SEA SUPERSTITIONS.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19964, 4 December 1926, Page 2

SEA SUPERSTITIONS.

PIGS AND PARSONS BANNED QUAINT BELIEF OF SAILORS. Those who know them report that, when at sea, the Scottish herring-fishers hold it unlucky to speak of a pig, a rabbit, a salmon, or a minister of religion. Most of our readers (says The Times! will be familiar with the ban on one of these subjects; the minister of religion. His presence has ever been unlucky, a harbinger of death whether by land or sea. In the days of chivalry, should you meet with a priest on your way to battle or tourney, you were wise to turn back. On board ship he was a Jonah. And it needed no excessive caution to attribute to his name and title the ill-luck inherent in his person. The ban upon the other unmentionable things may perhaps he known to professed students if this lore; but they are far enough from being common knowledge to excite a little speculation. The rabbit, and that naturally cleanly beast, the pig, are, Biblically, and traditionally, unclean; and though swine’s grease used to bring luck to Scottish brides, the Highlanders, we believe, do not, or ostensibly do not, eat of their flesh. But the rabbit is not so unlike the hare as to make it impossible that lie has come to be credited with the hare’s malign influence. In Scotland the have ‘is so far technically “game” that, like other game, his appearance brings disaster to soldier, raider, or traveller unless he is promptly killed; in England he was as dangerous as a parson, and, according to Sir Thomas Browne, with justcr cause, because “the ground of the conceit was probably no more than this, that a fearful animal passing by us portended unto us something to be feared.” The name of the pig, again, might suggest the old saying: “An’t please the pigs,” which meant, of course, the pyx, and said nothing else than “God willing.” About the salmon speculation must oe wider yet, for it could not be seriously submitted that the herring-fishers refuse to name the salmon because these swaggering river fish diminish their trade. This easy guesswork leaves untouched a deeper subject for speculation: why meu who have so many real dangers to face as sailors have should be of all men the readiest to beware of imaginary dangers. But a very short time ago no ship ever set sail on a Friday: whistling on board ship still brings n gale, and we suspect that the caul of a new-born child is still, in spite of Tom Hood’s jolly mariner, a sure preventive of drowning. Mingle the deepsea sailor with the Highlander, and there is sure to be a rich store of the rules through which the simple and naturally religious mind pays respect to powers and laws which it does not presume to understand. It is knowledge, not ignorance of danger, of loneliness, of the might of Nature —by modern Highlanders inherited, perhaps, rather than experienced, but daily truth to them that go down to the sea in ships—which makes these men bear themselves cautiously and humbly before the unknown. Let Mr Spectator sneer, and John Gay scoff, and Sir Thomas Browne, with all his successors in rationalism, explain, something of the deep-sea spirit lingers in most people yet, and is no bad thing in character and conduct. Simple, ignorant, captious though the forms that it takes may seem, this humility of spirit, when it is an honest part of a larger humility, has its virtue in davs of a cood deni of intellectual arroganee. It will be time to laucrh at such simpleness when no door in the more expensive parts of London is numbered I2n because the householder is afraid to li'’e at No. 13