There is a story told of some English sailors who, passing by the French Ambassador’s house, that was illuminated in celebration of a treaty of peace between France and Great Britain, observed the word “Concord” flaming in the midst of several devices. The men read it “Conquer’d,” and one of them exclaiming, “They conquer us! they be,” etc., they knocked at the door and demanded to know why such a word was put up. The reason was explained, but to no purpose, and the French Ambassador, in order to get rid of these jolly tars, ordered “Concord” to be taken down and replaced by the word “Amity.”
It is to illiteracy of this kind that we are indebted for much of the romantic superstitions of the sea. In olden days the forecastle was certainly very unlettered, and the wonderful imaginings of the early navigators, whose imperfect gaze and enormous credulity coined marvels and miracles out of things we now deem in the highest degree prosaic and commonplace, descended without obstruction of learning or scepticism through the marine generations. It is easily seen on reading the old sea-chronicles how most of the superstitions had their birth, and it needs but a very superficial acquaintance with the nautical character to understand why they should have been perpetuated into comparatively enlightened times. Two capital instances occur to me, and they are both to be found in the narrative of Cowley’s voyage round the world in the years 1683, ’84, ’85, and ’86. The first relates to the old practice of choosing valentines.
“We came abreast with Cape Horn,” says the author, “on Feb. 14, 1684, where we chusing of valentines, and discoursing of the intrigues of women, there arose a prodigious storm, which did continue to the last day of the month, driving us into the latitude of 60 deg. and 30 min. south, which is further than any ship hath sailed before south; so that we concluded the discoursing of women at sea very unlucky, and occasioned the storm.” That such a superstition as this ever obtained a footing among mariners I will not declare. Yet it is easily seen that the conclusion the author arrived at, that the “discoursing of women at sea” is very unlucky, might engender a superstition strong enough to live through centuries. In the same book is recounted another strange matter, of a true hair-stirring pattern. On June 29, 1686, there had been great feasting on board Cowley’s ship, and when the commanders of the other vessels departed they were saluted with some guns, which, on arriving on board their ships, they returned. “But,” says the author, “it is strangely observable that whilst they were loading their guns they heard a voice in the sea crying out, ‘Come, help! come, help! A man overboard!’ which made them forthwith bring their ships to, thinking to take him up; but heard no more of him.” The captains were so puzzled that they returned to Cowley’s ship to see if he had lost a man; but “we nor the other ship had not a man wanting, for upon strict examination we found that in all the three ships we had our complement of men, which made them all to conjecture that it was the spirit of some man that had been drowned in that latitude by accident.” Thus they resolved their perplexity, braced up their yards, and pursued their course in a composed posture of mind; and in this easy way I think was a large number of the superstitions, which fluttered the forecastle and perturbed the lonely look-out man, generated.
So of the corposant, that ghostly meteoric exhalation, which in gales of 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.
[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?
[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.”
[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.”