Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 1).djvu/593

 ought to take her departure from a safe harbour. In the Middle Ages it was dreaded by seamen as the day of all days of ill-omen or misfortune: again, salt being spilt horrified them, and knives placed across were, in their opinion, the prognostications of calamity. Divination, sorcery, witchcraft, and necromancy, were then practised by even "thinking minds." What, then, could have been expected from the thoughtless sailor, who, to obtain a fair wind, invariably had recourse to prayers and incantations? In the midst of the gale he invoked a return of fair weather by various superstitious practices. The Greeks of the Mediterranean during a storm threw small loaves into the sea, which they called the loaves of "St. Nicholas." The Russians, to appease the evil spirit which stirs up the boiling waves, and charms the mountain which the sea cannot pass, offered in humility a cake made of flour and butter. The Portuguese, when in imminent peril, fixed to the mast of the ship an image of St. Anthony, and to this idol prayed until the wind changed to his liking.

Nor were these superstitions confined to the sailors of Europe. Some of the Indians, when in danger on the ocean, supplicated the protection of their prince of evil spirits, who was one of their gods, and drank the blood of a cock, swallowing with it a small piece of burning coal, the heat of which they did not feel in the excitement of their insane delirium. When a waterspout was discovered ahead of the ship, the practice prevailed, especially in the Mediterranean, for a sailor to pull out his knife and make the sign of the cross or triple triangle in the air, as representing the Trinity, uttering in his despair some mystical