A Fictionalized Firsthand Account of Victorian Naval Ritual: Arthur Robert Francis Bailey’s “Neptune’s Visit to H. M. Ship Rocket on Crossing the Line” (1874)

Abstract Recently rediscovered and previously unpublished, “Neptune’s Visit to H. M. Ship Rocket on Crossing the Line,” by then-Sub-Lieutenant Arthur Robert Francis Bailey, offers twenty-first-century readers an especially engaging introduction to a naval ritual with roots in the sixteenth century. Although crossing the line narratives were quite familiar to sailors and lay readers alike by the 1870s, this manuscript is unusual in that it attempts to normalize otherwise theatrical elements, such as the appearance of the Roman god Neptune and his retinue aboard the ship, and to maintain the realism of this highly performative collective action. An engaging firsthand account in its own right, this manuscript moves beyond the familiar—and dismissed—contemporary conceptions of the ritual and effectively speaks to the period’s revival of folk and fairy tales.