The mention of "astrologers and soothsayers" reminds us that sailors have always had the reputation of being exceptionally superstitious. I doubt if this is still true--at any rate as regards the Royal Navy. Take the proverbial bad luck of sailing on a Friday. My own sea experience, which goes back for a good many years, is that Friday was a very favourite day for going to sea. We often left harbour on Fridays. I think it was because on Saturday we got a good clear day for cleaning up the ship, then came Sunday--a quiet day--so that everything and everybody was nicely settled down by Monday morning, and we could start fair on the weekly routine. But from what we know of life in the Middle Ages it would have been indeed strange if seamen had _not_ been superstitious. The wonders and dangers of the deep were very real and close in those days of cogs and galleys--veritably mere specks on the ocean. It is to be feared that seamen of later ages had not the same dread of going to sea in debt as De Joinville the Crusader,[14] or the expression "to pay with the fore-topsail" would never have arisen. Like Chaucer's seaman, some of them "of nice conscience took ... no keep", and were very glad to escape their creditors by hoisting sail and putting to sea. "Sailors have ever been superstitious," says a French writer on the Middle Ages;[15] "their credulous brains are the parents of all the fantastic beings and animals that they persuade themselves that they have seen in their wanderings, and with which they have peopled the mysterious depths of the ocean. The syrens of antiquity, the monsters of Scylla and Charybdis, have been far surpassed by modern legendary creations, such as the 'Kraken', a gigantic mass of pulp which attacked and dragged down the largest ships; the 'Bishop Fish', which, mitre on head, blessed and then devoured shipwrecked mariners; the 'Black Hand', which, even in the days of Columbus, was despicted as marking the entrance to the 'Sunless Ocean'; and the numerous troops of hideous demons, one of whom, in the sight of the whole French Fleet of Crusaders, on their way to attack the Island of Mitylene, in the reign of Louis XII, clutched and swallowed up a profligate sailor who had 'blasphemed and defied the Holy Virgin'."