Superstitions at Sea
Bring a banana onto the wrong fishing boat and you may be asked to take it straight back off. Whistle on deck and someone might tell you that you’re calling up a storm. Kill an albatross and, according to one of the most famous pieces of maritime folklore, you’ve just given everyone on board a very good reason to worry.
Sailors and fishermen have collected an extraordinary number of superstitions over the centuries. There are unlucky days to leave port, animals you shouldn’t mention, people you apparently don’t want to meet on the way to the boat and signs in the sky that tell you whether the sea is about to turn against you.
Some of these beliefs have fairly obvious roots in the dangers of working at sea. Others are much harder to explain. And while a few have become familiar almost everywhere, maritime folklore was never one universal set of rules. A Scottish fisherman, a Newfoundland skipper and a Hawaiian angler could all be superstitious about the sea without worrying about exactly the same things.
Why were sailors so superstitious?
If your livelihood depends on the sea, a lot can go wrong without giving you much warning. Weather changes, equipment fails, fish disappear and accidents happen miles from help. Before modern forecasting, radio and navigation systems, that uncertainty was even greater.
The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress describes traditional maritime beliefs as one of the most distinctive parts of life among sailors and fishermen. Its records include forbidden words, unlucky objects, rules about which days to sail and all sorts of signs used to predict weather or fishing luck.
That doesn’t mean every sailor seriously believed every warning. Plenty didn’t. But when you’re heading into an environment where a change in weather can become dangerous very quickly, “I don’t believe it, but don’t bring it on my boat anyway” is an understandable attitude.
Why is it unlucky to sail on a Friday?
Friday developed a particularly bad reputation among European and North American sailors. Starting a voyage on that day was supposed to invite trouble, and the belief lasted much longer than you might expect.
The United States Naval Institute notes that some US Navy departures during the Second World War were reportedly delayed to avoid leaving on a Friday. The usual explanation connects the fear with Christian tradition and the Crucifixion taking place on a Friday, although maritime superstitions rarely have one origin that can be proved beyond doubt.
Newfoundland fishermen knew the same warning. An 1896 collection preserved by Memorial University records Friday sailing as an established piece of local superstition, alongside rules about whistling and the direction in which a boat should be turned.
There’s also a famous story about a Royal Navy ship called HMS Friday. Supposedly, the Navy became so tired of the superstition that it built a ship on a Friday, launched it on a Friday and sent it to sea under a Captain Friday. Naturally, the ship then vanished.
It’s a good story and it isn’t true. No Royal Navy vessel called HMS Friday ever existed. The superstition about Friday is real, but the ship created to prove everyone wrong belongs to much later folklore.
Don’t whistle unless you really want more wind
Whistling on a boat has an awkward problem and depending on the tradition, it can either summon the wind you need or summon far more wind than you wanted.
The basic belief says that whistling calls up the wind. If you’re sitting completely becalmed, that might sound useful. If the weather is already looking questionable, it becomes a very bad idea.
Newfoundland folklore records fishermen whistling for wind and even throwing a half-penny overboard when a vessel was becalmed. In the version collected around Harbour Grace, the coin was thrown into the sea to buy wind “in the devil’s name.”
Elsewhere, whistling was simply forbidden because it could whistle up a gale. The New Zealand Maritime Museum includes whistling among traditional European sailing superstitions, with the warning that you could call a storm onto the ship.
There are practical explanations suggested for the rule too. Whistles could once be used for signalling aboard ship, so unnecessary whistling had the potential to cause confusion. That doesn’t explain every version of the superstition, but it gives a very ordinary reason why someone might have shouted at you to stop.
Why are bananas bad luck on a boat?
This is one of the maritime superstitions that’s very much alive. Turn up for a fishing trip carrying bananas and there are still captains who won’t let them aboard.
The usual warning is that bananas ruin the fishing, cause equipment trouble or bring general bad luck to the boat. The superstition is particularly familiar among recreational and commercial fishermen in the United States and the Pacific, although it’s now known much more widely.
What nobody can give you with much confidence is the original reason. Stories blame spiders hiding in banana cargo, fruit causing other food to ripen too quickly, dangerous conditions on fast banana ships and fishermen being unable to catch anything while those ships hurried their cargo to port. They all sound plausible enough, which is probably why they get repeated.
There’s little solid historical evidence proving any one of them. What we can document is the superstition itself. The USC Digital Folklore Archives records the no-bananas rule among fishermen in the Pacific Northwest, while another collection from Hawaii records fishermen refusing to take bananas aboard because they were believed to stop the fish biting.
One fisherman interviewed for the USC archive tried to prove the belief wrong by deliberately taking a large bunch of bananas aboard and returning with an excellent catch. His superstitious crewmate wasn’t impressed. He decided they would obviously have caught even more without the bananas.
Once a superstition can explain both a bad catch and a good one, it becomes quite difficult to argue with.
Hawaiian fishermen had other ways to ruin a fishing trip
Bananas aren’t the only fishing belief recorded in Hawaii. Sometimes just talking about the catch too confidently could supposedly spoil it before you had even reached the water.
The Bishop Museum has highlighted a Hawaiian-language newspaper story from 1926 that describes discussing a fishing trip beforehand as hoʻomanamana, or superstition. Children could tease someone preparing to fish by asking for the head of the fish they were going to catch. Saying it before the trip was supposedly enough to make sure the fishermen caught nothing.
That is a much more specific Hawaiian example than treating every Pacific fishing practice as one tradition. Hawaii has its own fishing folklore, just as other Pacific communities have theirs.
An albatross could be lucky until somebody killed it
If an albatross appeared around a ship, you left it alone. The bird could be treated as a good sign, and one old belief said albatrosses carried the souls of sailors who had died at sea.
Killing one was another matter entirely.
Mystic Seaport Museum records the belief that an albatross could represent the soul of a dead sailor and that harming one could turn good fortune into disaster. NOAA also notes the long association between albatrosses and good luck at sea.
Most people now know the superstition through Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1798 poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In the poem, a sailor kills an albatross that had been welcomed by the crew, and everything goes very badly from there. The dead bird is eventually hung around his neck, which is where we get the expression about having “an albatross around your neck.”
The poem helped make the unlucky albatross famous, but it would be too simple to claim that Coleridge invented every sailor belief surrounding the bird. Maritime traditions already gave seabirds supernatural meanings, and different crews didn’t necessarily agree on what an albatross meant.
Scottish fishermen had animals you weren’t supposed to mention
Some fishing communities took bad luck a step further. You didn’t need to bring an unlucky animal onto the boat. Saying its name could be enough.
In parts of Scotland, fishermen avoided words such as pig, swine, hare and rabbit while they were at sea. One nineteenth-century collection from the Moray Firth even records a fisherman refusing to keep a gull he had caught because an older man aboard considered having it on the boat unlucky.
Shetland developed an especially elaborate version of this. Fishermen used substitute words at sea instead of saying the ordinary names of animals, people and everyday objects that were considered unlucky.
The University of Edinburgh describes this taboo language as part of a much wider North Atlantic fishing tradition. Similar rules were recorded in Norway, Shetland and other communities around the North Sea.
In Shetland, some of the substitute words preserved older Norse vocabulary long after the islands’ everyday language had changed. A fisherman might therefore be speaking English on land and switch to a strange collection of inherited sea words once the boat was out fishing.
That’s one of the more interesting places where Scottish and Scandinavian maritime folklore meet. The superstition wasn’t just about what you did at sea. It could change the words you were willing to say.
Norwegian fishermen had forbidden words too
The same fear of naming the wrong thing was recorded along the Norwegian coast. Fishermen in some communities avoided ordinary words for people and land animals while they were at sea and replaced them with safer nicknames.
Priests and livestock were among the things that could be troublesome to mention. The University of Edinburgh’s research into North Atlantic fishing taboos traces this kind of sea language through western Norway and across to Shetland, showing that it wasn’t just an isolated Scottish habit.
You don’t need to assume every Norwegian fisherman followed the same list. These taboos were intensely local. One harbour could fear a word that meant absolutely nothing to fishermen a few miles away.
That local variation is probably why the lists can look so strange now. Pigs, priests, cats, rabbits, sheep and other perfectly ordinary things could all become dangerous once someone decided saying the name at sea was asking for trouble.
Scottish mermaids weren’t offering sailors a friendly swim
Modern mermaids have had a considerable image makeover. In older Scottish maritime folklore, seeing one could be a very bad omen.
Historic Environment Scotland records a South Uist story in which fishermen see a mermaid and everyone aboard is expected to throw something to her.
The skipper has nothing suitable, so he throws his knife. The mermaid catches it and disappears. The rest of the crew understand what this means but don’t tell him. The knife has turned the encounter into a warning that he will drown, and according to the story, he and another man do drown the following spring.
That makes the mermaid an actual omen within the story rather than just a sea monster added for entertainment. The sailors see her, a particular thing happens, and they understand it as a warning of a death that hasn’t happened yet.
Newfoundland boats came with plenty of rules of their own
Newfoundland fishing folklore is full of small things that could apparently decide whether a voyage went well before the crew had caught a single fish.
Whistling on the water could bring wind. Turning a boat the wrong way when leaving the fishing ground was unlucky. Turning a hatch cover upside down could cause trouble. A fisherman known for repeatedly having unsuccessful voyages could even be treated as a jinker, someone whose bad luck might infect the trip.
An 1896 collection digitised by Memorial University preserves several of these Newfoundland fishing superstitions. It records fishermen refusing to leave on Friday, avoiding certain movements of the boat and worrying about whether an unlucky person had joined the crew.
Another Newfoundland belief put a horseshoe in the boat for good luck, while fishermen could spit on their bait before casting it. If the weather refused to cooperate, a coin thrown into the sea might persuade the wind to turn up.
These weren’t necessarily followed by every fishing community on the island. Newfoundland’s coastline is enormous, and local folklore could change from one harbour to the next.
A shark following the ship could mean someone was going to die
Sharks didn’t need much help looking ominous, and sailor folklore gave them another reason to make the crew uncomfortable.
An old belief said that a shark persistently following a ship was waiting for somebody aboard to die. Once the body went overboard, the shark would supposedly get what it had been following the vessel for.
The Library of Congress maritime folklore guide records supernatural beliefs and omens as an important part of sailors’ working culture, while historical American collections include the shark-following-the-ship warning among older seamen’s beliefs.
Seeing a shark around a wooden ship was hardly unusual, of course. Once the animal had been given a reputation for waiting on a death, every shark that stayed alongside for a while could suddenly look as though it knew something the crew didn’t.
Rats leaving a ship were a warning to leave too
If rats started abandoning a ship before it sailed, sailors could take that as a particularly bad sign. The animals were supposedly aware that the vessel was doomed and were getting themselves off while they still had the chance.
Unlike plenty of maritime superstitions, this one has at least a practical idea hiding inside it. Rats live low in a ship and could potentially notice water, structural problems or other changes before the crew did. That doesn’t mean they can predict a shipwreck, but it gives the superstition a reason to feel convincing.
The belief survived despite the obvious contradiction that sailors generally spent a great deal of effort trying to keep rats off ships in the first place. Apparently rats aboard were unwelcome, but rats suddenly deciding to leave were worse.
Why is changing a boat’s name supposed to be bad luck?
Buy a second-hand boat and dislike its name? Maritime superstition says you should think carefully before painting a new one on the stern.
Changing the name of a ship or boat has long been treated as unlucky. The New Zealand Maritime Museum includes renaming a vessel among traditional sailing taboos.
You’ll find modern ceremonies online that promise to remove the old name from the records of Poseidon or Neptune before the new one is revealed. Those rituals can be great fun, but you should be cautious about claims that every detail comes directly from an ancient sailor ceremony. A lot of the elaborate renaming instructions circulating today are much newer than the superstition itself.
The older idea is much simpler. A ship already has an identity and a history. Changing its name means interfering with something that has already carried crews safely across the water, and sailors have never been especially keen on unnecessarily testing their luck.
A ship could be given good luck before it even touched the water
Not every sailor superstition was about avoiding disaster. Some were supposed to build good luck into the vessel from the beginning.
Coins have been placed beneath masts or incorporated into ships during construction, and vessels have long been ceremonially christened when they were launched. The American Folklife Center lists placing a coin beneath the mast and breaking a bottle over the bow among maritime beliefs associated with good luck.
A christening that went wrong could therefore look ominous. The Great Lakes steamer Adella Shores, launched in Michigan in 1894, was christened with water rather than alcohol because the owner’s family didn’t drink. The vessel later disappeared on Lake Superior in 1909 with everyone aboard.
The Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society notes that an old sailor could easily have treated that unusual christening as a bad omen. That doesn’t mean the water had anything to do with the sinking. It shows what happens once a tragedy gives an earlier event a much darker meaning.
Red sky at night isn’t entirely superstition
“Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Red sky in morning, sailor’s warning” sounds exactly like the sort of weather rhyme that should belong entirely to folklore.
This one is different because there’s some science behind it.
The Library of Congress explains why the saying can work under the right weather conditions. In regions where weather systems usually travel from west to east, a red sunset can indicate stable air approaching from the west. A strongly red sunrise can mean that the clearer weather has already moved past and wetter weather is approaching.
It isn’t a guaranteed forecast and it doesn’t work everywhere, but sailors weren’t imagining the connection completely. Some pieces of sea lore survived because generations of people watching the weather had noticed something real.
Were women really considered bad luck on ships?
Yes, in some maritime traditions, although this one says much more about the sailors and the society they lived in than it does about women.
Women aboard ship could be labelled unlucky, and some fishermen were uneasy even about meeting a woman on the way to the boat. Red-haired women received an especially unfair share of the blame in some British and Irish traditions.
These beliefs weren’t universal, and women have worked, travelled and lived at sea throughout maritime history despite the superstition. The New Zealand Maritime Museum includes several of these older European warnings in its collection of sailing superstitions.
There’s also an obvious contradiction in the old claim that women angered the sea. Ships were frequently decorated with female figureheads, sometimes bare-breasted, and those figures could themselves be credited with watching over the vessel. Maritime superstition has never been especially bothered by contradicting itself.
Why do sailor superstitions survive?
A modern skipper has weather radar, satellite forecasts, GPS and equipment that an eighteenth-century crew couldn’t have imagined. None of that has completely killed the superstition about bananas.
That tells you something about how these beliefs work. They aren’t always kept because someone seriously expects a piece of fruit to wreck the engine or a whistle to summon a hurricane. Sometimes following the rule is part of belonging to the crew. Someone taught it to you, everyone knows it, and ignoring it feels unnecessary.
The sea also leaves plenty of room for coincidence. You take a banana aboard and the fishing is terrible. You leave on Friday and the engine fails. You kill a seabird and a storm arrives that evening. Once those two events have been connected in your head, the superstition has a new story keeping it alive.
And if your captain tells you the bananas are staying on the dock, proving a point probably isn’t worth spending the entire trip being blamed for every fish that doesn’t bite.
Explore more warnings, lucky signs and traditional beliefs in Superstitions and Omens.