CHRISTENING SHIPS

Hokitika Guardian, 8 February 1926, Page 3

CHRISTENING SHIPS

AMERICA’S NEW .METHOD. NEW YORK, December 18. Though prohibition only forbids the use of intoxicating liquors for beverage purposes, American shipbuilders have abandoned the practice of christening new vessels with a bottle of champagne. To-day witnessed the inauguration of a new maritime custom. At the launching of the new steamer Brooklyn for Florida trade the owners christened her by breaking a 101 b jar of ice-cream over the how. CAN ICE-CREAM REREACE CHAMPAGNE?

.Joint Blunt, writing in the London “ Daily Mail ” apropos of the above, says:— f do not know how long it is since ships were first christened by having a bottle of wine broken over their bows —the origin of most accepted customs is lost in antiquity—but, at any rate, it has cemc to have for our miiuls a kind of symbolic propriety and the action seems dignified and even impres-

sive. But what arc \vc to say of the latest American way of christening a vessel, which consists of breaking a jar of icecream over it:-' Could anything be more trivially fantastic and out of place? Why, one might just as well use cold-cream as ice-cream : the one sounds no worse than the other. This linal degradation of an ancient custom is not the least of the disadvantages prohibition has imposed upon a great nation. WINE AXI) CEREMONY. Throughout the ages wine has always bad a ceremonial significance, but the only ideas that ice-cream calls up are frivolous. It outrages the fitness of things that a ship should take to the water smeared with a strawberry ice. Yet all this just shows bow deeply ingrained in human nature is the love of ritual and ceremony. One would have thought that if the Americans could not use wine, they would use nothing; but, no, they must have tlieii magic rites even if only with ice-cream. We laugh at the survival of pageantry which seems often such an anachroninn in these modern times, but in our heart of hearts we delight in it and would he sorry to see it vanish. Indeed, if all the pageantry of life were officially abolished, we should find substitutes for it, just,as the Americans have done, in the ease of wine. And perhaps in a couple of hundred years or so ice-cream will appear to our descendants as the proper substance with which to launch a ship. For it is tradition that sanctifies custom. and no doubt many of our present customs would appear rather ludicrous if we could dissociate them, so to speak, from their context. EQUALLY FATUOUS. We accept, many things as lit and proper simply because we have been brought ii]) so to accept them. Blit no doubt to the perfectly logical inhabitant of some other planet a great many of our customs would be utterly menni ngless.

T am, indeed, pretty sure that to such a one the breaking of a bottle of champagne over a vessel would seem as equally fatuous, as equally the survival of some primitive inxPnot, as the breaking of a jar of ice-cream. Rut, thank goodness, we are not the victims of pure reason! Life would be intolerably drab if we only thought and did what logic dictated.