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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 involving 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 was also a belief that seals embodied the souls of drowned mariners.

The friendly dolphin invariably brings good luck to seafarers, and has even been known to guide them to the right direction. As recently as January 1989 the newspapers reported that an Australian swimmer who had been attacked and wounded by a shark was saved from death only by the intervention of a group of dolphins which drove off the predator.

Also worthy of mention here is another benevolent helper of seamen lost in open boats: a kindly ghost known as the pilot of the “Pinta”. When all seems lost he will appear in the bows of the boat and insistently point the way to safety.

Other denizens of the deep inspired fear and terror. The water horse of Wales and the Isle of Man – the kelpie of Scotland – grazes by the side of the sea or loch. If anyone is rash enough to get on him,  he rushes into the water and drowns the rider; furthermore his back can conveniently lengthen to accommodate any number of people. There are several tales believed of the water horse, for example, if he is harnessed to a plough he drags it into the sea. If he falls in love with a woman he may take the form of a man to court her – only if she recognises his true nature from the tell-tale sand in his hair will she have a chance of escaping, and then she must steal away while he sleeps.  Legnd says that the water horse also takes the shape of an old woman; in this guise he is put to bed with a bevy of beautiful maidens, but kills them all by sucking their blood, save for one who manages to run away. He pursues her but she jumps a running brook which, water horse though he is, he dare not cross.

Still more terrible are the many sea monsters of which stories are told. One played havoc with the fish of the Solway Firth until the people planted a row of sharpened stakes on which it impaled itself. Another serpent – like creature, the Stoor Worm, was so huge that its body curled about the earth. It took up residence off northern Scotland and made it known that a weekly delivery of seven virgins was required, otherwise the towns and villages would be devastated. Soon it was the turn of the king’s daughter to be sacrificed, but her father announced that he would give her in anyone who would rid him of the worm. Assipattle, the dreamy seventh son of a farmer, took up the challenge and put to sea in a small boat with an iron pot containing a glowing peat; he sailed into the monster’s mouth, then down into its inside – after searching for some time he found the liver, cut a hole in it, and inserted the peat . The liver soon began to burn fiercely, and the worm retched out Assipattle and his boat. Its death throes shook the world: one of its teeth became the Orkney Islands, the other Shetland; the falling tongue scooped out the Baltic Sea, and the burning liver turned into the volcanosof Iceland. The king kept his promise, and the triumphant Assipattle married his daughter.

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