THE NINTH WAVE.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1175, 10 July 1911, Page 9

THE NINTH WAVE.

Those who live on the waters, and are familiar with the sea in nil its different phases, come to differentiate and label tho waves that break over their vessels. Such has been (he custom from time immemorial, and Virgil went to the trouble of furnishing a regular catalogue. _ no sang of tho'friendly wave, the sinister wave, the wave ot good tidings, and the wave with the shining hair, Lach of the waves was surrounded by a wealth ot. lore, and thus it came about that the. ninth wave was spoken of with bateii breath as one that wronght death ana destruction. . . The superstition concerning the nintn wave is world-wide. It is to lie found 111 Hindoo mythology, among Iceland hsnerincn, and 'has affected our own mariners. Tennyson, in the "Holy Grail," refers to it:— And watched the great sea fall Wave after wave, each mightier than tho last,Till last a ninth one, gathering half the deep, And full o' voices, slowly rose, and plunged, Roaring, and all the wave was in a flame. Seamen professed to be able to tell the ninth wave almost by instinct, and during a storm they held their breath when fins wave struck the ship, for they believed that none but the ninth could send them to the bottom. So convinced were they of tho havoc wrought by tho ninth wave that they ofttimes spoke of it as tho death wave. The spot where it broke was believed to mark a burial ground of the dead. Tho superstition concerning the ninth wave is closely allied to the superstition that is attached to the ebb of the tide. The belief that people die on the ebb of the tide has been fathered by many of our greatest intellects. Shakespeare makes Falstaff die "even at the turning o' tho tide." Dickens was very fond of playing on this idea. More than one of his characters was affected, when in extremis, by the ebb of tho tide, and in the case of Barkis "it being high-water he went out with the tide." Little wonder, therefore, that people of less intelligence should bo affected by this superstition. Just as the ninth wave was the only one that would wreck a ship, so it was generally supposed that a man would not die until the ebb tide began to run. If he survived one' ebb tide he was certain to live to the next.