The Sale of Winds

No landsman who goes to sea-or stays home and reads Marryat and Clark Russell Conrad and William McFee-can fail to be impressed with the observation that the sailor's ideas about weather differ materially from those prevailing on shore, and that he has a vocabulary peculiar to himself for discussing its doings. On land we generally think of the temperature of the air as the most important element of weather. The ups and downs of the thermometer form the staple of our weather conversations, but it seems to be all one to the sailor whether the rigging is stiff with frozen spray or the deck is oozing pitch in the inferno of the Red Sea.

The only meteorological instrument in which he takes much interest is one with which most landlubbers are entirely unfamiliar-the barometer. Both business and pleasure on terra firma are notoriously affected by rain and if snow. The mariner is concerned with these things only in so far as they interfere with clear vision. "Thick" weather-due either to rain, snow or fog-is a vastly more serious matter on the seas than on the land. The state of the sky, whether clear or clouded, is a fact that governs the whole tone of the weather according to the conceptions of shorefolk, whose hearts are warmed by sunshine and chilled by the lack of it; while the sailor is quite content if he sees the sun long enough to get a shot at it with his sextant.

Lastly, wind plays a far less prominent part in human affairs on land than it does at sea. Indeed the seaman often speaks of "weather" when he has in mind nothing more than wind. "Dirty weather," suggests to the landsman the idea of rain and mud, but in nautical parlance it means a blow. The "weather" side of a ship is the windward side. To "weather" a cape means to pass it to windward, and to "weather" a gale means, properly, to lie to, with head to wind, until its fury is spent. On etymological grounds the sailor is justified in thus identifying "weather" with "wind," for the former word comess to us from a Sanskrit root meaning to blow. Even landdwellers apply the names "weather vane" and "weathercock" to a device for showing the direction of the wind. The lore of the winds is richer and more picturesque among mariners than among men of any other class.

A host of nautical superstitions relating to winds and storms survived to a recent date, and some of them still flourish. Not so long ago the sale of winds, tied up bags, to credulous sailormen was a profitable industry, for which the Finns and Laplanders were especially celebrated. This remarkable business was still carried on at places on the English and Scottish coasts as recently as the middle of the Nineteenth Century, and probably exists in out-of-the-way corners of the earth to this day.