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Fictional character From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Mother Carey is a supernatural figure personifying the cruel and threatening sea in the imagination of 18th- and 19th-century English-speaking sailors. The entity was supposed to be a harbinger of storms[1] and a similar character to Davy Jones (who may be her husband).[2]
Mother Carey | |
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Created by | Traditional |
Portrayed by | John Masefield, Charles Kingsley, Jessie Willcox Smith, John Gerrard Keulemans, ... |
The name seems to be derived from the Latin expression Mater cara ("Precious Mother"), which sometimes refers to the Virgin Mary.[3]
John Masefield described her in the poem "Mother Carey (as told me by the bo'sun)" in his collection Salt Water Ballads (1902).[2] Here she and Davy Jones are a fearsome couple responsible for storms and ship-wrecks.
In a C. Fox Smith poem entitled "Mother Carey", she calls old sailors to return to the sea.[4]
The character appears as a fairy in Charles Kingsley's The Water-Babies. She lives near the North Pole and helps Tom find the Other-end-of-Nowhere. She is shown in one of Jessie Willcox Smith's illustrations for this book.[5]
Storm petrels, thought by sailors to be the souls of dead seamen, are called Mother Carey's chickens. Giant petrels are known as Mother Carey's geese.[3] In The Seaman's Manual (1790), by Lt. Robert Wilson (RN), the term Mother Carey's children is defined as "a name given by English sailors to birds which they suppose are fore-runners of a storm."[6]
In Moby-Dick, Chapter 113, Captain Ahab interrogates the blacksmith Mr. Perth about the sparks fantailing from his hammer: "Are these thy Mother Carey's chickens, Perth? they are always flying in thy wake; birds of good omen, too, but not to all;—look here, they burn; but thou—thou liv'st among them without a scorch."[7][8]
Ernest Thompson Seton's book Woodland Tales is described by the author as a collection of "Mother Carey Tales". In his use, Mother Carey is a Mother Nature figure, the "Angel of the Wild Things", who favors the strong and the wise but destroys the weak: "She loves you, but far less than she does your race. It may be that you are not wise, and if it seem best, she will drop a tear and crush you into the dust."[9]
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