Jack Tar was manly, able, and brave, but gullible as a child when faced with the unknown. If he was the sailor that landlubbers wanted to believe in, what was the reality? We are trained to dismiss stereotypes, but evidence suggests that sailors did in fact believe what they were said to believe. The cost of cauls, sold as a preventative against drowning for sums ranging from £1 10s to £6 6s, gives a metric of how seriously people took superstition. And officers were as prone to nail up a horseshoe as their men were. They shared a culture of the uncanny except when it risked discipline.
Sailors may have felt themselves a breed apart, but they devoured the ballads and chapbooks produced by publishers on land. Stories were a valuable currency on deck; a cabin boy who had picked up a repertoire at home found he staved off bullying at sea. But folklore would be modified for the maritime environment. The romance of the Flying Dutchman, as developed on land, dwells on his curse and his fate: seafarers were more interested in what it meant to see him. They weren’t even bothered whether the name belonged to the ship or its captain.
There were innumerable omens of calamity at sea, and very few charms to ensure good luck, quite the opposite to how things were on land. Talk of ill luck could hint at unseaworthiness without the punishments that awaited those who spoke out of turn; rats might desert a sinking ship without a qualm, but then rats weren’t on contract. Not until the end of the nineteenth century did steam liberate men from their dependence on wind and tide, disenchanting their world. But the ocean is still big, and ships are small.
Though social historians like to quarry folklore for its latent messages, maritime mysteries do not always lend themselves to this. Ghosts were feared and debated, but mermaids were simply seen. Of course, beings who were 50% naked girl could not be without interest, and one can speculate on the relations between seamen and an ocean which, like their ships, was gendered feminine. Drowning as an eroticised death at the hands of the sea-woman might tickle a landsman’s taste, but the usual response of a sailor to a mermaid was to take a shot at it. Like sea-serpents, phantom islands, and the perils of the Sargasso Sea, they had the attraction of indeterminate status: it was not their meaning, but the perpetual curiosity about whether they were real that fuelled onboard discussion and the letters page of newspapers.
The Perilous Deep is an ambitious survey of narratives and superstitions, ghosts and omens, monsters and mysteries across the Atlantic through the days of sail, with a nod to their classical and medieval antecedents. But salt water makes poor glue and the different themes do not always hold together. Who are the folk of which this was the lore? The first four chapters deal with deep-sea sailors, essentially an industrial group: they didn’t want to be on the water, so much that their vision of damnation was eternal seafaring, whether in the company of the Flying Dutchman or as a lonely albatross. But ports were communities in their own right, with a perspective very different from the ships which brought their trade; and coastal villages were different again. They perpetuated themselves over generations instead of being broken up and reconstituted, like ships, with new members at each voyage; they saw the sea as a resource to be exploited, not an obstacle to be endured. But it was a resource that could kill. Those who are lost at sea are never fully, socially dead; they are in limbo, like ghosts, and like ghosts they call the living to join them. There is a kind of survivor guilt at merely being alive in a fishing village. This feeds into the mixed celebration and horror of wrecker stories, though as Karl Bell notes, much wrecker lore is retrospective fabulation.
On smugglers he is less skeptical, repeating tales of how they invented ghosts to terrify the locals. This is an antiquarian fancy passed from guidebook to guidebook: certainly, Black Shuck in his original manifestation had nothing to do with smugglers. The Perilous Deep casts its net very wide, and some sections are researched in more depth than others, while the last chapter sees an awkward shift of gear from oral to popular culture: what have Godzilla or Atlantis to do with folk communities? But the discussion of this modern lore is engrossing, as is the rest of the book. It is just the thing for a long sea voyage.
[Review Length: 776 words • Review posted on November 12, 2025]