In the collections of Aberdeen Maritime Museum in northeast Scotland is a seventeenth-century ship model at one time classified as a ‘votive ship’. This model came from the city's St Nicholas Kirk, where it was hung in 1689 in front of the seamen's loft, the seating gallery built for the Shipmaster Society of Aberdeen. Votive ship models were presented as offerings to be hung up in churches or shrines in fulfilment of a sacred vow made to God in return for safe deliverance from peril at sea. As the philosopher Hans Blumenberg writes, ‘there is a frivolous, if not blasphemous, moment inherent in all seafaring […] a transgression of natural boundaries that was likely to result in punishment’. Several seafaring cultures have adopted suitable measures to assuage the correct deity and so avoid such punishment, and the power of magical and intercessory objects is clearly evident in the surviving material culture from the earliest British practices of the Christian faith, from pilgrim badges and miniature ship models recorded at medieval shrines, to graffiti of ships carved onto church pillars. As Thomas notes, ‘Magical aids were invoked when problems were too great to be solved by human skill. The dangers of seafaring made sailors notoriously superstitious and generated a large number of ritual precautions designed to secure favourable weather and the safety of the ship.’

For medieval Christians all elements of the votive act were crucial: it was imperative that the vow be completed to fulfil the pact made between the sailor and God. As Morgan states, ‘Promises are solemnly made… Publicly displayed imagery makes vows more meaningful and the hope for deliverance more promising’. In the pre-Reformation Scottish church the public display of the vow's fulfilment was a crucial element of this sacred contract. This chapter argues that this may have continued informally in the early modern period too. The original vow was an individual act for personal intercession, but its completion was made in a public space, and moreover in a sacred public space. As such, these little ships would also serve as a reminder to congregations of their dependence on the sea and God's grace for their livelihoods, and by extension dependence on the shipmasters.