, never to reappear. At Zennor a mermaid was so
entranced by the singing of Matthew Trewella, the squire’s son, that she
persuaded him to follow her; he, too failed to to return, but his voice
could be heard from time to time, coming from beneath the waves. The little
church in which he sang on land has a fifteenth – century bench – end
carved with a mermaid and her looking – glass and comb.
On the other hand, mermaids could sometimes be helpful. Mermaid’s Rock
at Saundersfoot in Wales is so called because a mermaid was once stranded
there by the ebbing of the tide. She was returned to the sea by a passing
mussel – gatherer, and later came back to present him with a bag of gold
and silver as a reward. In the Mull of Kintyre a Mackenzie lad helped
another stranded mermaid who in return granted him his wish, that he cpuld
build unsinkable boats from which no man would ever be lost.
Sexual unions between humans and both sea people and seals are the
subject of many stories, and various families claim strange sea – borne
ancestry: for example the Mc Veagh clan of Sutherland traces its descent
from the alliance between a fisherman and a mermaid; on the Western island
of North Uist the McCodums have an ancestor who married a seal maiden; and
the familiar Welsh name of Morgan is sometimes held to mean “born of the
sea”, again pointing to the family tree which includes a mermaid or a
merman. Human wives dwelling at sea with mermen were allowed occasional
visits to the land, but they had to take care not to overstay – and if they
chanced to hear the benediction said in church they were never able to
rejoin their husbands.
Matthew Arnold’s poem “The Forsaken Merman” relates how one human wife
decides to desert her sea husband and children. There is also a Shetland
tale, this time concerning a sea wife married to a land husband:
On the island of Unst a man walking by the shore sees mermaids
and mermen dancing naked in the moonlight, the seal skins which they
have discarded lying on the sand. When they see the man, the dancers
snatch up the skins, become sea creatures again, and all plunge into
the waves – except one, for the man has taken hold of the skin. Its
owner is a mermaid of outstanding beauty. And she has to stay on the
shore. The man asks her to become his wife, and she accepts. He keeps
the skin and carefully hides it.
The marriage is successful, and the couple has several
children. Yet the woman is often drawn in the night to the seashore,
where she is heard conversing with a large seal in an unknown tongue.
Years pass. During the course of a game one of the children finds a
seal skin hidden in the cornstack. He mentions it to his mother, and
she takes it and returns to the sea. Her husband hears the news and
runs after her, arriving by the shore to be told by his wife: “
Farewell, and may all good attend you. I loved you very well when I
lived on earth, but I always loved my first husband more.”
As we know from David Thomson’s fine book “The People of the Sea”
(1984), such stories are still widely told in parts of Ireland and in
Scotland and may explain why sailors were reluctant to kill seals. There
