History of the Ship's Figurehead
Ship figureheads have a long and fascinting history dating to pre-Christian times, when Chinese, Egyptian, Phoenician, Greek and Roman mariners navigated the Pacific and Indian oceans and Mediterranean Sea.
According to the Illustrated Oxford Dictionary (1998), the noun "figurehead" is defined as: "A carving, usually a bust or a full-length figure, at the ship's prow." The 1981 edition of the Encyclopedia Americana defines the word as: "A sculptered image decorating the stemhead of a ship."
These descriptions are exact as fas as post-Christian prow embellishments are concerned, but the Encyclopedia Britannica(1972 edition) takes the term much further back into nautical history.
This source credits the Chinese and Egyptians with having originated the practice when seafarers of those two ancient civilizations instituted the custom of painting oculi(eyes) on the bows of their vessels, believing that these adornments would enable the ships to find their way.
The Phoenicians not only adopted the primitive eye motif for their ttrading vessels at an early date, they later adorned the prows of their galleys with carved wooden likenesses of deities, animals, birds,and serpents.
The Greeks also adopted the eye motif, as surviving decorations on ther pottery vases prove. The prow adornments of the vessels of the ancient world grew increasingly more complicated.
Athenian naval vessels of the classical era were frequently adorned with full-length wooden carvings of Athena, the goddess for whom the city is named.
When Rome took over dominance of the Mediterranean, its warships and galleys were decorated with fierce prow fires drawn from its own pantheon, an assertion proven by surviving scultpures dating from Rome's imperial heyday. The Carthaginians, Rome's most serious early rivals, used carved figures of the god Ammon Jupiter to head up their warships.
The figureheads of these ancient people were linked to the superstition that these sculptered imeages were guardians of the vessels they adorned and were also supposed to frighten enemies, as well as give a religious significance to the exploits in which they were engaged.
The same motive wwas later endorsed by the Vikings, Danes and Normans during the early Christian era. The prows of vessels in which these cultures engaged in their far-flung operations rode high out of the water and were frequently tipped with intimidating dragons, sea serpents of fierce animal heads.Since the Vikings are credited with having been the first navigators to explore North American waters, it is likely that the figureheads on their vessels were the first ones to appear in the New World.
The sailors of these early northern European vessels firmly believed that their wooden icons were endowed with magical powers. Seafarers of later eras turned their backs on this type of idol worship, but remained fiercely superstitious concening the protection of the figureheads on their vessels, believing that any damage to these icons meant certain disaster.
Shipbuilding, both for mercantile and military purposed, remained fairly static until the Renaissance, between 1400 and 1600, when nations and city-states throughout Europe began vying for natutical supremacy. At that time, England, France, Spain, Portugal and Holland, as well as the Italian city-states of Genoa and Venice, began jockeying for power, and the increasingly lavish and sophisticated vessels that were launched from their dockyards continued to stress the importance of intimidating figureheads.
This assertion can easily be supported by referring to the countless seascapes, drawings, engravings and other iconographic evidence that played an important part in the artistic output of the same nations and city-states at that time. Catholic countries and city-states frequently adorned the prows of their great gallons and merchantmen with religious figures.
Of particular note were the vessels of the Spanish Armada, the great fleet of warships dispatched in 1588 by Philip II of Spain to subdue Protestant England and return it to the fold of the Catholic faith.
Surviving paintings, drawings, engravings and tapestried depicting the action show that most of the Spanish galleons had elaborate prow decorations that depicted Christ and the Virgin Mary, as well as numerous popular saints whose invocations to the Almighty on behalf of the Catholic cause, it was thought, would guarantee an overwhelming victory to the Spanish enterprise.
As for the prow decorations of the small English ships that eventually spelled defeat for King Philip's mighty galleons, their stemheads, according to surviving iconographic sources, were singularly bare of ornamental carvings.
But that does not mean that the English warships of the same period were without elaborate figureheads and other carvings. For instance, Sir Francis Drake made the first English circumnavigation of the globe in a vessel that sported a gilded deer on its prow, thereby causing the ship to be named the Golden Hind.
Later, during the reign of Charles I, English ship carpenters and wood carvers created the Sovereign of the Seas, one of the most highly decorated vessels in the history of shipbuilding. Graced with a ferocious gilded lion at its stemhead, it and the other carving and gilding of this fabulous vessel cost around 7,000 British pounds, quite a sum considering the total cost of the vessel was around 40,000 pounds.
Up until the middle years of the 18th century, the figurehead was the crowning wooden adornment on any warship or important mercantile vessel. Though figureheads increasingly vecame less decorative as time went on, that did not mean that the men who sailed the ships ceased feeling that the wooden sculptures on the prows were more than merely ornamental.
For instance, there are numerous records concerning how the figureheads of new vessels were consecrated by the superstitious with hefty splashes of wine to guarantee that they would give the vessels good luck when they were "launched into their element"--to quote a widely used nautical term of the period.
The came the golden age of figureheads, which lasted from around 1790 to 1825. That's when most of the warships and merchant vessels of Europe and North America sported elaborate prow adornments.
The high water mark of figureheads was reached during the clipper-ship era dating from the early and middle years of the 19th century. The graceful bows of these streamlined ships presented an excellent opportunity to display figureheads to their best advantage.
By the late 19th century, however, figureheads on most vessels gave way to simpler and less expensive billet heads (i.e. scrollcarvings resembling the end of a violin). This change took place because the carvings were expensive and easily damaged, either by rough weather or in battle.
In this way, a tradition extending backward to the ancient Chinese and Egyptians has run its colorful course. But for those of us who love the sea and museums devoted to nautical things, we wistfully muse that if the wooden lips of thes fascinating survivors of an earlier era could talk, the long and thrilling maritime odysseys of the world would by marvelously enriched.
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