Sailors, like other people, prognosticate winds and weather from the behavior of various birds and beasts, but they go a little farther than the rest of mankind in ascribing actual control of the elements to these creatures. The Ancient Mariner was reviled by his shipmates for shooting the albatross, “That made the breeze to blow.” We are indebted to the seamen of antiquity for the belief that kingfishers cast a spell upon the deep, so that calm weather prevails during the “halcyon days,” about the time of the winter solstice. Old salts still object to the presence of a cat on board ship, because she “carries a gale in her tail.” Clergymen are unpopular.
Sailors have not ceased to whistle for a wind, though the custom is less general than it was a century ago. Basil Hall, writing in 1811 of a calm at sea, says: “One might have thought that the ship was planted in a grove of trees, so numerous were the whistlers.” Scratching the mast is another superstitious method, not yet extinct, of raising a breeze. Some nautical authorities say the foremast should be chosen for this operation; others prescribe the mizzen.
Still another wind-raising process is to stick a knife in the mast, with the handle pointing in the direction from which the wind is desired to blow. At sea there are two distinct systems of describing the direction of the wind, while on land there is but one. The method common to sea and shore is to name the point of the compass from which it blows; but nine times out of ten the mariner prefers to indicate its direction with reference to the course of the ship-as “wind abaft, ” or “on the port beam,” and the like.
On land the force of a wind is commonly expressed in miles per hour (or meters per second outside of English-speaking countries). Sailors almost universally use the Beaufort Scale, in which there are 13 degrees, ranging from 0 (calm) to 12 (hurricane). In estimating the wind according to this scale due allowance must be made for the motion of the ship, and accuracy is attained only through long practice. The appearance of the surface of the sea; is a great aid in the process.
One result of the substitution of steam-power for sails is that fog has become a much graver danger to navigation than it was a few generations ago. In foggy weather there is generally little wind. Hence sailing craft automatically slow down when they enter a fog, and when sails were universal collisions in a fog were very rare. A steamer is under no such natural limitations.
