Crossing the Line

This lithograph depicts a line-crossing ceremony aboard an East Indiaman. Such ceremonies were conducted as an initiation ritual for sailors and passengers crossing the Equator for the first time. The print represents several of the traditional characters and actions associated with line-crossing ceremonies, including King Neptune, who sits in the centre of the image with a crown and a trident. Beside him is the barber, brandishing his razor, and in front of them is the doctor, a bespectacled figure with a pill box and an ‘Eau de Cologne’ bottle (usually filled with saltwater).

The print was plate 3 in John Corbet Anderson’s ‘To India and Back by the Cape, By a Traveller’, printed for the author in 1858. Anderson’s book was a self-published guidebook for travellers to India, featuring eighteenth lithographic plates including views of Ceylon [Sri Lanka], Madras [Chennai], Calcutta [Kolkata], Bombay [Mumbai], Mauritius, Madeira, Tristan da Cunha and the Cape Peninsula.

Anderson describes a line-crossing ceremony in the text but includes a note that his description ‘refers rather to the past than to the present time’ and that ‘the “Neptune scene” is now-a-days rarely acted in all its features; which have here be aggregated together, from different sources, more to give a complete a view as possible of this singular and (so far as I can learn) peculiarly England and fast waning custom, than to produce a picture which is realised at ever first crossing of the line’ (p. 7).