Page:A book of folk-lore (1913).djvu/119

116 unmanageable, lots were cast to discover who occasioned the disaster—precisely as in the case of Jonah and in that of the Undutiful Daughter, and the man on whom the lot fell was cast overboard.

In an old English broadside ballad,—

It is but a step from drowning a man as an offering to the hungry sea to allowing a man to drown, refusing him help, as was the case in Orkney and Shetland and in Cornwall as well. On the west coast of Ireland, when the Spanish sailors were wrecked from the Armada, the Irish murdered and threw them back into the sea, not that they bore them animosity—these Spaniards were Roman Catholics as well as the Irishmen, but because it was unlucky to rescue anyone from the sea, which exacts its toll of human life. It is not only the sea that makes these demands, but, as we have seen, rivers as well. So do lakes.