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The ‘Wonders in the Deep’ and the ‘Mighty Tempest of the Sea’: Nature, Providence and English Seafarers’ Piety, c. 1580–1640*

The religious beliefs of seafarers have not received a great deal of attention over the years. Contemporaries of early modern English seafarers stereotyped them as superstitious and irreligious, prone to turning to God only in times of danger. The Puritan William Perkins preached about ‘the Mariner, who is onely good in a storme’. The association of seafarers, irreligion and superstition was also reflected in popular literature. Edmund Spenser, in The Faerie Qveene, wrote of ‘the glad merchant, that does vew from ground / His ship far come from watrie wildernesse, / He hurles out vowes, and Neptune oft doth blesse’. These stereotypes have coloured the historiography of maritime religion, which has drawn a division between ‘superstition’ and religion in seafaring culture. However, recent work on religion and provi-dentialism on land shows this to be a faulty paradigm.