Why We Don’t Whistle
By Andrew Webster

At a farmers’ market in Roseau, Dominica, I am wandering from table to table sampling bananas, melons, citrus, and a variety of other Caribbean foods. It is difficult to estimate the number of people in a crowd, but there could be a thousand people in the streets on this Saturday morning. I meet a man selling grapefruit, four for a dollar. I am just getting breakfast, so I only want one. He smiles, amused, and says there is no charge.

As I stand by his table peeling the citrus, I start to ask this man some questions about farming. How big is a typical Dominican farm and what percentage of the population make a living this way? Do most farmers fertilize with manure? Do they use herbicides? Do they have tractors?

Although I am genuinely curious about these things, farming is not at the heart of what I really want to know. What truly interests me are the ways an ordinary person prays in Dominica. What are the local rituals and customs that fuel this culture?

I have, for quite some time, held an assumption that people are most inspired to pray for that which is beyond their control. When people get to a point (or fear getting to a point) where they can’t solve a problem, they develop rituals, traditions, and superstitions – all of which strengthen cultures by giving them a unique identity.

By design, technology aims to increase people’s control over their world and, in so doing, makes rituals obsolete. For this reason, I believe our modern prayers are lame in comparison to those of our ancestors.

For example, as recently as the 1920’s, before the widespread use of chemical fertilizers, it was not uncommon for a farmer in the Midwest to sow crops only on the full moon while following his wife through the fields and bouncing seeds off her naked bottom. While to our modern sensibilities, accustomed to the guarantee that food will always stock the grocery store shelves, a ritual like this may seem silly, we must consider the lengths that people will go to avoid being hungry.

You can imagine my disappointment as I am told that most Dominican farmers are now heavily use chemical fertilizers and pesticides in their fields. I wonder how many Dominican farming rituals have been abandoned as this country, seemingly isolated from the industrialization that one experiences in other parts of the Caribbean, has begun to adopt aspects of the technological revolution.

On Saint Patrick’s Day, 2005, I am on board the Harvey Gamage—a 131-foot schooner that will sail from the Caribbean to New York with a crew of thirty-three people (teachers and students) who are learning to sail and studying natural and cultural history along the way. As I write this paper for my Maritime History class, the boat rocks to and fro in the waves… I wonder how the prayers of a sailor compare to those of a farmer.

Temporarily suspending any prejudice against the man for instigating a genocide, let us consider Christopher Columbus. Like all sailors of his day and like countless before, Columbus would travel for thousands of miles across the ocean with no way of calculating longitude and no certain knowledge of exactly how long the voyage would last. Would there be enough food? enough fresh water? Would there be wind? storms? monsters? The number of unknown factors old seamen had to contemplate is countless.

Suffice to say, maritime culture has evolved where the concept of having control over the fate of a ship is laughable. It is no surprise that a seafaring lifestyle is steeped in ritual, tradition, and superstition.

The Ocean Almanac lists forty-four of the most common maritime superstitions. For example, it is considered bad luck to begin a voyage on a Friday. It is also bad luck to step on board a ship with your left foot first, throw stones into the sea, have a black traveling bag, have flowers on board, look back at a port once the ship has left, meet a red haired person on the day a ship leaves port, have a priest on board, have a woman on board, use the word “drown” or “pig,” kill an albatross, dolphin or gull, hand a sailor a flag between the rungs of a ladder, lose a mop or bucket overboard, cut fingernails or hair at sea, hear church bells, or see a dog near fishing tackle, just to name a few. I wonder how many more the crews of the Nina, the Pinta, or the Santa Maria could name.

Three hundred and twenty-nine years after Columbus’s first trip to America, twenty sailors left Nantucket, Massachusetts aboard the whaleship Essex. At this point, technology had advanced to where accurate maps and clocks enabled navigators to chart their location at sea; still the Essex met a terrible end when a large sperm whale attacked and sank their ship. As their vessel slowly submerged into the sea, the men piled aboard three small row boats that had been rigged with small sails. With barely any food or fresh water, the crew drifted across the Pacific Ocean for ninety-three days. Starved and dehydrated, the men eventually resorted to human sacrifice and cannibalism. When they were finally rescued off the coast of South America, only nine were still alive, and barely.

On my first day aboard the Harvey Gamage, I was reminded (rather sternly) that it is considered bad luck to whistle on a boat. I don’t know when this tradition began but I presume it is very old—certainly old enough that the crew of the Essex would have abided to the same custom. For us on the Harvey Gamage with our electronic satellite tracking system, our diesel engine motor, and our state-of-the-art emergency lifeboats, it is easier to dismiss the whistling ritual as an outdated superstition inherited from old mariners who didn’t know any better. What difference would it have made anyhow if one of those men, dying aboard their small row boats, had puckered up and blowed? Probably nothing; but then again, we must consider the lengths that people will go to avoid being hungry.

Upon his return to Nantucket, the Essex’s captain, George Pollard, is said to have moved on with life (this after on other disastrous whaling voyage). He became the town’s night watchman and was described as a jolly man, “loving the good things in life.” Still, Pollard never forgot his experience on the Essex and once a year, on the anniversary of its sinking, he locked himself in his room and spent the day fasting.

Even though we can seem carefree and secure as we sail across the ocean in our modern schooner, we, like Pollard, know that the sea ultimately controls our fate. It is with this humility that we still observe the old traditions; we respect what we cannot tame. As I watch so many customs burn out before my eyes, I delight in the fact that there are still some places where the last few cultural embers have not yet died out.

Shortly after I finish my grapefruit, I wander over to another table where a white woman is selling vegetables under a sign that says “ORGANIC.” With an American accent, she tells me that she moved to Dominica because she has a severe sensitivity to pollution this is one of the only places left where she can live without getting sick all the time. I buy some carrots and silently wonder if we are all going to need to find a place like Dominica someday and if Dominica will still be clean enough for us to find refuge.

Sometimes it’s hard to know what’s been lost until it is gone. And this may be the most important reason why we don’t whistle.