Tom,

I was going to go through which of John Short's shanties were 'covered' by Stan as Harding/WestIndies - but it'll be a few weeks yet: will post when it's done. From the other direction, has anyone listed the 'Harding shanties' from Seven Seas? (or the 'picked up' for that matter).

That would be very insightful, good idea.
I did once read through Hugill with an eye to which shanties were from Harding, but I didn't keep a strict list. My goal at the time was to sketch a rough picture of the percentages of what chanteys came from where. Needless to say, that is impossible to say with any accuracy since as many people would disagree on the origins (or dismiss the effort as rather pointless). The number of course will also vary widely depending on what you count variations. For whatever it's worth though, here are some of my stats:

Total number of shanties, not including textual variants or little "sing outs," is about 181. Usually I counted each different tune as a different chantey. "Blow the Man Down" was counted as a single chantey, despite there being "Flying Fish" version, "Blackballer" version, etc.

Of these,

78 were of "Black" origin. Out of those 78, I filed 47 as Black American and 31 as Caribbean. Keep in mind that this also includes minstrel song types, which are difficult to distinguish from authentic African-American songs of the period. Also, the Caribbean number may seem low because many of the chantey, even if learned from Harding, seemed to originate in the Southern U.S., as minstrel songs, etc.

14 were "Irish" or Irish-American. This does not include the minstrel songs, which are often a sort of Black-Irish combo. As already noted, I included those under "Black"--a bias in my count, I guess.

8 were "American," exclusive of "Black" or "Irish."

"All Others," an undifferentiated category, numbered 80.

I did not note which were "English" specifically, though that number was comparatively few. Moreover, many of these are forebitters that Hugill admitted into the collection on the criterium that he'd hear one person say they had been used as a capstan song. A contrary statement one could make is that they are all really "English," since it was Stan, an Englishman, who sang them!

Take those numbers with several teaspoons of salt.

Gibb