It has been a superstition for generations that a marriage
performed by a Captain of a man-of-war on his own quarter-deck was legal, and it may turn out to be so yet. Her Majesty's law .officers, however, having informed the Admiralty that all such marriages are illegal, they have for the future been prohibited. The old practice was founded, we imagine, on the fact that at common law any marriage by contract before witnesses, followed by cohabitation, was legal, and the Captain was only the most conspicuous witness procurable. It may possibly prove to be so now, almost all the Statutes regulating marriage containing a clause limiting them to. these. islands, of which a man-of-war may or may not for such a purpose form part. If the law officers are right, as is most, probable, a law should be pasaed.legalisingAll such contracts, as a sailor could hardly know better than his captain, and then this odd result will remain. Captain Marryat, who fully believed in his own power to act as clergyman, could perform the ceremony in Scotch waters, but not in English or Irish, the. Scotch law of consent being, we pre- sume, valid within the regular distance. The Admiralty might have postponed the decree, we think, till the Supplementary Bill could have been passed.
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