Thus we gather from Tudor’s Orkney and Shetland, that amongst the seamen of those places it was deemed unlucky to rescue persons from drowning since it was held as a matter of religious faith that the sea was entitled to certain victims, and that, if deprived, it would avenge itself on those who interfere. The still more cautious and considerate people in the Solomon Islands go a step further. If a man accidentally falls into the river and a shark attacks him, he is not allowed to escape. If he does succeed in eluding the shark, his fellow-tribesmen will throw him back to his doom, believing him to be marked out for sacrifice to the god of the river.[41]
In his “Folk Medicine” Black accounts for this superstition on the ground that it is believed that the spirits of people who have died a violent death may return to earth if they can find a substitute and that hence the soul of the last dead man would feel insulted or injured by anyone preventing another from taking his place. Some people on the other hand believe that the reluctance to save drowning persons is due to the belief that the person rescued from being drowned would inflict mischief on the man who saves his life. It would seem from Walter Scott’s novel[42] that this belief prevailed in Scotland. In it asks the pedlar Bryce: “Are you mad? You that have lived so long in Zetland to risk the saving of a drowning man? Wot ye not if we bring him to life again, he will be sure to do you capital injury?”
This superstition appears to have been confined to the West only. In the East, luckily, there is no such antipathy to extend a helping hand to the drowning. It may be mentioned, however, that in his Popular Religion and Folklore of Northern India Crooke seems to suggest that this feeling is also common in India, but he cites no examples although he gives several instances and quotes several authorities concerning the Western ideas on the subject. We, however, find no such instance recorded anywhere. In the year 1893 Mr. Sarat Chandra Mitra read before the Anthropological Society of Bombay a paper on some superstitions regarding drowning. He quoted several Western examples concerning the aversion to save drowning people but gave no parallel for any of these from the folklore of Bengal and Upper India with which he is intimately familiar. If such antipathy did exist, that indefatigable student of Indian folklore would have certainly heard of it.
Crooke appears to have confounded two separate, though analogous, ideas, and to have assumed that the prevalence of one connotes the existence of the other. There is, of course, abundant evidence in Indian folklore to show that it was believed throughout this country that the spirits of those persons who got drowned wandered for a hundred years if their corpses were not properly and solemnly buried with all the requisite ceremonies. The spirits of the drowned are, therefore, believed to haunt those rivers and wells and tanks in which they have found their graves, just as the fisher-folk of England believed that the spirits of the sailors who were drowned by a shipwreck frequented those parts of the shores near which the shipwreck took place. In his “Romances in the West of England” Hunt refers to these superstitions. The mere prevalence, however, of one of the superstitious beliefs of the same class in two countries does not warrant the sweeping assertion that the other beliefs also prevail in both the countries.
CHAPTER XII.
RIVER WRAITHS.
The worst of all ill-omened streams in India is the dread Vaitaranî, the river of death, which is localized in Orissa and which pours its stream of ordure and blood on the confines of the realm of Yama.[43] Ill fares the man who in that dread hour lacks the aid of a priest and the holy cow to help him to the other shore. But the Indian water furies are easily propitiated. Goats, or fish, or fowl, or even flowers and cocoanuts are enough to appease them. Thus the Tapti and the Sutlej receive goats, whereas the Jata Rohini, the Deo infesting the Karsa, a river in Mirzapur, is pleased with a fish caught by the Buiga and presented to him. Many of the continental water deities, however, must needs have human sacrifices, just as the African river spirit Prah, who must have every year in October two human sacrifices, one male and one female. Thus in England the River Tees, the Skerne, and the Ribble have each a sprite, who, in popular belief, demands human victims. The Ribble’s sprite is known by the name of Peg O’Nell, and a spring in the grounds of Waddow bears her name and is graced by a stone image, now headless, which, according to Sir Laurence Gomme,[44] is said to represent her. A tradition connects the Peg O’Nell with an ill-used servant at Waddow Hall, who, in revenge for her mistress’s successful malediction in causing her death, was inexorable in demanding every seven years a life to be quenched in the waters of the Ribble. “Peg’s night” was the closing night of the septenniate, and when it came round, unless a bird, a cat, or a dog was drowned in the stream, some human being was certain to fall a victim there.
The sprite of the Tees is called Peg Powler, a sort of Lorelei, says Henderson in his Folklore of Northern Counties, with green tresses and an insatiable desire for human life. Children were warned from playing on the banks of this river by threats that Peg Powler would drag them into the water.