Thanks, Lighter, glad you enjoyed the view. The "how come?" is something the documentary will address, and I'm working on a journal article to lay it out with more detail.

None of it would be possible without the gracious assistance of Gazela's crew. They really are fantastically knowledgeable and I'm lucky they are also receptive. Hopefully the film will allow Gazela and her caretakers to shine, because, as I say, what they are doing is pretty unique: They've got on one hand an original 19th century vessel which they care for AND use. Usually ship stuff these days is either about preserving an old vessel and not using it *or* about sailing newer vessels.

The main points of "how come" are:

Perhaps as few as two of these windlasses exist in our times and one of them, on the Charles W. Morgan, never operates with a load on. I believe that goes as far back as Mystic Seaport has ever been doing demonstrations in the 1970s (but I have to double-check).

Add to that, windlasses of such size were rarely operated by hand after the 1920s. (The Morgan itself got a donkey engine in 1886.) By the turn of the 20th century, this was obsolete tech on most ships outside of whaling and fishing vessels. I suppose that writers about chanties in the early 20th century, even those who had shipping experience, had had little experience with these windlasses. I believe that when people were writing by then about "capstan and windlass chanties," the "windlass" part of the equation was either their way of saying "the windlass driven by a capstan" (which, technically, was known more as a windlass in its earlier days) or kind of BS-ing the windlass part. The character and repertoire of chanty singing, I argue, changed by then with the shift to the capstan.

As a case in point, Hugill, though he wrote about the brake windlass, said he never had any windlass working experience outside of "coasting vessels" (which may imply the smaller versions of brake windlass). There's a little story about what Stan Hugill had on his mind about windlasses at the start of the Mystic Sea Music festivals in 1980, when he first appeared there—a failed attempt to make brake windlass chanties happen during the '76 Op Sail.

I have a photo of Hugill doing a singing demo with the Morgan's windlass at that first festival, and I assume they had to pretend to do work (though I need to check).

So, most of the knowledge of how to do it disappeared over time. I'm pitching the film as a resource to help people revive this (if they want).