Jon,

It's a mess. I'm not going to remember all of the details from when I dissected it (or when we, including you, might have participated in that dissection on Mudcat), but yes, the Rule #1 I follow is that everything after the narrative part should be treated with skepticism.

It's worth repeating that the material was put together 50 years (!) after Harlow's sea service. It happened, too, after Harlow had been active in various concertizing activities at the height of the sea shanties craze of the mid-1920s. He's 70 years old and suddenly trying to put together a collection.

Harlow's simple narrative of his sea experiences appears quite solid and makes The Making of a Sailor quite useful. However, he seems to have felt (compelled by exactly which forces at the start, I don't know) to take up the contemporary interest in chanties and build that into the tale. I imagine (just thinking here) that because Harlow knew a thing or two about chanties (which I do believe he did) he was either called on (by local folks on the sea shanties bandwagon) or felt inspired to pipe up during that time to add his voice to it all—which is nice to an extent, but he ended up overstepping the limits of what he could speak to with accuracy. I imagine that is why the publisher made him cut most of the chanty material in order to get Making of a Sailor published, to keep it a solid travel narrative.

The narrative part in CAAS, as well, is problematic, even if less hodgepodge-y than the rest. I hint at it in the preceding posts: Did the chantyman, Brooks, *really* sing "Donkey Riding" in that way, or at all, back in 1876?

"South Australia" and "Shenandoah" are two other examples of songs in that section which come to mind as looking iffy.

Is the narrative a true account of when/what chanties occurred during the voyage, or has he used the voyage narrative-form as a shell in which to present all chanties of which he is in possession and he has fabricated what was actually sung because it seems close enough to what "could" have happened?

I'm grateful to have the work, but, like Hugill (for whom I'm also grateful), the work blurs the author's experience with his research many years later.