//
It may be imagined that the specimens of sailor songs already given illustrate the highest possible achievements of man in the direction of vocal idiocy. This would be a mistake. There are songs which in elaborate unintelligibility and inanity of chorus are so appalling that it would be unkind to lay them before the sane reader. The following song is bad enough in this respect, but there are others which are infinitely worse. It has, moreover, the redeeming trait of true melody, and was once, perhaps, the most universally popular of its class.

O the wildest packet you can find--
Ah he, ah ho, are you most done?
Is the Marg'ret Evans in the Black X line.
So clear the track, let the bulgine run.
To my high rigajig in a low-back car.
Ah he, ah ho, are you most done?
With Eliza Lee all on my knee.
So clear the track, let the bulgine run.
//

It seems to be the first reference to CLEAR THE TRACK. The only earlier thing that might be related is a corn shucking song, mentioned in 1848 (AMERICAN AGRICULTURALIST, above) called "Clear the track when Sambo come."

//
It is not the purpose of this article to give the entire repertoire of the shantyman. If he was an artist of any real cultivation, he had at least seventy-five songs at his tongue's end. Those which have been given will afford a fair idea of the best of the sailor songs which will bear translation from the windlass to the columns of a magazine. It must be admitted that, in spite of the simplicity and purity of character ascribed to the sailor by novelists, not a few of the songs which he sang were highly objectionable on the score of morality. They were, however, no worse in this respect than the songs which one occasionally hears in the smoking-car of an excursion train, and were decidedly better than certain opera-bouffe songs which some ladies seem to enjoy when the song-writer's indecency is picturesquely illustrated by a clever French-woman. But both the good and the bad songs ceased when the sailor disappeared, and to revive them on the deck of an iron steam-ship would be as impossible as to bring back the Roman trireme.
//

Clearly, Alden knew more chanties than what he has given.

With the end of the article, another lament for the end of sailing ships...and chanties.