When a ship was launched, it was a common practice to provide her with a guardian spirit or god by making her roll over the body of a human victim. The Norwegian vikings used to “redden their rollers” with human blood. That is to say, when a warship was launched, human victims were lashed to the round logs over which the galley was run down to the sea, so that the stem was sprinkled with their spurting blood. Thus the victim was incorporated, as it were, in the very planks of the vessel. Captain Cook found the South Sea Islanders similarly christening their war-canoes with blood. In 1784, says Mr. William Simpson, at the launching of one of the Bey of Tripoli’s cruisers, “a black slave was led forward and fastened at the prow of the vessel to influence a happy reception in the ocean.” And Mr. Speth quotes a newspaper account of the sacrifice of a sheep when the first caique for “Constantinople at Olympia” was launched in the Bosphorus. In many other cases, it is noted that a victim, human or animal, is slaughtered at the launching of a ship. Our own ceremony of breaking a bottle of wine over the bows is the last relic of this barbarous practice. Here as elsewhere red wine does duty for blood, in virtue of its colour. I do not doubt that the images of gods in the bow of a ship were originally idols in which the spirits thus liberated might dwell, and that it was to them the sailors prayed for assistance in storm or peril. The god was bound up in the very fabric of the vessel. The modern figure-head still represents these gods; figure-heads essentially similar to the domestic idols occur on New Zealand and Polynesian war-canoes. The {264}canoes of the Solomon Islanders, for example, “often have as figure-head a carved representation of the upper half of a man, who holds in his hands a human head.” This head, known as the “canoe-god” or “charm,” “represents the life taken when the canoe was first used.” A canoe of importance “required a life for its inauguration,” says Dr. Codrington.