SAILORS AND CATS

Evening Post, Volume XCVIII, Issue 130, 29 November 1919, Page 14

SAILORS AND CATS

HOW TO RAISE THE WIND

SUPERSTITIONS DIE HARD.

Among the stories told by some rescued passengers from a wrecked ship was one to the effect that on the day before the disaster a lady passenger noticed that there were two cats on board. 'That means that we are doomed," said she. "01 course I paid no attention to this at the time," remarked the passenger who told the story. "I regarded it merely as a superstition." And the said passenger may well continue to.regard it not merely as a superstition, but as betraying complete ignorance of the real attitude of seafaring men towards cats. All domestic animals are usually considered lucky fellow-passengers by sailors, and cats particularly so. There are, however, several superstitions about cats to which sailors and fisherfolks are prone. The one tiling which, is sure to cause disaster is the throwing overboard, or taking the life in any way, of a cat. To destroy poor pussy in this way is certain to bring bad luck, and in all probability a storm. It is a little curious that Fielding, in his "'Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon," tells a story which, if he did not misunderstand the situation, would seem to show that sailors' ideas on this point were in his day not quite what they are now after the lapse of more than a hundred and fifty years. When the ship in which the novelist Bailed for Lisbon in a vain search for health was delayed off the Isle of Wight by contrary winds, a kitten fell overboard, and was rescued by a sailor who leaped boldly into, the water and swam back to the ship "bearing the motionless animal in his mouth." WORTH OP A KITTEN. The kitten was "exposed to air and sun on the deck," but lay apparently lifeless, to -the sorrow of the captain, who declared that he would rather hifve lost a cask of rum or brandy—which shows that the presence of a cat on board was considered lucky then as it is now. But Fielding goes on-to tell us that after a while the kitten recovered, "to the great joy of the good captain ; but to the great disappointment of some of the sailors, who asserted that, the drowning of a cat wits the very surest way of raising a favourable wind: a superstition of which, though we have heard several plausible apcounts, =we will not presume to assign the true original reason." It is possible that the novelist misunderstood the sailors; for assuredly nowadays to drown a cat would be considered a very sure way of raising, not a favourable wind,' but a storm.

A curious idea, which seems to have been entertained by sea-going folic on both sides of the Atlantic in days gone by, was that ill could be wrought to a ship by shutting up a cat. In the summer of 1880 an American lady,. writing from the State of New York, said that Bbc had heard of an old woman in Block Island—the island which Whittier calls by ' its Indian name of Manusees—who put a. cat under a barrel and kept the miserable creature there until it was nearly starved io death, in-order to prevent the sailing of a certain schooner tho captain of which had incurred her enmity. The cat at last escaped, aiid as soon as it had obtained some food from a womaii who hospitably took it in, a .brisk breeze sprang up, although there had been no wind for many days; and the schooner, released from the spell, sailed away. There was much indignation, said the teller of this story, against the worker of the spell, "but though Block Island contains a flourishing Baptist Church, and a high school, and a good public library, people did, nevertheless, seem to feel that it was just as well not to' offend this objectionable old lady, who might cause 'something to happen!'" OATS __.!> WITCHES. Then, on this side of the Atlantic, in the "Denham Tracts,"-a remarkable colleciion of . folk-lone made by the late Mr. M. A. Denham, and printed by him more than fifty years ago, it is xecorded that seventy years or so previously— which would mean in the later decades of the eighteenth century—it was a common practice among fishermen on the ■Northumbrian coast,, when shipwrecks had been scarce, to shut up the cat in a^ cupboard. The spell which in New England prevented a ship from sailing was believed in England—on the north country coast, at least—to be powerful enough to draw one to its doom on the rocks.

There is so much uncanny lore con-, nectod with cats, especially iv relation to witches and witchcraft—no witch scene is properly set without the black cat on the hearth—that it is pleasant to" know that poor puss is not in every respect so black as popular superstition has sometimes painted her. If seamen like to sail with a cat on board for luck, their .wives also in some parts like to keep a black cat by the domestic fireside for luck. The late William Henderson, the well-known angling writer, says thatat Scarborough, in his day, this fondness of 'sailors' wives gave black cats such a value that no one else could. keep them; they were always stolen! And the sable pussy brings good luck not) only to sailors and their wives. An old north-country rhyme says:—

Whenever the cat o' the house is black, The lasses o' lovers will have no lack.