The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #167430   Message #4154882
Posted By: GUEST,Phil d'Conch
13-Oct-22 - 07:13 AM
Thread Name: Maritime work song in general
Subject: RE: Maritime work song in general
Just a quick reminder on the thread title: However, in recent, popular usage, the scope of its definition is sometimes expanded to admit a wider range of repertoire and characteristics, or to refer to a "maritime work song" in general. [Sea Shanty wiki]

This one's on the wiki proper. The East India Fleet crew is singing to a fiddle and working a capstan. The wiki authors themselves can't really relate it to shanties or shantying and 1832 is a long ways from “recent” ––


“Always giving a fillip to conversation by some anecdote or enlivening jest:–– the capstan bars move at the word heave, when accompanied by his usual exclamation of “cheerly, my lads! Cheerly!…”

HEAVING AT THE CAPSTAN.
All who have been on board ship must recollect heaving at the capstan. It is one of the many soul-stirring scenes that occur on board when all hands are turned up; the motley group that man the bars, the fiddler stuck in a corner, the captain on the poop encouraging the men to those desperate efforts that seem, to the novice, an attempt at pulling up the rocks by the root. It's a time of equality; idlers, stewards and servants, barbers and sweepers, cooks' mates and cooks-mate's ministers, doctors' mates, and loblolly boys; every man runs the same road, and hard and impenetrable is that soul that does not chime in with the old ditties, "Pull away now, my Nancy, O!" and the long" Oh!" that precedes the more musical strain of

"Oh her love is a sailor,
His name is Jemmy Taylor,
He's gone in a whaler,
To the Greenland sea:"

or

"Oh ! if I had her,
Eh then if I had her,
Oh! how I could love her,
Black although she be."
[The Quid or Tales of my Messmates, anon, 1832]