Nautical Folklore: Superstition of Friday

April 16, 2004 · 1 min read

The reluctance of seamen to sail on a Friday reached such epic proportions, that in the 1800s the British Government decided to take strong measures to prove the fallacy of the superstition.  They laid the keel of a new vessel on Friday, selected her crew on a Friday, launched her on a Friday and named her HMS Friday.  They then placed her in command of one Captain James Friday and sent her to sea for the first time on a Friday.  The scheme worked well, and had only one drawback ... neither ship nor crew was ever heard from again.

That may seem extreme, but Snopes seems to agree.  Google finds lots of HMS Friday references.  Whether true or not, people seem to want it to be true.  At least you are certain I posted this on a Friday.

Update:  If you are interested, there were 172 Friday the 13ths during the 18th century (the 1700s), another 172 in the 19th century (the 1800s), and another 172 this past century.  A web page with a Java script that can provide you a list during any time period is available here.  Also, the story above is difficult to verify since several large lists of Royal Navy ship names through the years do not include an HMS Friday.

This article is part of the GWB Archives. Original Author: Mark Treadwell

New on Geeks with Blogs

  • We Won The One Award I Actually Care About

    Full Scale made the Inc. 5000 for the fifth year straight, the 12th listing across my three companies. Here is why the one award you cannot buy is worth stopping for.

  • Your Customers Build the Features Now

    I let a tool I liked sit dead for a year rather than build the features I wanted. An MCP server meant I never had to, and your customers can do the same to your product.

  • Get the Size of a Directory in Linux the Easy Way

    du -sh for the quick answer, ncdu for the cleanup, df for the disk itself: every command for checking directory size in Linux, plus why du and df never agree.

  • Vim Search and Replace: The Ultimate Guide

    One :%s command replaces every match in a file before a find dialog would even open. The Vim substitute patterns worth the muscle memory: flags, ranges, capture groups, and multi-file edits.