The 19th-Century Maritime Superstitions That Were Believed To Protect Men At Sea

Karl Bell-(The Conversation)– Maritime folklore has long been shuffled to the margins of nautical history, presented as the quaint, colourful oddities of a former age. Yet this body of beliefs, practices and stories can offer important insights into how seafarers of the 19th century viewed and understood their working environment. 

Beneath the dominant histories of European exploration, heroic naval battles and imperial claims to mastery of the seas, there was the daily reality of working, living and, not uncommonly, dying in a dangerous marine environment. 

This folklore – which was exchanged between multinational crews of mariners and carried across the oceans – provides a way into appreciating their everyday fears, longings and hopes. It reveals a rich emotional and psychological engagement with the ocean, a history of sea fearing that does not sit easily with the stereotypical macho image of mariners.

These ideas are explored in my new book, The Perilous Deep: A Supernatural History of the Atlantic, a study of the imaginative and supernatural world of seafarers.

Much of maritime folklore spoke to anxieties about the temperamental ocean and storms, which boiled down to a fear of disaster and drowning. 

To protect themselves from such a fate, 18th- and 19th-century sailors went to sea armoured with magical charms. A popular one was a caul. It was believed owning a caul – the membrane that protects a baby in the womb – would protect a seafarer from drowning. 

Such items were openly sold in newspaper advertisements in the 19th century. Three advertised in the Liverpool Mercury in 1873 were priced from 30 shillings to four guineas, no small amount for a common mariner to pay for an idle “superstition”.

Nineteenth-century sailors and fishermen also developed a rich system of omens and predictions. They were attentive to their behaviour and even words (“pig” and “rabbit” being among the worst) that might provoke the ocean or attract bad luck.

One such example was whistling aboard ships, which was believed to stir winds or gales. The idea that the temperamental winds could be provoked by the smallest actions of the tiny human beings who passed over the ocean’s surface spoke to both mariners’ vulnerability at sea, but also a sense of personal responsibility for the good or bad fortune of their voyage.

That concerns about death haunted seafarers is also seen in a superstitious reluctance to have coffins, dead bodies or clergymen (associated with funerals) aboard ship. As the author and critic William Jones wrote in Credulities Past and Present(1880), the sailor who was fearless in battle or in the face of physical danger, often “shrinks with indescribable apprehension … at the sight of a coffin”.

This was reinforced by maritime ghost stories. Numerous tales of ghost ships, most famously The Flying Dutchman, served as a reminder of the haunting prospect of death at sea.

In telling stories of those who had been lost, seafarers could also express concerns about their present circumstances and future travails. Aboard ships, such tales could also serve as reminders of health and safety concerns. Stories about ghostly crew members who had fallen from the rigging or been washed overboard served as cautionary tales.

The decline and return of maritime folklore

Nineteenth-century critics of mariners’ “superstitions” attempted to debunk their ideas. They pushed the idea that this body of folklore was fading out with the transition from sail to steam power. 

No longer reliant on the winds, the steamship symbolised a more rational, mechanical world that had no time for the supernatural whimsy of the age of sail. Yet, indicating its ongoing importance as a way of addressing seafarers fears and concerns, such ideas did not simply disappear. Rather they adapted to the modern world.

While the price of cauls had dropped in the late 19th century, suggesting declining belief in their protective power, there was a sudden revival in their trade when submarine warfare became a feature of the first world war. Accounts of ghost ships were updated to include steam and later diesel vessels in the 20th century.

Maritime folklore history reminds us that our proclaimed “mastery of the waves” has always been built on rhetoric as much as reality. 

In an age of mounting concern about our relationship with the oceans, in which we are having to radically reassess our control over and influence on the natural world, it is perhaps time for this history to resurface.

The Converstation

Subscribe for Daily Maritime Insights

Sign up for gCaptain’s newsletter and never miss an update

— trusted by our 107,048 members