MichaelKM,

More likely a windlass rather than a capstan on that schooner, I think.

Indeed, it may have been Hugill that floated or reinforced an already existing idea (i.e. which inspired this thread) about less chanty singing on whalers. I can't readily discover if that's an idea Hugill "borrowed" from his reading or came up with himself. He would not really have been in the position to really scour primary sources. I conjecture that he used the "crews were too large" idea to come up with the idea--and then propagated that idea repeatedly in presentations. Another place where he presented that idea was at an 1980 talk at Mystic Seaport. Interestingly, Stuart Frank -- at that time sort of just taking cues from Hugill-- repeated the idea a short time later at the event. BUT, in his 2000 book, Frank has done his due diligence as a scholar and revisits the idea. He contests the "large crew" rationale, saying that only a fraction of the whaler's crew was engaged in those jobs such that the overall crew size is not germane.

M. Lutz spoke to the (evidently conventional wisdom) idea of less chanties on whalers in her 1977 dissertation, offering some rebuttal.

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Huntington's _The Gam_ does not contain chanties. Huntington rationalizes the lack of chanties in his sources (mainly whalemen's journals) by saying that (paraphrased) "the men didn't think of chanties as songs." Maybe so. But that's not particular to whaling ships; there is VERY little discussion of chanty singing in the journals of any seamen. After a point, it turns up, rather, in published travelogues.

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