No bananas on board
Bananas bring bad luck on fishing boats — possibly because spiders hid in cargoes, or fruit made other food spoil.
Performance superstition
Sailing superstitions
Sailing superstitions: bananas aboard bring disaster; renaming a ship invites it. First recorded: Antiquity; most surviving rules from the age of sail. That makes it more than 1,500 years old — joint 2nd oldest of the 45 superstitions we have dated.
- Earliest record
- Antiquity see the history below
- Written down in
- 1867 Harland and Wilkinson, Lancashire
Record: John Harland and T. T. Wilkinson, Lancashire Folk-Lore (London: Frederick Warne, 1867).
When it actually starts
How old is this one
First recorded
Antiquity; most surviving rules from the age of sail
That makes it
more than 1,500 years old
Rank by age
Joint 2nd oldest of 45 dated here
Category
Performance
Sailing was the most dangerous common occupation for centuries, and the rules multiplied accordingly: no whistling, no bananas aboard, never rename a ship, never sail on a Friday.
Why it stuck. Danger plus no control is the strongest generator of ritual known, and sailing had both in a degree no other trade matched.
1 of the dated superstitions here were written down earlier and 32 later, while 11 share its date.
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Primary source
As it was written down in 1867
“on which day Lancashire, like other sailors, have a strong repugnance to beginning a voyage.”
John Harland and T. T. Wilkinson, Lancashire Folk-Lore (London: Frederick Warne, 1867) — read the original text.
Sailors’ dislike of starting a voyage on a Friday, which the same passage traces to Good Friday.
The versions people follow
What exactly is believed
Renaming a ship
Changing a boat's name angers the sea gods unless a proper renaming ceremony is held.
Women and cats
A cat on board is lucky, and figureheads were often female because a woman calmed the sea.
Never leave on a Friday
Voyages were not begun on a Friday.
How the bad luck is traditionally undone
A renaming ceremony removes the old name from the logbook and boat, then asks Poseidon or Neptune to accept the new one — often with a libation.
Where it lives today
Renaming ceremonies and the banana ban are still observed by many sailors and fishing crews.
What people say
Bananas aboard bring disaster; renaming a ship invites it.What is going on
One explanation for the banana rule is practical — bananas release ethylene that spoils other cargo fast, and banana boats had to race to port, leaving crews no time to troll a fishing line.Where it applies. Shared across nearly every maritime tradition, which is unusual for superstitions this specific.
Other performance superstitions
Nearest in age
Sailing superstitions are joint 2nd oldest of the 45 dated superstitions here. Of those, 3 date from 1900 or later and 14 predate the common era.
First-recorded dates are the earliest documented appearance in written sources, not the earliest possible origin — an unrecorded practice can be older. How the dating works and where it is uncertain →
Sources
Statements of fact on this page were checked against these sources in October 2026. How we choose and check sources: editorial policy.
Cite this page
AstroHot. “Sailing Superstitions: Origin, Meaning and When It Began.” Accessed October 28, 2026. https://astrohot.com/superstitions/sailing-superstitions/
For Wikipedia
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