I agree with Q & his staging of "Kanaka". The word was still well known while I lived there in the very early 80's but it was not a tem you'd here anyone use unless they were Hawaiian themselves. and as Q mentioned the Samoan language is very different from the Hawaiian & in no way does "Kanaka" remotely come close to Samoen.
It is distintley Hawaiian & not Polynesian or Somoan at all. Think the use of the word "Nigger". Though I'm sure that was not the case in the days of the Golden Age of Sail.
Another use of the term is found in "Rolling Down to Old Maui" a song of & about the Hawaiin Islands as a whaling port. The term is used affectionately just as the Hawaiian word Wahine (woman) is.
Besides, had it been influenced with Samoan origins the song probably would've been titled "Jon Kanaka" seeing as the ports in Somoa where used by Germans.
As to the "tulai-e" part of the chorus being Somoan as Hugill supposes, Im not taking much stoch in that seeing as sailors loved their playing with the soundings of foriegn tongues & wordplay.


Gibb;
"I have said earlier that I think there is a cluster of chanteys cut from the same mold, which may include: Kanaka, "Mobile Bay," "John Cherokee," "Essequibo River," and maybe even "John Dameray." They all have a format with 3 solo phrases, the third being more vocables than lyrics. They're all ascribed to the Caribbean; all but 1 from Harding."


"John Cherokee" & "John Dameray" do not fit the mold you discribe as a "3 solo phrase". Of the 3 left that you mention Hugill does not say where his sourse of his printed version comes from. The other 2 are from Harding which only means that Harding had at least 2 shanties in his repitoire that used the "3 solo phrase" (your term not mine) form, which was probably very well suited to the related work he choose to sing them too. By no means does or should that alone lead us to believe that they are West Indian or Caribbean shanties.

I have some thoughts & a theory on "yelps" & I'm thinking that the discripion of John Short's singing is just another factor that comes into play. Short sailed at 18 in 1856, pretty much the height of Blacks role in Shanteydom (if we agree it's dated somewhere just after the 1812 & 1815 Wars & lasting up until-I'm in agreement with Whall, around 1875, when Jim Crow at sea was just about under full sail). So we have a number of documenters giving discriptions of "yelps" etc. from sailors of color. Sailors of color by my take & what I've come across were "the "old hands/men of the sea". By then (meaning at the tail end, say post Civil War till 1875, many white 'greenhorns' who'd come to sea did so more frequently as 'Johnny Come Lately's' & more stood their watch only a hand full of times & more than less moved on to more friendly occupations. Blacks did not have those other oppertunities to move on to so they were forced to stay at sea longer even as their oppertunities ere beginning to deminish. So we have Whall (& others stating by 1875) shanties were dying if not deead as a replenishing tradition, timing coincenadently with the sea slowing losing it's sailors of colors). So we have by the turning of the century a diminishing trade under sail (which lasted up to bewteen the 2 world wars) a diminishing of "old salts left to pass on their trades to a younger generation that wants no part of haiving seafaring as a life long career. Now you have those few like Sharp who'd picked up their trade from the "old salts" & by my figuring the majority of "old salts" would be "sailors of color" so there were the few like Short & Hugill that would be the recipentients of what ever was available & left over for them to be passed down. By this I would say (if I'm heading in the right direction) that they were an anomaly rather than the likes of those sailors coming from a culture in the West Indies or elswhere in the Caribbean where the singing styles picked up in yesteryear would've stayed far more current in the living tradition & probably were in an atmosphere the styles would've been nourished. So after all that it may have been a style of singing used mostly among sailors of color in the early days & stayed with them till their last days at sea & were only picked up by those few from other backgrounds who had the oppertunity to sail with this dying breed & by the time the collecters can around the "Old Salts of Color" had long passed on & only the very who'd picked up from them were left to sing their songs.

Did any of that make sense, I read it & it does but that doesn't mean squat at 2 in the morning?
G'nite

"They call me yelping" Barry