INTRODUCTION 



WHEN did man first go down to the sea in ships? 

 Who can say? It surely must have been far, far back of grandfather's 

 "good, old days." 



What did the sailor think when first he faced that alluring, charming, help- 

 ful, inviting, cruel, destructive, devastating, heartless stretch of water, his 

 frau craft set against those bufi^eting biUows? 



What more natural than a thought, perhaps even a stop, to "thank what- 

 ever gods may be," to offer a prayer for mercy at sea, to promise grateful 

 sacrifice for a safe trip, to give heartfelt thanks and to voice sincere rehef 

 when safely landed? Thriftily, might not this sacrifice not only care for the 

 latest voyage but also for the next to come? 



What more natural than that on later voyages the seasoned old salt should 

 call on the green shipmates to prove that they could not only stand the terrors 

 and strains and stresses so soon to begin, but that they had also enough of the 

 courage and the good fellow in their make-up to take in good humor the 

 joking and the ragging and the joshing accepted as part of daily life aboard 

 ship? 



The field for musing and speculation is both boundless and inviting. So too 

 is it exasperattagly and disappointingly limited and unproductive when a man 

 tries to find something more definite and reliable and rewarding than his own 

 questioning of just when and where and how did travelers tell what they knew 

 or felt about the way the crossing of the equator or any other important 

 stretch on land or sea was marked; when and why did the formula take present 

 shape and form, how much did one nationality take over from another. 



Man undoubtedly traveled by sea soon after he came to see the great 

 waters. Such records of those early days as come down to us tell little more 

 than we set out, landed, now and then suffered shipwreck. Egyptians, Phoe- 

 nicians, Greeks, Romans took to the sea as a thoroughfare so familiar as to call 

 for no comment other than that it was used. Iliad and Odyssey sing about 

 the sea travel, the ships, the sea folk, but I find no mention or suggestion of 

 any particular ceremony connected with the sea, as such. School boys thrill 

 as they hear Xenophon teU in the Anabasis how the Greeks shouted "thalassa! 

 thalassa!" when they saw the Euxine on their toilsome homeward plodding; 

 but if they danced with joy or offered prayers or sacrifices we get not one word. 



The Psahnist knew what men suffer when they "go down to the sea in ships," 

 and tells us that when they "do busiaess in great waters . . . they cry unto 

 Jehovah in their trouble, and he bringeth them out of their distresses, . . . 



[3] 



