There were a thousand legends of the sea that mariners still adhered to, and many of them concerned storms. It was a world in which the elements were subject to the whims of witches and warlocks who “at their pleasure send hail, rain tempest, thunder and lightning” to sink their enemy’s vessels. Roderick believed that witches could disturb the air by digging a hole in the ground, filling it with water, and then stirring the water lightly with a finger, or by boiling hogs’ bristles in a pot; his father had told him the evil wretches could call up a hurricane by tossing a little sea sand into the air. This led to a ban on women aboard.
As late as 1808, the English admiral Cuthbert Collingwood wrote that “I never knew a woman brought to sea in a ship that some mischief did not befall the vessel.” One Mrs. Hicks and her daughter went to trial for witchcraft in 1716, and the prosecution claimed they’d created the storms by swirling their bare feet in a pot and stirring up soapsuds into a foam. Or storms could be caused by a black dragon that emerged from the clouds and plunged its head into the sea, drinking up the water and any unlucky ship that happened into its way. The dragon might be a waterspout, but the danger was just as real; the only way to avoid it was to shout at the monster or to hold a knife with a black handle, read the Gospel of St. John, and then slice the knife across the waterspout (as Columbus’s crew did once, successfully).
Source:
Talty, Stephan. “Black Clouds to the East.” Empire of Blue Water: Captain Morgan’s Great Pirate Army, the Epic Battle for the Americas, and the Catastrophe That Ended the Outlaws’ Bloody Reign. New York: Crown Publishing Group (NY), 2007. 175-76. Print.
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