Mother Carey was a supernatural figure personifying the cruel and threatening sea in the imagination of 19th-century English-speaking sailors. She was a similar character to Davy Jones

Davy Jones' Locker

Davy Jones's Locker is an idiom for the bottom of the sea: the state of death among drowned sailors. It is used as an euphemism for death at sea ....

 (who may be her husband).

The name seems to be derived from the Latin expression Mater cara ("Precious Mother"), which sometimes refers to the Virgin Mary.

John Masefield

John Masefield

John Edward Masefield, OM, was an English poet and writer, and Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1930 until his death in 1967...

 described her in the poem "Mother Carey (as told me by the bo'sun)" in his collection "Salt Water Ballads" (1902). Here she and Davy Jones are a fearsome couple responsible for storms and ship-wrecks.

In a Cicely Fox Smith poem entitled "Mother Carey", she calls old sailors to return to the sea.

The character appears as a fairy in Charles Kingsley

Charles Kingsley

Charles Kingsley was an English priest of the Church of England, university professor, historian and novelist, particularly associated with the West Country and northeast Hampshire.-Life and character:...

's "The Water Babies

The Water-Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby

The Water-Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby is a children's novel by the Reverend Charles Kingsley. Written in 1862–1863 as a serial for Macmillan's Magazine, it was first published in its entirety in 1863...

". She lives near the North Pole and helps Tom find the Other-end-of-Nowhere. She is shown in one of Jessie Wilcox Smith's illustrations for this book.

Storm-petrels (thought by sailors to be the souls of dead seamen) are called Mother Carey's Chickens. Giant petrel

Giant petrel

Giant petrels is a genus, Macronectes, from the family Procellariidae and consist of two species. They are the largest birds from this family...

s are called Mother Carey's Geese.