Appendixes — Crossing in Scandinavian Waters 225 



baptism is celebrated with good hard drinking for the money the baptized seaman has paid 

 for his shave. 



The fishermen of the coast, too, have long known this baptism and therefore come in their 

 boats alongside the ships that pass KuUisaar to sell gin that is rather cheap, but at the same 

 time fairly strong. 



The begging for money and the baptism itself were thought rather 

 inconvenient by the victims, and it is not sm'prising that the laws of some 

 countries tried to suppress the baptism. Already at the beginning of the 

 seventeenth century the Dutch East India Company forbade all such cus- 

 toms on its ships and converted them into a decent festival with extra wine 

 and food for the crew, at the expense of the Company, in order better to 

 control what might arise out of the rude fun. Of course it must have been 

 difficult to maintain such a prohibition, but in reahty I know only one record 

 of a Dutch baptism on crossing the Line till the end of the eighteenth cen- 

 tury,^^ whereas I have found at least tliree Portuguese, six Enghsh and 

 twenty-three French descriptions of this custom diuring the same time. 



The Swedish king, Carl XI, put the following paragraph, most likely taken 

 from the Dutch ordinance, into his Sea-Law, 1667, Sweriges Rikes Sjö-Lag:^'^ 



About the baptism of sailors 



When a master in future sails past Kullen or another cape or point where people have been 

 accustomed to baptize those who have not sailed that way before, from this date such baptism 

 wall be neither tolerated nor permitted, but the master must give for each sailor, who has not 

 sailed there before, a pot of wine for each table-company ( mess ) among the sailors, so that every 

 man may get a drink. But other people on board shall be quite free, unies they, of their own good 

 wdll, are willing to give something for the benefit of the sailors. If anyone forcibly acts against 

 this decree, he vdll be punished at the judge's discretion. 



We find another more severe prohibition in the famous Danish lawcodi- 



fication. Christian V's Danske Lov, 1683. The so-called hjzinse-paragraph 



(4-1-20) runs: 



No one of the ship's crew is from this date allowed to demand money or money's value from 

 those who may be on board a ship, either sailors or travellers, when they come upon a certain 

 water where they have not saued before, far less threaten them, after old bad uses, with being 

 soused with water and the hke, but the master shall at once punish everyone who ventures to do 

 this with water and bread (i. e. severe imprisonment) for tliree days. 



Here the master of the ship is not obliged to give wine or brandy to his 

 crew as in the Dutch and Swedish ships. On the other hand, we know that 

 they have occasionally done it. 



It vsdll of course scarcely be necessary to tell that this regulation was not 

 at all obeyed. The Danish sailors continued to h0nse, in Danish waters, at 

 Berlengas (Portugal) and, after about the year 1750, at the Equator. 



Kullen was without doubt the most important h0nse--pla.ce in Scandina- 

 vian waters, because the Sound was the international shipping-route of the 

 North. But there were a lot of other places, where the same custom of 



22 The Voyage of Fr. Leguat. . . , Hakluyt, Vol. LXXXII (1891), pp. 19 seq. 



23 Skipmanna-Balken, § 20. 



