Why are sailors so superstitious? | AskHistorians Archive Observer

Contrary to popular belief, during the Age of Sail there really isn't much to suggest that sailors tended to be much more superstitious than the average person. The superstitions they did have seem to have been more customary and ritualistic rather than genuine, deeply held beliefs that influenced the course of voyages. As for religion, sailors were often regarded as if anything less religious than most people on land at the time, as expressed in a quote by Daniel Defoe from his book Robinson Crusoe published in 1719: "But alas! falling into the seafaring life, which of all the lives is the most destitute of the fear of God, though His terrors are always before them" (Earle, p. 103).

To give one example of the real motives behind apparently superstitious sailing rituals, it was a long established custom on French and Dutch ships during the 17th century that when they passed the equator or some well-known obstacle on a routine voyage, the passengers were obliged by the crew to do elaborate, semi-hazing rituals. By one account from 1666, after having successfully passed the hazardous Isles of Scilly off the coast of Cornwall, the boatswain "dressed himself up in a long robe with an outlandish cap on his head, a wooden sword in his right hand and a pot of blacking [tar] in his left." He also painted his face black and placed a garland of ship's tackle on his head. Then everyone who had not gone on the same voyage before (i.e. the passengers) was made to kneel in front of him while he painted a cross on their forehead and struck them on the neck with the wooden sword. After that they were "baptized" by having buckets of water thrown at them. The same French author says that the Dutch did a similar ritual except that instead of just splashing them with water, volunteers were thrown three times off the mainmast into the ocean and even towed behind the ship. Those who went first or did it extra times were cheered and a flag was flown and a cannon fired in their honor (Exquemelin, pp. 26-7).

The sailors claimed that they did these things to avoid bad luck and ward off bad omens and such. Probably part of it was because the sailors were bored and genuinely elated to have survived a dangerous passage, but the most obvious ulterior motive behind it--rather than superstition--was that the sailors used these rituals and performances as an excuse to extort alcohol and money from the passengers and ship's stores. The same author writes that the passengers were required to "donate" a bottle of wine or brandy from their private stores afterwards as "payment" for the sailors "initiating" them into this ritual. The alcohol was then shared out amongst the sailors later. Other times, anyone not willing to be dropped three times from the mainmast was required to pay a shilling to the sailors, and officers had to pay two. If the ship hadn't passed that way before, the crew would sometimes force the captain to give them a hogshead of wine or else they would threaten to "saw off the roundhouse from the ship" and destroy the captain's cabin. The goal here seems pretty clear: alcohol and money. In one instance in 1684, when the French explorer Sieur de La Salle refused to allow the above described custom of "ducking" on his ship after crossing the Tropic of Cancer, it caused the crew to be extremely angry and bitter. This was ostensibly because it brought bad luck on the voyage and violated tradition, but probably in reality the crew were upset at being deprived of alcohol and money and having what little authority they had undermined. Three years later, La Salle's crew mutinied and killed him in the failed French settlement he tried to set up in Texas, not directly because of that one incident but it can't have helped their opinion of him (Little, pp. 112).

Basically what I'm trying to show here is that sailors often claimed to be superstitious and did weird elaborate rituals and such that might give the impression they actually were, but in fact on closer examination these seem to have almost always been done opportunistically as a pretext to extort alcohol and money from people or alleviate boredom or maybe gain a small amount of power over their officers. There are almost no other instances apart from the one mentioned above that I know of where apparent "superstition" created any sort of conflict or possibly changed the course of a voyage.

Sometimes when sailors saw a strange animal or weather phenomenon, they might casually (perhaps even flippantly) attach some supernatural belief or omen to it, but like in the previous example, this just doesn't seem to have actually been very important to them or something they really believed in, even though it has been greatly mythologized in later literature and poetry. In one famous example of this that inspired Samuel Taylor Coleridge's famous poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), an English privateer sailing around Cape Horn in 1719 shot a black albatross that had been following their ship. I'll quote the entire passage:

In short, one could imagine it impossible that anything living could subsist in so rigid a climate, and indeed, we all observed, that we had not had the sight of one fish, of any kind, since we were come to the Southward of the straits of Le Mair; nor of one sea-bird, excepting a disconsolate black albatross, who accompanied us for several days, and hovered about us as if he had lost himself, till Hatley (my second captain) concluding, in a gloomy fit, that the company of this melancholy bird brought us ill luck; resolved to destroy him, in hopes we might then have better weather, and more favorable winds than we had hitherto had to deal with in these remote tempestuous seas. I must own the navigation here is truly melancholy, and it was the more so to us, who were a single ship, and by ourselves in this vast and dreadful solitude; whereas a companion would have mixed some cheerfulness with the thoughts of being in so distant a part of the world, exposed to such dangers, and, as it were, separated from the rest of mankind. The very thoughts of the possibility of losing our masts, by the violence of such very stormy weather as we had had, were enough to cast a damp upon the clearest spirits;... (A Voyage Round The World by Way of the Great South Sea by George Shelvocke, p. 75-6).

From this it sounds like Simon Hatley (the one who shot the albatross) was just feeling depressed by the gloomy weather and decided to shoot a large, ominous looking bird that had been following the ship; the excuse he gave was that it brought ill luck. The narrative goes on to say that the weather did eventually improve, and nothing more was mentioned of the albatross. In Coleridge's poem, however, he turns that brief anecdote into this huge mythology where the crew of the ship blame the sailor who shot the albatross for continued bad weather and eventually angry spirits show up and kill everyone... and yeah. But that was written nearly a century later and it was complete fiction that didn't reflect the actual beliefs of sailors.

Sources:

Sailors: English merchant seamen 1650-1775 by Peter Earle

The Buccaneer's Realm: Pirate life on the Spanish Main, 1674-1688 by Benerson Little

The Buccaneers of America by Alexandre Exquemelin