Gibb, thanks for your thoughts on this. I had just come across the song in Abrahams last week and it has been rattlin' around in the back of my head. I, too, would suspect some kind of relationship with "South Australia", but my question would be does it precede "South Australia" or derive from it. This would also be my question with regard to the version from the Georgia Sea Islands in L. Parrish. Does Parrish's version go back to slave days?

With regard to "South Australia" being around in '53, I was taking a fairly literalistic point of view and saying that it would appear that the earliest written dating we can get for this shanty would be sometime between 1872 and 1874, from William Laurie (Doerflinger) and Harlow's "shipmate Dave". This is about twenty years or so later than the time of the "Julia Ann" (1853-55). There's nothing to say that it wasn't around twenty years earlier. And I would like to track down the "Heave away, Haul away, We're bound for California" song that Hugill mentions, which would probably move it back earlier. The other question is how much weight to put on Hugill's comment about "With the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and the new-fangled "tin-kettles" taking over the China tea trade, many of the clippers and the newly found Baines' Blackball line began to carve regular trade routes between the Mother Country and the Colonies. Apart from the capstan shanty "South Australia", no new work-songs were produced in these ships either,..."

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You say, ""Was "South Australia" sung aboard the Julia Ann?" and "What chanteys could have been sung aboard the Julia Ann?" are questions that demand different focus and methodology. Your question, as I understand is the latter." I agree with you on focus and methodology and yes, my question is the latter "What chanteys could have been sung aboard the Julia Ann?"   And what I am looking for help with today is how to establish the "could" with as much historical foundation as the sources allow. Sources here include not only the written references to certain shanties, but the lyrical content of the shanties as they have come down to us. I agree with you when you say "However, based on their language, style, melody characteristics, and other historical info, they can be reasonably dated. I am saying this even as a natural skeptic. So I do appreciate the line of thinking that "these chanteys may not really be as old as we tend to think," but lack of references until later does not account for why they would have characteristics of earlier eras of song."

You ask "Is this the sort of thing you are asking, i.e. about alternative ways to "prove" besides this straight "literary mention" sort of thing?" My answer is "yes" although "prove" is probably too strong a word. And, "One can only capture the gestures, the tendencies, the examples or incidental realizations (what Peirce called sinsigns, I think) -- one can say "the kind of thing that was being done," not the thing that was done." Whoa! Yes! (Peirce yet!)

I'm not interested in "seeking to date the rise of chanteying "as we know it". My "measure of positive documentation" does not demand "their direct mention in a piece of writing". When I am talking about "oral traditions" I am very much including your idea of "performance" when you say "With performance --even talk of performance-- this notion of pinpointing an exact thing goes out the window. Because not only will future performances never match past performances, but also past performances never matched each other." Oral traditions include both the actual singing of the shanties, but also the telling of the stories about them and how they came down to us, as well as actually passing on sets of lyrics, dates, etc.

This thread is definitely a work in progress and I think I am with you on this, and I greatly appreciate the course corrections. Without being presumptuous, I feel a bit like Captain Pond might have felt when he took that earlier voyage on the "Julia Ann" down to Valparaiso as a passenger and began to learn about sailing. I hope this provides some clarification. This sums it up for me: "But the main question calls for more flexible methods, and certainly a more flexible way of viewing the nature of the chantey genre (not as pieces of repertoire but as a practice associated with common gestures)."