Superstitions and Beliefs of the Sea

BECAUSE the sea is immense, dangerous, variable and exciting, a food-provider, and the source of livelihood for thousands, the people most closely connected with it sailors, fishermen, and those who live by the shore have tended to regard it, from time immemorial, as a living, thinking entity, rather than as a mere natural expanse of salt water. Once, it was divine, and like all early divinities, it was two-sided at once malicious, cruel and unreliable, and a giver of benefits, as well as a powerful force affecting the daily lives of everyone within its reach. We still speak quite naturally of the sea as though it had the capacity for thought and emotion; and many of the surviving beliefs and traditions of seafarers and coastal dwellers reflect this ancient concept. All round our coasts, births are thought to occur most readily with the flowing tide, and deaths with the ebb. Life comes in at the flood, and goes out again with the ebb. In some districts, it is thought that no one can die until the tide begins to run out. If a sick man lingers through one ebb-tide, he will survive until the next, and then he is most likely to go out at dead low water. Conversely, births are commonest when the tide is nearly in. If a child is born during the ebb, it will be unlucky in life; and another variant of the same idea is that boys are oftenest born at high tide and girls at low tide. In Scotland, poultry-farmers used to set their eggs during flood-tide if they wanted cockerels, and at the ebb if they wanted hens. Some say that clover grows faster if it is planted with the rising tide; butter needs less churning then, and water boils faster on the fire. But in the Orkneys, if a marriage is celebrated at low water, it will be unlucky because there will be no children. An East Anglian cure for whooping-cough was to take the sufferers to the shore to meet the incoming tide; when it ebbed again, the water would take the disease with it. When a fisherman goes down to the harbour to join his boat