Are ships captains allowed to marry people at sea?
Dear Cecil: This question is for my friend Irene. Were ships’ captains ever allowed to marry people while cruising the deep blue? If not, can you tell me where this rumor emerged? — Magenta, Washington, D.C. Cecil replies: This being a free country, Magenta, ships’ captains are allowed to marry anybody they want to. Performing marriages, however, is a different story. So far as I can tell, sea captains in the United States cannot now and have not ever been able to perform marriages at sea or anywhere else, unless they also happen to be recognized ministers or JPs or something. The same goes for sea captains in Britain and the Soviet Union. However–and this is the interesting part–this myth is so widely believed, not only among the general public but among sailors, that both the United States Navy and the British Mercantile Marine Office have taken the extraordinary step of explicitly forbidding captains to do free-lance weddings. Let me quote from the Code of Federal Regulations, Tit
