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The Sea In Their Blood

Yithian

Parish Watch
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Oct 29, 2002
Messages
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Location
East of Suez
A treat for Peter Greenaway and Michael Nyman fans as well as an eccentric analysis of how the British are shaped by the sea and view themselves as an island race.


Statistics: http://petergreenaway.org.uk/sea.htm

Some of the statistics are clearly out of date (it was produced in 1983), but the premise stands.

Edited: links replaced.
 
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This is just fantastic and I urge you to watch. Tall tales, family history and a seaside love of British eccentricity:

A search for the truth behind a fishy tale.

Sometime in the 1980s, Caspar Salmon's grandmother was invited to a gathering on the Welsh island of Anglesey, attended exclusively by people with fish surnames. Or so he says. Thirty years later, film-maker Charlie Lyne attempts to sort myth from reality.

Video Here:
https://www.theguardian.com/film/ng-interactive/2017/jun/30/fish-story-anglesey-video-fish-surnames
 
I once knew a Whiting. And, IIRC, I once sold a small boat to a Salmon, who wanted to do a Transatlantic race in it.

And the misforecast Hurricane was in October 1987: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Storm_of_1987
(I've written about that before, because it wrecked the boat I was living on at the time! :eek:)
 
I kept on thinking that it was a good job that nobody with the surname 'whale' came along.
 
I know someone called 'Ling'.
 
Full text now online (I particularly recommend the third chapter, which I have taken this extract from)

T. C. LETHBRIDGE
Boats and Boatmen


CHAPTER III
SUPERSTITION AND RITUAL

A BOAT is the work of men’s hands, so anyone might think that a sailor would regard his vessel in the same sort of way as a man views his other inanimate possessions — as no more than an extension of himself like his spade or his wheelbarrow. This is not the case, for directly a vessel takes the water she becomes a living thing in the eyes of seafarers. She has to be named like a human child and to be studied in her moods as if she were a wife, or even perhaps a goddess. This curious relationship between man and his creation is becoming less apparent year by year, but it is still there, even if it is no longer on the surface of a seaman's mind. To understand how this came about, it is necessary to go far into the past and try to recover ideas at the back of the minds of the earliest boatmen.

Man is little more adapted physically for movement in the water than he is for flying in the air. He learns to swim with difficulty and is not very good at it. When man took to making a boat to move himself about on the water, he was trusting himself to a new and alien environment full of hidden dangers. The water, whether river or sea, was unpredictable in its behaviour, much stronger than he was, and could drown him if it chose. It could be friendly, or it might be hostile. It is not strange, therefore, that primitive man should regard the river or the sea as having a personality of its own. You could anger it and it would drown you; or appease it, and it would carry you safely to where you wished to be. To make sure that it would be friendly, the best plan was to give it some other victim instead of yourself. And so man took to sacrificing somebody when a ship or fleet was launched. Theoretically, this was done to ensure a successful conclusion of the enterprise, but deep down in their minds men knew that the real reason was to give the waters a victim in place of themselves.

In spite, however, of these precautions, disaster still overtook the voyagers at times. Perhaps the sacrifice had not been big enough; perhaps the waters were offended by some unknown fault on the part of the mariners. There was another way to ensure added protection. This was by persuading some other great personality to take an interest in your adventure. It looks very much as if the sun, or shall we say the sun god, appeared to primitive man as the obvious force to be enlisted.

These are hypotheses based on probability. It may be interesting, however, to see whether any facts can be brought forward in their support. To do this it is necessary to range far in time and space. No one now sacrifices a victim to the God of the Sea. Is this statement quite accurate? Why is a bottle of wine or whisky broken on the stem of a great liner before she slips down the ways? To christen her, of course; but I do not think that is the answer. I believe that the bottle takes the place of a man, like the man, for instance, who was formerly sacrificed yearly by Annamese fishermen when the fishing fleet set out. It is the modern form of paying the price the sea god requires for the safety of the ship’s company. Perhaps the sea god thinks it a trifle mean, for more men have perished in the sea in the last forty years than ever before — “From rock and tempest, fire and foe”. It may be that the rock and tempest have not been claiming the number of victims they were wont to do, but the foe has excelled himself; and have we forgotten the Georges Pbilliepar and other great liners destroyed by fire?


Continued at full-length here:
https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.507552/2015.507552.Boats-And_djvu.txt
 
Lived by the sea (English Channel) all my life,apart from a year as a kid in NZ, it really is in your blood. You can just tell when it's high tide,when the Spring tides are due (not just in Spring),when a sea fog will come rolling in,and it does roll. Seriously, if I'm more than 40 miles or so from the sea it feels wrong. Every year non locals have to be rescued from the bottom of the cliffs or drown when they get caught in the mud. Dos'nt happen to locals.
 
Lived by the sea (English Channel) all my life,apart from a year as a kid in NZ, it really is in your blood. You can just tell when it's high tide,when the Spring tides are due (not just in Spring),when a sea fog will come rolling in,and it does roll. Seriously, if I'm more than 40 miles or so from the sea it feels wrong. Every year non locals have to be rescued from the bottom of the cliffs or drown when they get caught in the mud. Dos'nt happen to locals.

Where I live people are like that with trains.
 
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