Historical reprints and original research on sea shanties, maritime music, and the age of sail.
The Battle of Trafalgar was fought to music and mourned in song. A guide to the ballads, stage songs, and shanties that grew up around Nelson's death, from the bands playing on the approach to the rum the sailors called Nelson's Blood.
In 2021 millions of people sang about waiting for the Wellerman to bring sugar and tea and rum. The Wellermen were real: the supply ships of three brothers from Kent who ran a whaling station in Otago Harbour in the 1830s. This is the story of their station, of what its whalers actually sang, and of where the famous song really came from.
Temple Bar
The future Poet Laureate's account of the shanties he heard as a young sailor, at the capstan, the halyards, and the pumps, and of the ballads sung in the dog-watch, with six of the tunes.
Sailors' Language: A Collection of Sea-terms and Their Definitions
The nautical novelist's tour of forecastle talk: the jargon that baffled lawyers in marine courts, and the names sailors gave their food and shipmates.
Harper's New Monthly Magazine
A journalist's detailed survey of sea shanties from the age of American packet ships, classifying them into pulling songs and windlass songs, with nineteen musical transcriptions. One of the earliest attempts to document these traditions before the last sailors who knew them were gone.
Oberlin Students' Monthly
An Oberlin College student draws on his time at sea to reflect on why sailors cannot work without singing, and traces the plaintive minor key of shanties to African musical traditions. A rare pre-Civil War essay on shipboard work songs, with vivid firsthand anecdotes.
