Ffrangcon Lewis wrote me:

Dear Ros,



       Thanks for helping out. I looked at the thread on the site you offered, and the ancestry through 'High Barbary' to an Elizabethan pirate ballad (?) is interesting and helpful. As a complete layman and landlubber, it does seem to me to have a chorus,
and to be, or at least to mimick, a sea-chantey. The book in which I found the version was called 'Solo and Chorus'. On the net, I found the longer and more exciting title, and the poster who said she grew up opposite Salcombe might like to know that golden dinars from North Africa were salvaged from Salcombe harbour in, I think, 1997. Meanwhile, it looks as if this chantey was current in or before Melville's time:
I wonder how many other such sea-chanteys and sea-songs make reference to the 'red flag' in this way? Anyway, thanks again, and yes, I do like real folk music,



best wishes,





Ffrangcon Lewis

On Ishmailites the topic was broached anent the red flag that figures in the closing portion of Moby-Dick, so I have retitled this post "Red Flags in maritime ballads and chanteys" and request more such cases.

FWIW, my personal preference for "chantey" as opposed to "shanty" derives mainly from my desire to avoid confusion with the sort of shanty one might abide in, a ramshackle hut of Québecois provenance.

Haruo