Shanty: 93 posts about 1:5 jokes or drift. The rest is consumer preference and speculation. The Advent thread (891 posts) is about the same ratio, making for +200 yuks, but at least some 19th century citations & references. One can skim both combined in less than one hour.

Naval Science: Slogging thru Ships and Seamanship in the Ancient World (Casson, 1971) at the mo. It's 2/3 footnotes every page and takes me an hour to fully digest a paragraph. If I could actually read Greek and/or Latin I could speed things up a tad.

Shanties are a gentrified, fictional genre of pop entertainment. They've always been there even when they are not called shanties. Wagner's Dutchman came out right in the middle of it all.

Maritime work song is the true, mostly lost, naval science & history the new and old fictions are based on.