Pour oil on any waters today and
you'll stir up a storm among ecologists rather than soothe or calm a situation
by fact and diplomacy which is the figurative meaning of the above phrase. The
ancients, Pliny and Plutarch among them, believed that oil poured on stormy
waters reduced the waves to a calm and allowed a vessel to ride through a
storm. The Venerable Bede says in his Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum
(731) that Bishop Aidan, an Irish monk, gave a priest, who was to deliver King
Oswy's bride to him, holy oil to pour on the sea if the waves became
threatening; his miraculous oil would stop the wind from blowing. A storm did
blow up and the priest saved the ship and the future queen by following this
advice. Later, Benjamin Franklin mentioned the practice of pouring oil on
troubled waters in a letter and it is said that the captains of American whaling
vessels sometimes ordered oil poured on stormy waters. Oil spills today,
however, trouble the waters, polluting them and killing wildlife. In Fact, men
have even suffocated in oil slicks, as did the crew of the sinking tanker
Usworth in 1934.