I guess where I'm landing with all this is that if I were, say, on a jury, and on trial stood a Mr. Xanty. Mr. Xanty has been charged with having always been pronounced as "shingle." I could not find him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

Nordhoff's writing, for one, gives me that reasonable doubt, for it suggests enough that Mr. Xanty was at some time pronounced as "church."

Nordhoff provides solid observational details. What he tells about cotton screwing and about the songs is uncommon knowledge. To recall the songs with such detail that we can corroborate elsewhere says to me this was as close to reality as fair recollection, 6-7 years after the fact, can provide. I'm not inclined to suppose, with that evident high quality of observation, that he didn't hear how the words were pronounced. Then, I find nothing persuasive to say he heard "shingle" but wrote it as "chingle" to reflect a French orientation. It would be a bit too weird, in my estimation, to think Nordhoff wrote "chanting" for something that sounded like "shanting."

It need not be that the pronunciation shifted from "church" to "shingle" between 1848 and 1859. (Abbe's sea journal, by the way, in which "Shantie" appears numerous times in the 1859 entries, has now been digitized and posted by New Bedford Whaling Museum.) Maybe both pronunciations were in use by different people. In any case, I can't declare unequivocally that the word was always pronounced "shingle."