The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #128220 Message #2886777
Posted By: Lighter
14-Apr-10 - 06:52 PM
Thread Name: The Advent and Development of Chanties
Subject: RE: The Advent and Development of Chanties
Gibb beat me to it. The "diary" is also here:
http://www.angelfire.com/al/aslc/Tulle80.html
"Based on" is the tip-off.
From Basil Lubbock's "The Blackwall Frigates" (1922):
A hundred years is a very long time,
Oh-ho! Yes ! oh-ho !
A hundred years is a very long time,
A hundred years ago.
They hung a man for making steam,
Oh-ho ! Yes ! oh-ho !
They cast his body in the stream,
A hundred years ago. (OLD CHANTY.)
Note the identical, somewhat unusual spelling of "Oho!" in both sources. Lubbock's book, not coincidentally, also includes a skeletal "log" kept by a midshipman on _Agincourt_ in 1848. (I have not compared the accounts any more closely.)
Hugill gives both stanzas, though not consecutively or quite identically.