April 27th, 2012 at 3:27PM
When I worked on ships, seamen were a superstitious lot. When there was a bad storm, while the ship pitched and rolled, the crew, unable to eat or sleep, would gather in the messroom and grumble. Anyone who remembers Coleridge’s ancient mariner knows that seamen don’t blame the wind and tides for bad weather and rough seas. Rather, they blame a fellow member of the crew — someone who has, say, killed an albatross. During storms, they’d mumble darkly that a crew member had ‘Jonah’d’ the ship — done something wicked, while ashore, that caused the seas to rise up and take revenge. Inevitably, someone would point out that the likely cause of the foul weather was that one of our crew had committed the worst sin of all: not paying a whore. — Roberto Loiederman, a merchant seaman from 1966 to 1974, on what the Secret Service could learn from drunken sailors. (via washingtonpoststyle)
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