Mother Carey

Mother Carey
Illustration by Jessie Wilcox Smith for The Water Babies
Created by	Traditional
Portrayed by	John Masefield, Charles Kingsley, Jessie Wilcox Smith, ...

Mother Carey was a supernatural figure personifying the cruel and threatening sea in the imagination of 19th-century English-speaking sailors. She was a similar character to Davy Jones (who may be her husband^[1]).

The name seems to be derived from the Latin expression Mater cara ("Precious Mother"), which sometimes refers to the Virgin Mary.^[2]

John Masefield described her in the poem "Mother Carey (as told me by the bo'sun)" in his collection "Salt Water Ballads" (1902).^[1] Here she and Davy Jones are a fearsome couple responsible for storms and ship-wrecks.

In a Cicely Fox Smith poem entitled "Mother Carey", she calls old sailors to return to the sea.^[3]

The character appears as a fairy in Charles Kingsley's "The Water Babies". She lives near the North Pole and helps Tom find the Other-end-of-Nowhere. She is shown in one of Jessie Wilcox Smith's illustrations for this book. ^[4]

Storm-petrels (thought by sailors to be the souls of dead seamen) are called Mother Carey's Chickens. Giant petrels are called Mother Carey's Geese. ^[2]

References

1. ^ ^{a b} Masefield, John (1902), Salt Water Ballads, London: Grant Richards, 1902, ISBN 1110895364  The poem in question can also be found on-line, for instance in the Lied and Art Song Texts Page.
2. ^ ^{a b} See entry "Mother Carey's Chickens" on p. 597 of the 1890 edition of Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable published by Cassell (London). This is available online from the Internet Archive.
3. ^ "Mother Carey" by Cicely Fox Smith in "SONGS & CHANTIES: 1914-1916", edited by Cicely Fox Smith, published by Elkin Mathews (London) in 1919. Available on-line at [1].
4. ^ Kingsley, Charles (1863), The Water-Babies, Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1995, ISBN 0-19-282238-1  Available on-line, for instance with Jessie Wilcox Smith's illustrations at The University of Adelaide Library.