In October 1718, off Cape Horn, a topman named William Cammell drowned in a storm aboard the privateer Speedwell. Shortly after, the ship’s second captain, Simon Hatley, shot an albatross that had been following the vessel, convinced the bird was an ill omen. Hatley was later captured and imprisoned by Spanish authorities, and his shipmate George Shelvocke wrote up the episode in his published account of the voyage – where it caught the eye of a young Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who turned it into “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Real sailors, in other words, could be exactly as superstitious as the poem suggests.
A Business Built on Bad Luck
Golden Age piracy was a business run almost entirely on trust and rumor, and where evidence ran out, superstition filled the gap. Sailors of every stripe, pirates included, treated the sea as a place where the wrong word or the wrong passenger could doom a voyage, and crews policed each other’s behavior accordingly.
Whistling, Women, and Unlucky Days
Whistling on deck was widely believed to “whistle up a wind” – useful in a calm, dangerous in anything else – with one standing exception: a ship’s cook was allowed to whistle freely, since it proved to the crew he wasn’t sampling the food meant for everyone else. Some sailors also treated whistling as suspect because coded whistles were an easy way for mutineers to signal each other without officers noticing, which made an idle tune sound like conspiracy. Women aboard were widely held to be bad luck, blamed for distracting the crew and provoking the sea itself; redheaded passengers carried a similar reputation. Setting sail on a Friday was avoided across the merchant and naval world alike; 19th-century Admiral William Henry Smyth later gave the day a Latin nickname, dies infaustus, the unlucky day, codifying a habit that was already centuries old.
Reading the Ship Itself
Some omens were practical dressed up as mystical. Rats were known to abandon a ship before it sank or caught fire, likely sensing rising water or smoke long before the crew did; sailors took a mass rat exodus at the dock as a warning sign and sometimes refused to board. A crew member seen as unlucky, deformed, or simply disliked could be labeled a “Jonah,” after the Biblical sailor thrown overboard to calm a storm, and blamed for a run of bad weather or bad prizes – a superstition that, on a pirate ship with no formal law beyond its own articles, could turn genuinely dangerous for the man singled out.
Sending the Dead Back to the Sea
Burial at sea followed its own ritual. The body was sewn into its own hammock, and tradition called for thirteen stitches, with the final one passed through the corpse’s nose – a gruesome final check that the sailor was truly dead, since a body that flinched at the needle had been buried alive. Two cannonballs were placed at the feet to carry the body down and, sailors believed, to keep the dead man’s spirit from following the ship home. None of this was official navy or merchant procedure; it was custom, passed from crew to crew, exactly the kind of practice pirates would have carried over from the merchant and naval ships most of them had served on before turning to piracy.
What the Evidence Actually Supports
Not every superstition attached to pirates today is well documented for their era specifically. The modern taboo against bananas aboard a boat, for instance, is widely repeated but its origins are murky and likely postdate the Golden Age considerably; treating it as period-authentic pirate lore outruns the evidence. What is well attested is the broader pattern: sailors who spent months at a time in genuine physical danger built an elaborate, half-practical, half-magical code for managing risk, and pirate crews, drawn from that same maritime world, inherited it wholesale.
Sources consulted: Cindy Vallar, “Pirates and Privateers – Superstitions and the Sea”; Wikipedia, “Sailors’ superstitions”; George Shelvocke’s “A Voyage Round the World” (1726) as summarized in secondary accounts of the Cape Horn albatross incident.
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