Now I'm beginning to wonder, Greg, if you might be on to a cultural phenomenon that may have existed in the somewhat vague area between "Slavery" and "Indentured Servitude".

An Ancestor of ours, James ADAMS, was a "Loyalist Scot" who came up on the losing side of the Battle of DUNBAR in 1650. Some luck was still with him, however, as he was not among the many Scots who were slaughtered while trying to surrender or flee, and somehow managed to survive the subsequent Death March and squalid confinement with fellow survivors in a little church for months.

At length, he and about 60 of his fellow survivors were packed into the HMS "UNITY" and shipped as "Indentured Servants" to the Colonies where he was essentially "sold" to the Saugus Iron Works in what is now Massachusetts.

Apparently someone, bless their hearts, smuggled some Lawyers in about the same time, and everybody took to suing everybody else for about every real or contrived grievance they could imagine, and within about 7 years of consistant losses the Iron Works went out of business and ADAMS quietly faded away to Salem where he was active in some organization to help and advocate for fellow Scots Immigrants.

Since the distinction between slavery and servitude may have been a bit vague, and in some cases perhaps even moot (I don't think that Adams had a lot of options at the time) it is concievable that they lived and worked together on at least some occasions, sharing cultural elements such as language.

The work of the Mariner seems to have been one of the oldest truly integrated vocations from time immemorial, and even during the American Civil War the US Navy held to this tradition even when the Land Services were strictly segregated.

It well may be that Sailors of Color, slave or free, picked up Gaelic from the Crews and/or Officers of ships they sailed on.

There certainly is a strong African influence behind the whole concept of the "Sea Chanty" as well as their musical construction, so it stands to reason that a lot of cultural interchange went on at sea.