6 Crossing the Line 



Wait just ten years, and later, under 1529, we shall see below the first news 

 about special marking of the crossing, when Jean Pamientier sails from France 

 and sings a Mass, largely if not purely a religious ceremony. 



AU the writers quoted so far are Latins. How about the northerners? What 

 do we hear when Sir Francis Drake sailed to the South Seas to singe the 

 Spaniard's beard? The Reverend Master Francis Fletcher gives us plenty of 

 detail as to how Drake had been out of sight of land some 63 days before 

 "passing the hne equinoctiall the 17. day [of February 1577] . . . Wee often 

 met vdth aduerse winds, vnwelcome stormes, and to vs ( at that time ) lesse 

 welcome cahnes, and being as it were in the bosome of the burning zone, wee 

 felt the efiFects of sultring heat, not without the aflFrights of flashing Hghtnings, 

 and terrifyings of often claps of thunder." * May one suppose that if any relig- 

 ious ceremony had marked the crossing that the "Preacher in this imploy- 

 ment" would have told us? 



Accept aU this as one more time when writers of books refuse to glimpse 

 beforehand all the questions we later readers of those books may choose to 

 pose, then stop a moment to ask if it is unfair to think that some formal cere- 

 mony came with the passing of any well-known landmark or position, such as 

 the Straits of Gibraltar, the Skagerrak and Kattegat, the clearing of the Eng- 

 Hsh Channel or the reaching of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, the 

 Tropics of Cancer or Capricorn, as well as the swinging of the sun from north 

 to south? Indeed, why limit it to the sea? We shall see later that the mouth of 

 the River Platte served as such a point in the westward movement in this 

 coimtry early in the nineteenth century; also the height of land between the 

 Mississippi and Great Lakes systems to the south and the Arctic and Hudson 

 Bay systems to the north.f 



Even today do we see a variation of the equatorial version of the ceremony 

 develop in the passing over the 180th meridian or the crossing of the Arctic 

 Circle. The airmen too have their version, as their Hmits of space and speed 

 must perforce change some details. Records of sea or air voyages to the South 

 Pole seem to say nothing about it. Was the crossing unmarked, or was the 

 tale kept from the uninitiated? Few voyages from south to north mention it, 

 though we shall find one lone tale about it set down below with date about 

 1910. Several passengers on ships to or from the Cape of Good Hope have 



* The World Encompassed, by Sir Francis Drake, carefully collected out of the notes of Master 

 Francis Fletcher, Preacher in this iraployment, and divers others his followers. London, 1628. 

 p. 12. 



t In The Mariner's Mirror, May, 1954, v. 40, no. 2, p. 161-162, Henning Henningsen reports he 

 has material showing that for 33 points in Europe some form of baptism was practiced. 



