Stockwin's Maritime Miscellany (24 page)

When the first vessels took to the water a number of customs developed that were designed to appease the gods of the sea. Some involved human sacrifice; the Norse Vikings launched their warships over live prisoners tied to the launch-ways so their blood was carried into the sea.

In the Golden Age of Sail it was important to follow certain traditions to ensure good fortune for a ship and all who sailed in her. One of these was the custom of leaving coins under the step of a mast at the time the vessel was being built. This came down from the Roman tradition of placing a coin in the mouth of a dead person to pay the underworld ferryman Charon to transport him across the River Styx to Hades. If a ship met a mishap at sea the coins would ensure that the fares of the hands were paid.

When an English ship was launched a toast was drunk to her prosperity out of a silver cup, which was afterwards thrown overboard. In the late seventeenth century this was felt to be too extravagant and the practice of breaking a bottle over the ship began, performed either by a royal personage or a dockyard commissioner. In 1811 the Prince Regent introduced the custom of ladies performing the ceremony. However, one lady’s aim was so poor that the bottle hit and injured a spectator, who sued. As a consequence the Admiralty decreed that henceforth the launching bottle should be secured by a lanyard to the bows.

French ship christenings in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were accompanied by rites resembling marriage and baptismal ceremonies. A godfather for the new ship presented a godmother with a bouquet of flowers as both said the ship’s name. No bottle was broken over the ship, but a priest blessed it with holy water
.

Tradition has it that water was used in the first two attempts to launch the iconic USS
Constitution
(‘Old Ironsides’), but she would not budge. It took a bottle of fine Madeira from the cellar of the Honorable Thomas Russell, a leading Boston merchant, to entice her to enter Neptune’s Realm.

Sailors had a number of colourful expressions for death at sea, mostly involving nautical terms. Some sails need a long spar, or boom, to spread their foot. When the boom is topped, the vessel is ready to start the voyage. Sailors adopted the expression ‘to top your boom’ to refer to the journey to the afterlife, from which there was no return. Other salty euphemisms for dying were to ‘cut your painter’, ‘slip your cable’, ‘cross the bar’ and ‘go aloft’.

A mariner might talk about meeting Davy Jones, the spirit of the deep. Davy Jones was thought to be in all storms and was sometimes seen as being of huge height, with three rows of sharp teeth in an enormous mouth, and emitting blue flames through his nostrils. The origin of this name is uncertain. It may be a corruption of ‘Duffy Jonah’, a West Indian sailors’ name for the devil. Another explanation is that Davy derives from St David, the saint often invoked by Welsh sailors, and Jones comes from Jonah, the biblical figure swallowed by a whale. Some claim that Davy Jones was a London pub owner who kept drugged ale in a special cupboard and served it to the unwary, who were thus shanghaied – sent stupefied off to sea.

Davy Jones’ Locker was the bottom of the sea, a sort of repository for everything that went overboard, from rigging to men. Sailors used to say, ‘Nothing is lost, for you know where it is.’

Then there was Fiddler’s Green, a mythical Elysium waiting for shellbacks, those who had been at sea for so long that barnacles grew on their backs, when they slipped their cable and went to their rest. In this paradise, populated by countless willing ladies, equipped with rum casks that never emptied, it was always a fair wind and flying fish weather. To get to Fiddler’s Green the shell-back became a gull and then flew to the South Pole, where the entrance awaited him in the form of an open hatch.

Sailors did not like molesting sea birds, as they were thought to be the spirits of dead sailors who had not yet found their way to Fiddler’s Green.

Unless the ship was very close to land, burial was at sea for most sailors. The body was sewn up in the man’s hammock and weighted with a cannonball. At the last minute, a stitch through the nose confirmed that he was really dead! It became customary for the man who performed this task to claim a guinea a body. The French, however, brought their slain sailors home buried in the ship ballast so that they could be given Catholic rites.

Jack Tar was very uneasy about having a corpse on board ship, believing it would attract bad luck. If a corpse was carried on board there were some things that could be done to minimise the impact: it must always lie athwart the vessel, never end on, and when the home port was reached it must leave the ship before any member of the crew.

CUT AND RUN – make off without warning.
DERIVATION
: if the enemy suddenly came on a ship when she was at anchor, or if a sudden storm threatened to force her on to a lee shore, the captain would order the crew to cut the anchor cable and run downwind to escape.

For a sailor the day of his ship’s departure was important. Wednesday was the best day of the week to begin and end a voyage – probably because the name derives from Woden’s Day, the Anglo–Saxon god Woden being the chief protector of mariners. Friday, however, was to be avoided at all cost, an injunction that holds to this day. The Temptation and Banishment from the Garden of Eden, the Flood and the Crucifixion were all believed to have occurred on a Friday. Exceptionally, Spanish sailors favour Friday, as this was the day on which Columbus began his great voyages.

One admiral, a friend of Nelson’s, once remarked: ‘Why, I was once fool enough to believe that it was all nonsense, and I did once cruise, sail on a Friday, much to the annoyance of the men. The consequence was that I run my ship aground, and nearly lost her… nothing shall induce me to sail on a Friday again!’

The ghost ship is one of the most pervasive legends of the sea, and there is none more famous than
The Flying Dutchman
.

In the early eighteenth century a ship called
The Flying Dutchman
under Captain Vanderdecken set sail from Holland for the Cape of Good Hope. Then, according to nautical folklore, a great storm arose and the captain scoffed at the tempest and blasphemed. Suddenly a cloud opened up and a celestial figure descended on the deck. The captain fired a gun at this apparition, which put a terrible curse on him – to wander the oceans ceaselessly with neither rest nor fine weather, the sight of his ship bringing misfortune to all who see it.

It is said that the skipper of
The Flying Dutchman
on occasion personally visits passing ships. Sometimes he sends letters on board and if the captain reads them he is lost; he goes mad and his ship dances in the air, then pitches violently before sinking. Vanderdecken also leads ships on to rocks, turns wine into vinegar and rots food aboard.

The Flying Dutchman
is a master of disguise, changing six times a day so as not to be recognised. Sometimes it is a heavy Dutch vessel, at other times a light corsair.

There were a number of reported sightings of
The Flying Dutchman
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One account, written in 1835, reads:

Suddenly the second officer, a fine Marseilles sailor who had been the foremost in the cabin in laughing at and ridiculing the story of
The Flying Dutchman
, ascended the rigging and cried: ‘
Voilà le Hollandais Volant!
’ The captain sent for his night glass and observed, ‘It is very strange but there is a ship bearing down on us with all sail set, while we scarcely show a pocket-handkerchief to the breeze.’

Another report, made in July 1881 in HMS
Bacchante
, cruising in the Pacific, stated:

At 4 a.m.
The Flying Dutchman
crossed our bows. A strange red light as of a phantom ship all aglow, in the midst of which light the masts, spars and sails of an old-fashioned brig 180 m distant stood out in strong relief as she came up. The look-out man on the forecastle reported her as close on the port bow, where the officer of the watch from the bridge clearly saw her, as did the quarterdeck midshipman, who was sent forward at once to the forecastle; but on arriving there no vestige nor any sign whatever of any material ship was to be seen
either
near or right away to the horizon, the night being clear and the sea calm.

Sightings continued to occur past the age of sail. During the Second World War the German U-boat fleet commander Admiral Karl Dönitz reported that his crew told him they had seen the
The Flying Dutchman
on their tours of duty east of Suez.

The theme of
The Flying Dutchman
has inspired novelists, poets and composers – Marryat, Scott and Wagner among them. In modern times the legend was adapted into the
Pirates of the Caribbean
films.

BY AND LARGE – in general.
DERIVATION
: a ship that performs well under most sailing conditions goes smartly into or ‘by’ the wind and also does not disappoint with a following wind or when ‘going large’.

The ancient town of Deal in Kent lies on the shore of the English Channel. Around 10 km out to sea lie the notorious Goodwin Sands, an uneven underwater platform of limestone, some 18 km long by 6.5 km across, over which many tons of shifting sands constantly flow. More than 2,000 ships have been wrecked there. At high tide the sands are covered by just 4 m of water. Some parts are treacherous quicksands which can swallow up whole vessels.

According to legend the sands were once a fertile, low-lying island called Lomea owned by Godwin, Earl of Wessex, after whom they are named. The land was later given to St Augustine’s Abbey in Canterbury, but the abbot failed to maintain the retaining walls and the sea reclaimed the area. The Goodwin Sands quickly developed a sinister and feared reputation as ‘the shippe swallower’.