Crossing the Line ceremonies are still performed on ships of the Royal Navy when they cross the Equator – but the elaborate, highly decorated certificates depicting Neptune and his Court (usually featuring plenty of mermaids, wearing very little) had their heyday in the middle of the last century.

The ceremonies are thought to be pagan in origin, and in their more rudimentary form were not even associated with the Equator – they were designed to assuage the fears of superstitious sailors, and would hopefully placate the gods who were presented with a sacrifice while the ship was on passage into the unknown.

Straits and narrow passages, as well as providing access to hitherto unexplored waters, held very real terrors for seamen. Not only was there the possibility of gods and monsters, but there were the natural navigational hazards such as strong currents, unreliable winds and uncharted rocks.

Early records show that some form of ceremony was connected with areas such as the Straits of Gibraltar, where a ship would pay a forfeit on behalf of its crew – and in the days of the Viking explorers there is a suggestion that the forfeit paid was in the form of human sacrifice.

A mariner’s diary of 1675 refers to the ducking from the yardarm of men entering the Straits for the first time, or being required to pay one dollar in lieu – and ducking remains an integral part of the modern ceremony in the Royal Navy.

It is thought that such duckings are derived from the actual throwing of a sacrificial victim into the sea in moments of danger.

Duckings had the additional advantage of bringing smelly sailors and water into prolonged contact – under old laws, a mariner did not remove his clothes from beginning to end of the voyage, and Capt Woods Rogers, referring to the customary ducking when entering the Tropic, notes that this was of great benefit in enabling many “to recover the colour of their skins, which were grown very black and nasty.”

There could also be a link here with the modern practice of lathering and shaving of novices, but creating a major mess could just be part of the sense of lawlessness which has developed around the arrival of King Neptune and his courtiers.

In any case, much of the traditional ceremony is indistinguishable from the universal custom of “blooding” initiates, and so the final result is probably a combination of this custom and the symbolic remains of the original offerings to the sea-gods.

In the course of time both the Equator and the Arctic Circle (involving initiation into the Blue Nose Club) became the scene of traditional ceremonies, as marking the limits of fresh enterprise and, to those who had not previously crossed them, the boundaries of “the unknown”.

Sadly for the more fastidious of the modern sailors of the Royal Navy, the custom of paying forfeits, either in money or in kind, in order to avoid the rigours of initiation, no longer applies – there is no escape from the Bears.

The standard ceremony is as follows – though there are infinite varieties, depending on each particular ship.

King Neptune and his Queen, Amphitrite, board the ship, accompanied by their Court, and after various speeches, they officiate at the pool, often a canvas or nowadays plastic affair set up on the flight deck.

All who are to be initiated are lathered, shaved, dosed with a ‘pill’ and then dumped into the bath, where they are ducked by the Bears.

Upon being initiated, the sailors concerned are usually awarded their certificate, with wording that may include an appeal to sharks, dolphins, whales, eels etc “under our Command to abstain from eating, playing with or otherwise maltreating them.”