The tenth wave

Correspondents of Hone’s Year Book took up the old notion that every tenth wave is bigger than the rest. James Jennings wrote that it had long been believed by many people who knew the sea shore, that he had heard it as a boy, and that watching the waves break he found it held on a rising tide but not an ebbing one, though it was not always exactly the tenth. Sir Thomas Browne had argued against it, and others cited Ovid, who wrote of the tenth wave as the mightiest.