MDMD2 Chap 6---Pollywogs Live Yet!

[dennis grace]

Eric posits:

>     As about 800 former Hong Kong Civil Service aboard HMS Primrose
>and the P&O liner Orianna can now firmly attest, the Pollywog rites at
>the crossing of the equator are still firmly a part of British sea-board life. 
>However, now they are merely another watered-down entertainment among 
>a thousand other absurd ship-board entertainments (overeating, 
>shuttleboard, table-tennis, overeating, line-dancing, massage, overeating),
>where once they were a way of keeping sane in the enourmous number
>of days abord ship. (Hence also the enourmous attention sailors were happy
>to pay to details of shipboard neatness.)

Yeah, well, commercial sailing vessels water down the entire seagoing
experience. Sailors aboard military and merchant ships still give different
accounts.  As a Shellback (a term TRP seems to have missed--the
post-equatorial form), a Bluenose (crossed the arctic circle) and a Dragon
(international dateline), I can tell you that the traditions are alive,
humiliating, disgusting, and even a bit dangerous--though less so than of
old.  Take for example the kissing of the baby's belly.  

The 18th Century version went something like this:  the fatest shellback on
board was stripped to the waist (sometimes diapered) and set upon a barrel
with his belly tarred and a cherry stuck into his navel.  Each Pollywog was
ordered by Neptune (the eldest Shellback on board--the real chain of command
having been transgressed for the event) to "kiss" the baby's belly--i.e. try
to remove the cherry without tasting any tar.  Of course, as soon as a tar
got his face within a few inches of the belly, poised with mouth open, the
baby would grab the wog's head and ram his face into the tar.  Then the wog
could spend a few hours trying to get the tar out of his teeth, nostrils,
and eyebrows. 

The only difference in the ceremony I experience in the 1980s aboard a US
submarine was that the tar had been replaced with a mixture of chicken fat
and anchovy paste.  The only "entertaining" part of the experience for the
pollywogs was that our CO was also a pollywog.

I wonder if the crews of the HMS Primrose and the P&O liner Orianna had a
separate, more thorough ceremony than the passengers?

dgg

_____________________________
Dennis Grace
University of Texas at Austin
English Department
Recovering Medievalist
amazing at mail.utexas.edu

The banana is great, but the skin of the banana is greater still.
                                                        -George Orwell