The question: Do bananas really bring bad luck to a boat?
Background: Where does the taboo come from?
There are many theories as to where the "bad-luck-banana" superstition got started. Some people think it began back in the colonial shipping days, when trade vessels brought bananas from the New World across the Atlantic to Europe. Bananas spoiled quickly on board the boats, and so the ships had to travel fast; this pressure on speed may have led to riskier and more disastrous voyages. Alternately (and less sadly) the speed also meant that the boats had less time to stop and fish, which may have led to the association between bananas and low fishing success.
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image from: http://farm4.static.flickr.com
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Other theories focus more on the cargo than the voyage. Historically, creatures like spiders and snakes would stow away in banana cargo, and so it may have been that captains started the rumor to keep banana crates off their boats. Another theory is that because bananas give off ethylene gas as they ripen, they may have caused other food to spoil quickly in the cargo hold, resulting in their unpopularity on boats. One story from Hawaii says that bananas packed by fishing tribesman would spoil at the same time that the men paddled too far out for good fishing, hence their association with poor fishing.
Whatever its origins,
the banana taboo is here to stay in angling culture; some fishers even extend
the taboo to include anything associated with bananas, such as banana boat
sunscreen or banana republic clothing. I for one have many friends who would be exceedingly angry were I to sneak a banana on board their boat, and anecdotes relating bananas to poor fishing days abound in Florida. So when as a student I was asked to design a study for a course I was taking, it seemed the time was ripe to set the records straight.
The Design: How do we test it?
