PORTUGUESE SAILORS.

Globe, Volume IV, Issue 315, 16 June 1875, Page 3

PORTUGUESE SAILORS.

(Pall Mall Budget.)

The “time-honoured” ceremony, as the report calls it, by which the Portuguese sailors are accustomed to celebrate Good Friday seems to have gone off last week at the docks with more than the usual spirit and success. The manner of performing it on board each Portuguese ship was precisely similar. Punctually at daybreak the effigy of the false apostle is hoisted to the masthead, with a placard fastened to its breast bearing the legend in Portuguese, “ This is Judas Iscariot,” a precaution which can scarcely be deemed unnecessary when we read that the figure of Iscariot was “ dressed in a sailor’s costume with jack boots.” The effigy remains mastheaded until about 6 a.m., when the entire crew assist in lowering it to the deck, the ship’s bell meanwhile keeping up an incessant clanging. The figure is then carried three times round the deck, and finally lashed _ to the capstan the crew belabouring it with knotted ropes and shouting. The clothes are then cut away in shreds, and, when the figure is completely denuded, the block of wood which does duty for the body is kicked all over the deck suspended to a line, thrown overboard into the docks and repeatedly dipped. Owing to the dock regulations the stump cannot be publicly burned, but it is chopped up into small fragments and handed over to the cook to be destroyed under the galley fire. The ceremony is one which is somewhat out of harmony with the “modem spirit,” but at the same time no great amount of public sympathy is likely to be felt for the object of these indignities. In spite of De Quincey’s ingenious attempt, Judas Iscariot still remains a distinctly unpopular character. Richard 111., |Tiberius, Marat, Lucezia Borgia, and many others, have all been found capable of “ taking” a coat of whitewash, but the rehabilitation of the traitor apostle is a work still to be performed, and one well calculated to awaken the ambition of the modern historian, who looks upon a character of excessive blackness in somewhat of the spirit in which a physician regards a “ beautiful case.”