Sailors' Funerals

Death was ever present in the minds of people of the eighteenth century, and the dangers of the sea made it especially so among seamen. Much has been written on eighteenth-century funerary practices afloat and ashore. Burial at sea has featured prominently in mass media.

Outlander, Season 3 (2017)

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003)

Hornblower: The Examination for Lieutenant (1998)

It is easy to see why this tradition is well remembered. In the words of Commander Royal W. Connell and Vice Admiral William P. Mack (both United States Navy, retired) in their book Naval Ceremonies, Customs, and Traditions: 'Arguably the most powerful ceremony of the sea is that which consigns mortal remains to the deep.'[1] There have been changes to the ceremony over the centuries, but it is remarkable how little has changed. Hessian soldier private Johann Conrad Döhla witnessed the ceremony on his voyage to America in 1777:

As soon as someone on the ship dies, whether he is a soldier, sailor, or anyone else, he is fastened onto a piece of wood or a board and then a sack filled with sand or a stone, or a piece of iron, or a cannonball, is fastened on the piece of wood or board so that the dead body, which later will become food for the fish, is immediately pulled under the water.[2]

As Commander Connell and Vice Admiral Mack point out 'it is seldom necessary nowadays to bury at sea,' but 'if the deceased is buried at sea, the body is sewn in a canvas shroud or placed in a coffin that has been weighted to ensure sinking.'[3]

The ceremony was often brief. In his The Slave Ship: A Human History, Marcus Rediker states this was because 'seamen were "plain dealers" who did not care for elaborate rituals.'[4] Given the eighteenth century sailors apathy toward traditional religion, this seems likely. This brevity is reflected in the Diary of John Harrower, an indentured servant sent to America in 1773:

Sunday, 27th. Wind at N. V. at 4 AM Tack'd ship. At same time the man who was bade with the flux was found dead in his hammock, at 8 he was sewed up in it and at 9 AM he was burried in the sea after reading the service of the Dead over him, which was done by the Mate.[5]

Hammocks were a common entombment for the dead. Richard Glover makes this explicit in his 1740 ballad Admiral Hosier's Ghost:

All in dreary hammocks shrouded, Which for winding-sheets they wore,
And with looks by sorrow clouded Frowning on that hostile shore.[6]

On a voyage to Angola, scurvy tore through the ship on which Carl Peter Thunberg was sailing. He remembered later:

Five men had been reported dead, all of them had been sewed up in their hammocks, and two had already been thrown overboard, when the third, the instant he was put on the plank, called out, 'Master Boatswain, I am alive still!' to which the Boatswain with unreasonable jocularity replied,-'You alive, indeed! what, do you pretend to know better than the surgeon?'[7]

On the slave trade, some sailors got no funeral at all. Both Rediker and Peter Earle, in his book Sailors: English Merchant Seamen, 1650-1775, quote a sailor from a 1744 slaving voyage aboard the Florida:

We conceal the death of the sailours from the negroes by throwing them overboard in the night, lest it might give them a temptation to rise upon us.[8]

The opposite was true on Olaudah Equiano's Middle Passage. As a young man, he witnessed the crew beat a sailor to death before 'they tossed him over the side as they would have done a brute.' This was a different kind of deterent, because it 'made me fear these people the more; and I expected nothing less than to be treated in the same manner.'[9] Robert Barker, a shipwright on a slaver, uses the term 'thrown overboard' to describe the method by which the bodies of slave ship sailors were disposed of. He implies a distasteful treatment of the dead on the slave trade.[10]

While common, the unceremonious dumping of slave ship sailors' bodies was not universal. In 1789 James Field Stanfield related through the heartfelt, if tortured, poetry of The Guinea Voyage the scene when his close shipmate Russel was committed to the deep:

Like the wild screaming of the midnight blast,
'Midst the torn cordage of the shatter'd mast,
With notes that pierce th' unwholsome welkin through,
The shrill-blown pipe convenes the remnant crew.
The remnant crew their o'ercharg'd bosoms smite,
And rise to join the melancholy rite.
With painful steps the burning deck they crowd,
Or pensive hang upon the slacken'd shroud;
Speechless they mark the foul presageful wave,
That, Ruffel parting, opes thy fluid grave!
The jutting hatch, a sable bier, is laid,
The pitchy pall throws a funereal shade,
His honour'd corse in awful form dispos'd,
Decent his clay-cold limbs his eyelids clos'd;
The ringlet dear, which once Maria grac'd,
Upon his breast by holy friendship plac'd;
The sinking iron slung with duteous pains,
In shrouded canvass wrapt his cold remains,
A rev'rent silence the sad prospect: draws;
The sacred liturgy, with solemn pause
Swells the sad sound, at whose inverted doom,
Plung'd in the abyss, he finds the liquid tomb![11]

More ceremony could be expected in the Royal Navy and aboard merchantmen. Aboard British warships, only the Anglican Book of Common Prayer was used in burials at sea. Below is an excerpt from the 1762 edition of that religious text, giving the precise language to be used when committing a body to the deep.

We therefore commit his Body to the Deep, to be turned into Corruption, looking for the resurrection of the Body (when the Sea shall give up her dead,) and the life of the world to come, through our Lord Jesus Christ; who at his coming shall change our vile Body, that it may be like his glorious Body, according to the mighty working, whereby he is able to subdue all things to himself.[12]

As many ships were without clergy, this was read by the captain or officers, or, as related by Stephen R. Berry in A Path in the Mighty Waters: Shipboard Life & Atlantic Crossing to the New World, even by passengers:

The German schoolteacher Gottlieb Mittelberger assumed all the duties of a minster. 'I held daily prayer meetings with them on deck, and, since we had no ordained clergyman on board, was forced to administer baptism to the children. I also held services, including a sermon, every Sunday, and when the dead were buried at sea, commended them and our souls to the mercy of God.'[13]

At first, burial at sea might have been distinctly British. Connell and Mack state 'In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries French men-of-war sometimes carried the remains of those who died at sea in the holds until the ships reached port. Old reports indicate that this was a very disagreeable practice and one that served solely the purpose of burying the deceased in consecrated soil.'[14] 'French and Spanish Roman Catholic mariners,' writes Berry,' usually transported the deceased in the hold of the ship so that they could be interred in consecrated ground.' He suggests that part of the reason for burial at sea may have been sailors fear of their shipmates 'body haunting the ship.'[15] On the other side of the coin, Earle states that 'most sailors had a superstitious aversion' to burial at sea for themselves.[16] I'm inclined to disagree with both of these historians, as neither provides strong evidence for sailors' feelings toward burial at sea, and sailors' superstitions are often overplayed. But then, neither claims superstition as the sole reason for this aversion to burial at sea.

A more significant reason that Berry points to for sailors wish to be buried ashore is the prevalence of sharks. Rediker agrees that 'the shark was the dread of sailors.'[17] John Atkins, who sailed aboard a slaver in the 1730's, was aghast at the sharks that swarmed around burials from slavers:

Their Voracity refuses nothing; Canvas, Ropeyarns, Bones, Blanketing, &c. I have seen them frequently seize a corpse as soon as it was committed to the sea; tearing and devouring that, and the Hammock that shrouded it, without suffering it once to sink, tho' a great Weight of Ballast in it.[18]

Alexander Falconbridge, a former slave ship surgeon sailing on the coast of Nigeria, witnessed what the sharks did to the bodies of the enslaved, and noted that sailors were not buried at sea on this part of the African coast:

The river Bonny abounds with sharks of a very large size, which are often seen in almost incredible numbers about the slave ships, devouring with great dispatch the dead bodies of the negroes as they are thrown overboard. The bodies of the sailors who die there, are buried on a sandy point, called Bonny Point, which lies about a quarter of a mile from the town.[19]

Perhaps this was the captain splitting the difference between frightening the enslaved with the callous disposal of the dead as mentioned by Equiano, and preventing the enslaved from knowing how their enslavers were being weakend as the sailor of the Florida attested to.

Private Döhla, the same Hessian who said bodies would 'later become food for the fish,' witnessed other sea life consume the dead:

It happens before one's eyes that, as soon as the dead body is thrown into the water, the fish or other creatures gather and tear him apart and consume him, and there are crabs that are so large that they can hold a man in their pincers and pull him under the water. These are called lobsters and are twelve feet long and as large around as a man's body, and one claw weighs over twenty pounds. I myself have seen an English soldier thrown into the water who was grabbed by a crab with his claws and pulled under the water.[20]

James Field Stanfield wrote of the sharks and other creatures of Africa that could rend the bodies of seamen:

If to the sea consign'd— the hallow'd corse
The briny monsters seize with savage force.
If to the fresh'ning flood the lifeless clay;
Rank alligators seize the quiv'ring prey.
Or when, more favour'd, on the burning land
The kindred dust is mix'd with solemn hand,
Fierce from his nightly watch and native wood,
Lur'd by the distant scent of morbid blood,
The tiger rushes by foul carnage led,
Front the fresh tomb tears up the reeking dead
Devours the mangled limbs — churns the chill gore,
The last avenger of th' insulted shore![21]

The uncertainty about where their bodies would wind up is reflected in the standard form of a sailor's will. Below is an example, repeated countless times, from the 1756 will of mariner Jonathan Hill:

I commend my Soul into the hands of Almighty God hoping for Remission of all my Sins thro the Merits of Jesus Christ my blessed Saviour and Redeemer and my Body to the Earth or Sea as it shall please God.[21]

"Will of Jonathan Hill, Mariner now belonging to His Majesty's Ship Trident 
of Gosport," National Archives (UK), 11 March 1756, PROB 11/821/151

Officers buried ashore, as you might guess, received a bit more ceremony with their funerals. James Wyatt, a privateer serving in the War of Austrian Succession, remembered just such a funeral:

When I came to our Ship, I found one of our Midshipmen (whose Name I have forgot) was drowned in Catwater, in endeavouring to swim ashore. He was buried very decently in the new Churchyard, in Plymouth; and those of our Men that made the best Appearance, and which we were sure would not run away, attended at the Funeral. Every one had a Pair of Pistols stuck in his Belt, a Hanger by his Side, and there were Swords cross'd on the Coffin Lid.[22]

Other burials could be hasty and sloppy. Christopher Prince, an American mariner pressed into British service in the opening years of the American Revolutionary War, related a harrowing near death experience when the people of New York believed he had succumbed to the smallpox epidemic that swept the continent:

I was placed under a sand bank, and there was a number of people over me throwing down sand that often covered me. I then struggled until I got my head above the sand and breathed. But they continued shoveling it upon me until I thought it would be impossible to get my head out and fetch my breath. And the last struggle I made, I was sure it would be the last, for my strength was nearly gone.[23]

When the diggers realized that Prince was still alive, they abandoned him on the beach, presumably still half buried.

As Paul Gilje points out in his To Swear Like a Sailor: Maritime Culture in America, 1750-1850, 'the selling of the contents of a sea chest became a final ritual commemorating the death of a sailor aboard ship. After the burial at sea, the men would haul the chest on deck and then auction off each item with the intent of sending the money raise to the dead man's family.'[24] The practice was so common that muster books were printed with a column for deductions from pay that went toward 'Dead Man's Cloaths.'

ADM  36/6179, Nightingale Muster Book, 1754 Oct - 1756 Jun, photo by Alexa Price.

As Gilje states, 'this sale also became an effective way to distribute used goods among the crew. It also connected the sailor at sea to his family on land.'[25] Among sailors themselves, the chest and their late shipmate's possessions could also serve as a sentimental reminder.

Equiano, enslaved aboard the Preston, made friends with a young man named Richard "Dick" Baker. It was an unlikely pairing, but the dangers of the sea bred an unbreakable bond between them:

He was a native of America, had received an excellent education, and was of a most amiable temper. Soon after I went on board he shewed me a great deal of partiality and attention, and in return I grew extremely fond of him. We at length became inseparable; and, for the space of two years, he was of very great use to me, and was my constant companion and instructor. Although this dear youth had many slaves of his own, yet he and I have gone through many sufferings together on shipboard; and we have many nights lain in each other's bosoms when we were in great distress.[26]

In 1759, Equiano received terrible news:

I ran to enquire about my friend; but, with inexpressible sorrow, I learned from the boat's crew that the dear youth was dead! and that they had brought his chest, and all his other things to my master: these he afterwards gave to me, and I regarded them as a memorial of my friend, whom I loved and grieved for as a brother.[27]

Hardened men though they were, sailors mourned one another. Funeral rites could help them cope with their loss.


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[1] Connell, Cdr. Royal W. and Vice Adm. William P. Mack, Naval Ceremonies, Customs, and Traditions, sixth edition, Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2004, page 70.
[2] Döhla, Johann Conrad, A Hessian Diary of the American Revolution, edited by Bruce E. Burgoyne, Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press: 1993, page 20.
[3] Connell and Mack, Naval Ceremonies, 71.
[4] Rediker, Marcus, The Slave Ship: A Human History, New York: Viking, 2007, page 38.
[5] "Diary of John Harrower, 1773-1776," The American Historical Review, Volume 6, Number 1, October 1900, page 73, via Internet Archive, accessed August 1, 2018, <https://archive.org/details/jstor-1834690>.
[6] Glover, Richard, "Admiral Hosier's Ghost," via Barlteby.com, accessed August 1, 2018, <https://www.bartleby.com/333/81.html>.
[7] Thunberg, Carl Peter, Travels in Europe, Africa, and Asia, made between the years 1770 and 1779, Third Edition, London: F. and C. Rivington, 1796, page 118, Yale University via the HathiTrust Digital Library, accessed August 1, 2018, <https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008726012>.
[8] Rediker, Slave Ship, page 246; Earle, Peter, Sailors: English Merchant Seamen 1650-1775, London: Methuen, 2007, page 140.
[9] Equiano, Olaudah, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, edited by Vincent Carretta, New York: Penguin, 2003, page 57.
[10] Barker, Robert, The Unfortunate Shipwright: Or Cruel Captain, London: Robert Barker, n.d., c1760., page 23.
[11] Stanfield, James Field, The Guinea Voyage: A Poem, London: James Phillips, 1789, pages 23-24.
[11] The Book of Common Prayer, 1762, via Google Books, accessed August 2, 2018, <https://books.google.com/books?id=WgsVAAAAQAAJ&dq=book+of+common+prayer&source=gbs_navlinks_s>.
[12] Berry, Stephen R., A Path in the Mighty Waters: Shipboard Life & Atlantic Crossings to the New World, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015, page 66.
[13] Connell and Mack, Naval Ceremonies, 69. Follower Adam Hodges-LeClaire points out that this may not have been the case by the mid to late eighteenth century. Boudriot, Jean, (trans., Robert, David H.), The Seventy-Four Gun Ship: A Practical Treatise on the Art of Naval Architecture, Volume IV, Manning & Shiphandling, Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1986, pages 155-157. This work is also without notes and citations, though the author suggests the Naval Ordinance of 1765 includes a detailed approach to burial at sea in the French Navy. I have not yet found the Ordinance and so cannot verify one way or the other.
[14] Berry, Path in the Mighty Waters, page 124.
[15] Earle, Sailors, page 140.
[16] Rediker,Slave Ship, page 38.
[17] Atkins, John, A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil, and the West-Indies, Scarborough: Ward and Chandler, 1737, page 46, via Google Books, accessed August 1, 2018, <https://books.google.com/books?id=xak-AQAAMAAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_s>.
[18] Falconbridge, Alexander, An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa, Second Edition, London: James Phillips, 1788, page 67, via Google Books, accessed August 1, 2018, <https://books.google.com/books?id=_lTrja-FFXEC&dq=account+of+the+slave+trade+on+the+coast+of+africa&source=gbs_navlinks_s>.
[19] Döhla, A Hessian Diary, page 20.
[20] Stanfield, Guinea Voyage, page 23.
[21] "Will of Jonathan Hill, Mariner now belonging to His Majesty's Ship Trident of Gosport," National Archives (UK), 11 March 1756, PROB 11/821/151.
[22] Wyatt, James, The Life and Surprizing Adventures of James Wyatt, London: W. Reave, 1753, page 12.
[23] Prince, Christopher, The Autobiography of a Yankee Mariner: Christopher Prince and the American Revolution, edited by Michael J. Crawford, Washington, D.C.: Brassey's Inc., 2002, pages 95-96.
[24] Gilje, Paul A., To Swear Like a Sailor: Maritime Culture in America, 1750-1850, New York: Cambridge University, 2016, page 266.
[25] Ibid.
[26] Equiano, Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, page 79.
[27] Ibid., page 80.

Mortality

Detail from Admiral Hosier's Ghost, Charles Mosley,
1740, John Carter Brown Library.

Today I'm taking a very quick look at what historians have to say about mortality rates among common sailors.

The actual occurrence of death at sea was not uncommon, but how present it was depended widely on what trade a sailor was engaged in. In examining logbooks of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Peter Earle came to the conclusion that 'well under one per cent of sailors died on any voyage in European water or on voyages to the northern American colonies or to the Arctic to hunt whales.' These percentages go up considerably for sailors working the routes to South America and the West Indies, and especially those sailing on East Indiamen.[1]

Denver Brunsman points to the high death rates in the West Indies as one of the motivations for employing press gangs in those waters. It was widely recognized at the time that, in the words of a Parliamentarian, 'the West Indies has been a sink where our seamen have perished.' Brunsman also states (truthfully) that 'the mortality rate on ships in the West Indian naval campaigns could approach 50 percent from disease alone.'[2] Fifty percent mortality from disease in the West Indies is an outlier, but it was a possibility.

Mortality rates aboard men of war were comparable to those in the merchant service, as N.A.M. Rodger demonstrated in his book The Wooden World:

In the 1740s Bristol merchantmen were losing only slightly more than average (5.5 per cent a year against 4.5) on voyages to the West Indies, and it has been calculated that at the same period British men-of-war in those waters were losing about 6 per cent of their authorized complements a year dead from all causes. Allowing for the usual turnover of ship's companies, the mortality as a percentage of the population exposed would have been lower.[3]

By far the most deadly trade for a sailor was the slave trade. As Marcus Rediker related in The Slave Ship: A Human History:

In surveying crew mortality for 350 Bristol and Liverpool slavers between 1784 and 1790, a House of Commons committee found that 21.6 percent of sailors died, a figure that was in keeping with Thomas Clarkson's estimates at the time and is consistent with modern research. Roughly twenty thousands British slave-trade seamen died between 1780 and 1807. For sailors as for African captives, living for several months aboard a slave ship was in itself a struggle for life.[4]

---

[1] Earle, Peter, Sailors: English Merchant Seamen 1650-1775, London: Methuen, 2007, page 130.

[2] Brunsman, Denver, The Evil Necessity: British Naval Impressment in the Eighteenth-century Atlantic World, University of Virginia, 2013, page 106.
[3] Rodger, N.A.M., The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy, New York: W.W. Norton, 1996, page 99.

[4] Rediker, Marcus, The Slave Ship: A Human History, New York: Viking, 2007, page 244.

Superstition, Spirituality, and Religion

Detail from Admiral Hosier's Ghost, Charles Mosley,
1740, John Carter Brown Library of Early American Images.

Our view of sailors in the eighteenth century is colored greatly by subsequent centuries. Richard Henry Dana's excellent memoir Two Years Before the Mast, published in 1840, details some of the superstitions held by sailors on a trip from Boston to California, including premonitions of death and the Flying Dutchman. Patrick O'Brian makes superstition an important part of his Napoleonic seafaring novels The Far Side of the World and The Hundred Days, which in turn were translated to a significant plot point in the 2003 movie Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. None of these take place in the eighteenth century, but their ideas of superstition are filtered back through mass media. The Pirates of the Caribbean franchise and the Revolutionary War based video game Assassin's Creed III both make sailors' superstitions and their belief in a relatively irreligious supernatural world part of their main themes.

Sailors in the mid to late eighteenth century did sometimes hold beliefs we would recognize as relatively secular superstitions, but more commonly they held a supernatural view of the world in which God directly intervened based on their personal actions.

In their memoirs and journals, sailors rarely mention explicit superstitions. When they do, it is often with an air of disdain. Samuel Kelly related the story of a pilot's belief that the ship's cat could predict (or perhaps effect) the weather:

Having got the pilot on board at Deal and some fresh provisions, we sailed for the river. Our pilot, seeing our cat frolicsome, who doubtless smelled the land, and was running in and out on the bowsprit, became exasperated against the poor animal; he being superstitious concluded her gambols denoted a heavy gale of wind, which actually came on and we rode out the storm in Margate Roads, but I do not think the manoeuvres of the cat were in any way connected with it.[1]

Sean M. Kelley, in his Voyage of the Slave Ship Hare, points to a form of superstition specific to mariners from the colony of Rhode Island: horoscopes.

By the mid-eighteenth century, the practice of astrology in England had declined to the point where it existed only in popular form among the rural and urban laboring classes. But for unclear reasons, it persisted in colonial America, and for reasons that are even murkier, all surviving maritime horoscopes come from Rhode Island.[2]

And there is evidence that others saw sailors as superstitious as well. In The Gentleman's Magazine for 1771, the author relates the tale of a Chinese visitor to Britain who sailed on the Grenville East Indiaman. 'Mr. Chitqua,' as the authors of the magazine called him, discovered that the common sailors were unaccountably prejudiced against him ; owing, probably, to his strange dress and appearance.' This was made worse, they wrote, to his falling overboard and nearly drowning. The sailors with 'superstitious fears...like those of Tarshish' turned against Mr. Chitqua and denounced him as a 'Chinese dog.'[3] How much of this was genuine superstition and how much was just base racism is a matter of speculation.

There is also evidence that sailors repeated superstitions, but didn't really believe them. William Spavens seemed to think that superstitions were harmless fun when he wrote of albatrosses 'we used to say they were old transmigrated pursers, &c.'[4] Kelly made game of a cabin boy by intentionally misleading him to believe Kelly possessed the power of telling the future:

One evening, sitting alone writing in the cabin, I heard a rat at work in the locker, when having looked therein, I saw a rat with one eye shut, eating the cork of an oil jar. Soon after I heard him again. I therefore called the cabin boy and told him to hold the candle that I might kill the rat he heard in the locker, and in order to make the boy be more afraid of doing anything amiss, I gave him to understand that I could discover many things, and as proof of it that I knew the said rat had but one yes. I then (with the poker) opened the locked an killed the rat, which I told the boy to examine, and he was not a little surprised at finding my report true.[5]

Though Kelly obviously didn't believe he had accurate premonitions, it was a common belief among sailors. Olauadah Equiano related a story in which his vessel's quarter gunner, John Mondle, woke from a nightmare 'in which he said he had seen many things very awful, and had been warned by St. Peter to repent.' Duly selling off his hard liquors, Mondle was rewarded when 'before Mr. Mondle had got four steps from his cabin-door, [a vessel] struck our ship with her cutwater right in the middle of his bed and cabin, and ran it up to the combings of the quarter-deck hatchway, and above three feet below water, and in a minute there was not a bit of wood to be seen where Mr. Mondle's cabin stood.' Equiano saw this 'as an awful interposition of Providence for his preservation.'[6]

In this anecdote we see an intersection between superstition and religion: a belief in the direct and immediate intervention of God (and Saint Peter) into the lives of sailors based on their behavior.

Detail from Poor Jack, Charles Dibdin, 1790-1791, British Museum.

To be clear, sailors do not appear to have been traditionally Christian. Church services for sailors at sea were rare, and sailors do not appear to have been particularly interested in keeping up with their daily prayers and reading the Bible. John Nicol fell away from his religious observance rather quickly when he first put to sea:

At first I said my prayers and read my Bible in private, but truth makes me confess I gradualy became more and more remiss, and before long I was a sailor like the rest; but my mind felt very uneasy and I made many weak attempts to amend.[7]

John Newton similarly lost his faith at sea:

I was exposed to the company and ill example of common sailors, among whom I ranked. Importunity and opportunity presenting every day, I once more began to relax from the sobriety and order which I had observed, in some degree, for more than two years. I was sometimes pierced with sharp convictions; but though I made a few faint efforts to stop, I never recovered from this declension, as I had done from several before: I did not, indeed, as yet, turn out profligate; but I was making large strides towards a total apostacy from God.[8]

Despite being raised in a strictly traditional Christian household in New England, Christopher Prince also lost his religious habits after a short time afloat:

I soon began to neglect my morning and evening prayers which I had strictly attended to for five years.[9]

Samuel Kelly later expressed regret over not attending church when he had the opportunity to:

Instead of frequenting a place of worship on Sundays to return thanks for the numberless mercies I had experienced during my voyage, I spent the Sabbath in wandering about and in paying visits.[10]

Ebenezer Fox would also later 'regret that I did not spend the Sabbath on board of the Flora,' where he would presumably read his Bible and pray, but was instead 'carousing at a public house on shore.'[11]

The gunner of the Wager, a sailor named Bulkeley, was quoted by Brian Lavery in his Royal Tars: The Lower Deck of the Royal Navy, 875-1850, echoed the lack of regular religious services at sea:

The duty of public prayer had been entirely neglected aboard, though every seaman pays fourpence per month towards the support of a minister; yet devotion, in so solemn a manner, is so rarely performed that I know but one instance of it during the many years I have belonged to the navy.[12]

The lack of religious ceremony, ritual, and prayer afloat does not appear to have always been the case. Peter Earle wrote 'that religious observance was not unusual on merchant ships, though regular prayers may well have been commoner in the seventeenth than in the eighteenth century.'[13]

Marcus Rediker, in his Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750 put it this way:

The ship was an environment where work, activity, and self-help necessarily took precedence over religious mediation or supplication. Religious belief and practice had to be broadly congruent with the imperative of work and survival. This necessity, reinforced by the ship's isolation and distance from religious institutions, joined with long-standing plebian traditions of skepticism and anticlericalism to make sailors one of the most notoriously irreligious groups of the early modern period.[14]

John Nicol typified this attitude when he wrote:

The Portuguese are the worst sailors in the world in rough or cold weather, and we had plenty of both, but worse than all we had a black fellow of a priest on board to whom the crew paid more attention than the captain. He was forever ringing his bell for mass and sprinkling holy water upon the men. Whenever it blew harder than ordinary they were sure to run to the quarterdeck to the black priest. We were almost foundered at one time by this unseamanlike conduct.[15]

To Nicol, the Portuguese praying with a priest and engaging in the sacraments instead of working to change their fate was 'unseamanlike conduct.'

Sailors were irreligious in the traditional Christian sense, but that doesn't mean they were agnostic or atheistic. They did still believe that God (or providence, or a similar permutation) would directly and immediately intervene and punish or reward them for their actions. Once a situation was out of the control of sailors, they then resorted to prayer. Kelly thought this attitude understandable, but fickle:

I have read somewhere that seamen are neither reckoned among the living nor the dead, their whole lives being spent in jeopardy. No sooner is one peril over, but another comes rolling on, like waves of a full grown sea. In the Atlantic one fright after another undermines the most robust constitution and brings on apparent old age in the prime of life. No trouble softens their hard obdurate hearts, but as soon as the danger is past they return in the greatest avidity to practice wickedness and blaspheme their Maker and preserver.[16]

William Spavens reflected this same thought when he observed:

I have somewhere seen it observed, that when sailors are in such distress that they have scarcely any hopes of saving their lives, they will curse the elements, go to prayer, and make the most solemn vows of amendment, which are generally forgotten as soon as the tempest is over; but, to the honour of my brother tars, I can truly assert that I have met with many humane and worthy characters in the service, who I have reason to suppose were neither wanting in their duty to their God nor their fellow creatures.[17]

Spavens did not deny that sailors acted in a fashion seen as irreligious for their time, nor did he deny that they would drop to their knees in prayer when disaster threatened only to revert to their old ways immediately afterward. Still, he defended them as 'humane and worthy characters.' This is completely in line with the sailors' view of the direct and immediate intervention of God based on their actions.

An excellent example of this was related by Olauadah Equiano:

While I was in this ship an incident happened, which though trifling, I beg leave to relate, as I could not help taking particular notice of it, and considering it then as a judgment of God. One morning a young man was looking up to the fore-top, and in a wicked tone, common on shipboard, d----d his eyes about something. Just at the moment some small particles of dirt fell into his left eye, and by the evening it was very much inflamed. The next day it grew worse; and within six or seven days he lost it.[18]

John Newton similarly saw God's hand in choosing who lived and who died:

I have been told, that he was overtaken in a voyage from Lisbon with a violent storm; the vessel and people escaped, but a great sea broke on board, and swept him into eternity. Thus the Lord spares or punishes according to his sovereign pleasure![19]

Christopher Prince thought God chose to spare his vessel and its entire crew because of Prince alone:

The kind interposition of Divine Providence brought to my mind many others that had brought me within a hair's breadth of death: and one was in a voyage once to St. Lucé, where I fell from the upper deck of a large brig into the bottom of the hold, one tier of hogsheads excepted, in a dark night, and all hands asleep. There was a protecting hand of the Almighty which saved me from death, although I was in the arms of death for some time.[20]

Kelly also saw the hand of God in his preservation ('What a mercy it is that an elect sinner cannot lose his life till he has experienced the grace of effectual calling') and in the punishment of sinners ('As my uncle was a very moral, prudent man, I cannot account for his losses as anything so much as from the property being obtained in the slave trade').[21]

Sailors could also influence the Almighty and ask for His intervention. John Harrower, a servant being shipped to America in 1773, related an incident that straddled the line between superstition and religious practice in supplications to Christ:

This morning a young lad, one of the servts being verry ill with the Fever and Ague, he begged me to apply to Mr. jones the Cheif Mate, and told me he cou'd give him something that would cure him; Mr. Jones first desired me to give him a Womite and then wrote the following lines on a slip of paper and after folding it up gave it to me, to see it tyed up int he corner of his handkirchif or Cravat and wear it at his breast next his skin with strick charge not to look at it himself nor let any other person see it or look at it untill it was got wel. The words are as follows When Jesus saw the Cross he trembled, The Jews said unto him why tremblest thou, You have neight got an Ague nor a fever. Jesus Answered and said unto them I have neight got an Ague nor a fever But whosoever keepth my words Shall neither have an Ague nor a fever. Mr. Jones told me when he gave me the above copy it a sertain cure for the fever and Ague, the patient being first womited and then wearing the lines as above directed, But if they show it to any or look at it themselves it will have no effect.[22]

A similar intersection of religion and superstition came from the belief that Friday was an ill omen, as it was this day that Christ was crucified. Christopher Prince, writing after he had left the sea and became a religious reformer, believed he had proof against it:

We arrived safe at New London, only eight days absent, and brought Mr. Mumford not less than $40,000 worth of property, equal to silver and gold. The success throwed away the superstition of many about a vessel sailing on a Friday.[23]

Sean M. Kelley points to Rhode Island sailors' practice of casting horoscopes as another example of the mutual existence of superstition and Christianity:

While most clergy would have frowned upon astrological conjuring, practitioners often found ways to reconcile it with formal religion. The system was open enough to allow practitioners to elide any conflicts.[24]

It is worth noting that Olauadah Equiano, Christopher Prince, and John Newton, all men who served as common sailors and later wrote memoirs, became active religious reformers when they retired from the sea. Samuel Kelly likewise went on to become a fervent traditional Christian, though you might not know it from reading his published journal. As Stephen R. Berry related in his A Path in the Mighty Waters: Shipboard Life & Atlantic Crossings to the New World:

The nearly unanimous conception of sailors as irreligious sometimes downplayed contrary evidence, to the point of excising religion from texts. The early twentieth-century editor of mariner Samuel Kelly's journal expunged the "disease" of "psalm-singing" and moralizing from the diary, acting on the conviction that these traits had little to do with life at sea. For Kelly, however, those things had everything to do with the sea.[25]

The memoirs of Kelly, Equiano, Prince, and Newton are all colored by their later religious fervor, and conformity to a terrestrial Christianity that may not have been as prominent at sea. Or, as Berry argues, it may have 'had everything to do with the sea.'

Ultimately, the line between religion and superstition is a blurry one. The very root of superstition is in the Latin word meaning 'prophecy, soothsaying; dread of the supernatural, excessive fear of the gods, religious belief based on fear or ignorance and considered incompatible with truth or reason.'[26] This definition is broad enough that it can be imposed by any religious belief onto another. Sailors were irreligious in the eyes traditional terrestrial Christianity. Whether that translates to superstition is dependent very much on your own religious belief.

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[1] Kelly, Samuel, Samuel Kelly: An Eighteenth Century Seaman, Whose Days Have Been Few and Evil, edited by Crosbie Garstin, Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1925, pages 159-160.

[2] Kelley, Sean M., Voyage of the Slave Ship Hare: A Journey into Captivity from Sierra Leone to South Carolina, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2016, page 46.
[3] The Gentleman's Magazine, vol. 41, 1771, page 237, University of Michigan via HathiTrust Digital Library, accessed January 7, 2019, <https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015018405400;view=1up;seq=285>.
[4] Spavens, William, Memoirs of a Seafaring Life: The Narrative of William Spavens, edited by N.A.M. Rodger, County Somerset: The Bath Press, 2000, page 72.

[5] Kelly, Eighteenth Century Seaman, page 141.
[6] Equiano, Olaudah, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, edited by Vincent Carretta, New York: Penguin, 2003, page
[7] Nicol, John, The Life and Adventures of John Nicol, Mariner, edited by Tim Flannery, New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997, page 28.
[8] Newton, John, The Works of the Rev. John Newton, Late Rector of the United Parishes of St. Mary Woolnoth and St. Mary Woolchurch Haw, London, Volume 1, New Haven: Nathan Whiting, 1824, page 18.
[9] Prince, Yankee Mariner, page 15.
[10] Kelly, Eighteenth Century Seaman, page 130.
[11] Fox, Ebenezer, The Adventures of Ebenezer Fox in the Revolutionary War, Boston: Charles Fox, 1847, page 213-214.
[12] Rediker, Marcus, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987, page 169.
[13] Lavery, Brian, Royal Tars: The Lower Deck of the Royal Navy, 875-1850, Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2010, page 176.
[14] Kelly, Eighteenth Century Seaman, page 138.
[15] Earle, Peter, Sailors: English Merchant Seamen 1650-1775, London: Methuen, 2007, page 105.
[16] Nicol, Life and Adventures, page 148.
[17] Spavens, Memoirs, 26
[18] Equiano, Interesting Narrative, page 

[19] Newton, Works, page
[20] Prince, Yankee Mariner, page 92
[21] Kelly, Eighteenth Century Seaman, pages 88 and 133.
[22] Harrower, John, "Diary of John Harrower, 1773-1776," in The American Historical Review, Volume 6, No. 1, October 1900, page 75, via Internet Archive, accessed February 3, 2018, <https://archive.org/stream/jstor-1834690/1834690#page/n11/mode/2up>.

[23] Prince, Christopher, The Autobiography of a Yankee Mariner: Christopher Prince and the American Revolution, edited by Michael J. Crawford, Washington, D.C.: Brassey's Inc., 2002, page 160.
[24] Kelley, Slave Ship Hare, 48.
[25] Berry, Stephen R., A Path in the Mighty Waters: Shipboard Life & Atlantic Crossings to the New World, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015, page 89.
[26] 'superstition, n,', Online Etymological Dictionary, accessed February 22, 2018, <https://www.etymonline.com/word/superstition>.