Science is Golden
Page 10
Can’t Marry at Sea
But ships’ captains have never—until very recently—performed marriages.
In fact, both the US and UK governments have specific regulations for the captains of military and civilian ships. They are clearly forbidden to perform marriage ceremonies and do not, and never have had, the authority to do so. Here is a direct quote from the US Navy Code of Federal Regulations, Title 32, Subtitle A, Chapter VI, Subchapter A, Part 700, Subpart G, Rule 716, also known as 32 CFR 700.716): ‘The commanding officer shall not perform a marriage ceremony on board his ship or aircraft. He shall not permit a marriage ceremony to be performed on board when the ship or aircraft is outside the territory of the United States, except: (a) In accordance with local laws…and (b) In the presence of a diplomatic or consular official of the United States.’
But today there are a few exceptions.
Can Marry at Sea
Captains of Japanese ships can now perform marriage ceremonies, but only for those who hold Japanese passports.
Since 1998, a few cruise lines have offered wedding packages—perhaps to gain extra revenue, or perhaps from a deep and profound respect for the sacrament of marriage.
The captains of Cruise West ships can obtain a temporary permit to perform marriages—but only in certain Alaskan waters, including Prince William Sound, LeConte Glacier and Misty Fjords. However, prior to the ceremony, arrangements have to be made with the countries that abut these waters. After the marriage ceremony, the captain then has to mail the licence to the relevant courthouse, so that the marriage can be legally registered.
It is also possible to get married at sea on a few of the Princess Line ships. These ships (Gold Princess, Grand Princess and Star Princess) are registered in Bermuda, and the captains have Burmuda licences to perform marriages, but only while the ships are in international waters. The price ranges from $1,000 to as much as you wish to pay. The Princess ‘Tie the Knot at Sea’ Wedding Program can include a live string quartet, champagne, a three-tiered wedding cake, both still and movie photography, flowers, wedding-cam so that your relatives across the world can watch the ceremony on the internet as it happens and, of course, the captain in a sparkling white uniform performing the ceremony.
You can also get married when the ship pulls into a port, if you have previously done all the paperwork for that particular country. In this case, the ceremony can take place on land (‘Tie the Knot Ashore’), or on the ship (‘Tie the Knot Harborside’). If it takes place onboard, it would be highly unlikely for the captain to perform the ceremony. They would rarely have authority to do so. Instead, you would have to organise a celebrant recognised by the country concerned.
Ships’ captains (until recently) never performed marriages
It seems that people possibly were confused with the huge amount of power and authority a ship’s captain had…and simply thought that this power included the power to perform marriages.
So Why?
In the academic land of folklore research, no-one has been able to track down exactly how this myth started. However, the captain of a ship has a huge amount of authority and power, and I guess that people have just assumed that this power included the power to perform marriages.
Or perhaps the people who started the myth were all at sea.
We Wanted to Get Married on a Ship
In 2006, Mary and I got married on the Longest Day of the Year, when the Midnight Sun does not set on Norway. There was a lot of travelling involved. Three generations of the family flew for 36 hours in one continuous run of flights to get to Kirkenes in Norway, deep inside the Arctic Circle. (Kirkenes is a long way from most places, especially Sydney.) The plan was to then experience the Midnight Sun for seven days as the big cruise ship took the Honeymoon Couple (plus the kids and grandparents) down the coast to the southern end of Norway.
After being mostly awake for 36 hours, we landed, quite jet-lagged, in Kirkenes. We slept, woke up the next morning, had breakfast, and then drove for a few hours in a mud-splattered purple truck to get married in a mistenshrouded church on the Russian border. My youngest child, Lola, was deeply disappointed that the purple truck was not a proper wedding car with ribbons.
The original plan had been to get a ship’s captain to marry us, as we floated down the Norwegian coast on a cruise ship.
But we could only get married on land. So we had to jump through many hoops with various government departments in Australia and Norway to get the paperwork signed. Then we ran into trouble with the Norwegian Q150 and Q151 forms.
They were almost identical to the Q268 and Q269 forms, which was very confusing. Which ones to use? It took quite a few international phone calls to various Norwegian authorities to clear this up.
Finally, the man on the phone started asking the right questions. ‘Now, Karl, are you a man?’ ‘Yes,’ I replied, a little surprised. And then he asked, ‘And this person you wish to marry, this Mary, is that person a man or a woman?’ ‘A woman,’ I replied, even more surprised. Once he realised that we were man and woman, he said, ‘Ah, then you want the heterosexual marriage, not the homosexual marriage, so you should fill out the Q150 and Q151.’
This didn’t seem so odd when we realised that Norway allows same-sex marriages. As a result, a significant number of the foreign wedding planners who contact the Norwegian authorities would be more interested in the legal same-sex wedding that they could not get in their own countries.
References
Encyclopædia Britannica, Ultimate Reference Suite DVD, 2006—‘marriage’.
Green, Joey, Contrary to Popular Belief: More than 250 False Facts Revealed, New York: Random House, 2005, p 185.
Richlin, Amy, ‘Not before homosexuality: The materiality of the Cinaedus and the Roman law against love between men’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 1993, Vol 3, Issue 4, pp 523–573.
Varasdi, J Allen, Myth Information: More Than 590 Popular Misconceptions, Fallacies, and Misbeliefs Explained!, New York: Random House, 1996, pp 49, 50.
Fraudulent Flipper
Dolphins get amazingly good press—even the Encyclopaedia Britannica tells us that they are ‘noted for their friendliness to humans’. They have enjoyed nothing but good PR over the past few thousand years. But don’t believe it—dolphins are just wild animals, albeit with a cute smile. In fact, their permanent, fixed smile is not an indication that they love us—it’s just a happy accident caused by the curve of their mouth.
Dolphins Love Us
Dolphins have been around for about 20 million years. In ancient Greek the name means ‘fish with a womb’. So even back then, the Greeks realised that dolphins were different from the other fish in the ocean.
The ancient Greeks also thought that having a dolphin ride the bow wave or wake of your ship meant good luck.
Overall, dolphins are perceived as creatures of universal love and goodwill, intent on spreading peace on Earth. Some people perceive the naïve innocent dolphins as inferior to us, in need of our love, help and protection to survive. Others think that dolphins are our equals, with similar intelligence and language. And some people see dolphins as our superiors in all things except the ability to handle tools—a kind of benevolent, smiling, extraterrestrial genius with fins and no hands. These preconceptions never involve the slightest hint of aggression.
You Can’t Trust TV
Over half of these false impressions about dolphins come from TV, books, aquariums and schools, with music trailing slightly behind. The original TV series Flipper, and its later franchised versions, have to take a lot of the blame. The Flipper theme song ran:
They call him Flipper, Flipper, faster than lightning.
No one, you see, is smarter than he.
And we know Flipper, lives in a world full of wonder,
Flying there under, under the sea!
Everyone loves the king of the sea,
Ever so kind and gentle is he.
Tricks he will do when children appear,
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br /> And how they laugh when he is near!
(Henry Vars and William D ‘By’ Dunham, 1963)
The countercultural author J.C. Lilly took a pseudoscientific approach. He helped spread totally unrealistic notions about dolphins with his two books Man and Dolphin (1962) and The Mind of the Dolphin (1967). By 1975 this psychoanalyst and friend of Dr Timothy Leary (the ‘turn on, tune in, drop out’ 1960s advocate of the benefits of LSD) was calling dolphins ‘the humans of the sea’ and claiming that they had language skills. By 1978 he had gone right off the rails, speculating that they communicated using telepathy.
Dozens of movies and songs romanticise dolphins. The singers include not just softies like John Denver, but even hardened rockers like the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Their 1987 song, ‘Behind The Sun’, includes this verse:
My talking dolphin spoke to me.
He spoke to me in symphony.
From freedom’s peace beneath the sea,
He looked to me eyes full of love,
Said yes we live behind the sun.
The overall vibe is that dolphins are lovely and caring, with only goodwill and kindness for all other creatures. (I guess we just ignore the fact that they are carnivores that eat other sea creatures.)
Deceptive Dolphins
The basic run down of a bottlenose dolphin
The bottlenose dolphin may look like it’s always smiling, however it’s not a sign of happiness. Their ‘smile’, or upturned mouth, is in fact a feature of their anatomy.
Dolphin-Assisted Therapy
In fact, some people think that dolphins love us so much that they can heal all human ills.
I first came across this notion when a friend returned from Byron Bay, saying that she was feeling ‘extra good’, because she had done a lot of ‘dolphin work’. In her case, this meant sitting on the beach drinking beer and looking out at the occasional dolphin swimming about in the ocean. The theory goes that dolphins are superior beings who can heal us with their mere presence or with their sonar or spiritual forces such as ‘healing energy’.
Indeed, some charlatans have ramped up this simplistic notion into a new and highly lucrative Field of Quackery, giving it the name of DAT, i.e. Dolphin-Assisted Therapy. According to one paper, the proponents claim that DAT can cure a whole gamut of physical and psychological problems, including, but not limited to, ‘clinical depression, developmental apraxia, language development, speech development, attention disorders including ADHD, hearing impairments, Down’s syndrome, autism, cerebral palsy, chronic pain, cancer, stress, muscular dystrophy, spinal chord (sic) injuries, AIDS, brain injuries, post-traumatic stress disorder, anorexia, trauma from sexual abuse, blindness, and disorders of the immune system’. All of these cures are available, they claim, by swimming or interacting with dolphins, which they can provide—for a fee.
And their fee can be up to $11,800 of your hard-earned cash (air fares and accommodation extra).
Now there’s no doubt that hanging around in the open, in lovely weather, with friendly wildlife will make you feel better. But is this the same as a permanent cure? According to several studies that have looked at DAT since it came into existence in the 1970s, the answer is no. In fact, just snorkelling around in the open water near a lovely reef, without the dolphins, made people feel just as ‘good’ as if they had seen dolphins.
Smart Dolphins
Dolphins are quite smart. Studies in 1995 and 2001 claimed that they had awareness of images of themselves in mirrors or video, but this was not corroborated in followup studies. However, one study in 2005 did definitely show that they can use sponges as a tool to protect the snout from sharp coral while foraging.
They are certainly intelligent enough to learn tricks when they live in an aquarium. And it does make sense for them to have some kind of communication with each other in the ocean—so that they can round up fish and warn each other about predators, etc.
Science = Real
However, the hard science tells a different story about the supposed eternally calm nature, benevolence and goodwill of dolphins.
Trevor R. Spradlin and his colleagues presented a paper on this topic at the Wild Dolphin Swim Program Workshop. They pointed out that ‘people have been seriously injured while trying to interact with wild dolphins’ and ‘dolphins have been known to bite, ram and pull people under the water’s surface’. They also quoted a paper rather scarily entitled, ‘Women and children abducted by a wild but sociable adult male bottlenose dolphin’.
Other researchers such as Dr Amy Samuels and her American colleagues have written many articles on dolphins in peer-reviewed journals. They also wrote a chapter for the CSIRO book, Marine Mammals: Fisheries, Tourism and Management Issues (2003), edited by Nick Gales and his colleagues.
Dr Samuels looked at four separate ‘types’ of dolphins.
1—Solitary Dolphins
One study of 29 solitary dolphins that would seek out human company was particularly illuminating. In this study, only one dolphin, coincidentally called ‘Flipper’, was praised for ‘saving’ a drowning boy.
But the remaining 28 dolphins included kidnappers, some who were sexually aggressive, and some with very serious ‘anger issues’.
‘Donald’ and ‘Percy’ were dolphins who ‘achieved notoriety for abducting people who then had to be saved by boat’! About two-thirds (18) were aggressive towards people, causing (among other injuries) a ruptured spleen, fractured ribs and unconsciousness. Nearly half (13) of the dolphins in this study had ‘misdirected sexual behaviour towards humans, buoys and/or vessels’—in other words, just about anything that happened to be floating in the water. The authors of The Book of Animal Ignorance describe ‘misdirected sexual behaviour’ very nicely. ‘…Given that an average male bottlenose weighs 40 stone [about 250 kg or one-quarter of a tonne] and has a foot-long [30 cm], solid muscle penis that ends in a prehensile hook agile enough to catch an eel, you wouldn’t want to give off the wrong signals.’ Scary, huh!
Mind you, the dolphins’ aggressive responses might have been quite justified. ‘Percy’ suffered a hook in one eye. He ended up disappearing after being exposed to some sewage. ‘Donald’ had received quite serious wounds from a boat propeller and had also been shot. ‘JoJo’ had received some 37 injuries from human beings, of which eight were life-threatening.
Dolphins Rescue People, Don’t They?
The big story that gets all the pistons going in the same direction is the one about how dolphins love to rescue us from the evil sharks. These stories go back to Greek and Roman times.
Sharks and dolphins eat the same food—and will sometimes pursue each other as they chase the food. If sharks pursue one of the dolphins of a pod, the other dolphins band together to protect the targeted animal, aggressively attacking the shark to drive it away. Marine scientists have often seen this happen. If people happen to be in the water at the same time, they might think that the dolphins are banding together to protect them, not the lone dolphin.
And of course, there are the random events of dolphins going out of their way to rescue people—but it doesn’t seem to be their general policy.
2—Conditioned to People, With Food
The study also looked at dolphins in circumstances where they had been conditioned to feeling at ease with people, by being given food. A typical case involved Monkey Mia, a tourist spot in Western Australia. Here wild dolphins swim to within a metre or so of tourists standing in knee-deep water. The dolphins are encouraged to approach the tourists by being offered food. Indeed, on one of our Outback Trips in 1990, we were some of those tourists.
Dr Samuels’ summary is grim—this is harmful to the dolphins.
First, Dr Samuels found that the food that they were given was not as nourishing as fish that they caught for themselves—and was sometimes diseased or partly rotten.
Second, the dolphins were exposed to other risks. The original Monkey Mia dolphin, ‘Old Charlie’, was shot dead. Another seven of the dolphin
s died as a result of pollution. In general, the dolphins in these groups showed poor maternal-caring behaviour, which led to reduced survival of their newborn calves. They had also become significantly more aggressive.
The dolphin–human encounter can also be harmful to the visitors. Tourists at Monkey Mia have been bitten by dolphins.
3—Conditioned to People, No Food
Dr Samuels also looked at dolphins that had been conditioned not to fear people, without giving them food.
It turns out that there has been very little research done on dolphins in this situation. But it is known that they usually change their behaviour when a boat approaches.
4—Not Conditioned to People
These dolphins have only infrequent contact with people.
With this group, there is a low risk of aggression from the dolphin. However, in one case, a woman nearly died while swimming with a pilot whale (which, despite its name, is actually a member of the dolphin family).
Love or Hate?
Dolphins are not full of love for each other, either. They can be very aggressive towards each other, especially during the mating season.