Seafaring Lore and Legend: A Miscellany of Maritime Myth, Superstition, Fable, and Fact - Softcover

Jeans, Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0071486569 ISBN 13: 9780071486569

Verlag: International Marine/Ragged Mountain Press, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

"A valuable and lively resource. Jeans sorts truth from fiction with a sure hand and does full justice to both."-Peter Stanford, President Emeritus, National Maritime Historical Society

"A veritable sourcebook of nautical history, beliefs, and heritage. Every true mariner will get lost in this book."-Boating

Seafaring Lore and Legend is a storehouse of wonders for those who love the sea. From Noah's Ark to Thor Heyerdahl's raft, from Atlantis to the Northwest Passage, author Peter Jeans scours the ages and the seven seas for fanciful, inspiring, and bizarre tales of sea monsters, ghost ships, lost continents, castaways, pirates, explorers, superstitions, and customs.

Discover the surprising truths behind:

• The origins of naval salutes and the Beaufort Scale
• Flogging a dead horse and other oddities of nautical custom
• Sea chanties, scurvy, and the hardships of life at sea
• Infamous and noteworthy sea captains and their ships
• Famous wrecks and mutinies
• Mermaids, sirens, and sea nymphs
• Nautical superstitions such as the albatross and Fiddler's Green
• And much more

This is a book you can open anywhere to savor for a few minutes or an afternoon. But be careful: it's easy to lose track of time at sea.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Peter Jeans was born in Perth in 1936. He was educated at Geraldton Senior High School and was graduated in English from the University of Western Australia in 1962. In 1962 he resigned his job, sailed to Singapore, bought a motorcycle, and spent fifteen months riding it overland to London, arriving on Westminster Bridge in September, 1963. The story of this adventure is described in his book Long Road to London. His love for seafaring lore began when he wrote his first nautical book, Ship To Shore: A Dictionary of Everyday Words and Phrases Dervived from the Sea. He has been an English teacher, a columnist, and is an avid writer and sailor. He and his wife, Judith, and two sons live in Perth. AUTHOR HOMETOWN: Perth, Australia

Von der hinteren Coverseite

"A valuable and lively resource. Jeans sorts truth from fiction with a sure hand and does full justice to both."—Peter Stanford, President Emeritus, National Maritime Historical Society

“A veritable sourcebook of nautical history, beliefs, and heritage. Every true mariner will get lost in this book.”—Boating

Seafaring Lore and Legend is a storehouse of wonders for those who love the sea. From Noah’s Ark to Thor Heyerdahl’s raft, from Atlantis to the Northwest Passage, author Peter Jeans scours the ages and the seven seas for fanciful, inspiring, and bizarre tales of sea monsters, ghost ships, lost continents, castaways, pirates, explorers, superstitions, and customs.

Discover the surprising truths behind:

• The origins of naval salutes and the Beaufort Scale
• Flogging a dead horse and other oddities of nautical custom
• Sea chanties, scurvy, and the hardships of life at sea
• Infamous and noteworthy sea captains and their ships
• Famous wrecks and mutinies
• Mermaids, sirens, and sea nymphs
• Nautical superstitions such as the albatross and Fiddler’s Green
• And much more

This is a book you can open anywhere to savor for a few minutes or an afternoon. But be careful: it's easy to lose track of time at sea.

Peter Jeans began his love affair with seafaring lore more than forty years ago. He has been an adventurer, English teacher, and columnist, and is an avid sailor and writer whose books include Ship to Shore: A Dictionary of Everyday Words and Phrases Derived from the Sea.

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SEAFARING LORE & LEGEND

A MISCELLANY OF MARITIME MYTH, SUPERSTITION, FABLE, AND FACT

By PETER D. JEANS

The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

Copyright © 2004 International Marine
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-07-148656-9

Contents

Acknowledgments
Note to the Reader
Introduction
1. IN THE BEGINNING
2. FABLED LANDS
3. LEGENDARY VOYAGES
4. SEA QUESTS OF OLD
5. MARITIME HISTORY
6. NAUTICAL CUSTOM
7. LIFE AT SEA
8. THE CAPTAIN AND HIS SHIP
9. A MURMURING OF MEN
10. BIG SHIPS AND BATTLES
11. DEATH AND DISASTER
12. NAVIGABLE WATERS
13. CASTAWAYS AND SURVIVORS
14. AT ODDS WITH THE LAW
15. SEA FANCIES
16. MYTH AND MYSTERY
17. SEA MONSTERS
18. WRAITHS OF THE SEA
19. SUPERSTITION AND BELIEF
Sources and Notes
Select Bibliography
Index

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

IN THE BEGINNING

When people first emerged from the long dark night of their savage and brutallives as predatory hunters and gradually became more or less contemplativebeings, increasingly aware of themselves as but a very small part of what seemedto be a very big picture, doubtless the two questions they asked themselveswould have been: Where did we come from? Why are we here?

We have been struggling with these fundamental issues ever since.

Ancient civilizations—such as the Greeks, the early inhabitants ofMohendro-Daro in what is now Pakistan, the Maya people on the Yucatán Peninsulaof Mexico, the Aztecs of Central America, the Australian Aborigines (the proudinheritors of a continuous culture at least sixty thousand years old), and manyothers who peopled the "long-ago"—all of them found answers of a sort toexplain what otherwise seemed inexplicable.

This chapter deals with some of the myths, stories, and legends that ourancestors gradually accumulated in an effort to make sense of the world aboutthem.

GREAT FLOODS

"In the sixth hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month,the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountainsof the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were open.And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights."

Genesis 7:11–12

This biblical flood, also called the Deluge, is very important to all seafarers,past and present. It is the great flood that covered the earth as a mark ofGod's wrath toward man for his sins and general iniquity and a sign of God'sregret at having created him in the first place: "And God saw that thewickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of thethoughts of his heart was only evil continually ... And the Lord said, I willdestroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast,and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air."

This biblical account is in fact a fusing of two traditions from which acontinuous story emerges; for example, in one version the beasts fit for ritualsacrifice are taken into the ark by sevens and the remainder by twos, and ittakes seven days for them all to enter the ark; the other tradition lists allthe beasts alike in twos, and seemingly these all embark in one day.

Only the pious Noah and his wife and Noah's three sons (Shem, Ham, and Japheth)and their wives were to be spared, along with a male and female animal of eachspecies, by means of a great ship or ark that God ordered Noah to make. This arkwas 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide, and 30 cubits high, the Hebrew cubit beingabout 22 inches long—a large vessel even by modern standards. According tolegend, Noah's wife was unwilling to enter the ark and she and her husband, orso the story goes, had quite a quarrel about it. Chaucer refers to the quarrelin "The Miller's Tale" in The Canterbury Tales:

Hastow not herd, quod Nicholas, alsoThe sorwe of Noe with his felawshipeEr that he mighte gete his wyf to shipe?

Seven days later the rain began, lasting for forty days and forty nights in thestory that is familiar to many of us (in the parallel tradition the flooddoesn't end until after 150 days), a thundering downpour that must haveexhausted virtually all of the atmospheric moisture in the heavens at the time.Underground water was caused to flood the earth along with the heavy andcontinuous rain from above; this flood "prevailed upon the earth an hundred andfifty days" until all the land was inundated and every living thing hadperished—except, of course, Noah and his companions in the ark.

When the rains stop and the ark comes to rest on the summit of Mount Ararat,Noah sends out a raven, then a dove, but they both return repeatedly, showingthat there was still no dry land they could alight on. A week later he lets thedove go again, and this time it returns with an olive leaf in its beak, a signto Noah that "the waters were abated from off the earth." God then instructsNoah to leave the ark, whereupon Noah builds an altar on the newly dry groundand sacrifices animals to show his thankfulness to the creator, who in turnpromises that never again would there be such punishment inflicted on mankind("I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenantbetween me and the earth"), and as a sign of this a rainbow appears in theheavens (see The Rainbow in this chapter).

Finally Noah and his family and the cargo of livestock are blessed by thecreator and given the instruction, in that famous biblical phrase, to "Befruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth."

The ark of Noah derives from the Latin arca, chest, related toarcere, to keep off; hence the ark of Noah that "kept off" the flood. Aninteresting suggestion for the source of "Noah" is Nuah, a moon goddessfrom Babylonian times, with the subsequent ark being used to ferry men from oneworld to another, as when Osiris, a principal Egyptian god, ferries the dead tothe Otherworld; when Charon ferries his cargo of souls over the River Styx toHades; and when King Arthur is taken by barge to Avalon.

Similar stories of a universal flood that wipes out an errant mankind are to befound in many other cultures. The best-known of these is perhaps the biblicalaccount, briefly summarized above, this being but a variation of the Sumerianepic of Gilgamesh, a story so old that it predates Homer. In 1853 twelve claytablets were discovered in the excavated library of the Assyrian kingAshurbanipal. On these tablets, some of which date back to 2000 B.C., were anumber of ancient Babylonian stories and myths, the central hero of which wasGilgamesh, legendary king of Erech or Uruk.

Gilgamesh learns that the god Ea has told Utnapishtim, an ancestral being, tobuild a boat and fill it with his family and relatives, his valuables, andanimals both wild and tame; this ark is cube-shaped and measures some 120 cubitsalong each side (about 220 feet). A storm rages for six days and nights; on theseventh the ark comes to rest on Mount Nisir, whereupon Utnapishtim sends out adove, which returns, then a...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: International Marine/Ragged Mountain Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0071486569
• ISBN 13: 9780071486569
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 384
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland