The changes which have taken place in the sea-life cannot be wholly restricted to the transformations of the shipbuilding yard. There is a mighty difference indeed between the line-of-battle ship of fifty years ago and the armour-clad of to-day—between the Atlantic passenger clippers of which Fenimore Cooper wrote and the iron mail steamers which have succeeded them; but there are changes in other maritime directions fully as remarkable, though perhaps not so deeply accentuated to the shore gaze. Where are the old customs of the ocean? Whither has fled the traditionary character of the sailor? His canvas remains. He still has his topsails (albeit halved) to hoist, his topgallant sails to sheet home, his royals to set; spite of steam, there are still scores of the old-fashioned windlasses for him to bawl his hurricane songs over; still scores of the old-fashioned capstans for him to wind round, “drunk, monotonous, and melodious,” davits at which he may cat his anchor, as did his forefathers, forecastles as clammy as the most reeking of the holes in which the Jacks of other days lay snoring, with purple faces, in clouds of cockroaches.

But, for all that, it will not do to pretend that the sailor is what he was. I do not speak of the caricatures of the fictionist; the monstrous pig-tailed figures with lanthorn jaws, broken teeth, wooden legs, and bloodshot eyes, the race of Hatchways, Trunnions, and Pipses, who stagger, full of drink and oaths, in clamorous procession through the pages of the sea novelists, losing, to be sure, something of their inexpressible garnishings as they enter the truer oceanic atmosphere of the Coopers and the Marryats of the present century. I refer simply to the old sailor, to the plain man-o’-warsman and merchantman of bygone years, not to the Frankenstein in flowing breeches and hat on nine hairs who trod the stage and procured his circulation in one, two, and three volumes, in the respectable name of Jack, prior even to the days when Sir Launcelot Greaves found the irresponsible anatomy willing to ship

Let me be understood. The British or American mariner of to-day is as hearty, nimble, dexterous, determined a fellow as ever he was at any time during the choicest and most glorious period of his nation’s history. He needs but opportunity to test him. It is in his traditions, habits, superstitions, that he differs from his predecessors. I do not think it is the iron of his latter-day calling that has entered his soul and changed him. The very distinguishable difference is owing to a natural decay of marine sentiment. He is no longer superstitious—possibly because he is not without a tincture of education. Hard wear has attenuated his prejudices, and custom has lost its hold upon him. It would be difficult now, I should think, to find in any forecastle such a superstitious sea-dog as the old salt who, in Dana’s “Two Years Before the Mast,” agreed with the black cook as to the malignant and wizard qualities of the Finns. Familiarity with the grand liquid amphitheatre into which he descends and toils for his bread may have helped to rob the modern sailor of what I must call the romantic features of the seaman’s nature. In olden times the voyage was long, the art of navigation crude and halting; the wonders of the deep were many, at least they were found so; a man passed so long a while at sea that he was saturated with the spirit of it. Superstitions salt as the billow from which they were wrought begot peculiar forms of thought; customs grew out of the strange fancies and interpretations, and that they should now be dead means simply that they flourished for centuries, and that they died very hard at last.

How wide the difference is between the shipboard life of the mariners of the past and that of the present race of seamen may be collected by looking into a few of the customs which are now as extinct as the timbers of Noah’s ark. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was a practice on board Italian and Spanish, and possibly Portuguese ships, for the sailors on crossing the equator to erect a canopy on the forecastle, under which three seamen, absurdly dressed, seated themselves. One was called the president, the others judges. They started first with trying the captain, then the officers, finally the passengers. A sailor, dressed up as a clerk, read the indictments, after which the judges pronounced sentence of death. Careri, in his “Voyage Round the World,” explains the purpose of this tomfoolery. “The sentence of death,” says he, “was immediately bought off with money, chocolate, sugar, biscuit, flesh, sweetmeats, wine, and the like. The best of it was that he who did not pay immediately, or give good security, was laid on with a rope’s end, at the least sign given by the President Tarpaulin.” Apparently heavier punishments than rope’s-ending attended the poverty or contumacy of the convicted, for the same author tells of a passenger who was drowned on board a galleon through being keel-hauled for refusing to conform to this singular marine custom. The sport—if sport it can be called—lasted all day, and then at sundown the fines or forfeits were divided among the sailors.

It is possible that out of this old sea-joke rose the stupid and irritating practice of ducking men on their crossing the equator for the first time. This imbecile piece of horse-play was wonderfully popular among seamen down to quite recent days. I don’t think Jack ever saw much humour himself in the mere dressing up as Neptune and acting Jack Pudding in the waist; what he relished was the privilege, by prescription, of lording it over the captain and officers for a few hours, and tarring and soaking people to whom at other times he would have to pull his forelock, with the whole length of the ship between him and their nobility.

Another curious custom was to be found on board Dutch vessels. When a ship entered the 39th parallel “every one,” writes John Nieuhoff (1640), “of what quality or degree soever, that has not passed there before, is obliged to be baptized or redeem himself from it. He that is to be baptized has a rope tied round his middle, wherewith he is drawn up to the very top of the bowsprit, and from thence three times successively tumbled into the water.” A man was at liberty to get another to take his place by paying him. Plenty of money and other good things must have been earned by sailors out of this custom, for one may conceive that a nervous passenger would pay handsomely to escape so formidable a ducking as the tall bowsprits of those days promised, whilst, on the other hand, a seasoned mariner would look upon such sousings as mere child’s play—think no more of it than a man in a regatta now thinks of walking out upon a greasy boom to loose the pig in the sack at the end of it. The practice, however, eventually led to such riots, broils, and bloodshed, that it was forbidden by the Dutch Government.

It was long continued, however, in the British navy as a punishment. In the “Annual Register” for 1797 there is an account of four naval officers who were soused by a mutinous crew on board his Britannic Majesty’s ship Sandwich. The writer calls it a “curious ceremony.” The unhappy naval officers must have thought it so! “They tie the unfortunate victim’s feet together, and their hands together, and put their bed at their back, making it fast round them, at the same time adding an eighteen-pounder bar-shot to bring them down. They afterwards made them fast to a tackle suspended from the yard-arm, and hoisting them nearly up to the block all at once let go, and drop them souse into the sea, where they remain a minute, and then are again hoisted and let down alternately, till there are scarce any signs of life remaining.” When the miserable victims are ducked enough—according to the fancy of their judges—they are triced up by the heels that the water may run out of them, and then stowed away in their hammocks. This kindness was denied to the four naval officers, who, after having hung head down for some time, were tumbled into a boat and sent ashore.

The Portuguese had a custom of their own on crossing the Line. It was curiously tinctured with the superstitions of that age. Those on board who had never “cut the Equator,” were compelled to give the sailors money, or provisions, or wine. No one was excused, “not even the Capuchins,” says the missionary Angelo of Gattina, writing in 1666, “of whom they take beads, agnus Deis, or such-like things; which being exposed to sale, what they yield is given to say masses for the souls in Purgatory.” If any one declined to give he was carried before a forecastle tribunal by sailors habited as officers. A seaman dressed as a judge, in a long gown, passed sentence, and the victim was straightway hoisted to the yard-arm and ducked. This custom was not confined to the Equator. “The same,” says Angelo, “is practised in passing the Straits of Gibraltar and the Cape of Good Hope.”

The Italian fashion was somewhat similar. Sailors apparelled as judges sat at a table, and those who had never before crossed the Line were brought before them. The judges reproached them contemptuously for daring to live so long in the world without passing the Equator, and fined them according to their condition. Ducking followed refusal to pay. Merolla, in his “Voyage to Congo” (1682), says: “From this punishment or a fine none are exempt, and it is said that with the latter they maintain a church.” A livelier, and certainly a less cruel custom, I find in Spanish ships, in the form of a bull-fight. This was contrived by a man dressing himself up so as to resemble a bull. He took care to equip himself with an ugly pair of horns. Another fellow, mounted upon two men, attacked the bull with a spear. The humour lay in the two men who formed the horse being tied back to back with a saddle between them, on which sat the rider. The bull, it may be supposed, usually had the best of it. I am reminded here of a stroke of original humour on the part of some midshipmen. It is illustrative of the reefer’s theory of wit. They got some hencoops and formed them into a cockpit, and, making a circle by coiling ropes, they pitted a couple of cocks. The cocks did their best to fight, but they staggered so oddly that they could scarce strike each other. It was at last admitted that they had been fed with barley soaked in rum. The midshipmen supposed that the spirit would fortify the hearts of the birds, but they had over-dosed them, and the creatures were too drunk to fight.

Drinking is a sea custom not yet dead—at least, if it is dead the fault is not Jack’s. But, even though the economical principles of owners had suffered perpetuation of the practice on shipboard, I question whether the most bibulous of the present race of sailors could carry it to the height to which it was formerly raised. I suppose the very biggest drink on record is that related by Dampier. He says that there came on board his ship one Captain Rawlins, the commander of a small New England vessel, along with a Mr. John Hooker. They were asked into the cabin to drink, and a bowl was made containing six quarts, “Mr. Hooker being drunk to by Captain Rawlins, who pledged Captain Hudswell, and, having the bowl in his hand, said that he was under an oath to drink but three draughts of strong liquor a day, and putting the bowl to his head turned it off at one draught, and so making himself drunk, disappointed us of our expectations till we made another bowl.” Six quarts at a draught! Twelve pints at a swallow, without a sigh between! But then hard drinking was the custom, not of the privateers only, but of the whole seafaring races of early times. They were educated to it by liberal doses of grog. The allowance sometimes rose to a pint of rum per man a day. In the French, Spanish, and Portuguese ships, and very often in the Dutch, the sailors’ courage before an action was nearly invariably helped with jacks of brandy, and the doses were repeated whilst the fight proceeded, a bumper being handed between the guns. The men, frenzied by drink, would mix gunpowder with the spirits, supposing that, thus prepared, there was no better liquor for heroes. I think it need not be doubted that more actions were lost than gained by this custom. How should a drunken gunner aim his piece? and what mischief—save to one another—could a mob of inebriated small-arms men do in the tops or along the quarter-deck?

But if privateersmen could be found able to swallow six quarts at a draught, they had customs besides that of drinking which must have tended to render them desperately hard and seasoned men. It was their practice to keep their ships clear, so that the deck was the only bed they had to lie upon. No hammocks were allowed, no chairs or tables; they took their meals upon the deck and lay upon it; preserving, in this direction, the old tradition of the buccaneers, who denied themselves every imaginable comfort and convenience that they might never be mistaken for anything else than the savage beasts they were.

It is in the superstitions of the sea that we must search for the beginning and history of many of the customs which, in modified forms, lingered down to the period of a late generation of seafarers. They veined the life with elements both of humour and romance, and I do not scruple to say that much of the poetry of the profession of the sea has perished with the extinction of the simple forecastle credulities of other ages. In the beginning of European navigation, in the times of Diaz, Cabot, Columbus,^[80] De Gama, and earlier yet, the mariner was a Roman Catholic, devout, profoundly superstitious, perpetually invoking the protection of the Blessed Virgin and the Saints of Heaven, finding miracles in the common operations of Nature, peopling the deep with wondrous monsters, glorifying its blue breast with the gleam and colour of the enchanted island, gazing awe-struck about him as he sailed along, and willing to believe anything he was told. I could give you no better illustration of this than the remark of the Jesuit Anthony Sepp, in his account of a voyage from Spain to ParaguanÁ: “Towards the evening,” says he, “we saw an entire rainbow quite across the sky, resembling our rainbows.” Resembling our rainbows! As though the worthy father supposed that rainbows in those unfamiliar seas were very different from the same radiant arches which span the showers of Italy, Spain, and Germany! They were prepared for all sorts of wonders, and their imaginations created what their eyes could not see. The lightning was not that of Europe; the thunder was the reverberation of some hellish conflict between armies formed of fiends of Satanic stature; the very rain was unnatural, being coloured. Religion, or superstition if you will, interposed to mitigate the horrors of a perfervid fancy, wrought familiar appearances into celestial expressions, and instructed poor Jack to calm his perturbed soul, to quell the tempest, to exorcise the mermaid, to smooth the waters, to disperse the horrid shadows of the electric storm with litanies, effigies of saints, and spells of many different sorts. Thus Pirard de Laval (in “Churchill’s Collection of Voyages,” Vol. i. p. 702) says, “We frequently saw great whirlwinds rising at a distance, called by the seamen dragons, which shatter and overturn any ship that falls in their way. When these appear the sailors have a superstitious custom of repairing to the prow, or the side that lies next the storm, and beating naked swords against one another crosswise.” This custom long prevailed. Scores of similar practices may be traced to the primitive superstitions of sailors. They unquestionably colour the old marine life, and their extinction leaves the calling uncomfortably bald, I think. The stars in those aged stories seem to glow the richer for the incense floating up to them from the little altar on the forecastle, and for the tender strains of a hundred voices rising in some solemn, melodious canticle. The glory of the setting sun makes cloth of gold of the sails of those castellated fabrics, and they look to float over faery seas of purple as we view them through that atmosphere of superstition, in the midst of which those young and awe-struck imaginations made their miraculous voyages to the Indies and to the mighty shores of Columbia.