Why Do People Christen Ships With Champagne? | by Blessing Akpan | Jul, 2022

What’s the deal with people smashing bottles of champagne on ships?

Christenings can happen for many reasons, but this article is specifically about the practice of christening a ship. We all have this image in our heads, right? A boat or a ship has been built, it’s complete, it’s ready to slide into the briny blue. And right before it does, someone walks up to the ship usually with great pomp and circumstance. They take a big bottle of bubbly, usually champagne, and they smash it against the whole- everybody cheers. And then the ship goes into the water and off to adventure on the high seas.

It’s really interesting that the term christening is still what’s used because christening like baptism is a religious term. It’s what they do to babies when they dip them in holy water in a Catholic ceremony. I’ve heard interchangeably that baptizing is the same thing as christening.

I believe that christening is part of baptism. It’s also a naming ceremony. It’s where you give a kid a Christian name during the baptism like how the naming of a ship is also a big part of its christening.

So, it’s super old. It goes back to the Egyptians, the Greeks, and even the Romans. And it was all about calling on their particular sea gods to protect the cruise of these newly constructed ships because they were going out into the great unknown and oftentimes, these were very dangerous voyages.

In Greece, they would put olive branches around their heads and drink wine, and they also had religious shrines that were carried on board, various kinds of little trinkets that represented certain aspects of the gods. That was something you’d see on Greek and Roman ships. This practice of carrying shrines aboard the ships carried further into the middle ages, and they were particularly located on the quarter deck. The quarter deck would be the area under the main mast where you would often see the captain standing.

The Egyptians, Romans, Greeks, and also the Babylonians practiced some form of christening. There is a written record from Babylon dating back to the third millennium BCE, that describes a process of what we would call christening today. In this case, they get a little weird with it, they give sacrifices to their gods.

And so, there we are. We know in ancient history, there were tons of rituals and ceremonies that varied in their specifics, but they all had the general goal of ensuring the ship’s safety at sea. However, eventually, christening went secular, which is why I think it’s weird that they kept the same name for the term because now, a lot of people don’t associate it with religion.

There were various kinds of flavors of this that had roots in religion. But as we see them catching up to comparatively more modern religions, like Judaism and Christianity. You see slight changes to these rituals. For example, Christians and Jews would use wine and water as an offering similar to what you would see as a communion situation where they would ask God to safeguard them against the hazards of the sea. The Greeks wore wreaths of laurels or olive branches rather around their heads. They would even call upon saints, and oftentimes clergy would be involved in these christening ceremonies. If we look at the Ottoman Empire, they would offer up prayers to Allah and sacrifice live animals. And if I’m not mistaken, the earliest reference to christening or blessing a ship was in ancient Greece, and it was a reference on a stone where a sacrifice was carried out.

It makes sense that people would have religious ceremonies before they set off into the ocean because it was such a dangerous place. It’s still a very dangerous place now, but we have to remember before the days of GPS or accurate world maps, these people were literally setting off into the unknown in many cases, and they needed all the help they could get.

If we fast forward to the Reformation in Europe, we see that there was a division that began between Catholic countries and the Protestants. In Catholic countries, people maintained what we would call the liturgical part of a christening, and that petered out in the Protestant areas of Europe. By the 17th century, English launchings were overwhelmingly more secular. If we look at, for example, the 1610 christening of the ship of the line, Prince Royal, then we see some very interesting differences between a christening in this day and age versus a christening in ancient Babylon.

Here’s a quote:

The noble Prince… accompanied with the Lord Admiral and the great lords, were on the ooop, where the standing great gilt cup was ready filled with wine to name the ship so soon as she had been afloat, according to ancient custom and ceremony performed at such times, and heaving the standing cup overboard. His Highness then standing upon the poop with a selected company only, besides the trumpeters, with a great deal of expression of princely joy, and with the ceremony of drinking in the standing cup, threw all the wine forwards towards the half-deck, and solemnly calling her by name of the Prince Royal, the trumpets sounding the while, with many gracious words to me, gave the standing cup into my hands.

A standing cup may be better known as a loving cup. And a loving cup is a big two-handed cup, and the way people used to party at banquets back in the day. Everybody would take this big, two-handed cup, and each guest would take a drink from it while passing it around themselves.

Something happens when we hit the scale of the economy. Navies are growing larger and larger. Over time, more and more boats are being launched. Eventually, someone in the English government decides they can’t keep making these enormous expensive cups and throwing them over the side.

With the expansion of the Navy, this became a ridiculous expense and we know that militaries and navies aren’t exactly known for their frugality.

So, we see this evolution of this ceremony becoming increasingly secular. We know wine is often involved and eventually, wine becomes the beverage of choice for a time. But fast forward to the modern day. You will notice that we typically as a species are using champagne.

The United States borrowed their christening tradition from what they saw people doing in England, back in 1797. The christening of the USS Constitution did involve the breaking of a bottle, but it wasn’t champagne, it was Madeira which is a dessert wine.

The christening of the USS Constitution was a really important hallmark because of not necessarily the christening fluid per see, but because the actual christening juice varied from christening to christening. For example, whiskey was used in the christenings of the USS Princeton, the Raritan, and the Shamrock. Those were all ships that were christened with whiskey. The USS New Ironside was actually christened twice, first with brandy and then with Madeira wine. Folks will use things like grape juice, water was really popular, and we even know about some uses of holy water. The USS Hartford was a ship that was christened no less than three times and it was sprinkled with water from the very ocean that it was bound for which was the Atlantic, the Connecticut River, and a spring in Hartford, Connecticut.

So, we see all these different fluids used for christenings. How did champagne win the day? Well, first, it’s fancy, we already associate champagne with celebrations. In 1890, we know the Secretary of the Navy’s granddaughter christened the Navy’s first steel battleship with champagne.

We know that there’s another instance just a year later when Queen Victoria launches the HMS Royal Arthur, she also smashes a bottle of champagne against the whole. So maybe they use champagne because there was royalty involved? We can’t know for sure.

Prohibition outlawed alcohol as we know, and therefore it wasn’t something that could be publicly used in these very public ceremonies. So, we started to see much more use of juices like apple cider. And also again, water from the specific body of water the ships were destined for. Champagne did make a comeback stronger than ever with the passage of the 21st amendment. And that really was the moment that solidified it.

We know that there was in some cases, a lot riding on the successful rupture of the bottle on the first try. In the New York Times on November 18, 1890, we see an account of a battle cruiser for the US Navy, named the Maine, and it was christened in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. This is a description of the granddaughter of the Secretary of the Navy that we mentioned earlier. And this description emphasizes just how much is riding on getting this right. Here’s the quote;

Miss Wilmerding will have the precious quart bottle secured to her wrist by a short bunch of ribbons, which will serve the same purpose as a sword knot. It is of the utmost importance that the bottle be broken on the first throw, for the bluejackets will declare the vessel is unmanageable if she is permitted to get into the water without first being christened. It is consequently a matter of deep interest to the old “shellbacks” to learn that Miss Wilmerding has performed her task successfully.

But let’s get back to the practicalities that we mentioned just a little bit earlier. It’s tough to break a champagne bottle, and it should be tough because they have to stand up to enormous pressure, which means that glass is by necessity very thick. I found a great article on BBC interviewing a guy named Mark Miodownik, who is a material scientist at King’s College London. And he’s the one who talks about how to prepare a champagne bottle. First, he says you want a bigger bottle because a bigger bottle is going to have a higher likelihood of carrying a natural defect. And I believe this is the same article that provides the inside tip on how to weaken the bottle in advance and you can use just a glass cutter, which I think is just a handheld thing that you would use to cut a hole in a window, like in the movies.

I’ve seen examples where people tie the bottle to a rope, because a lot of these ships are massive, and you can’t get right up on them. So, they would swing the bottle from the dock on a rope and then hit the side of it. And the way to go about that is apparently to use a very rigid rope because of its elasticity that’ll soak up some of the impact that you need to actually break the bottle.

Christening is an ancient tradition, and through the long game known as human history, it has transformed over time, but its roots are still very deep in our society. Also, if you are a person who doesn’t get super into booze, or if you’re a person who doesn’t want to waste champagne, you can consider a couple of other christening traditions. For instance, in Japan, instead of a bottle of champagne, they tend to use a special silver axe to cut the lines that hold the ship away from the water.

In 1931, Lew Henry Hoover christened the Akron, but he didn’t use any liquid at all. He christened it with a flock of pigeons that were released to fly over the ship. We think of the liquid christening as being the only way it’s done but that’s just not the case.

Even with the secularization of this ceremony, it still has echoes of religion, and the fact that it’s still called a christening speaks volumes to how much staying power a lot of these rituals have.

Sources:

www.thoughtco.com/ships-champagne-and-superstition-1774054