Never Say P*g: A superstitious Q&A with a sea captain turned author

He has logged more than 100,000 nautical miles, many of those as the captain and owner of North Star of Herschel Island, an old fur-trading ship that helped maintain Canadian sovereignty in the Arctic during the Cold War.  Now, R. Bruce Macdonald is out with a new book drawing on those many miles at sea, entitled Never Say P*g:  The Book of Sailors’ Superstitions.

John Ackermann: Bruce, the book begins with a great story about the time you almost stirred your tea with a knife.  I say almost because someone stopped you!  What happened?

Bruce Macdonald: Oh, I was just a young sailor signed on board as crew of what we now call a tall ship, a training ship for teenagers, a ship named Pathfinder, and I found myself in the galley all alone making a cup of tea.  And in walks the captain, the most feared and respected and revered person aboard, and I was just hoping that he would not speak to me. I kind of liken it to be [like] if you’ve found yourself as the junior assistant to a roadie on the Rolling Stones tour and Mick Jagger walked into the lunchroom and you’re just praying that he doesn’t ask you anything about music because you know nothing. Anyway, we each poured some water into our cups and then passed around the can of milk, what we used to call canned cow, and then I reached for an implement to stir our respective cups. Unfortunately, I picked up a knife and he clapped onto my wrist and then just roared in my ear, “Stir with a knife, trouble and strife!  Are trying to jinx the whole voyage?” And then he left me kind of shaking in my boots and everybody on board, the 28 crew, just kind of gave me the hairy eyeball for the rest of the day as the guy who just about jinxed the voyage.  That was my first real lesson in how superstitious sailors are. Then I made a life of it and became superstitious myself. In all the different ships and boats vessels I’ve sailed in, various places around the world, every ship has their own superstitions, and nobody tells you what they are, they don’t they tell you what the rules of the ship are, but you have to find out by trial and error, what’s allowed on board each vessel, and that’s really just what this collection is.

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Ackermann: Did you ever think that so many years later, you’d be collecting the superstitions in a book or that you’d even have enough to make a book out of?

Macdonald: Well, no. As a lifetime sailor, I know that I carry with me certain superstitions. I was just doing a dock walk here at the Vancouver Maritime Museum’s Heritage Harbour. And one of the boat owners, I’m not sure how the conversation even came up, but he just asked me why you can’t whistle on a boat. And so, we had a little chat about that and somebody else joined the conversation and they were asking why fishing boats don’t want to have bananas on board. And then, just really for my own amusement, I sat back aboard Northstar and I just started writing out all the ones that I could remember. And I think I got to about 100 and so I wrote to a bunch of sailors that I knew around the world and said, “What have I missed here?” and they added in a few more. And it just turned into a thing. I mean, there’s hundreds there and I’m sure that there’s thousands more that I didn’t record, but these are basically the ones that I’ve come across in my career.

Ackermann: Why do you think we’re so fascinated by these superstitions?

Macdonald: Well, I think that people in all walks of life are superstitious, whether they know it or not. We all carry certain superstitions and they’re kind of ingrained in us at a young age. For sailors, I think originally, you’re sailing literally off into the unknown and sea monsters and witches and devils and storms. And so, you’re looking for what I call, you know, sort of the original marine insurance. So, anything that you could do to get yourself from one port to another safely, you would do and it just kind of got passed along from generation to generation. Much like if you were to pull out an umbrella right now inside your room there and put it over your head, it would probably feel pretty uncomfortable to you or me or anybody who’s watching. You would think, “Well, you can’t do that.” That goes back to ancient Egypt when [an umbrella] was originally a sun parasol. And being inside, you’re already not partaking of the bounty of the sun god Ra. Now you’re putting up a second barrier, so you’re insulting this god, and most of us don’t worship the sun god Ra anymore, but we still don’t put umbrellas up overhead.

"Stir with a knife, trouble and strife!" Today on the #CityNewsBookshelf, I speak with sea captain and author R. Bruce Macdonald about "Never Say P*g: The Book of Sailors’ Superstitions," available from @Harbour_Publish. @CityNewsVAN @ArcticShip pic.twitter.com/lU9NkGD1Wi

— John Ackermann ???? (@jackermann) July 17, 2022

Ackermann: What do you hope the reader gets out of the book?

Macdonald: I think for the sailors, the hope and dream is that [the book] will just sort of sit there, maybe on the galley shelf, and when people are having the same kind of conversation that I had on the dock here, they can look it up. And what I’ve tried to do is do a deep dive on as many of these as I could and find out their origin story. And so, it’ll just spark conversation. And what I’m hoping is that people will write in their own [superstitions], write in the margins, cross out the ones that they don’t like, and then just pass it on to the next generation, and it just becomes a book that gets passed along.

Ackermann: And, finally, why can’t you say pig on board a vessel?

Macdonald: Well, like so many of these superstitions, this one could be traced back to the Holy Bible. And in this one, there was a fellow who is beside the Sea of Galilee, and he was consumed by, I guess what we would call the devil, but is consumed by evil. And Jesus came along, and he begged Jesus to take the demons from him and pipe them into a herd of swine or herd of pig, who are on this cliff, and Jesus did this. And the pigs became crazed and threw themselves off and drowned in the Sea of Galilee. So, pigs became associated with the devil. And just like saying Beetlejuice, you don’t say the word pig because it’s inviting the devil on board.

Never Say P*g:  The Book of Sailors’ Superstitions is available from Harbour Publishing.