Friday

Friday is usually a day associated with the positive side of life. The end of the working week, the start of the weekend, a time when optimism reigns, the glass is half full, Friday is the complete opposite of its evil brother - Monday. But that's on land...

Across the seas, where the weekend does not exist, where the glass is always half empty, where pessimism and fog are one step ahead of reason - there Friday means something else, it means a day when nothing is started, a day to be skipped, to be forgotten. Extremely superstitious sailors sometimes knew how to be problematic in insisting on their superstitions. The British Navy, as the main imperialist player in the world at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, faced several sailors' mutinies that caused headaches. Of course, superstitions were not the cause of it, but they could be the initial trigger.

And the peak of bad luck was the sailing of ships on Friday. For this reason, and perhaps not exactly, around the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Admiralty of the British Royal Navy, trying to dispel the eternal naval superstitions about sailing on Friday, decided to prove once and for all that there was nothing unlucky about sailing on that day.

On a Friday, in January 1818, the ship HMS Friday (His Majesty's Ship - Friday) was commissioned.

It was a Brique, a relatively small and fast sailing ship whose keel was laid on the slipway of the shipyard in Friday, was launched on Friday and was officially commissioned... on Friday. A man with the surname Friday was even found as a captain, a certain James Friday. The maiden voyage was also scheduled for - Friday.

The modest ceremony served to suppress fears, to overcome paranoia, to suppress the voice in the minds of those present that perhaps this was not the best idea...After setting sail, the HMS Friday smoothly headed for the calm sea, sailed into the sunset, greeted the ships it encountered...and a few days later disappeared without a trace, never to be seen again or heard of what happened to it. Some point to the existence of an urban myth with a similar theme, some swore that such a ship really existed, others searched the Royal Navy registers but failed to find evidence of the existence of such a ship, at least under that name.

And so the frigate HMS Friday remains forgotten among the mysterious uncertainty of sailors' tales in the port taverns, between the tobacco fog and the smell of strong alcohol, somewhere between the quiet conversation and the unbridled superstition, the trace of the ship that was supposed to mark a different approach and the triumph of rationality over mystery is lost. Instead, Friday with its short (non)existence, only served as a source of new legends, myths and traditions that to this day sail across the oceans and through the minds of people who adore the unknown, who rejoice in the unusual and the undefined...

(Roger Mortis, 159)