Steve,

I'm presuming we are looking mainly for influences rather than origins.

My stated interest in looking to see the "emergence" of shanties nicely (!) confounds "influences" and "origins." While influences are indeed a more realistic thing to document and while it's undoubtably true that shanties are a composite of various influences (i.e. like most things)...my personal working hypothesis (which I'm willing to abandon at any time BTW) is that, with respect to being *shipboard* songs, "chanties" were *introduced*, and relatively suddenly at that. So my pet interest does include a lean towards the concept of "origins." That being said, I hope the evidence can do its own speaking; the rest is each person's interpretation.

I fully agree that the information will have to be organized in other ways; there is a zooming in / zooming out process involved. On the big "Sydney" thread, John Minear has followed the trajectories of individual chanteys. What I want to eventually do here is create the complimentary warp to that weft. I've begun -- and I think this is what you're suggesting? -- to create a timeline with the shanty "sightings" in each year. It's a lot of info to round up, but I'll post it once I have it, and people can re-format it as they like. The process definitely requires several phases of digestion. The trick is having it condensed enought to glance over, but with enough detail so the significance is not lost. For example, it might be misleading to group all songs mentioning "Sally Brown" with that tag. Anyways, it will be a start.