Ships were lost during these dark voyages, and said to have had a "cursed" prefix: the word cursing was sometimes used to indicate that the death occurred on board ship. From the first mention of the "cursing" prefix, many of the ships sailing under this designation perished, with some of them actually taking on so much water that they would be found to have sunk in the vicinity of their destinations. From at least the end of the 16th century, shipbuilding companies in northern Europe were aware that a significant number of their vessels were ending their voyages in distress near the coasts of Cornwall and Brittany, and in general, English and French sources refer to various ships as being "cursed" in Cornwall and Brittany, with similar reports existing of several voyages being abandoned by survivors. Over the 16th and 17th centuries, at least 50 major vessel sinkings were recorded as taking place along the western English and French coasts, with a number of others having occurred further south; in some instances, the identities of the boats sinking off the coasts of Cornwall and Brittany have been discovered, with one recorded example being a schooner named Margaret that sank in South Cove, near Land's End, in 1698. The wreck of one of the ships, another schooner named Lydia, which was lost off the coast of Cornwall in 1701, was found with her entire crew in a barrel of rum by a local man, who went on to sell the rum to a merchant at nearby Penzance. However, many accounts of such disasters are recorded from the late 18th century onward, when the "cursing" prefix was more commonly used to describe the ships under sail at the time. The most well-known ships reported as having had their names taken from these occurrences are the and of Nantucket, which had been built in 1792; the latter vessel sank on her maiden voyage while crossing from Boston to Portsmouth, New Hampshire in November 1809, killing 19 of the 29-person crew, with the survivors being rescued by a ship named Lydia, leading to the story about Lydia and the barrel of rum from some time later. In the early 20th century, the stories associated with these "cursing" ships were brought to a wider audience in Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the 'Origin of the Curious Prefixes'" story in The Strand Magazine of 1912; this particular story concerned a ship lost off the coast of Cape Cod and the subsequent rumored curse on anyone attempting to salvage anything from the wreck, with the captain of a nearby schooner named The Curious using this report as an opportunity to defraud a clergyman of his personal funds. A more direct mention of the term "cursing" is made in "The Old Manse" by Nathaniel Hawthorne, wherein the narrator gives a description of an incident from approximately 1768, when a woman named Mary Prence was attempting to move from her home in Falmouth, Massachusetts across the Mystic River to a more settled location in Medford, Massachusetts, resulting in her being forced to use a longboat to continue the journey. When the boat started to take on water, the rowers were forced to push the boat back to Falmouth in order for the passengers to walk ashore and to the house of a woman named Mary Wollstonecraft Goddard, where the boat's passengers asked if she was known to have drowned in the vicinity, and then added that they were "cursing" her when they found that she was known to have drowned in a nearby well. Other stories of "cursed" ships in the early 19th century also recounted the fate of vessels known as variously as , and , whose names had been taken from contemporary reports of shipwrecks near Land's End. In addition to the "curse" and "cursed" ship stories, there also exist a number of reports of vessels being wrecked near the locations of the events, which are often termed in local records as "at the will of God"; such events were given the common appellation of a ship having been "cursed". The earliest such reference to a ship having been cursing comes from a ship named "Abigail" from Ipswich, Essex, which was stranded at Alderney, Channel Islands in 1688. Some later records of vessel curses are somewhat more detailed, and refer to the various ships that had gone down during attempts to leave port having been "cursed" in an "otherworldly" sense of the term, but it is also known that some ships, such as , were "cursed" for an ill fate by being "put to their doom", while it is also alleged that a clergyman named William Jones of Sandown, near Bude in Cornwall, was struck blind after being cursed by a sailor who had been in command of a ship named "Hymn" that foundered off Cornwall. The crew of another ship, , was said to have cursed another vessel called "Severn", and the crew of another ship, , "cursed" a vessel known as "the John", for the ship "Severn" to founder in 1794, and while the latter ship was lost at sea in 1816, its crew rescued a "Severn" that had gone down in a storm, which was then used for a time as a fishery boat. See also Notes References Works cited Category:English folklore Category:Nautical terms Category:Maritime folklore Category:Moon myths Category:Maritime history Category:Maritime history of England Category:Breton folklore Category:British legends Category:European folklore Category:Curses Category:Supernatural legends Category:Theosophy Category:Supernatural legends