of the ocean, and there it chanced that his knife fell overboard, as he was cleaning it one day after dinner. At that very moment his wife was seated at table with their children in the house at Bristol, and behold, the knife fell through the open skylight, and stuck in the table before her. She recognised it immediately, and when her husband came home long afterwards, they compared notes, and found that the time when the knife had fallen from his hands corresponded exactly with that in which it had been so strangely recovered. "Who, then," exclaims Gervase, "after such evidence as this, will doubt the existence of a sea above this earth of ours, situated in the air, or over it?" Such a sea is still known in Celtic tradition. "If our fathers have not lied," say the peasants of La Vendée, "there are birds that know the way of the upper sea, and may no doubt carry a message to the blessed in Paradise."* In the days of Sir Francis Drake the vulgar people supposed the world to be composed of two parallel planes, the one at a certain distance from the other. In reference to this space it was commonly said that Sir Francis had "shot the gulf," meaning that his ship had turned over the edge of the upper plane, so as to pass on to the waters of the under. "There is," says Mr. Davies Gilbert, "an old picture of Drake at Oxford, representing him holding a pistol in one hand, which, in former years, the man who acted as showman to strangers was wont to say (still improving upon the story) was the very pistol with which Sir Francis shot the gulf!' By the "Nauticum Astrologicum," directing merchants, mariners, captains of ships, insurers, etc., how (by God's blessing) they may escape divers dangers, which commonly happen in the ocean, the posthumous work of John Gadbury "That there are waters in the Regions of the Blessed, Bede, it is said, assures us for this reason, that they are necessary there to temper the heat of the sun. And Cornelius à Lapide has found out a most admirable use for them above the firmament, which is to make rivers, and fountains, and waterworks for the recreation of the souls in bliss, whose seat is in the Empyrean Heaven."-Southey. (1710), it appears that astrological figures were often made. concerning the voyages of ships from London to Newcastle, etc. In one part the predictor tells us his answer was verified; the ship, though not lost, had been in great danger thereof, having unhappily run aground at Newcastle, sprung a shroud, and wholly lost her keel. At page 93, there is a figure given of a ship that set sail from London towards Newcastle, Aug. 27, 11 p.m., 1669. This proved a fortunate voyage. "As, indeed," saith our author, "under so auspicious a position of heaven, it had been strange if she had missed so to have done; for herein you see Jupiter in the ascendant in sextile aspect of the sun; and the moon, who is lady of the horoscope, and governess of the hour in which she weighed anchor, is applying ad trinum Veneris. She returned to London again, very well laden, in three weeks' time, to the great content as well as advantage of the owner." Lodge, in his "Incarnate Devils" (1596), speaks of "a divell who persuades the merchant not to traffique, because it is given him in his nativitie to have losse by sea." It is curious to notice how the superstitions of pagan times, modified according to the change in religious belief, have been interwoven in successive ages with each other, and are not even yet extinct among the seafaring communities of various countries. The monks in the middle ages were the chroniclers of saintly interpositions at sea, similar functions to those of the maritime gods of the ancients. A goodly harvest of delusions came from the monastic granary, but independent of these, the gross ignorance and misconception which prevailed, until within a comparatively late period, of the most ordinary principles of meteorology, and nautical science generally, encouraged a faith in the supernatural, and gave a loose rein to credulity. It is scarcely half a century ago that in the west of England, a strange hollow noise on the sea-coast was supposed to proceed from a spirit called Bucca, and foretold a tempest. This was a matter of terror to all mariners on the coast. It is well known that sound travels much faster than currents in the air; it was, therefore, the former that indicated the approach of a very heavy storm, which seldom takes place on that wild and rocky shore without a shipwreck on some parts of its extensive coasts surrounded by the Atlantic.* Considering the great advance of modern intelligence, there is no great reason to boast of an immunity from gross superstitions; so late as 1857, a horrible murder was committed at sea on board the Raby Castle, by Karl Anderson, a Swede, on a fellow sailor, a mulatto, under an hallucination that the victim was a Russian Fin. It seems that the Fins are supposed to have the power of drawing blood from anything, even a ship's mainmast! Ignorance is the parent of superstition, as it frequently is of disasters at sea; for the want of nautical experience is too often the cause of shipwrecks. Landsmen, however, as well as seamen, have their strange beliefs and their vulgar prejudices. That such should be the case is a reproach to our boasted civilisation. The favourite doctrine of "luck," good and bad auguries, inauspicious days, fortune-telling, and a host of similar absurdities, are still current throughout the length and breadth of the land; so we should not judge too harshly the credulity of seamen, whose isolated occupations and peculiar mode of life render them more susceptible of fanciful impressions. Although the boldest men alive in action, yet they are frequently the very abject slaves of superstition. "Innumerable," observes Scot, in his "Discoverie of Witchcraft," are the reports of accidents unto such as frequent the seas, as fishermen and sailors, who discourse of noises, flashes, fires, shadows, echoes, and other things nightly seen or heard upon the water." Andrews remarks, "superstition and profaneness, those extremes of human conduct, are too often found united in the sailor; and the man who dreads the stormy effect of drowning a cat, or of whistling a country dance, while he leans over the gunwale, will, too often, wantonly defy his Creator by the most daring execrations, and the most licentious behaviour." * Sir Humphrey Davy's "Salmonia.” It has been truly said that a sailor is the oddest compound in existence : his habits, his feelings, his language are peculiar to himself alone. He displays the most noble and exalted virtues when roused into exertion; but too frequently indulges in gross habits and degrading vices. He is a child in sympathetic feeling, yet a stern hero in the hour of danger; undauntedly faces and defies death on deck, amidst the blood and slaughter of battle, and yet shrinks with indescribable apprehension on shore at the sight of a coffin. "Our own sailors," remarks Southey, "sometimes ascribe consciousness and sympathy to their ship. It is a common expression with them, 'She behaves well;' and they persuade themselves that an English man-of-war, by reason of its own will, sails faster in pursuit of a Frenchman than at any other time. Poor old Captain Adkins was firmly possessed with this belief. On such occasions he would talk to his ship, as an Arabian to his horse, urge and entreat her to exert herself and put forth all her speed, and promise to reward her with a new coat of paint as soon as they should get into harbour. 'Who,' says Fuller, 'can, without pity or pleasure, behold that trusty vessel which carried Sir Francis Drake about the world?” So naturally are men led to impute something like vitality to so great a work of human formation, that persons connected with the shipping trade talk of the "average life of a ship." The surrender of Jack's belief in the supernatural will probably be one of the last strongholds of superstition; for the obstinacy of his character will hold out long, despite "the schoolmaster abroad." Falconer thus describes this peculiarity in the old English seaman : "Each veteran rule he prized, And all improvements utterly despised." 6 Bacon naïvely observes: "One was saying that his great grandfather, and grandfather, and father died at sea.' Said another that heard him, 'An I were as you, I would never come at sea.' 'Why?' said he-'where did your great grandfather, grandfather, and father die?' 'Where, but in their beds!' An I were as you, then, I would never come to bed!" Addison, in the Spectator (No. 27), says: "It is an old observation that a time of peace is always a time of prodigies; for as our news-writers must adorn their papers with that which the critics call the marvellous,' they are forced, in a dead calm of affairs, to ransack every element for proper amusements, and either to astonish their readers from time to time with a strange and wonderful sight, or be content to lose their custom. The sea is generally filled with monsters when there are no fleets upon it." MENS for good or for evil were derived from birds and marine animals. Sir Thomas Browne, in his "Vulgar Errors," says: "That a kingfisher hanged by the bill sheweth what quarter the wind is, by an occult and secret property, converting the breast to that part of the horizon from whence the wind doth blow. This is a received opinion, and very strange, introducing natural weathercocks and extending magnetical positions as far as animal natures, a conceit supported chiefly by present practice, yet not made out by reason nor experience." Shakspeare alludes to the halcyon when he says: "Disown, affirm, and turn their halcyon beaks, The ancients believed that so long as the female kingfishers sat on their eggs, no storm or tempest disturbed the ocean. In Wild's "Iter Boreale" we read: "The peaceful kingfishers are met together About the decks, and prophecy calm weather." Dryden says: "Amidst our arms as quiet you shall be, As halcyons breeding on a winter's sea." "The halcyon," observes Willford, in his "Nature's Secret," "at the time of breeding, which is about fourteen days before the winter's solstice, foreshows a quiet and tranquil time, as it is observed about the coasts of Sicily, from whence the proverb is transported of 'halcyon days.' "* * Gmelin tells us that the Tartars pluck the feathers from a kingfisher, cast them into the water, and carefully preserve such as float, pretending |