Don't Be A Jonah: Bad Luck On Ships and Boats

I am not a sailor.

My brother loves to sail. My father loves to sail. I come from a long line of Nova Scotia fishermen, but somehow I didn't get the sailing gene. Instead I got the "I get seasick even riding a bus" gene. Maybe I inherited that one from my mother's side.

I'm still interested in nautical lore, even if I'm not a sailor. There is quite a bit of it in New England, naturally, and much of it concerns what might bring bad luck to a ship.

A person or thing that brings bad luck to a ship is called a "Jonah." The term of course comes from the Biblical prophet of the same name. Jonah is best remembered for being swallowed by a whale, but that's only part of his story, which goes something like this: Jonah was commanded by God to go preach in the Assyrian city of Nineveh, but refused to go. Instead he boarded a ship sailing in the opposite direction. He wanted to put as much mileage between himself and Nineveh as possible. God wasn't buying it, though, and sent a terrible storm which threatened to sink the ship. The sailors on board determined that Jonah was to blame for the bad weather and tossed him overboard. The storm abated and the ship reached its destination safely. (Jonah meanwhile was swallowed by a whale and eventually went to Nineveh).

"Sorry Jonah, but you gotta go!"

Similar stories appear throughout European literature and folklore. For example, in Shakespeare's play Pericles, the hero's wife dies in childbirth while at sea. A huge storm threatens to sink the ship, but the sailors calm it by throwing her body into the ocean. Don't be sad - since Pericles is one of Shakespeare's late romances there's still a happy ending. In folklore, mermaids often cause storms to delay or sink ships carrying handsome sailors they want to marry. The storm can only be stopped if the sailor throws himself overboard into the mermaid's waiting arms.

So apparently if you're on a ship carrying a reluctant prophet, the corpse of someone who died in childbirth, or a handsome sailor you will experience bad weather. If it's carrying all three just swim back to shore right away!

Here in New England, the following were considered bad luck:

• A man carrying a black valise on board will bring bad luck and should be shunned.
• Anyone carrying an umbrella on board brings bad luck.
• It is unlucky to pound nails on a ship on Sunday.
• Hawks, owls and crows will bring bad luck it they land on a ship.
• Dropping the hatch into the hold is bad luck.
• Never watch a ship sail out of sight, because it's the last time you'll see it.

Some men were also just considered naturally unlucky. A new crew member on a fishing boat will be blamed and labeled a Jonah if the boat brings in a small catch on his first trip. Stories are told of men who hexed three ships in a row with their bad luck. Time to pursue a new profession!

All is not grim, though, and there is light at the end of the voyage. Here are some things that bring good luck:

• Dropping a cake of ice overboard before leaving port
• Bees or small birds bring good luck if they land on the ship.
• A horseshoe nailed into the mast will protect the ship from witches.

Now I just need something to prevent motion sickness on the MBTA bus!

Healing the Weapon and the Wound

If you were cut by a sword in 17th century New England, either a family member or a village healer would take care of the wound. They'd clean it with water, bandage it, and possibly smear it with a salve containing herbs and animal fat.

If you were lucky, a highly skilled doctor (like John Winthrop Jr.) would also apply a salve to the weapon that injured you. Putting the salve on the sword would magically heal the wound it made on you.

This seems a little implausible to a modern New Englander, but the so-called weapon salve was grounded in a widely held view of the universe. This worldview claimed that if everything in the universe is connected, then the sword that cut you had a particularly strong connection to you. The weapon salve takes advantage of this connection to heal you at a distance.

This blog has a recipe for a weapon salve from the 16th century text Archidoxis Magia. Ingredients include human fat, moss that has grown upon a human skull, rose oil, linseed oil, and human blood. The ointment should sit for a while after it has been mixed. When someone is wounded, the doctor should dip a stick in their blood and then insert the stick into the ointment. The ointment is now ready for use.

Doctors in Europe and New England debated the efficacy of the weapon salve. Some claimed it didn't work, but those who claimed it did had a variety of reasons as to why. Some claimed it worked through magnetism, while others claimed it was the harmony between the macrocosm and the microcosm. Some thought it was just the work of Satan.

I learned about the weapon salve a while ago and thought it was just another piece of folk magic that had long since disappeared. But I was wrong! The practice, or one very similar to it, survived until at least the 1980s in parts of Vermont.

Jane C. Beck, director of the Vermont Folklife Center, has interviewed many Vermonters about their traditional medicine practices. She collected the following piece of lore from a woman in Hyde Park, Vermont:

Similarly, it was believed that a nail that had been withdrawn from the foot, must be treated as well as the puncture wound itself. While salt pork was applied to the wound, the nail was carefully greased, wrapped up, and put into the warming closet where it would stay an even temperature. Today these supplementary measures are considered in holistic terms - treating the psychological mind as well as the body.

Although no skull-growing moss is involved, the theory is the same. Treating the item that injured you will cure your wound. I have no clue how the weapon salve evolved into this folk magic about the nail, but I think the continuity over 300 years of history is amazing.

I got the information about the weapon salve from Walter W. Woodward's Prospero's America: John Winthrop, Jr., Alchemy, and the Creation of New England Culture, 1606 - 1676 (pages 195 - 196). Jane Beck's article "Traditional Folk Medicine in Vermont" appears in Medicine and Healing. Volume 15 of the Proceedings of the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife.