Bill:

I liked your piece on the origin of “wog.” Your version seems more plausible than the folk etymology I heard years ago, notably that wog was short for “pollywog” and came from Victorian-era Royal Navy slang for people native to equatorial regions.  

In both the RN and the USN, sailors used “slimy pollywogs,” “pollywogs,” or more often just “wogs,” to mean sailors who haven’t yet crossed the equator. They become “shellbacks” after an initiation ceremony at zero degrees latitude by King Neptune and his court.

Some sources claim the origin of the ceremony is “lost in the mists of time,” but the earliest European references of which I’m aware are from the mid-fifteenth century and mention a religious ceremony, asking God’s blessing, performed on Portuguese ships when crossing the equator. 

In the early eighteenth century, based on a 1708 account, the irreverent British merely dunked the uninitiated or required them to pay a fine. But by the end of that century King Neptune had become the key figure, along with his wife, Amphitrite, a writer (naval jargon for a clerk), a barber and various bit players done up in costume.

This is an oral tradition, never formalized in naval orders, so it varies, but nonetheless seems to have had a relatively persistent form from the Revolutionary War until navies got politically correct in the last couple of decades. King Neptune and his retinue arrive with nautical pomp and circumstance and the pollywogs are summoned one-by-one. The writer reads the “charges” and Neptune orders the punishment, which often comprises the barber lathering the pollywog with some foul mixture, shaving him with a large wooden razor and finally dumping him backwards into a large tub of water. 

But, at least as often, the punishment involves embarrassment and hazing tailored to individual personalities, especially junior officers. At the end, the writer provides each new shellback with a certificate of initiation, which usually includes commands to Neptune’s various subjects—sharks, sea serpents, etc.—to treat the holder kindly, and to landlubbers and the like to treat the holder with due respect.

The entire court, including Neptune ’s Queen, sometimes with her own female attendants, were played by sailors, of course. One relatively contemporary account from an American sailor says: “The King, behind his locks of hempen hair and beard, looked suspiciously like the ship’s Supply Officer. A retinue of “Wog Queens,” female sailors, who had avoided our fate by dressing in a most provocative manner, attended him. Some of them looked pretty damn cute, actually. Which was strange, because this was 1987, and there were no females at sea on warships, in those days. And it occurred to me on closer observation that these were not females at all. There were far too many Adam’s apples, among all those Eve’s.

One of the things I never figured out (because I was afraid of what the answer might be) was how it came to pass that these Wog Queens, in exchange for avoiding the more uncomfortable aspects of the crossing the line ceremony, managed to cruise for four and a half months with brassieres, fishnet stockings and stiletto heels stowed away in the very little space available to a Sailor at sea, while waiting for Just This Day!”

(http://homepage.mac.com/lexl/iblog/

C744401703/E1012632427/ )

But I digress.

I couldn’t find anything on the web to prove the use of the term “pollywog” in the ceremony in Victorian times. It wasn’t mentioned in an 1870 account of the ceremony on a USN frigate, but it seems to have been established in both the RN and USN before the Second World War. I did find a copy of an RN crossing-the-line certificate from 1944 that mentions both “pollywogs” and “gollywogs” as being Neptune’s subjects, so it seems there was some cross talk at work by then between civilian and naval vocabularies. http://www.geocities.com/valsvisuals/filesfaa

/crossline.htm

Keith Thomas