This Day in History
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All events
January
February
March
April
May
June
- 1 The Shannon and the Chesapeake
- 2 Maiden Voyage of the Flying Cloud
- 4 The Antelope Puts to Sea
- 10 End of the First Barbary War
- 13 The Greenland Whale Fisheries
- 15 Centennial Johnson Sails for England
- 17 The Arethusa and the Belle Poule
- 18 Napoleon Defeated at Waterloo
- 19 Sinking of the Alabama
- 21 Dear Diary: Today We Saw a Whalefish
- 24 John Cabot Reaches North America
July
August
- 1 Battle of the Nile
- 4 The Talambó Incident
- 10 The Gloucester Sea Serpent
- 14 Richard Henry Dana, Before the Mast
- 17 First Iron Ore Through the Soo Locks
- 19 The Constitution and the Guerriere
- 20 Thomas Moore Arrives in Quebec
- 24 The Gale of August, 1927
- 26 The Great Gloucester Fishermen's Race
- 30 Abandonment of Corbitt's Barkentine
- 31 The Song of the Corsairs
September
- 3 Sinking of the Bigler
- 5 The Enterprise and The Boxer
- 8 The Fall of Sevastopol
- 9 The Independence Hurricane
- 10 The Battle of Lake Erie
- 12 Captain Rogers Hanged for the Murder of Andrew Rose
- 16 Sinking of the Schooner Persian
- 17 Launch of the E. C. Roberts
- 23 Bonhomme Richard defeats HMS Serapis
- 25 Soon May the Wellerman Come
October
November
Eber Brock Ward started out as a deckhand on the lake boats of his uncle Samuel Ward, a shipbuilder at Newport (now Marine City), on the St. Clair River in Michigan. He rose to run the family fleet. After copper was found on Lake Superior in the 1840s, his steamers ran a weekly service from Detroit to Sault Ste. Marie, and his side-wheelers kept a regular line between Cleveland and Detroit. Later he put his money into lumber, mines, and iron, and in 1864 his works near Detroit made the first Bessemer steel in the United States. By the 1870s he was called the richest man in Michigan.
Ward was also a fierce opponent of slavery. Grove Heaton, a clerk on one of his Cleveland steamers in the 1850s, called him “a radical on the question of slavery” and remembered him saying that if there was anyone on earth he despised, “it was the person who bought and sold human chattels.” Ward gave orders that freedom seekers brought to the boat at Cleveland should travel free to Detroit, across the Detroit River from Canada. In September 1856 a Kentucky slaveholder followed three escaped men aboard. Ward happened to be on the boat that night. Ten miles below Detroit, he had the steamer anchor in the Canadian channel of the river and sent the men ashore in a small boat, each with a dollar for breakfast. Heaton told the story in a newspaper thirty years later.
On the morning of Saturday, January 2, 1875, Ward, aged 63, collapsed from a stroke while walking on Griswold Street in Detroit. The Detroit Tribune reported that “death followed the loss of consciousness almost instantaneously.” His shipping line, Ward’s Detroit and Lake Superior Line, outlived him. Its steamers kept carrying passengers and freight between Detroit and the copper ports of Lake Superior, and in 1891 the line became the Crescent Transportation Company. In the 1890s the boats took on Black deckhands at Detroit to load copper at Houghton and Hancock, for about fifteen dollars a month, according to a former mate interviewed by the folklorist Ivan Walton. The deckhands’ work song, The Ward Line, names the line’s steamers: “De Ward’s boun’ up, de Moran’s boun’ down, / ‘N’ de John M. Nichol am hawd agroun’.” The Ward is probably the Eber Ward, built in 1888. Most of the song is about the work and the pay: “It’s wo’k all night an’ wo’k all day, / An’ all yo’ get am not half pay.”
John Ward was allegedly born in Kent, England, circa 1553. He’s said to have worked in fisheries before signing onboard a British privateer. When King James I ended the Anglo-Spanish War in 1603, letters of marque were withdrawn, but many crews opted to carry on in piracy. Around 1604, Ward was allegedly pressed into service aboard the King’s Lyon’s Whelp from which he led colleagues in deserting and stealing a series of larger ships. Wards piracy quickly became a point of international contention as Venice pushed England to rein in their pirate.
The famed ballad Captain Ward and the Rainbow describes Ward’s royal pardon request on January 6 of some unknown year. The request was denied, and Ward reluctantly settled in Tunis, organizing a corsair fleet, teaching gunnery and navigation, and living in comfort until his death in 1622. Most details of Ward’s career come from a 1609 pamphlet of English merchant captain Andrew Barker, whose ship York Bonaventure was among those captured by Ward, A True & Accurat Account of the beginning, proceedings, overthrows, and now present estate of Captain Ward and Danseker.
The death of Lord Nelson was a national tragedy like no other for England. Vice Admiral Horatio Nelson (1758-1805) was Britain’s greatest naval hero, the man whose victories at the Nile, Copenhagen, and Trafalgar broke Napoleon’s sea power and secured British dominance of the oceans. When he was killed at the moment of his greatest triumph at Trafalgar, struck down by a French sharpshooter, the nation mourned as it seldom had before.
“From Greenwich to Whitehall Stairs, on the 8th of January, 1806, in one of the greatest Aquatic Processions that ever was beheld on the River Thames” drifted the royal shallop (barge). The event is referenced in the modern lament Carrying Nelson Home. Nelson is mentioned in nearly a dozen other songs.
Lou Killen, born on this day in 1934 in Gateshead on the Tyne, became one of the most important collectors and performers of English maritime song in the twentieth century. In 1958, Killen founded “Folk Song and Ballad” in Newcastle, one of Britain’s first folk clubs, and turned professional in 1961. The recordings made during this early period concerned songs of sailors, coal miners, and working people. Killen pioneered the English concertina as an accompanying instrument, setting a standard for how it should be done without overpowering the song.
After emigrating to America in 1967, Killen worked closely with Pete Seeger. “Louis was my education about the music of the United Kingdom,” Seeger later said. “He knew all the dialects, taught me many songs.” In 1969, Killen was among the maiden crew of Seeger’s sloop Clearwater alongside Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Don McLean. In 1970, Killen joined the Clancy Brothers, bringing the English concertina to their sound. In the 1990s, Killen served as volunteer coordinator at the San Francisco Maritime Museum, singing shanties and interpreting maritime history to visitors.
In 2010, at age 76, Killen began living as a woman, later taking the name Louisa Jo Killen. She died in Gateshead in August 2013. Her recordings of forebitters, shanties, and songs of the sea remain essential listening for anyone studying the tradition.
In the midst of the Napoleonic Wars, Francis Beaufort (1774-1857) rose through the ranks from merchant sailor to captain. While commanding the HMS Woolwich in 1806, he devised a popular system for categorizing wind speeds called the Beaufort Scale. The scale, first employed on January 13, 1806, ranges from flat, calm seas (0) to hurricanes (12). Beaufort provided heuristics for the fresh breeze needed to carry topsails (5) or the storm that would blow any sails (11). He continued to log the weather and develop the scale for many years before it was adopted by the Royal Navy. The scale has been adapted to describe the behavior of steamships, smoke, and wave crests.
The importance of winds in sailing is captured in songs such as Blow Ye Winds In The Morning and Southerly Wind. Beaufort also gives his name to the Canadian-Arctic sea mentioned in Stan Rogers’s Northwest Passage.
Zubenelgenubi (the Southern Claw) is the fictional ship in Jim McGrath’s shanty of the same name. The ship sails out of Newport on January 18. And the name of the ship (not to be confused with Zubeneschamali, the Northern Claw) comes from the Arabic language, coined for a particular star system’s former role in the constellation Scorpius. Today, the star system Zubenelgenubi is more commonly designated as a component of Libra. It has guided many navigators under summer skies, rising high into the sky and marking due south around 10 PM in early June.
Another constellation important in navigation is Crux, the Southern Cross, though it is only visible from near the Southern hemisphere. The prominence of this constellation is celebrated in the song Under the Southern Cross.
On January 24, 1848, James W. Marshall spotted flakes of gold in the tailrace of a sawmill he was building for John Sutter on the American River in Coloma, California. Sutter tried to keep the discovery quiet, fearing a rush of squatters would overrun his land grant, but word spread quickly. By the end of the year, President Polk confirmed the find in his State of the Union address, and the California Gold Rush was on.
The Forty-Niners who poured into California came by two main routes: overland across the plains, or by sea. The sea route meant either rounding Cape Horn, a grueling five-to-eight-month voyage, or sailing to Panama, crossing the isthmus on foot, and catching another ship north. Tens of thousands chose the ocean, and the rush transformed Pacific shipping almost overnight. San Francisco’s harbor filled with abandoned vessels whose crews had deserted for the goldfields, and the demand for fast passage fueled the golden age of the clipper ship.
The Gold Rush left its mark on the shanty tradition through songs like Banks of the Sacramento, set to the tune of Stephen Foster’s Camptown Races, with its chorus promising “plenty of gold on the banks of the Sacramento.” I Come from Salem City, a parody of Foster’s Oh! Susanna, tells of Forty-Niners rounding Cape Horn for San Francisco Bay, and Paddy Works on the Railway counts through the years of westward expansion that the rush set in motion.
It was early in the morning on the first of February, 1890, that the Lunenberg schooners Donzella and Ceylon started a race from Nova Scotia to Puerto Rico. Arriving in Ponce fourteen days later, the Ceylon was victorious by a mere ten hours. Bolstered by victory, a cargo of molasses was loaded and the crew set sail for Boston shortly after. The return journey saw fierce gales, and on the 28th of March, the ship was lost off Point Michaud, Cape Breton Island.
The friendly rivalry and the tragic pressures of mercantilism are narrated in The Donzella and the Ceylon, allegedly by the steward of the Ceylon. The Donzella was itself lost in a wintery storm in 1896.
By 1840 the Bay of Islands, in the far north of New Zealand, was a regular port of call for whaling ships, and British settlers and land buyers were arriving fast. Britain sent Captain William Hobson of the Royal Navy to make New Zealand a British colony, with the consent of the Māori chiefs. He arrived in HMS Herald on January 29, and the next day he read a proclamation at Kororāreka: the Crown would not recognize any land title it had not granted or confirmed.
On February 5 the chiefs met Hobson in a tent on the lawn at Waitangi, and the treaty was read to them in English and Māori. Some spoke hard against it. Te Kemara, a Bay of Islands chief, told Hobson, “My land is gone, gone, all gone.” The next meeting was set for the 7th, but the chiefs had brought no food and could not wait, so they gathered again on Thursday, February 6. Nobody had told Hobson, and he came ashore in plain clothes. The missionary printer William Colenso asked whether the chiefs understood what they were signing. “If the Native chiefs do not know the contents of this treaty it is no fault of mine,” Hobson replied. Forty-five chiefs signed that day, and Hobson shook each one’s hand, saying “He iwi tahi tātou,” “We are now one people.” Copies went around the country, and by September some 500 more chiefs had signed. But the two texts did not match. In English, the chiefs gave up their sovereignty to the Queen. In the Māori text they signed, they granted her “governorship” and were promised full chiefly authority over their lands and villages. Britain held to the English version. February 6 is now Waitangi Day, New Zealand’s national day, and often a day of Māori protest.
The whalers in Soon May The Wellerman Come waited on the supply ships of the Weller brothers, who had run a whaling station at Otago, in the South Island, since 1831. Expecting Britain to take over, the Wellers had bought land, and by 1840 they claimed nearly three million acres. Under Hobson’s proclamation, none of it was theirs unless the Crown confirmed it. Meanwhile the whales were running out. By 1840 the Wellers’ Otago station was taking only 14 tons of oil a season, and by the end of 1841 the firm had failed.
As day after day passes and no tidings arrive of the missing Grimsby smacks, it is beginning to be realised that the gale of the 9th ult. will prove one of the most disastrous to the Grimsby fishing trade on record. Altogether nearly a dozen fishing vessels, carrying between 60 and 70 hands, are missing. Most of these vessels were only provisioned for eight or nine days, and many of them have been out over a month. Of the safety of seven of them all hope has now been abandoned… This calamity in a single port is one of the most appalling on record.
The year of 1889 was particularly bad for the English fishing trade. Above, the Hull Times (March 2) marks the loss of some fifteen vessels from the large port town, Grimsby. William Delf, a local fisherman, had a knack for penning verses to memorialize local tragedies, and his broadsheets were sold “in aid of the widows & orphans”. His Ballad in Memory of the Fishermen from Hull and Grimsby who lost their lives in the Gale of 8 and 9 February 1889 became by far his most famous work, and it has entered the popular folk tradition as Three Score and Ten.
Pictured: The Fishermen’s Memorial in St. James Square, Grimsby, erected 2005.
Some songs are so shrouded in history that their origins are a mystery. Such is the case with The Bold Princess Royal, which, depending on the version, set sail for the Rio Grande or Newfoundland, on the 14th of February (or perhaps April) of some unknown year. Stan Hugill estimated the song dates to as early as the 1600s, when the English Channel was infested with pirates and privateers. Joanna Carver Colcord thought it came out of the American War for Independence, when the Atlantic seas were similarly plagued. The ballad was popular along the eastern coast of England, but Alan Lomax collected it in Michigan, 1938, as part of the Irish-American folk repertoire.
The beauty of songs like this is in their flexibility. The name of a port, captain, or ship can be altered at will. Only a few things remain more-or-less consistent: the dangers of the high seas, the swiftness of the Princess Royal, and the timeless melody passed down through tradition.
On February 22, 1847, some 15,000 Mexican soldiers under General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna advanced on an American force of fewer than 5,000 near the village of Buena Vista in northern Mexico. It was the height of the Mexican-American War, and Santa Anna had raised a fresh army to drive the Americans out of the territory they had seized. He demanded surrender. Taylor’s reply, delivered through his aide, was brief: “I beg leave to say that I decline acceding to your request.” The fighting that followed ended with Santa Anna’s army in retreat and Zachary Taylor a national hero.
Taylor was a career soldier, not a politician, known to his men as “Old Rough and Ready” for his plain dress and willingness to share the hardships of campaign life. He had spent decades on remote frontier posts before being sent to the Rio Grande in 1846. Buena Vista made him famous overnight. Within a year, the Whig Party had nominated him for president, and in 1848 he won the election, despite having never held political office or even voted.
Shantymen were always hungry for topical material, and Taylor’s name quickly entered the repertoire in the halyard shanty General Taylor and the capstan shanty Santy Anna.
Today’s date gives the title of the song The Twenty-Fourth of February (also known as the Twenty-Third of February). On a clear day, the English protagonists casually encounter seven Algerine ships, sinking one and capturing two.
The details sound nondescript but they refer to real events - though the date, ship names, and battle aftermath have been altered over time. The Battle of Cádiz in 1669 took place between Rear-Admiral John Kempthorne’s Mary Rose and a group of seven pirate ships. The Mary Rose was escorting several merchants and diplomats when she was attacked over December 18-19. Kempthorne jettisoned excess cargo and a recently rescued ship, preparing to fight. Casualties were severe on both sides, but the Mary Rose prevailed despite three damaged masts.
The events were well documented by the English engraver Wenceslaus Hollar who watched the battle from the deck. The names of the Algerine ships, apparently, were: the Golden Lion, Orange Tree, Half Moon, Seven Stars, White Horse, Blewhart, and Rose Leaf.
Albert Lancaster Lloyd, known to friends and fans as “Bert,” was born on February 29, 1908 in London. A leap day baby, Lloyd would become one of the most influential figures in the British folk revival and a tireless champion of traditional sea music. His scholarship and performances brought shanties and forebitters to audiences throughout the mid-twentieth century.
Lloyd’s path to folk music was unconventional. As a young man he worked as a sheep shearer in Australia, where he first encountered traditional songs in the mouths of working people. In 1937, he signed aboard the whaling ship Southern Empress, gaining firsthand experience of maritime life. Returning to England, he became a journalist and eventually joined the BBC, all while immersing himself in folk song research. His 1967 book Folk Song in England remains a foundational text in the field. Throughout his life, Lloyd was a staunch anti-fascist and social champion.
For shanty enthusiasts, Lloyd is perhaps best remembered for his collaborations with Ewan MacColl. Lloyd’s robust voice and deep understanding of maritime work songs made these recordings definitive. He passed away in 1982, but his recordings and scholarship continue to shape how we understand and sing the songs of the sea.
Paul Clayton, born on this day in 1931, grew up on Summer Street in New Bedford’s West End. His grandfather Charles Hardy was a whaling ship outfitter who sang songs picked up from seafarers; his grandmother Lizzie contributed songs from Prince Edward Island. By his teens, Clayton was hosting folk music radio shows on WFMR and later WBSM, steeped in the music of the sea.
Clayton earned a master’s in folklore at the University of Virginia and cut over a dozen albums for Folkways, Tradition, and Elektra. His 1956 album Whaling and Sailing Songs remains an essential document of maritime folk song, and his 1959 collaboration with The Foc'sle Singers on Foc'sle Songs and Shanties drew on BBC field recordings of English shantymen. In Greenwich Village, where friends knew him as “Baby Blue,” Clayton was a commanding presence who could hold a room with his stories. Dave Van Ronk called him “one of the most delightful human beings I’ve ever met.” He mentored the young Bob Dylan (whose “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” owes a debt to Clayton’s “Who’s Going to Buy You Ribbons When I’m Gone”).
Clayton struggled with depression and the burden of concealing his homosexuality in an era that punished it. He died by suicide on March 30, 1967, just weeks after his thirty-sixth birthday. Many hear Clayton in Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”:
The seasick sailors, they are rowing home / The vagabond who’s rapping at your door / Is standing in the clothes that you once wore / Strike another match, go start anew / It’s all over now, Baby Blue.
His recordings of shanties, whaling songs, and forebitters remain invaluable to the tradition.
On the morning of March 8, 1862, the Confederate ironclad CSS Virginia (rebuilt from the captured USS Merrimac) steamed into Hampton Roads, Virginia, and attacked the Union blockading fleet. The wooden frigate USS Cumberland, commanded by Lieutenant George Morris, was among her targets.
The Cumberland’s broadsides bounced harmlessly off the Virginia’s iron-plated hull. The ironclad then rammed the wooden ship, piercing her hull with her iron prow. As the Cumberland sank in the James River, her crew refused to surrender—continuing to fire even as the water rose around them. The ship went down with her flag still flying, nailed to the mast.
The engagement marked the end of wooden warships in naval warfare and set the stage for the following day’s historic duel between the Virginia and the USS Monitor—the first battle between ironclad warships.
On St. Patrick’s Day in 1865, the brig Abeline set sail from New York, bound for Newfoundland. The Abeline was registered to Maitland, a small village on the Shubenacadie River in Hants County, Nova Scotia, that had become one of the province’s most prolific shipbuilding centers during the 1860s. Dozens of brigs and barques were launched from its tidal yards during the decade, deploying in the lumber, coal, and West Indies trades.
The Abeline’s captain was Stafford Nelson, barely sixteen years of age. Two days out of New York, Nelson fell gravely ill with fever and was soon unable to come on deck. The crew, all strangers to these waters and without their captain’s guidance, missed their landfall and were forced to put back to sea. They made for Cape Canso and eventually anchored at Arichat, a port on Isle Madame in Cape Breton, where they sought medical aid. Eight days after arriving, young Captain Nelson died.
The tragic voyage is remembered in the forecastle ballad Bound Down to Newfoundland, collected by Doerflinger from Professor M. M. MacOdrum in Nova Scotia. The tune comes from Helen Creighton’s Songs and Ballads from Nova Scotia (1932). Like many ballads of the sea, it opens by fixing its story to a precise date — “Saint Patrick’s day in ‘sixty-five / From New York we set sail” — and closes with a prayer for the safety of all sailors.
Joanna Carver Colcord (1882–1960) was born aboard the barque Charlotte A. Littlefield while her father, Captain Lincoln Alden Colcord, was sailing in the South Seas. She spent most of her childhood at sea, and went on to compile Roll and Go, one of the first comprehensive collections of American sea songs.
The photo shows two-year-old Joanna on deck with the ship’s sailmaker.
“On the twenty-third of March, my boys, we hoisted our topsail.” So begins The Whale Catchers, a song of the Greenland right whale fishery. The crew sets out for the Davis Strait, the icy passage between Greenland and Baffin Island, to hunt the Greenland right whale, now known as the bowhead. It was called the “right” whale to hunt because it was slow, floated when killed, and yielded vast quantities of oil and baleen. British whalers made this grueling Arctic voyage every spring from the late 18th through the mid-19th century, enduring conditions the song captures vividly: “Our finger tops was frozen off, and likewise our toe-nails.”
Much of what we know about these voyages comes from the logbooks kept aboard whaling vessels. Captains and mates recorded daily entries noting position, weather, ice conditions, and whale sightings, often using a distinctive visual shorthand: a small stamp of a whale meant a sighting, while a stamp of flukes meant a kill. But the journals were also personal documents, filled with sketches, poems, and observations that bring the whaler’s world to life far beyond the bare navigational record.
Thousands of these logbooks survive today in museum collections. The Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut holds one of the world’s largest collections of whaling manuscripts, and the New Bedford Whaling Museum in Massachusetts preserves another vast trove. Researchers continue to mine these records not only for maritime history but for climate science, using centuries of ice and weather observations to study long-term environmental change in the Arctic.
Built in Nova Scotia in 1920-21, Bluenose was a fishing and racing schooner named after an 18th-century nickname for Nova Scotians. Comissioned after the 1920 racing defeat of Riverport’s Delawana to Gloucester’s Esperanto, Bluenose won the International Fisherman’s Cup with ease in her first set of races. The ship defended the title with significant success in the following years.
The ship was the pride of the province until she was wrecked on a coral reef off Île-à-Vache, Haiti, on January 28, 1946. She is among the most famous and favorite Canadian vessels, celebrated on Canadian stamps, on the Nova Scotia license plate, and by the Stan Rogers song of the same name. A replica, Bluenose II, was constructed in 1963 and rebuilt in 2013.
The spring trip was the first voyage of the fishing season for the schooner fleets of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. Crews set out in late March or early April, often into rough weather, to trawl for cod on the offshore banks. It was hard, cold work: vessels iced up on deck, bait ran short, and the fish did not always cooperate.
The song The Spring Trip of the Schooner Ambition preserves one such voyage in plain detail. Captain Albert Himmelmann telephoned his crew of nineteen to report on March 29th, making the Ambition “the first to fill away.” They took on frozen squid at Canso from the Atlantic Fish Company and headed for Western Bank. When ice blocked their passage to the Magdalen Islands for fresh bait, they diverted to Prince Edward Island, then fished off Cape North. Four baitings later, the spring trip was done and “everybody’s feeling fine.” The song reads more like a log entry than a ballad, which is part of its charm: a working record of an ordinary season, sung by the captain himself.
April 2, 1801, marks the First Battle of Copenhagen. Britain attacked the Danish fleet to prevent Denmark from joining a coalition that threatened British access to Baltic trade. Vice Admiral Nelson, serving as second-in-command, famously ignored his superior’s signal to retreat. Legend has it that he raised his telescope to his blind eye and declared, “I really do not see the signal.” Although not the origin of the idiom, this story is often associated with the phrase “turning a blind eye.”
After four hours of fierce combat, the Danish fleet was shattered, with 18 ships lost and over 2,000 men killed or wounded. Britain lost no ships. The victory solidified Lord Nelson’s fame, and Nelson's Victory at Copenhagen is just one of the many ballads to memorialize the day.
On the evening of April 4, 1859, Bryant’s Minstrels introduced a new walkaround number at Mechanics’ Hall in New York City. The song, written by Daniel Decatur Emmett, opened with the line “I wish I was in the land of cotton” and would become one of the most widely known songs in American history. According to Emmett, Jerry Bryant had asked him for a new piece by the following Monday, and he wrote it in a single evening in his New York apartment.
“Dixie” spread with extraordinary speed. Before the Civil War it was a popular novelty song enjoyed across the country. Once Southern states began seceding, it was adopted as an unofficial Confederate anthem, played at Jefferson Davis’s inauguration in February 1861. Emmett himself, a Northerner from Ohio, was reportedly dismayed by the association. Soldiers on both sides wrote endless parodies throughout the war.
In England the tune was equally infectious. By 1861 the London music hall comedian Frank Hall had adapted it as “In the Strand,” a bawdy comic song about street life in Victorian London. Sailors took to the melody on both counts: the original “Dixie” tune went to sea in its own right, and shipboard parodies multiplied alongside it. Hall’s version crossed the water and found a second life as the capstan shanty I Wish I Was With Nancy (collected by Cecil Sharp from Watchet sailor John Short in 1914), its words thoroughly reshaped for the fo’c’sle.
By the winter of 1847 the potato blight had brought famine to Ireland, and Americans were raising money and food for Irish relief. In February, Boston merchants petitioned Congress to lend them a warship to carry provisions. On March 3 Congress lent two, and since the navy was busy with the Mexican War, the Secretary of the Navy handed them over to private citizens to sail. The frigate Macedonian went to Captain George C. DeKay of New Jersey, and the sloop-of-war Jamestown to the Boston merchant and former sea captain Robert Bennet Forbes. The navy took out her guns, and on St. Patrick’s Day the Laborers’ Aid Society of Boston, “composed principally, if not entirely, of poor Irishmen,” came to the Charlestown Navy Yard and stowed a seventh of her cargo in a single day.
She sailed on March 28 with about 8,000 barrels of grain, meal and other provisions, and Forbes drove her across through snow, sleet and fog. On April 12, 1847, she anchored in Cork’s outer harbor “exactly 15 days and 3 hours from the Navy Yard, Charlestown, without having lost a rope yarn.” The town of Cove (now Cobh) was illuminated for her, and the temperance band played Yankee Doodle so often that Forbes concluded “the Irish consider it our only national anthem.” Then Father Theobald Mathew, the temperance priest, took him a few steps off one of Cork’s main streets into a lane of “hovels crowded with the sick and dying, without floors, without furniture,” and on to a soup kitchen “guarded by police officers,” where “hundreds of spectres stood without begging for some of this soup.”
That summer the Jamestown went back into naval service and sailed for the Mediterranean, where she stayed until 1850. The forebitter The Jamestown Homeward Bound probably comes from that cruise. After “three long years” of Sicily’s hills, Mount Vesuvius and the ruined walls of Pompeii, “and on them carved our names,” her crew are bound home at last for “freedom’s shore.”
On April 15, 1797, the seventeen ships of the Channel Fleet at Spithead, an anchorage near Portsmouth, England, refused Admiral Lord Bridport’s signal to weigh anchor. It was an act of mass defiance almost without precedent in the Royal Navy. The sailors’ grievances were real and longstanding: pay had been frozen at roughly 19 shillings a month for over a century, provisions were meagre and often adulterated by dishonest pursers, and shore leave was almost nonexistent. Delegates from each ship met aboard the flagship Queen Charlotte to present their demands, while the crews manned the yards and cheered in a show of disciplined solidarity.
The government panicked. Prime Minister Pitt and Henry Dundas, Treasurer of the Navy, sent Lord Spencer to negotiate, but his initial promises were not trusted. It was only when the popular Admiral Lord Howe arrived as the king’s representative that a settlement was reached: a full pardon for all mutineers, a pay increase to a shilling a day, and better victualling. It remains one of the few mutinies in Royal Navy history that actually succeeded, and the only one in which the mutineers were celebrated rather than hanged.
The forecastle song The Seventeen Bright Stars commemorates the event with unmistakable sympathy for the sailors’ cause, toasting Lord Howe “in a full flowing glass” while wishing “confusion to Pitt and likewise to Dundas.” The “seventeen bright stars” of the title are the seventeen ships whose crews stood together.
The early twentieth century saw the rise of training ships, purpose-built vessels for educating a new generation of sailors in the diminishing art of square-rigged seamanship. Among them was the Belgian four-masted bark Comte de Smet de Naeyer, an iron-hulled ship launched at Greenock, Scotland in October 1904 for the Association Maritime Belge. She was troubled from the start: during fitting out she capsized unexpectedly in dock, and Belgian maritime experts raised concerns about her seaworthiness before she ever put to sea.
On April 19, 1906, those fears proved tragically justified. Sailing off Ushant, the Comte de Smet de Naeyer sprang a leak and sank, taking 32 of her 54 crew with her, among them eighteen cadets on their first voyage. The disaster ended the short career of a ship that had been afloat barely two years.
The Comte de Smet de Naeyer is remembered in the capstan shanty Madeleine, a bawdy French song that was the ship’s signature tune. The shanty reached Stan Hugill through Commandant LeMaître of her sister training bark L’Avenir, preserving a small piece of the lost ship’s musical life.
By 1914, Cecil Sharp had spent a decade collecting folk songs from country singers in Somerset, but sea shanties posed a different problem. He admitted as much: “I have no technical or practical knowledge whatever of nautical matters; I have never even heard a chantey sung on board ship.” Steam had all but ended the work the shanties were made for, and the men who had led them were growing old.
That April, Sharp was staying with the Rev. A. A. Brockington, vicar of Carhampton, a few miles west of the little harbor town of Watchet. On April 20, 1914, he called on John Short, a retired sailor of 75 who was serving as Watchet’s town crier. Short had spent more than fifty years in sailing ships, most of them as chanteyman, the soloist who led the crew’s work songs. Among the songs Sharp took down that first day was the pulling shanty The Dead Horse, a version of Poor Old Man. Short sang him more than twenty shanties in three days, and Sharp kept coming back for months, collecting 57 in all. He was struck by Short’s voice, “rich, resonant and powerful, and yet so flexible that he can execute trills, turns and graces with a delicacy and finish that would excite the envy of many a professed vocalist.”
English Folk-Chanteys came out later that year, and 46 of its 60 shanties were Short’s. Sharp never heard some of them from anyone else, including Doodle Let Me Go and Old Billy Riley. Short also explained a line in Whup Jamboree: “Old Dan Lowrie’s,” he said, was a popular playhouse in Paradise Street, Liverpool, “much frequented by sailors.” Many of the shanty tunes sung today come down from Short, and a bronze statue of him has stood on the Watchet waterfront since 2008.
Packet ships were small and fast vessels that carried mail and passengers across the Atlantic, departing on a regular schedule. The Black Ball Line was the first company to offer scheduled service beginning in 1818, later giving name to the famous shanty. The ships took an average of 23 days to sail to Liverpool and 40 days to return to New York. The Black Ball Line started out with four ships, and the Albion, under Captain John Williams, was the first addition to the fleet.
On April 22, 1822, the ship was lost in storm off the coast of Ireland along with 45 lives. Yale University professor Alexander Metcalf Fisher and French General Lefebvre-Desnouettes were among the deceased. Spectators on both sides of the ocean were captivated by the accounts of the first wrecked packet-ship shared by the nine survivors. More information is well-documented in Shannon Selin’s historical write-up.
HMS Bounty was a small merchant ship bought by the Royal Navy for a single job: to carry breadfruit plants from Tahiti to the British West Indies, where they would be grown as cheap food for enslaved workers. Under Lieutenant William Bligh she sailed from England in December 1787 and reached Tahiti in October 1788. The crew spent five months ashore there while the plants were gathered. Bligh’s harsh tongue and the pull of Tahiti, where many had found partners, turned much of the crew against him. She sailed for home in April 1789, loaded with breadfruit.
On the morning of April 28, 1789, near the island of Tofua, the master’s mate Fletcher Christian led a mutiny. It was not long planned: the night before, after a row with Bligh, Christian had thought of deserting alone on a raft. Bligh wrote that “just before sun-rising, while I was yet asleep, Mr. Christian, with the master at arms, gunner’s mate, and Thomas Burkitt, seaman, came into my cabin, and seizing me tied my hands with a cord behind my back.” Bligh and eighteen loyal men were forced into the ship’s 23-foot launch and set adrift, while the mutineers cheered “Huzza for Otaheite!” Otaheite was the old English name for Tahiti. One of Bligh’s men was killed by islanders on Tofua. The rest sailed 3,618 miles in 41 days and reached the Dutch settlement at Coupang, on Timor, on June 14.
The Bounty went back to Tahiti. Some of the mutineers stayed there, and in 1791 HMS Pandora captured fourteen of them; three were later hanged. Christian took eight others, with a group of Tahitian men and women, to remote Pitcairn Island, where they burned the ship. Nothing was heard of them until 1808, when an American sealer called at Pitcairn and found one mutineer still alive. The pump shanty Bounty Was a Packet Ship tells the story from the forecastle, with Bligh as “Billy Blight, that silly man,” and it ends before anyone knew where the ship had gone: “Never was there heard a word, / From the crew that stayed on board.”
The packet ship Winchester, under Captain Moore, had sailed from Liverpool bound for Boston when a violent gale struck on April 17th. Francis McGuire was swept overboard while close-reefing the foretopsail and drowned. As sails and masts were lost, three more men followed: William Young, Patrick Boyden, and Charles Wigging. By the 18th, the ship was a complete wreck with all hands working the pumps.
What could have been a total disaster was averted through the heroic efforts of multiple rescue ships over the following days. The British ship Jane, the brig Edward, and the ship Mary & Caroline assisted in offloading some 300 passengers. On May 2nd, the U.S. mail steamer Washington under Captain Fitch completed the rescue, saving the remaining 446 souls—including Captain Moore—in less than an hour without a single accident.
The event inspired Song of the Steamship Washington, written on board immediately after the rescue.
On May 10, 1777, the sloop-of-war Ranger slid into the water at John Langdon’s shipyard in Kittery, Maine, just across the river from Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Armed with eighteen six-pounder guns and crewed by about 140 men, she was built for speed rather than heavy fighting. Her first commander was Captain John Paul Jones, who took charge on June 14, the same day Congress adopted the Stars and Stripes as the national flag.
Jones sailed for France in November 1777, carrying dispatches and looking for trouble. In February 1778, the Ranger received the first official salute to the American flag from a foreign naval power at Quiberon Bay. Two months later, Jones launched a daring raid on Whitehaven, England — the very port he had sailed from as a boy of thirteen — burning ships and spiking coastal guns. The following night, on April 24, the Ranger engaged the twenty-gun HMS Drake off the Irish coast. Superior gunnery and seamanship won the day, and Jones brought the captured warship back to Brest as a prize. The Ranger was eventually captured by the British at the fall of Charleston in May 1780 and renamed HMS Halifax.
The exploits of Jones and his Ranger are celebrated in The Stately Southerner, also known as “The Yankee Man-of-War” or simply “The Ranger.” The song follows the ship as she cruises off the Irish coast, outsailing and outfighting a British man-of-war. Jones later commanded the Bonhomme Richard in the famous Battle of Flamborough Head, the subject of Paul Jones.
On May 19, 1845, the ships HMS Erebus and HMS Terror departed from Greenhithe, England, under the command of Sir John Franklin. Their mission was to chart and navigate the Northwest Passage—the long-sought sea route through the Arctic connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The expedition was the best-equipped Arctic venture ever mounted: 134 men, three years’ provisions, steam engines for the ice, a library of over a thousand books, and—for morale and fresh meat—a monkey named Jacko, a Newfoundland dog named Neptune, a cat, and several live cattle.
The two ships were last seen by Europeans in Baffin Bay in late July 1845. When no word came after two years, Franklin’s wife Lady Jane began organizing search expeditions at her own expense. Though searchers eventually found evidence of the expedition’s fate—abandoned camps, scattered bones, and a brief written record—the full story of what happened after the ships became trapped in the ice remained a mystery for over 150 years. The wrecks of Erebus and Terror were finally located in 2014 and 2016.
The tragedy inspired Lady Franklin's Lament, a haunting ballad sung from the perspective of a dreaming sailor. More than a century later, Canadian folk singer Stan Rogers wrote Northwest Passage, which invokes “the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea” as the singer drives across the Canadian prairies, connecting his own journey to the explorers who came before.
Captain “Sandy” Mackenzie of the British barque Saladin was primarily a guano trader between South America and Britain. While lying in Valparaiso in 1844, Mackenzie offered free passage to a stranded British shipmaster George Fielding and his fifteen-year-old son. Once near the equator, the Fieldings organized a mutiny with the aim of seizing some of the 70 tons of copper, 13 bars of silver, and $9000 in gold and silver coins their host was tasked to transport. Captain Mackenzie, his chief mate, and four other seamen were killed by the Fieldings as at least 3 of the 8 remaining crewman joined the plot.
Between the barbarity of the act and George Fielding’s scheming to further reduce the remaining crew, the ringleaders claimed to be astounded. They threw the Fieldings overboard but continued toward the Gulf of Saint Lawrence to divide the bounty. Without a skilled navigator, however, the Saladin ran aground near County Harbour, Nova Scotia on May 21, 1844. The suspicious circumstances and mismatched defenses led to charges of piracy and murder in what became the last Canadian piracy trial. Four men were found guilty and sentenced to the gallows over Halifax Harbor, and at least one balladist put the predicament of mutineer Charles Gustavus Anderson to song.
Pictured here, what may be the ship’s figurehead now resides at Nova Scotia’s Maritime Museum of the Atlantic.
William Kidd was born around 1645 in Greenock, Scotland, and by 1690 had become a respected shipowner in New York. In 1695, he received a royal commission to hunt pirates in the Indian Ocean, backed by some of the most powerful men in England, including the Lord Chancellor and the First Lord of the Admiralty. He sailed aboard the Adventure Galley in April 1696, but the voyage went badly: disease killed a third of his crew, and the promised prizes never materialized. In a fit of rage during a dispute, Kidd struck his gunner William Moore with an iron-bound bucket, killing him. He then captured the Armenian merchant vessel Quedagh Merchant, an act that would seal his fate.
Declared a pirate, Kidd surrendered in Boston in July 1699, hoping his powerful backers would protect him. They did not. He was shipped to London, tried at the Old Bailey on May 8-9, 1701, and convicted of Moore’s murder and multiple counts of piracy. Kidd insisted that French passes found aboard his captured ships proved they were lawful prizes under his commission, but the documents were conveniently “mislaid” by the prosecution and only turned up centuries later in the Public Record Office. His well-connected backers, meanwhile, may have preferred a quick hanging to a trial in which Kidd might name names. On May 23, 1701, Kidd was taken to Execution Dock at Wapping. The hangman’s rope broke on the first attempt; he was hanged on the second. His body was coated in tar, locked in a specially fitted iron cage, and gibbeted at Tilbury Point on the Thames estuary as a warning to sailors, a scene captured in a well-known engraving from Charles Ellms’ The Pirates Own Book (1837).
The broadside ballad Captain Kidd appeared almost immediately after his execution, with copies surviving from as early as 1701. Sung to a tune later shared with “Samuel Hall,” it takes the form of a scaffold confession, with Kidd repenting his sins verse after verse: “Take warning now by me, and shun bad company, / Lest you come to hell with me, for I must die.”
Today marks the Battle of Boston Harbor, fought during the War of 1812. The USS Chesapeake was captured by the Royal Navy frigate HMS Shannon on June 1, 1813. Captain of the Shannon Philip Broke wrote to challenge the American frigate to leave the harbor for ship-to-ship combat: “As the Chesapeake appears now ready for sea, I request you will do me the favour to meet the Shannon with her, ship to ship, to try the fortune of our respective flags… Favour me with a speedy reply. We are short of provisions and water, and cannot stay long here.”
Captain Lawrence of the Chesapeake never received the challenge but instead set out to meet the British frigate on the first day of favorable weather. The ships were evenly matched but Lawrence’s crew proved ill-prepared. His ship was quickly disabled and boarded, and 71 men died in the ten minutes of ensuing hand-to-hand combat. The Chesapeake was taken as a prize in what became the first major naval victory for the British in the War of 1812. The British memorialized the event in The Shannon and the Chesapeake which parodies the American Revolutionary success sung in The Constitution and Guerrière.
On the afternoon of June 2, 1851, the clipper ship Flying Cloud slipped out of New York harbor on her maiden voyage, bound for San Francisco. She had been built that spring at Donald McKay’s yard in East Boston, and everything about her was new and untested. At her helm was Captain Josiah Perkins Creesy. At the chart table was his wife Eleanor, the ship’s navigator, who had learned the craft from her seafaring family in Marblehead, Massachusetts.
The Gold Rush was at its peak, and the fastest route from the East Coast to California was by sea: south down the Atlantic, around Cape Horn, and north through the Pacific. Thousands of miles, weeks of open ocean, and the worst weather on earth at the tip of South America. The previous record for the passage was 96 days, set by the clipper Surprise earlier that year. The Flying Cloud made it in 89 days and 21 hours. In 1854 she beat her own time by 13 hours, setting a record that would stand for over a century.
The famous clipper shares her name with the forecastle song The Flying Cloud, though the two have little else in common. The song tells the story of a slave trader turned pirate under a “Captain Moore,” captured and condemned. No record of such a captain or a slaving vessel by that name has been found, and scholars from Colcord to Hugill have concluded that the song is probably fictitious. But the name stuck, and it is almost certainly McKay’s celebrated clipper that gave it its ring.
During the American Revolutionary War, the British Crown issued letters of marque to private ship owners, authorizing them to attack and capture enemy merchant vessels. These “privateers” were essentially legalized pirates — if successful, they kept a share of the captured cargo as prize. Halifax, founded in 1749 and named after George Dunk, Earl of Halifax, was ideally positioned for such ventures. The harbour the Mi’kmaq called K’jipuktuk (“Great Harbour”) served as a major British naval base, and many Nova Scotian fishermen saw privateering as a path to quick fortune.
Stan Rogers‘s Barrett's Privateers (1976) captures this world through the tale of the fictional Captain Elcid Barrett, who recruits “twenty brave men, all fishermen” to crew the Antelope — a vessel so decrepit it “scarce could stand.” The song opens in 1778: “a letter of marque came from the king,” and “on the king’s birthday we put to sea.” June 4 was the official birthday of King George III, making it a fitting date for loyal subjects to embark on Crown-sanctioned plunder.
The voyage ends in disaster. After a failed attack on an American privateer, the surviving crew limps back to Nova Scotia, broken and maimed. The narrator spends his remaining years as “a broken man on a Halifax pier, the last of Barrett’s Privateers.” The song became Rogers’s most famous work and an unofficial anthem of Atlantic Canada.
The Barbary states of North Africa included Tunis, Algiers, and Tripoli, loosely united by the Ottoman Empire. From the 16th century onward, the pirates and privateers patrolled the Atlantic with corsairs and galleys, crews of 100 men and cutlasses. They raided the Iberian coasts, enslaving hundreds of thousands of people and pushing settlements inland. As nation-states developed frigates and cannons, the Barbary galleys would simply flee, and states had little choice but to pay tribute for protection. The period of terror is comparable to the reign of the Vikings and the dangers were recorded in songs like High Barbary.
The Barbary Wars refer to international conflicts in which the newly-formed United States joined with Sweden, Sicily, and mercenaries in refusing to pay tribute and ransoms. The alliance enacted a blockade and raids on Tripoli and other ports. The largest loss for the US occurred when the USS Philadelphia ran aground and its crew was enslaved. The immobile ship’s guns were used for months against the Americans until Stephen Decatur’s Marines detachment sailed a captured ship close enough to board and burn the Philadelphia. Meanwhile, 500 soldiers marched from Egypt to capture the city of Derna on “the shores of Tripoli”. On June 10, 1805, hostilities were ended and all hostages were released. Although the US paid a sum for the balance of prisoners and piracy soon resumed, the country’s armed services and reputation were forever changed.
“‘Twas in eighteen hundred and fifty-three, and of June the thirteenth day, that our gallant ship her anchor weighed, and for Greenland bore away.” Joanna Carver Colcord placed The Greenland Whale Fisheries in the latter eighteenth century, during the peak of the British bowhead fishery. The date in the song shifts with each singer: Captain W. B. Whall gives June 2, Masefield March 20, and collected versions range from February to August. The ship changes name, the captain changes name, but the story never does. A crew sails north, spots a whale, launches boats, and loses men when the whale capsizes them. They never catch the whale.
The real season had a logic the singers ignored. Whalers left Hull, Whitby, or Dundee in late February or March, stopped at Orkney or Shetland to fill out their crews, and followed the retreating pack ice north to hunt bowheads along the ice edge from May through July. Masefield’s March 20 departure fits this pattern. A June 13 departure does not: by then a ship would already be among the ice. A.L. Lloyd called the song’s events “not historical but imaginary, a stylisation,” and singers plainly swapped in dates as they pleased. But the arc is right: out in spring, home by autumn, and the closing verse that every version shares. “Oh, Greenland is a dreadful place, a land that’s never green, where there’s ice and snow and the whalefishes blow, and the daylight’s seldom seen.”
The summer of 1876 was the centennial year of American independence, and the nation was in a celebratory mood. Alfred “Alf” Johnson was a Danish-born fisherman who had worked the waters of Gloucester, Massachusetts for seven years. He resolved to mark the occasion in a manner that most would have called foolhardy: a solo crossing of the Atlantic in a twenty-foot dory he named Centennial, built for him by the Gloucester firm of Higgins and Gifford.
On June 15, 1876, Johnson set sail from Gloucester before a crowd of well-wishers, many of whom doubted they would see him again. The voyage was not uneventful. His compass was disturbed by iron aboard and had to be corrected at a stop in Barrington, Nova Scotia. Mid-ocean, a massive wave capsized the Centennial, and Johnson clung to the hull for some twenty minutes before a second wave righted her. He fended off a shark with an oar fitted with a knife, accepted a tablespoon of rum from a passing liner, and received bread from the brig Alfredon after his provisions were soaked by seawater. He arrived at Abercastle, Wales on August 12, completing what is now recognized as the first recorded solo transatlantic crossing by small boat. Back in Gloucester, when asked about the voyage, he reportedly said he had been “a damn fool.”
The voyage inspired a comic ballad by Gloucester poet Kitty Parsons, collected in her 1946 volume Gloucester Sea Ballads. Her poem Centennial Johnsen and His Dory Sail follows the voyage with affectionate humor, and ends with Johnson in his retirement years, beating his friends at cards in the rooms of the Master Mariners’ Association.
In the spring of 1778, France signed a treaty of alliance with the rebelling American colonies, and Britain and France drifted toward war without either one declaring it. Admiral Keppel took the Channel Fleet to sea to watch the French fleet at Brest. When his lookouts sighted a pair of French frigates on June 17, he sent ships to bring them in, so they could not carry home a report of his strength.
The British frigate HMS Arethusa, under Captain Samuel Marshall, overhauled the French frigate Belle Poule that evening. By the French account, Marshall hailed and “said he must come to her Admiral,” and the French commander, Lieutenant de la Clocheterie, answered that he would do no such thing. Each side later said the other fired first. The two frigates fought at pistol shot in a near calm from half past six until nearly midnight. The Arethusa lost her mainmast and had to be towed back to the fleet. The Belle Poule, with 40 dead and 57 wounded, anchored among the rocks near Plouescat on the Breton coast. Both countries claimed a victory. Louis XVI promoted Clocheterie and pensioned the families of the dead, and fashionable Parisian women wore their hair à la Belle Poule, piled high with a model frigate on top. A London paper grumbled that Marshall and his crew got nothing. Within a few weeks the two nations were formally at war, and they would be fighting on and off until 1815.
The British claim became The Saucy Arethusa, sung in Prince Hoare’s comic opera Lock and Key (1796) to William Shield’s setting of the old tune The Princess Royal. The words are usually credited to Hoare. Its third verse follows the French report almost line for line: “Bear down, d’ye see, to our Admiral’s lee.” “No, no,” says the Frenchman, “that can’t be.”
For over two decades, the wars that bore Napoleon Bonaparte’s name convulsed Europe and the world’s oceans. From his rise as a young general of the French Revolution through his coronation as Emperor, these wars forced every maritime nation to take sides. Britain’s Royal Navy, under admirals like Nelson and Collingwood, fought to maintain a blockade of the continent, while the press gangs that filled their crews became a grievance sailors would sing about for generations.
On June 18, 1815, Napoleon met his defeat on a rain-soaked field south of Brussels. Having escaped exile on Elba only a hundred days earlier, he faced the combined forces of the Duke of Wellington and the Prussian Field Marshal Blücher at Waterloo. By evening, Napoleon’s Imperial Guard had broken, and the man who had dominated Europe for a generation was finished. He surrendered to the British and was shipped aboard HMS Bellerophon to his final exile on the remote island of St. Helena, where he died in 1821.
Napoleon loomed large in the sailor’s imagination long after his death. He was a figure of almost mythic stature and his story mapped naturally onto the call-and-response rhythm of shipboard work. The short-drag shanty Boney Was a Warrior compresses his entire career into a few verses, from Moscow to Waterloo to St. Helena, with sailors cheerfully mangling the foreign names (“Billy Ruffian” for Bellerophon, “Elbow” for Elba, “Proo-shi-ans” for Prussians). A French relative, Jean-François de Nantes, shares the same musical structure. That crews were still singing “Boney” at the capstan a century later speaks to how deeply the Napoleonic era had marked the seafaring world.
The Alabama was a Confederate raider built in Birkenhead, England, on the river Mersey. In the Azores, she was quietly fitted with guns. For two years, she roamed the seas sinking and burning unarmed American merchant ships.
In the summer of 1864, late in the American Civil War, Captain Semmes docked The Alabama at Cherbourg, France for repairs. The American minister in Paris reported her arrival and the U.S. Sloop of War Kearsarge under Captain Winslow came to meet her outside the neutral French harbor. Crowds from Paris came to the cliffs and Southampton sportsmen brought their pleasure-yachts to witness the battle, which took place on the morning of Sunday, June 19, 1864. For forty minutes, the ships exchanged broadsides seven miles off the harbor. The Alabama sunk, and the British yacht Deerhound rescued Captain Semmes and forty-one of his crew before the Northerners could get to them. Despite his treason and failure, Captain Semmes enjoyed a hero’s welcome and military promotions upon arrival in England and his eventual return to the Confederate capital.
A. L. Lloyd identifies The Eclipse as a “Stonehaven steamer” that left for the Arctic during the 1887 whaling season. Gavin Sutherland, in writing for the Centre for Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen, provides more information:
Launched from Hall’s yard, Aberdeen, on 3rd January 1867 the ‘Eclipse’ cost almost £12,000, carried eight whale boats and a crew of 55 men. After a famous career at Peterhead the ship was sold to Dundee in 1893 and later on to Norway. Renamed ‘Lomonosov’, the old ship ended her ocean going days as a research vessel under the Russian flag based in Murmansk.
The ship is memorialized in The Eclipse, which opens with a line about the twenty-first of June, when the crew spotted a whale and “lowered all hands away.”
The Eclipse’s famous captain David Gray enlisted the help of Australian photographer Walter Livingstone-Learmonth during the 1888 season. The Eclipse can be seen flenching a whale (stripping the blubber) in the photograph here.
In 1496 King Henry VII gave a Venetian navigator, Zuan Caboto, known in England as John Cabot, a patent to sail west and claim new lands for England. Cabot believed he could reach Asia and its spices that way. His backers were merchants of Bristol, whose ships had been searching the Atlantic for a legendary island since 1480. In May 1497 he left Bristol in the Matthew, a small ship with a crew of about twenty.
After some 35 days at sea they sighted land. A Bristol chronicle gives the date as St. John the Baptist’s Day, June 24, 1497. Where they landed is still argued over, but it was probably Newfoundland or Cape Breton Island. Cabot went ashore at only one spot, raised the banners of the Pope and the King of England, found a trail and the remains of a fire, and went no farther inland than a crossbow shot. Then the Matthew spent about a month sailing along the coast. What the crew noticed most was the fish. “All along the coast they found many fish like those which in Iceland are dried in the open and sold in England,” wrote the Bristol merchant John Day, “and these fish are called in English ‘stockfish.’” Back in London, the crew told the Milanese ambassador that they could bring home so many fish “that this kingdom would have no further need of Iceland.” Cabot sailed again in 1498 with five ships, but what became of him is unknown.
For the next five hundred years, fishermen from Europe, and later from New England, sailed to the Grand Banks for cod. In A Trip to the Grand Banks, by Amos Hanson of Orland, Maine, the “Penobscot boys” fit out a schooner every spring “for the Grand Banks of Newfoundland their luck for to try.” They fish from dories through fog and gales, while big ships passing in the fog “sometimes run the schooners down.” The fishery lasted until the northern cod moratorium of 1992.
For five centuries, the cod fishery was the lifeblood of Newfoundland. When John Cabot first reached the Grand Banks in 1497, he reported seas so thick with fish they could be caught in baskets. Generations of Newfoundlanders built their lives around the cod — from Ship Cove to Cape Race, Port aux Basques to Harbour Grace — fishing from small boats, salting and drying their catch on stages and flakes along the shore.
But by the late twentieth century, industrial trawler fleets had taken their toll. Foreign factory ships, and later Canadian ones, vacuumed up fish faster than stocks could replenish. Despite warnings from fishermen who saw the decline firsthand, quotas remained too high. On July 2, 1992, Canadian Fisheries Minister John Crosbie stood before a crowd of angry fishermen in St. John’s and announced a moratorium on the northern cod fishery. Nearly 40,000 people lost their livelihoods almost overnight in one of the largest industrial closures in Canadian history.
The moratorium was meant to last two years. More than three decades later, the cod have never fully recovered, and much of outport Newfoundland has been transformed forever. Canadian folklorist Shelley Posen wrote No More Fish, No Fishermen in 1996 as a lament for this devastation, capturing the emptiness of harbours where “boats stand dried up on the beach, ghost-like in the early dawn.”
On July 4, 1840, the paddle steamer Britannia left Liverpool for Halifax and Boston, inaugurating the first regular transatlantic steamship mail service. The date was no accident: it was both American Independence Day and the birthday of Samuel Cunard, the Nova Scotian shipping magnate who had won the Royal Mail contract. The Britannia reached Halifax in ten days and Boston in just under fourteen, a crossing that sailing packets could rarely match and never guarantee. Cunard himself was aboard, and the Bostonians greeted him with such enthusiasm that he was reportedly invited to over 1,800 dinner parties.
Liverpool was already a busy port, but Cunard’s fortnightly service transformed it into the undisputed hub of transatlantic travel. Within a few years, a fleet of steamers was running on schedule between the Mersey and North America, carrying mail, emigrants, and cargo. The Prince’s Landing Stage, the long floating pier where passengers embarked, became one of the most famous departure points in the world. Millions of Irish and British emigrants would leave from there in the decades that followed, bound for new lives across the ocean.
That waterfront is the setting of The Leaving of Liverpool, one of the best-known farewell songs of the sea. Its opening lines, “Fare you well, the Prince’s Landing Stage / River Mersey, fare you well,” speak for every sailor and emigrant who stood on that pier and watched Liverpool fall away astern.
John Paul Jones was born on this day in 1747 in Kirkbean, Kirkcudbrightshire, on the southwest coast of Scotland. His father was head gardener at the Arbigland estate, and the boy grew up within sight of the Solway Firth, watching ships come and go from the nearby port of Carsethorn. At thirteen he was apprenticed to a merchant shipper and sailed out of Whitehaven, on the English shore opposite, bound for Barbados and Virginia. He rose quickly. By twenty-one, after both captain and first mate of a homeward-bound vessel died of fever, he navigated the ship safely to port and was given command. But in 1773, while captaining a merchant vessel at Tobago, he killed the ringleader of a mutiny over unpaid wages. He fled to Virginia and added “Jones” to his name.
When the American Revolution broke out, Jones offered his services to the infant Continental Navy. It was a navy that barely existed — a handful of converted merchantmen against the largest fleet in the world — and Jones became its most daring officer. In the Ranger he raided the British coast and captured a Royal Navy warship off Ireland; in the Bonhomme Richard he fought and won one of the most famous single-ship actions in naval history, against HMS Serapis off Flamborough Head. A Scottish gardener’s son had humiliated the Royal Navy in its own waters.
The Stately Southerner, also known as “The Yankee Man-of-War,” follows the Ranger as she outsails and outfights a British warship off the Old Head of Kinsale. Paul Jones recounts the Flamborough Head action broadside by broadside, from the opening hail to the striking of the British colours.
Of all the ghost stories told in the forecastle, none traveled farther than the Flying Dutchman. In most tellings, a Dutch captain swore he would round the Cape of Good Hope if it took him until doomsday, and he has been beating against the wind off the Cape ever since, never able to make port. To sight his ship was the worst of omens.
In 1881, two of Queen Victoria’s grandsons, Prince Albert Victor, 17, and Prince George, 16, were sailing around the world as naval cadets with the Royal Navy’s Detached Squadron. Their own ship, HMS Bacchante, was laid up at Melbourne with a damaged rudder, so they made the passage to Sydney in the flagship, HMS Inconstant. The princes’ journal, published in 1886, records what happened before dawn on July 11: “At 4 A.M. the Flying Dutchman crossed our bows. A strange red light as of a phantom ship all aglow, in the midst of which light the masts, spars, and sails of a brig 200 yards distant stood out in strong relief.” The quarterdeck midshipman was sent forward at once, but by the time he reached the forecastle there was no ship anywhere, though the night was clear and the sea calm. Thirteen men saw her, and two other ships of the squadron signaled to ask about the strange red light. At 10:45 that morning, the young seaman who had first reported her fell from the fore topmast crosstrees and was killed.
Prince George became King George V in 1910. The ballad The Flying Dutchman keeps to the old geography, with the captain doomed to the waters around the Cape: “He tries in vain his oath to keep to anchor in Table Bay.” The princes met him off the coast of Australia, more than six thousand miles to the east, which says something about how far sailors had carried the legend.
In 1859, Captain Samuel Samuels faced down a troublesome crew of Liverpool-Irish known as the “Bloody Forties”, ending their attempted mutiny aboard The Dreadnought. Samuels had forewarning of the plot, and at the first indication of disobedience, he had the gang’s knives broken and provided a cup of grog as peace offering. A day later, the crew charged, knives resharpened, only to stare down the barrels of Samuels’s pistols. They retreated, but did not submit, even after 58 tense hours without rations.
At this point, Samuels enlisted the help of 17 German passengers. Two mutineers rejoined the Captain and provided information of his continued unsafety. Upon his next visit to the gang’s quarters, a brawl ensured, but Samuels was reinforced by the iron-bar wielding Germans. At last, the mutiny was subdued and the crew was put to work. The crew cheered and thanked Samuels for having made them better men, and as they docked in New York and the police arrived for questioning, the Captain granted clemency “to prove to these men that moral courage was superior to brute force”. At least, that’s how Samuels tells it in his 1887 autobiography From the Forecastle to the Cabin, written nearly thirty years after the voyage.
Howard Blackburn is a Gloucester, Massachusetts legend. He left life as a successful tavern-keeper to row across the Atlantic in a single-person dory called the Great Republic. On July 18, 1901, the 25-foot sloop made port in Lisbon, Portugal, after just 39 days at sea. It was Blackburn’s second solo trans-Atlantic voyage, and his time set a record that would hold for many years.
What makes Blackburn’s voyage all-the-more remarkable is that he had lost nearly all of his fingers and toes to frostbite in 1883. While fishing for halibut, he and his crewmate were separated from their ship. While rowing and bailing, his crewmate lost hope and succumbed to the winter storm, but Blackburn, noting the inevitable, froze his hands to the oars and rowed for five days. He was nursed back to health but the results of the journey have been documented in gruesome detail. Nevertheless, shore life left Blackburn with a yearning for adventure, and strenuous solo voyages were his answer. His name lives on in Gloucester, where his tavern building still stands, and in the ballad The Saga of Howard Blackburn.
Charles Dibdin was born in Southampton in 1745 and sang as a boy in the choir of Winchester Cathedral. He never went to sea, but his elder brother Thomas did. Tom was captured by a 74-gun French warship while serving in the West Indiaman Hope, later commanded merchant ships, and died at the Cape of Good Hope on a voyage home from India after being struck by lightning. But Charles made his name in the London theaters as a composer and comic singer, and he wrote his first sea song, Blow High, Blow Low, in a gale during a thirteen-hour crossing from Calais. From 1789 he put on one-man “entertainments,” telling stories and singing his own songs while he accompanied himself on an instrument that, as the playwright John O’Keeffe put it, “was a concert in itself; he was, in fact, his own band.”
The wars with France made Charles useful to the government. He was paid to write, sing and give away “War Songs,” and in June 1803, with Britain expecting a French invasion, he was granted a pension of £200 a year. In 1805 he retired and sold the copyrights of three hundred songs, but when a new government took away his pension, he had to go back on the stage. He opened a music shop that failed and went bankrupt, and in 1810 his fellow musicians raised £640 for him at a public dinner. Paralyzed by a stroke in 1813, he died at his home in Arlington Street, Camden Town, on July 25, 1814, at the age of 69. He had boasted that “my songs have been the solace of sailors in long voyages, in storms, in battle; and they have been quoted in mutinies to the restoration of order and discipline,” and the Dictionary of National Biography later judged that “he brought more men into the navy in war time than all the press-gangs could.”
His most lasting song is Tom Bowline, written for The Oddities (1789) and said to be about his brother. Two of its lines are on Dibdin’s gravestone: “Though his body’s under hatches, / His soul is gone aloft!” Sailors sang it for half a century. In Herman Melville’s navy novel White-Jacket (1850), the old hands of the frigate’s crew are “the fellows that sing you” Tom Bowling. Half a century after his death, publishers still led with his name: Sea Songs and Ballads, a pocket songbook “by Dibdin and others,” opens with his Poor Jack and includes Ben Backstay. But by 1876 the Canadian captain Robert C. Adam could write that “Dibdin’s songs, which the orthodox sailor of the last half century was supposed to adhere to as closely as the Scotch Presbyterian to his Psalter, are falling into disuse.”
The Royal Navy gave its sailors rum for more than three hundred years. Rum took over from beer after the capture of Jamaica in 1655, and in 1740 Admiral Edward Vernon, nicknamed “Old Grog” for his grogram cloak, ordered it watered down. The mixture took his nickname. By 1850 the ration had settled at an eighth of a pint a day, handed out late each morning when the boatswain blew his whistle and called “Up Spirits!” By the twentieth century, sailors under twenty got no rum ration, and those who chose not to drink were paid threepence a day instead.
In December 1969 the Admiralty Board decided that the rum issue was “no longer compatible with the high standards of efficiency required” in a modern navy, and the House of Commons argued over it on January 28, 1970, in what became known as the Great Rum Debate. The last tot was poured at 11 a.m. on July 31, 1970. Sailors wore black armbands, held mock funerals and tipped their tots over the side. In compensation, each sailor got an extra can of beer a day. The Royal Canadian Navy ended its ration in 1972, and the Royal New Zealand Navy in 1990.
Tom Lewis, a submariner who served through the change, put it in the last verse of A Sailor Ain't a Sailor: “But now we get an extra two because they stopped the tot.” Older songs take the ration for granted. The dying man-of-war’s man in Tom Deadlight asks for “my tot, Matt, before I roll over,” and Sailor's Alphabet gives the forecastle’s view: “Give a sailor his grog an’ there’s nothing goes wrong!”
In 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte was the rising star of revolutionary France. That spring he sailed from Toulon with 40,000 soldiers and a massive fleet, bound for Egypt. The plan was bold: seize Egypt, the land bridge between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, and use it as a base to threaten British India, Britain’s most valuable colony. He took Alexandria in early July and marched inland, but his fleet remained anchored in Aboukir Bay, near the mouth of the Nile.
Rear Admiral Horatio Nelson had been hunting the French fleet for weeks, narrowly missing them at several ports. On the evening of August 1, he finally found them: thirteen French ships of the line at anchor in a defensive formation close to shore. Nelson’s captains needed no detailed orders. In a daring move, several British ships slipped between the French line and the shore, catching the enemy in a devastating crossfire. The battle raged through the night. Around ten o’clock the French flagship Orient exploded in a blast so enormous that both sides stopped firing for several minutes. By morning, eleven of thirteen French ships had been captured or destroyed. Napoleon’s army was stranded in Egypt, cut off from home.
The victory made Nelson a national hero and established British naval supremacy in the Mediterranean for the rest of the Napoleonic Wars. The broadside ballad The Banks of the Nile captures the domestic side of the campaign: a young woman begs to follow her sweetheart to Egypt, only to be told that no women may go. In fact, women were present aboard many ships at the Nile, and some helped carry gunpowder to the cannons during the battle.
By the mid-nineteenth century, Peru’s Chincha Islands were the center of one of the world’s most lucrative trades: guano. Bird droppings, accumulated over millennia on these barren Pacific rocks, made an extraordinarily effective fertilizer, and European demand was insatiable. Shiploads left Callao and the Chinchas for ports around the world, drawing a constant stream of sailing ships and working sailors to Peru’s coast. Loading guano was among the most wretched jobs in the maritime world. The dust burned the eyes and lungs, and the stench was legendary.
On August 4, 1863, a fight broke out at the Talambó hacienda in northern Peru between local workers and a group of Basque immigrants who had been contracted to work the estate’s cotton fields. Several were killed or injured. It was a local dispute, but Spain seized upon it as a diplomatic crisis, sending a representative provocatively styled as a “viceroy,” a deliberate echo of colonial authority that Peru rightly refused to accept. The following April, a Spanish fleet occupied the Chincha Islands, choking off Peru’s guano revenues. The seizure ignited the Chincha Islands War, eventually drawing Chile, Bolivia, and Ecuador into an alliance that drove Spain from South American waters. The conflict culminated in the bombardment of Callao in 1866, a decisive humiliation for the old empire.
Sailors who worked the guano and saltpetre trade out of Callao and the Chinchas knew these waters well, and the port features prominently in the capstan shanty Paddy, Lay Back. Versions of the song that mention “the Chinchas” place the singer squarely in this world of desperate labor and distant imperial quarrels, bound around Cape Horn to load cargo in one of the most miserable ports on earth.
On August 10, 1817, a little after noon, a Gloucester mariner named Amos Story was sitting on the shore with a spyglass when he saw “a strange marine animal, that I believe to be a serpent” swimming near Ten Pound Island in the harbor. Its head was shaped like a sea turtle’s and held a foot above the water, and he watched it for an hour and a half. His is the earliest date in the sworn testimony that followed. The shipmaster Solomon Allen watched it on three days running and judged it eighty or ninety feet long, with a head like a rattlesnake’s but “nearly as large as the head of a horse.”
On August 14 the ship carpenter Matthew Gaffney was out in a boat with his brother and got within thirty feet of it. “I had a good gun, and took good aim,” he said. “I aimed at his head, and think I must have hit him.” The creature turned toward the boat, then sank “like a rock,” passed under them, and came up a hundred yards away, apparently unbothered. In Boston, the Linnaean Society of New England appointed a committee on August 18 to investigate. It asked a Gloucester justice of the peace, Lonson Nash, to take sworn statements, keeping the witnesses from comparing stories until all were written down. Nash, who had watched the animal himself on the 14th, sent back eight depositions on August 28, Story’s and Gaffney’s among them. Then, on September 27, men working in a field near Loblolly Cove killed a three-foot snake with a strangely humped back, using a pitchfork and a stone. Its owner exhibited it in Boston as the sea serpent’s young, and the committee, deciding the two were probably the same species, named a new genus for it, Scoliophis atlanticus. The naturalist Charles Lesueur soon showed it was a common black snake with a deformed spine.
The serpent was seen off Cape Ann for years afterward, and Gloucester never let go of it. In 1946 the local poet Kitty Parsons told the whole story again in comic verse as The Sea Serpent, in which Story, Allen and Gaffney each take a shot at it, until “most citizens of Gloucester thought they’d seen / The serpent or some specimen of animate marine.”
In the summer of 1834, Richard Henry Dana Jr. was a 19-year-old Harvard student from a well-known Boston family, and his eyes had grown so weak that he could no longer study. Hoping to cure them “by an entire change of life, and by a long absence from books and study,” he signed on as a common sailor in the brig Pilgrim, bound around Cape Horn to California to trade for cattle hides. His book opens: “The fourteenth of August was the day fixed upon for the sailing of the brig Pilgrim.” He came aboard at noon “in full sea-rig,” sure he would pass for a jack tar, and was, he admitted, “known for a landsman by every one on board as soon as I hove in sight.” The Pilgrim hauled out into the stream and anchored for the night, and it was three more days before she got to sea.
Dana spent more than a year on the California coast, curing and loading hides, and came home in the ship Alert in September 1836. At San Pedro he watched Captain Thompson flog two of his shipmates, and lying awake in the forecastle that night he “vowed that if God should ever give me the means, I would do something to redress the grievances and relieve the sufferings of that poor class of beings, of whom I then was one.” Two Years Before the Mast came out in 1840 and was an immediate success. Dana became a lawyer who often represented sailors, wrote a handbook of their legal rights, The Seaman’s Friend (1841), and helped build the case against flogging, which Congress banned in 1850. When he came back to California in 1859, he looked out from a San Francisco hotel over a city of steeples, wharves and clipper ships, built on the cove where he had once beached the Alert’s boats.
Dana wrote down a good deal about how sailors sang at work. After the flogging, the sullen crew catted the anchor without Cheer'ly Men, the hauling song “in which all hands join in the chorus.” They pulled “a long, heavy, silent pull,” and since, “as sailors say a song is as good as ten men,” the anchor came up “pretty slowly.” At San Diego, two English man-of-war’s men in another ship’s crew sang through the old favorites, and he was glad to find that Tom Bowline and The Bay of Biscay O “still held their places.” When the Alert finally sailed for home, her topsails went up to “Cheerily, men!” From 1843 she was a New London whaler, until she was captured and burned near the Azores in September 1862 by the Confederate raider of The Alabama.
Lake Superior drains into the lower Great Lakes through the rapids of the St. Marys River at Sault Ste. Marie, which fall about 21 feet. Until 1855 no ship could pass them. Cargo was unloaded on one side, carted around the rapids, and loaded onto another vessel on the other. Ralph D. Williams, in his 1907 history of the Marquette iron trade, wrote that one old gray horse “had the distinguished honor in 1845 of hauling every pound of freight that passed to and from Lake Superior.” Ships bound for the upper lake were dragged overland on rollers, as one sailor remembered, “the same as buildings are sometimes moved.” The last ship hauled across was the side-wheel steamer Sam Ward, in 1853, for the Detroit shipowner Eber Ward. By then copper and iron had been found on the upper lake. That same year, a shipment of 152 tons of iron ore from the mines near Marquette needed four vessels and a portage to reach the lower lakes.
In 1852 Congress granted Michigan 750,000 acres of public land to pay for a canal around the rapids. Charles T. Harvey, a young agent for the Fairbanks scale company who had come to the Sault to recover from typhoid fever, took charge of the work and broke ground in June 1853. At times 2,000 men worked on the mile-long cut, and in 1854 cholera killed “fully one-tenth of the workmen.” The canal cost just under a million dollars, and its two locks opened in June 1855.
On August 14 the brig Columbia, under Captain Wells, left Marquette with 132 tons of ore for the Cleveland Iron Mining Company. Marquette’s little dock was flat, with no chutes, so the crew wheeled the ore aboard in barrows, for 25 cents an hour. On August 17, 1855, the Columbia passed through the locks, the first ore cargo to do so. That season the mines shipped 1,449 tons. By 1890 Lake Superior ports were shipping nine million tons a year.
The ore trade filled the lakes with schooners. One of them, the E. C. Roberts, carried a locomotive up the lake in 1857 for Marquette’s new ore railroad. She is the schooner of Red Iron Ore. In the song she loads at Escanaba, on Lake Michigan, where a railroad reached the ore docks in the 1860s and gave the mines a route that avoided the Soo. Copper from the Keweenaw Peninsula came down through the locks too. In the 1890s the steamers of the Ward line carried it from Houghton and Hancock. Black deckhands hired at Detroit loaded the copper with hand trucks and sang The Ward Line as they worked: “City folks, dey’s gon’ to bed, / But we push coppa till we’s dead.”
On this afternoon two months into the War of 1812, the USS Constitution and the HMS Guerriere met 400 miles southeast of Nova Scotia. The ships were each captained by well-seasoned veterans: the Consitution by Isaac Hull and the Guerriere by James Richard Dacres. (Dacres, incidentally, joined the Navy at age eight, while Hull waited until fourteen.)
The larger guns and thicker hull of the Constitution favored her in the initial combat, during which the Guerriere’s mizzen mast was brought down. The mast dragged like a rudder, allowing the Constitution to cross in front and fire raking shots, damaging the main and foremasts as well. After a period of musket-fire, the Constitution gathered for repairs before returning to finish the battle. The lack of masts proved problematic for raising the white flag of surrender aboard the Guerriere, which finally fired a cannon shot away from the Constitution to signal defeat.
As the captains met, Hull refused the customary surrender of Dacres’s sword, but did accept his hat to settle a prior wager over whose was the better ship. Hull even ordered the retrieval of Dacres’s mother’s bible before the Guerriere was sunk. Dacres was honourably acquitted for the loss by a military tribunal, arguing that the crew had done their best, the deficient ship was French-built, and the mizzen mast was rotting and needed to be replaced anyway. The American victory is celebrated in the song The Constitution and Guerrière.
On August 20, 1804, the Irish poet Thomas Moore arrived in Quebec after seventeen hundred miles of travel through the interior of North America. He had left New York on July 4, journeying up the Mohawk River, through the Genesee Country, and across to Niagara Falls before making the long passage down the St. Lawrence. His letters home to his mother overflow with joy and wonder: “Never did I feel my heart in a better tone of sensibility,” he wrote of the Mohawk valley, and at Niagara he wept at the first glimpse of the falls. The whole journey left him sun-browned, healthy, and brimming with material for poetry.
It was on the St. Lawrence, during a five-day boat journey from Kingston to Montreal, that Moore encountered the songs of the Canadian voyageurs. The wind was against them and the boatmen were obliged to row the whole way, singing long, winding French folk songs as they went. “Our voyageurs had good voices,” Moore recalled, “and sang perfectly in tune together.” One tune in particular stayed with him: “Dans mon chemin j’ai rencontré,” a rambling story-song he could only half understand through “the barbarous pronunciation of the Canadians.” After returning to England aboard the frigate Boston in November 1804, Moore set his own words to the voyageurs’ melody and published A Canadian Boat Song in his 1806 collection Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems. The song became one of his most celebrated works, and a recognized influence on nineteenth-century French-Canadian poetry.
Moore wrote home faithfully, and his mother kept every letter. His letters, journals, poems, and other writings preserve a detailed picture of early North American travel: encounters with the Oneida nation, wilderness inns that charged seven shillings for three men’s supper and beds, and a poet’s ear turning toward the working songs of the men who carried him downriver. The songs we study survive not only because people sang them, but because someone along the way thought them worth writing down.
The 1927 Atlantic hurricane season opened with the deadliest Canadian storm of the century. Though strong cyclones are rare due to the colder Canadian waters, the August Gale struck the coasts of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, maintaining Category II winds and causing widespread crop and infrastructure damage. On August 24-25, the fisheries were caught by surprise and decimated, with more than twenty boats and two hundred fishermen lost at sea.
The storm is memorialized in The Gale of August, '27, a song to the tune of “The Death of Floyd Collins”.
In August 1892 Gloucester, Massachusetts, marked 250 years since its incorporation as a town. The last day of the celebration, Friday, August 26, was saved for the event that mattered most: a race between the fastest schooners of the fleet, the “flying fishermen,” for a silver cup given by the yachtsman Henry S. Hovey. The cup’s handles were shaped like codfish.
The day opened with rain and a northeast gale. The course was a 41-mile triangle across Massachusetts Bay, from Eastern Point to a mark off Nahant, across to Minot’s Ledge, and back. In wind like that, a schooner would normally reef, tying down part of each sail to make it smaller. Nobody did. “To be the first to reef would make her the laughing stock of the town,” wrote William Hale, who sailed in the James S. Steele. The Ethel B. Jacobs took the early lead, then broke her main gaff jibing around the Nahant mark and dropped out. On the beat home the schooners sailed with their lee rails under and water up to the hatches, with two men at each wheel. “It is doubtful if ever a race was sailed under such savage conditions,” wrote one yachting reporter. The Harry L. Belden had come in from a fishing trip too late to get ready, and raced “just as she was.” Under Captain Maurice Whalen she won, her jibs torn but holding. The Nannie C. Bohlin was second and the Joseph Rowe third.
In 1946 the Gloucester poet Kitty Parsons told the story in The Race of the Flying Fishermen. Her ballad follows the race mark by mark, from the Jacobs’s broken gaff to the Rowe’s Captain Rube Cameron “tied to the wheel, / In water well up to his neck.” She may have had that detail from Cameron himself, since her book thanks “Captain Reuben Cameron” for his help.
The story of the George E. Corbitt, a triangle-trader out of Annapolis, Nova Scotia, is told in Corbitt's Barkentine. This well-documented journey of an unwilling sailor begins August 30, 1883. Much of the song is presumably based on fact. For example, the Eva Johnson was a notable tugboat in Digby, Nova Scotia. But as far as verifiable accounts go, we are limited to the folk song tradition.
The song traces the full triangular voyage with surprising geographic detail: from Nova Scotia to Demerara (now Georgetown, Guyana) with lumber, then north to Boston with sugar, and finally home. Along the way, it names Boston Light and the State House dome gleaming in the sun as the ship approaches port. These specifics lend credibility to the claim that the song was composed by Tom Reynolds, the Corbitt’s cook, based on an actual voyage.
The song was popular not just in forecastles, but also in the lumber woods of the Maritimes.
In the age of sail, a French corsair was a privateer: a captain licensed by the crown to arm a ship and raid enemy merchant vessels in wartime. Corsairs were not pirates. They sailed under official letters of marque, followed rules of engagement, and were celebrated as national heroes when they returned to port. No city produced more of them than Saint-Malo, on the north coast of Brittany, and no corsair was more famous than Robert Surcouf, born there in 1773. Over his career he captured 47 ships and earned the nickname le Roi des Corsaires, the King of Corsairs. His most celebrated action came on October 7, 1800, when his 18-gun brig Confiance, with a crew of 150, boarded and took the British East Indiaman Kent and her 437 men in the Bay of Bengal. Fourteen British sailors were killed, including the captain. Surcouf lost five.
The French song Le trente-et-un du mois d'août, known in English as “The Song of the Corsairs,” is traditionally connected to this battle, but the details do not quite match. The song places the action on the thirty-first of August, off Bordeaux, with a corsair of ten cannons against a frigate of thirty-six. The real engagement was in October, in the Indian Ocean, with different numbers. The melody itself is older than Surcouf: it appears in a collection of airs published in 1581, and Davenson wrote that the song celebrates French corsairs generally, not any single battle. Stan Hugill believed it dated to the reign of Louis XVI. Whatever its true origin, the chorus leaves no doubt about its loyalties: “To the health of the King of France, and shit to the King of England, who has declared war on us.”
September 3, 1884 marks the sinking of the John Bigler, an otherwise unremarkable schooner out of Detroit (or possibly Chicago) memorialized in song. The slow-moving timber drogher was sailed, and sometimes pulled, through the Great Lakes canals, averaging some 4 miles an hour. The ship was lost with $3,500 worth of stone in the middle of Lake Superior. A clipping from the Toronto Telegram, 3 Oct 1942, provides more detail about the ship, the times, and the song.
The USS Enterprise and the HMS Boxer met eight miles off the shore of Maine, midway through the War of 1812. The Enterprise was captained by Lieutenant William Burrows while the Boxer was commanded by Samuel Blyth. The ships were well-matched and the captains committed, maneuvering for six hours before engaging in close combat. Blyth was killed by cannonball in the early fusillades, while Burrows suffered a mortal musket ball wound to the thigh. When the Boxer eventually submitted, Burrows directed that Blyth’s ceremonially-surrendered sword be returned to the British captain’s family. After the ships arrived in Portland, the two captains were buried adjacent amid public ceremony in the city’s Eastern Cemetery.
The battle is the subject of the ballad Enterprise and Boxer, and is referenced in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem, “My Lost Youth”.
The Crimean War began in 1853 as a Russian push against the Ottoman Empire. Britain and France had spent centuries fighting each other, most recently at Waterloo, but neither would stand by while Russia grew stronger at the Ottomans’ expense, and in 1854 they joined the war on the Ottoman side. They struck at Sevastopol, home of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, landing armies on the Crimean peninsula in September 1854. The Russians scuttled part of their own fleet across the harbor mouth to keep the allied warships out, and the allies settled in for a siege that lasted almost a year, through a winter of frostbite and disease. Sailors of the Naval Brigade hauled their ships’ guns ashore and manned them in the siege batteries.
The key to Sevastopol’s defenses was the Malakoff, a hill fort crowned by a stone tower. Its guns also covered the Great Redan, the British objective just to the west, so the British could not move until the Malakoff had fallen. By late summer the French trenches had reached within a few yards of the Malakoff, and at noon on Saturday, September 8, 1855, when the Russians were thought to be at dinner, the French charged. The fighting inside was carried on, wrote the French engineer General Niel, “with the bayonet, with the butt-ends, and stones,” and within fifteen minutes the tricolor was flying over the fort. Then the British went for the Redan across 200 yards of open ground, under fire the whole way. Some got inside, but after nearly two hours they were driven out. The allied fleets, meant to bombard the harbor forts, were pinned at anchor by a gale. That night the British commander, General James Simpson, wired London: “The assault on the Malakhoff has been successful… The attack of the English against the Redan did not succeed.” Without the Malakoff the town could not be held, and the Russians would leave nothing behind for the allies. Through the night they blew up their powder magazines, set Sevastopol ablaze, filed across a floating bridge to the north side of the harbor, and sank or burned what was left of their fleet. Next day Simpson wired again: “Sebastopol is in the possession of the allies.”
Guns fired a victory salute at the Tower of London and church bells rang across the city, but the celebration was halfhearted. The siege had been won by the French at the Malakoff, while the British had failed at the Redan. The war dragged on until the Treaty of Paris in March 1856. Street-ballad printers soon had Capture & Destruction of Sebastopol on sale, to the tune of Cheer, Boys, Cheer!, with the chorus “Cheer lads, cheer, Sebastopol is taken.” Sailors at the capstan had their own version, Sebastopol. “The Crimean war is over now,” it opens, months too early, and its chorus insists that “Old England gained the day,” a claim the men who stormed the Redan might have disputed. The shanty doesn’t seem to have been written down until John Masefield printed it in 1906 in his article Sea-Songs, calling it one of “the best, and most popular, capstan chanties,” with a tune that “moves to quicker time than most.”
On September 9, 1775, a hurricane struck eastern Newfoundland at the height of the fishing season. A storm surge of twenty to thirty feet smashed coastal buildings and destroyed over 700 boats. At least 4,000 people were killed, roughly a third of Newfoundland’s summer population. The Annual Register recorded that for days afterward, fishermen “often found 20 or 30 dead bodies” in their nets. The storm takes its name from a hurricane that had swept through the American colonies in the weeks prior, battering every major colonial capital from North Carolina to Boston at the outset of the Revolution. Whether the two events were the same system remains debated.
The Grand Banks have always been treacherous. Shallow shoals, freezing fog, icebergs, and violent nor’westers made them a graveyard for ships long before and after 1775. The Banks of Newfoundland captures the same misery decades later: Irish sailors who pawned their warm clothes in Liverpool and froze on the Banks, dreaming of landfall at Sandy Hook.
In August 1812 an American army surrendered Detroit, and the British took command of the upper Great Lakes. To win the Northwest back, the United States needed Lake Erie, and that meant building a navy on it. The job went to Oliver Hazard Perry, a 27-year-old officer from Rhode Island. Through the spring and summer of 1813 his shipwrights at Presque Isle, now Erie, Pennsylvania, built two brigs and a handful of schooners, and his men floated the brigs over the sandbar at the harbor mouth on scows. Perry named his flagship Lawrence, for Captain James Lawrence, killed aboard the Chesapeake in June, and had a blue battle flag made with Lawrence’s dying words: “Don’t give up the ship.” Across the lake, the British commander, Robert Barclay, a one-armed veteran of Trafalgar, had a new ship of his own, the Detroit.
On the morning of September 10, 1813, Perry’s lookouts sighted Barclay’s squadron from Put-in-Bay, in the Bass Islands. The wind was light, and it was nearly noon before the Detroit fired the first shot. Perry’s brigs carried carronades, heavy guns that hit hard but only at short range, so he took the Lawrence in close. The Niagara, under Jesse Elliott, hung back, for reasons argued over for decades, and for two hours the Lawrence took the fire of the British squadron nearly alone. By half past two every gun on her deck was knocked out. Of about a hundred fit men aboard, 22 were dead and 61 wounded. Perry got into a boat and was rowed half a mile through the shot to the Niagara, standing up until his oarsmen refused to pull unless he sat down. Behind him the Lawrence struck her colors, and the British cheered. Perry took the Niagara straight through Barclay’s line. The Detroit and the Queen Charlotte had fouled each other trying to turn, and the Niagara raked them both at close range. By three o’clock the British flags were down, and two small vessels that tried to run were chased down. Barclay lay below with grapeshot through his good shoulder. Perry wrote to General William Henry Harrison: “We have met the enemy, and they are ours. Two ships, two brigs, one schooner, and one sloop.” Within three weeks Harrison’s army was back in Detroit.
Ye Parliament of England is an American broadside that runs through the war at sea one verse at a time, from Isaac Hull’s capture of the Guerriere to the Enterprise and the Boxer, five days before Lake Erie. Then comes Lake Erie, “Where Perry had some fun,” and the British squadron “beat complete, / Some took, some run ashore.” The last verse still has the Essex raiding in the South Seas, so the song was probably written before she was captured in March 1814. When Joanna Carver Colcord printed it in Roll and Go in 1924, she wrote that it “was good for a fight any time there happened to be a Britisher in the forecastle!”
A merchant captain at sea had almost unlimited power over his crew, and a sailor had nowhere to appeal until the ship reached port. In the spring of 1857 the Sunderland ship Martha and Jane, homeward bound from Calcutta by way of Demerara, put into Barbados for repairs. There Henry Rogers took command, and a seaman named Andrew Rose signed on. The second mate beat Rose so badly that shipmates advised him to run, and he did, but the police brought him back in irons, and the ship sailed on May 11.
For the next three and a half weeks, Rogers and his mates, William Miles and Charles Edward Seymour, flogged Rose almost daily. One Sunday morning, while he was in irons, he was heard singing the hymn “Oh, let us be joyful.” The captain answered, “I will make you sorrowful,” and gagged him with an iron bolt. Rogers trained his dog to bite him, sent him naked aloft with the mate whipping him up the rigging, and had him sealed in a water cask lashed to the ship’s side from noon to midnight. At last they hoisted him off the deck by the neck from the mainmast. Rose died on deck on June 5, so covered in sores that the crew dragged his body aft with a rope rather than touch him, and he was thrown overboard. When the ship reached Liverpool on June 9, the crew went to the authorities. All three officers were convicted of murder at the Liverpool Assizes in August and sentenced to death. The mates’ sentences were commuted, but on Saturday, September 12, 1857, Rogers was hanged outside Kirkdale Gaol before a crowd of about 50,000. Within a week, a Liverpool waxworks advertised “exact models” of Rogers and his mates, the captain “attired in the clothes actually worn at the execution.”
Broadside ballads on the case were printed that year in English and Welsh, and one of them survives in tradition as Andrew Rose. It follows the evidence closely, “Gagged him with an iron bar” and “Naked beneath the burning sun,” though it stretches the night in the cask to “seven long days” and declines to describe the worst of it: “The captain gave him stuff to swallow; / Stuff to you I will not name.” In Orkney the song was sung as Andrew Ross, and Orcadians held that he came from the island of Stronsay.
The Great Lakes in the mid-nineteenth century were a highway for grain. Schooners by the hundreds carried wheat from Chicago eastward through the lakes and canals to ports like Oswego, New York. The traffic was heavy and the sailing could be dangerous, especially where the lakes narrowed. The schooner Persian, built in 1855 at Oswego, was a working vessel of this trade: 128 feet long, 345 tons, unremarkable except to the men who sailed her.
On the night of September 16, 1868, the Persian was rounding Presque Isle on Lake Huron, loaded with wheat and bound for home. The weather was clear and the Persian had the right of way, but the schooner E.B. Allen, attempting to pass, struck her starboard quarter. The Allen’s captain sailed on, believing the Persian would make it to shore. She did not. All ten souls aboard were lost. The wreck lay undiscovered at 168 feet until sport divers found it in 1991, in what is now the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary.
The ballad The Persian's Crew preserves the names that the lake did not. It singles out first mate Daniel Sullivan of Oswego, “a man both bold and brave,” and mourns his friends who will wait in vain for his return.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, iron ore from the upper Great Lakes was feeding a growing American steel industry. Schooners hauled the ore from ports like Escanaba, on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, down through the lakes to Cleveland, where the furnaces waited. It was hard, unglamorous work. The ships were working vessels, not clippers, and the men who crewed them loaded and unloaded cargo by hand, shoveling ore until their fingers bled, then racing the fleet back for the next load.
The E.C. Roberts was one of these ore haulers: a two-masted, 273-ton schooner built by Lafrinier and Stevens at Cleveland in 1856. She served over fifty years on the lakes, eventually rebuilt as a tow barge in 1880, before being abandoned at Port Huron in 1908. No known photograph of her survives.
What does survive is Red Iron Ore, which records a specific September 17 voyage aboard her. The song names real tugs, the Escanaba and the Kate Williams, real ships like the Minch and the Exile, and a real captain in Harvey Shannon. “In the month of September, the seventeenth day / Two dollars and a quarter was all they would pay.” It is one of the great songs of the freshwater trade, and the final verse raises a glass to the Roberts herself, “staunch, strong, and true,” and to “the bold boys that make up her crew.”
On the evening of September 23, 1779, Captain John Paul Jones in the Bonhomme Richard closed on HMS Serapis off Flamborough Head, Yorkshire. It was the fourth year of the American War of Independence, and Jones had spent months raiding British waters with a small Franco-American squadron. The Serapis was a new 44-gun Royal Navy frigate under Captain Richard Pearson, escorting a convoy of some forty Baltic merchant ships loaded with timber and iron. The Bonhomme Richard was an old French merchant vessel, loaned to the Continental Navy and renamed by Jones in honor of Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac. She was outgunned from the start.
The ships exchanged broadsides at close range from around six in the evening, and within an hour the Richard was badly mauled. When the British captain called on Jones to surrender, he is said to have answered, “I have not yet begun to fight.” The ships collided and became locked together, bow to stern, their sides grinding in the swell. For hours the crews fought with muskets, pistols, and grenades at point-blank range. The turning point came when a Scottish seaman crawled out along the Richard’s mainyard and dropped a grenade through the Serapis’s main hatch. It landed among loose powder cartridges on the lower gun deck, and the explosion killed over twenty men and put the deck out of action. Captain Pearson struck his colours around half past ten. Jones transferred his crew to the captured Serapis; the Bonhomme Richard, with five feet of water in her hold, sank two days later.
Jones became a hero on both sides of the Atlantic, and the battle entered the folk tradition through songs like Paul Jones, which follows the action broadside by broadside. The Stately Southerner celebrates his earlier exploits in the Ranger off the Irish coast.
On September 25, 1831, the barque Lucy Ann sailed from Sydney under the command of Captain Owen, bound for Otago Harbour, New Zealand. She carried the supplies for the Weller brothers’ new whaling establishment, and her cargo combined “the arts of peace and war to a charming degree”: 6 cases of muskets, 10 barrels and 104 half barrels of gunpowder, iron boilers, casks of beef, whaling gear and line, a pipe of gin, 2 puncheons of rum, 5 kegs of tobacco, and stores. The ammunition was probably for trade with the Maori; the alcohol was for the whalers.
The Weller brothers, George, Edward, and Joseph Brooks, ran their company from Sydney. Their Otago station would become a major operation, but not without setbacks. In early 1832, a fire destroyed about 80 houses and the entire whaling establishment, with a quantity of gunpowder exploding in the blaze. Someone even attempted to burn the Lucy Ann herself while she sat in Sydney Cove that May. It was not until November 1833 that the Lucy Ann brought back the first whale oil from Otago: 130 tuns, with 7 tons of whalebone. Captain Worth reported that whales were so plentiful that twice the cargo could have been taken, had the ship only had enough casks.
The Weller brothers and their provisions ships are remembered in Soon May The Wellerman Come, where the crew of the Billy o’ Tea waits for the “Wellerman” to bring “sugar and tea and rum.” The firm’s fortunes declined with the whale population, and George Weller filed for bankruptcy in Sydney in February 1841. The details above are drawn from Robert McNab’s extraordinarily thorough The Old Whaling Days: A History of Southern New Zealand from 1830 to 1840 (1913).
In the early hours of October 7, 1864, with Sherman in Atlanta and the Confederacy in slow collapse, the Union sloop USS Wachusett slipped her cables in the harbor of Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, and rammed the Confederate commerce raider CSS Florida where she lay at anchor. Half the Florida’s crew, including her captain Charles Morris, were ashore. Morris had gone to the opera and was sleeping in a hotel, trusting that Brazilian neutrality would protect his ship. It did not. Commander Napoleon Collins drove the Wachusett into the Florida’s starboard quarter, snapping her mizzenmast, fired several shots into her hull, and had a prize crew aboard within fifteen minutes. By the time Morris reached the waterfront, the Florida was being towed out to sea.
The Florida had been one of the war’s most destructive raiders. Built secretly in Liverpool and commissioned under Captain John Newland Maffitt (“bold Maffitt” of The Florida's Cruise), she captured or destroyed some 37 Union merchant vessels directly, and her offshoots took another 20 or more. Maffitt himself had left the ship eight months earlier due to lingering yellow fever, the same disease he had fought through when he ran the Florida into Mobile Bay in September 1862, so weak he had to be lashed upright on deck.
The capture was an international scandal. Brazil demanded the ship’s return, the prisoners’ release, and Collins’s punishment. Secretary of State Seward apologized and had Collins court-martialed, though the Navy quietly restored him to command afterward. The question of returning the Florida resolved itself on November 28, 1864, when she sank at Hampton Roads after a collision with an army transport. The circumstances were suspicious enough that Admiral David Porter later claimed, by one account, that Seward had said “I wish she was at the bottom of the sea,” and Porter had obliged by sending an engineer to open the sea cocks. Whether or not the story is true, the sinking was remarkably convenient: no ship, no obligation to return her. Few outside of Richmond mourned the loss.
Cyril Tawney was born on October 12, 1930, in Gosport, Hampshire, into a Royal Navy family. He joined the navy himself in 1946 and served thirteen years, three and a half of them in submarines. In the early 1950s he heard traditional singers from the British countryside on the BBC’s folk song program As I Roved Out and was hooked for life. On Christmas Day 1957, while still a serving sailor, he sang on a BBC broadcast put together by the American collector Alan Lomax. In 1959 he bought his way out of the navy to sing for a living.
The last song he wrote before leaving was The Grey Funnel Line. Sailors called the Royal Navy the Grey Funnel Line, as if it were just another shipping company, and the song is about a sailor leaving home once more. The hardest time, he sings, “is to watch the sun as it dies away.” Tawney wrote that the refrain, “It’s one more day on the Grey Funnel Line,” came from a shanty chorus, “Rock and roll me over for one more day.” His Chicken on a Raft, a sailor’s grumble about fried egg on toast and the officers above him, is packed with navy slang.
Tawney settled in Plymouth and became known as the father of the West Country folk revival, collecting songs from traditional singers between tours. In 1965 he opened the West of England Folk Centre at Devonport, but running it on top of his touring led to a breakdown in his health, and it soon closed. From 1958 he also collected the navy’s own songs, and in 1987 he published them as Grey Funnel Lines, a book of the songs and verse sailors made up in the Royal Navy between 1900 and 1970. He died in 2005.
The Eddystone Rocks lie in the English Channel about nine miles south of Rame Head, off the approach to Plymouth, and for centuries they wrecked ships. The first lighthouse on them was Henry Winstanley’s wooden tower, lit in 1698. Winstanley was on the rock making repairs when the Great Storm of November 1703 struck, and the tower was swept away with everyone in it. John Rudyerd’s tower of timber and stone followed in 1708 and stood for almost fifty years, until the lantern caught fire on the night of December 2, 1755. Its keeper, Henry Hall, was 94. He said he had swallowed molten lead from the lantern roof while fighting the fire, and he died some days later.
The engineer John Smeaton built the next tower entirely of stone. He took its shape from “the natural figure of the waist or bole of a large spreading Oak,” and cut the granite blocks to dovetail into one another and into the rock itself, bound with a lime mortar that set under water. Work on the rock began in 1756. On October 16, 1759, the light was lit for the first time, with 24 tallow candles. When Smeaton got back out to the rock a few days later, Henry Edwards, one of the three workmen he had left to keep the light, told him “they lighted the house, as they were directed, early on Tuesday evening the 16th… and that they found the lights to burn very steadily, notwithstanding it blowed very hard.” The tower stood for more than a century, until the rock beneath it began to erode. Its upper part was taken down and rebuilt on Plymouth Hoe, where it still stands, and James Douglass’s new tower took over the light in 1882.
By then the Eddystone was the best-known lighthouse in Britain. The comic song The Eddystone Light began as The Man at the Nore, a music hall song of 1866 about the keeper of the Nore lightship in the Thames Estuary. Later versions moved him to the Eddystone, where he “slept with a mermaid one fine night,” and the Weavers and Burl Ives made it a folk revival standard in the 1950s.
Herman Melville went to sea in the whaler Acushnet out of Fairhaven, Massachusetts, in January 1841, and deserted her in the Marquesas the next year. Over the following decade he turned his years at sea into a run of novels, from Typee (1846) to White-Jacket (1850). His sixth book took in everything he knew about whaling, along with the story of the Nantucket whaler Essex, rammed and sunk by a sperm whale in 1820.
On October 18, 1851, Richard Bentley published it in London, in three volumes, as The Whale. He printed 500 copies. Bentley’s editors cut passages they thought offensive, and the Epilogue, in which Ishmael survives the wreck of the Pequod, was left out, so some reviewers asked how the narrator had lived to tell the story. Harper & Brothers published the American edition in New York on November 14 under a new title, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. The book sold poorly, and it was only in the 1920s, after Melville’s death, that it came to be seen as a great American novel.
The Pequod’s crew sing as they work. When the ship weighs anchor in chapter 22, the hands at the windlass roar “some sort of a chorus about the girls in Booble Alley,” though Captain Bildad had told them that no profane songs would be allowed on board. Chapter 40, “Midnight, Forecastle,” opens with the watch “all singing in chorus” the old song Spanish Ladies: “Farewell and adieu to you, Spanish ladies! Farewell and adieu to you, ladies of Spain!” Melville came back to the song near the end of his life in Tom Deadlight (1888), the dying words of a petty officer, which borrow its lines. When John Huston filmed the novel in 1956, A.L. Lloyd led the shanties, among them Blood Red Roses.
By the autumn of 1805, Napoleon had assembled a vast army at Boulogne for the invasion of England, but he needed control of the English Channel to get it across. That depended on the combined fleets of France and Spain, which had taken shelter in the port of Cadiz under the command of Vice Admiral Pierre-Charles Villeneuve. When Villeneuve put to sea on October 19, Vice Admiral Horatio Nelson was waiting for him with 27 ships of the line. The combined fleet had 33, with a corresponding advantage in guns, but Nelson had a plan and better crews.
On the morning of October 21, the allied fleet was sailing north in a loose crescent. Nelson divided his force into two columns and drove them directly at the enemy line, perpendicular to it, a maneuver that risked terrible punishment on the approach but would cut the allied formation into pieces and prevent the van from doubling back in time to help. It worked. The fighting was brutal and close, ship against ship at point-blank range, but by late afternoon the combined fleet had lost some twenty vessels captured or destroyed, with roughly 4,500 killed and 14,000 taken prisoner. The British lost no ships, though 449 men were killed and over a thousand wounded. Among the dead was Nelson himself, struck by a musket ball fired from the rigging of the Redoutable at the height of the action.
Trafalgar ended any serious threat of a French invasion and secured British naval supremacy for a century. Nelson became the supreme hero of the age, mourned by the whole nation. He appears in numerous songs of the tradition, including Nelson's Death, Nelson's Death and Victory, On Board a Ninety-Eight, and Carrying Nelson Home.
For the ballads, stage songs, and shanties that grew up around the battle, see Mourn, England, Mourn: The Songs of Nelson and Trafalgar.
The Royal Tar was a 164-foot wooden side-wheel steamer built in Saint John, New Brunswick, in 1835. On October 21, 1836, she departed Eastport, Maine for Portland carrying 72 passengers, 21 crew, a brass band, and the entire Burgess and Dexter’s Zoological Institute, a traveling circus. The menagerie included an elephant named Mogul, a Bengal tiger, two lions, a zebra, a hyena, two camels, exotic snakes and birds, and horses with show wagons. To make room for the animal cages, two of the ship’s four lifeboats had been removed.
Heavy weather delayed the voyage for three days. On the afternoon of October 25, while sheltering in Penobscot Bay near the Fox Islands, the engineer discovered the boiler water had fallen dangerously low. Captain Thomas Reed ordered the engine stopped and the furnace fire extinguished, but flames were soon discovered under the middle deck near the animal cages. High winds fanned the blaze beyond control. Mogul the elephant, panicked by the fire, charged through the smoke and leaped overboard, capsizing a makeshift raft of planks and ladders on which several passengers clung for their lives. The U.S. Revenue Cutter Veto arrived within the half hour and rescued some sixty survivors. Fisherman William Barter of Isle au Haut pulled others from the water and fed them beans, bread, and lamb. In the end, 33 people perished, and all the circus animals save the two horses were lost. Also lost was the ship’s safe, which held the passengers’ valuables and money, estimated to be worth over $1 million today. Salvage crews tried to recover it in the 1850s and again in 1930, but found nothing of value. A 1953 expedition could not even locate the wreckage.
The disaster inspired Arthur Slader’s 1837 poem “The Burning Boat,” published as a pamphlet in Saint John. Over a century later, the Maine folk group Schooner Fare recorded The Royal Tar on their 1990 album Signs of Home.
By 1900 many of Gloucester’s fishermen were Portuguese, most of them from the Azores. Joseph P. Mesquita, born in the islands in 1859, had come to Gloucester as a young man and become a schooner captain, and he named his vessel the Mary P. Mesquita after his daughter. Gloucester schooners fished Georges Bank and then raced home to sell their catch, crossing the busy steamer lanes out of Boston, often in fog.
On the evening of Saturday, October 27, 1900, the Mary P. Mesquita was coming home from Georges with a full hold. She had no wind and was drifting in fog about 27 miles south-southeast of Thacher’s Island when the Cunard liner Saxonia, which had left Boston that day for Liverpool, cut into her just forward of the main rigging. The schooner sank in about half a minute. The liner lowered her boats and saved all but one of the crew, some fifteen men. The man lost was Alfred Brown, a 38-year-old fisherman from the Azores with a wife and two children. The Saxonia carried the survivors on to Queenstown, Ireland, and the news reached America by cable from there on November 4. The crew came home to Boston aboard the Ultonia on November 18.
While waiting to be rescued, Captain Mesquita vowed to bring a crowning ceremony, as it was held in the Azores, to Gloucester in thanks for his crew’s survival. He kept the vow: a silver crown was sent from Portugal, and the first Crowning was held at Our Lady of Good Voyage Church in 1902. The ceremony is still held every year. The Gloucester poet Kitty Parsons told the story in The Wreck of the Mary P. Mesquita, from Gloucester Sea Ballads (1946). In her ballad, Alfred Brown dreams of smothering on the two nights before the wreck, and two of the schooner’s dories are found drifting off Cape Cod, so that everyone at home but the captain’s wife gives the crew up for lost.
John Benbow was born the son of a tanner in Shrewsbury, England, in 1653. He went to sea young and spent years in the merchant service before joining the Royal Navy, where he distinguished himself in actions against Barbary corsairs and in the Nine Years’ War against France. By the turn of the eighteenth century he had risen to the rank of vice-admiral, a remarkable career for a man of no particular birth or connections. He was well liked by common sailors and had earned a reputation for personal courage that bordered on recklessness.
In the summer of 1702, early in the War of the Spanish Succession, Benbow was commanding a squadron of seven ships in the West Indies when he encountered a smaller French force under Jean-Baptiste du Casse off Santa Marta, on the coast of modern Colombia. What followed was not one battle but a running fight over several days, during which most of Benbow’s captains hung back and refused to engage the enemy. Benbow pressed on with only the Ruby and his flagship Breda in close support. On the fourth day a chain shot shattered his right leg below the knee, but he refused to go below, ordering a cradle rigged on the quarterdeck so he could continue directing the fight. The engagement ended inconclusively; the French escaped, and the battered Breda limped back to Port Royal.
Benbow never recovered. He died of his wounds in Kingston, Jamaica, on November 4, 1702, and was buried in the parish church there. His cowardly captains were court-martialed: two were shot, and the rest cashiered (dismissed from service in disgrace). The affair became one of the most famous episodes in English naval history, and Benbow’s stubborn courage made him a folk hero. He is remembered in at least two songs: Brave Admiral Benbow, a forecastle favorite that tells the story in some detail, and Admiral Benbow, a shorter ballad sung to the tune of Samuel Hall.
The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down of the big lake they call Gitchigumi. Lake Superior claimed the Edmund Fitzgerald on the frigid evening of November 10, 1975. En route from Superior, WI to Detroit, MI with a full load of iron ore, she was caught in a storm with near-hurricane-force winds and waves up to 35 feet. Captain Ernest McSorley radioed the nearby freighter Arthur M. Anderson throughout the evening as conditions worsened. His last transmission, at 7:10 PM, was “We are holding our own.” Ten minutes later the Fitzgerald vanished from radar. She sank 17 miles northwest of Whitefish Point with all 29 crew. No distress call was ever sent.
Gordon Lightfoot penned the famous Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald in 1976 after reading an article about the Fitzgerald and other Great Lakes tragedies.
The Garthpool was a four-masted steel-hulled barque hauling cargo in the early 20th century. She was launched for the jute trade in 1891 but the industry quickly become unprofitable. Slow and awkward, the ship then hauled case oil and other cargoes before she was sold to the Marine Navigation Company of Canada in 1917. Here the captain and crew took up the grain trade between Adelaide, Australia and the United Kingdom.
Shanty-superstar Stan Hugill was working aboard the Garthpool on November 11, 1929 when she ran ashore near Boavista, Cape Verde, an archipelago in the central Atlantic Ocean. Though all 7 passengers and 30 crew survived, the ship was wrecked, closing the era of commercial square-rigged ships sailing under a British flag.
On November 17, 1869, a procession of ships entered the Suez Canal for the first time, led by the French imperial yacht L’Aigle carrying Empress Eugenie. Thousands of dignitaries had gathered at Port Said for days of celebration: fireworks, banquets, boat trips on the Nile. The canal had taken ten years to build, cut through 100 miles of Egyptian desert by tens of thousands of laborers working first with picks and shovels, then with steam-powered dredgers. When it opened, it was only 25 feet deep and 72 feet wide at the bottom, but it was enough to change the world.
The canal cut the voyage from Europe to Asia roughly in half by eliminating the long route around the Cape of Good Hope. But there was a catch: sailing ships could not use it. The Red Sea and the narrow canal itself offered little in the way of reliable wind, making the passage impractical under sail. It was a shortcut built for steamships, and within five years of its opening, steam traffic on Asian routes had nearly tripled. The age of the clipper, already under pressure, was effectively over. Sailing vessels were pushed to the routes that steam had not yet claimed: the long hauls around Cape Horn to the American West Coast, and the grain and wool trades from Australia.
Those remaining deep-water sailing routes are the world that shanties remember. Songs like The Girls Around Cape Horn, Paddy, Lay Back, and Rolling Home belong to the era when rounding the Horn was still the only way, and the hard miles under sail were a fact of working life. Five days after the canal opened, the tea clipper Cutty Sark was launched at Dumbarton, already obsolete for the trade she was built for.
Stanley James Hugill was born on November 19, 1906, in Hoylake, Cheshire. He first went to sea at sixteen, and by the late 1920s he was serving as shantyman aboard the Garthpool, the last British commercial sailing ship. Hugill later claimed to have led the last shanty ever sung in its proper working context: Fire Down Below, at the pumps, a few days before the Garthpool was wrecked off the Cape Verde Islands in November 1929.
His life at sea was far from over. In 1940, while serving as helmsman on the SS Automedon, the ship was sunk by the German auxiliary cruiser Atlantis in the Indian Ocean. Hugill spent four and a half years as a prisoner of war. After the war, he became an instructor at the Outward Bound Sea School in Aberdovey, Wales, where he stayed for twenty-five years.
When a broken leg laid him up in the 1950s, Hugill began writing down the shanties he had learned at sea. The result was Shanties From the Seven Seas, first published in 1961, a collection of over 400 working songs with detailed notes on how and when each was sung. It remains the single most important reference work on the subject. He went on to publish Shanties and Sailors' Songs and Songs of the Sea, and recorded several albums of shanties himself. Since 1993, the Stan Hugill Memorial Trophy has been awarded at the Tall Ships’ Crews Shanty Competition.
On November 22, 1869, the tea clipper Cutty Sark was launched at Dumbarton, Scotland, five days after the Suez Canal opened to shipping. She had been commissioned by the Scottish shipowner John “Jock” Willis and designed by Hercules Linton, whose firm Scott & Linton went bankrupt during construction; the yard of Denny Brothers finished the job. Willis named her after the short shift worn by the witch Nannie in Robert Burns’s poem Tam o’ Shanter. She was the pinnacle of clipper design: long, narrow, sharp-bowed, with three raking masts.
The Cutty Sark made eight voyages to China for tea, but steamships using the canal were faster to market and the premiums for the first cargo home soon vanished. Her most famous tea race came in 1872, when she and her great rival Thermopylae left Shanghai together on June 18. By mid-August the Cutty Sark was four hundred miles ahead, but a gale in the Indian Ocean tore away her rudder. Captain Moodie refused to put into port; his carpenter built a makeshift rudder from spare timbers at sea, working for six days in heavy weather. She arrived in London only seven days behind the Thermopylae, a performance that made her reputation. In 1883, Willis switched her to the Australian wool trade, where sailing ships still held their own against steam on the long run around the Cape. Under Captain Richard Woodget she set a record of seventy-three days from Sydney to London in 1886.
The Cutty Sark is the last survivor of the world that shanties describe. The Dreadnought celebrates another clipper’s speed and reputation on the Western Ocean run. Clear the Track was sung at the capstan aboard the packet ships that preceded her. Rolling Home belonged to the Australian trade, sung on the homeward passage that gave the Cutty Sark her greatest years. In 1895 she was sold to Portuguese owners and renamed Ferreira, and she might have rotted away entirely had Captain Wilfred Dowman not spotted her in Falmouth harbour in 1922 and bought her back. He restored her original name, and since 1954 she has stood in dry dock at Greenwich, the only surviving tea clipper.
The fishing port of Gloucester, Massachusetts had suffered countless storms in its long history, but the gale of November 1898 was unlike anything in living memory. Two storm systems merged off the Virginia coast and drove northward, striking New England on the night of November 26 with hurricane-force winds and blizzard conditions. Harbor piers were destroyed, and the coastline from Maine to Cape Cod was battered for thirty hours.
The storm takes its name from the steamship Portland, which departed Boston’s India Wharf at seven that evening despite weather warnings. She was last sighted near Thacher’s Island off Cape Ann, not far from Gloucester, heading into the storm. She never arrived. Her wreck was found in 2002 on the bottom of Stellwagen Bank, just off the Gloucester coast. No one survived, and the passenger manifest went down with the ship: estimates place the dead between 192 and 245 souls. Across New England, 141 vessels were lost and 456 people died.
Gloucester poet Kitty Parsons recorded the catastrophe in verse in her 1946 collection Gloucester Sea Ballads. Her poem The Portland Gale memorializes a storm that struck the town’s fishing fleet at its heart.
The number of women venturing to sea was surprisingly high: as servants or prostitutes, as laundresses or cooks, and occasionally, as sailors, merchants, or pirates. Anne Bonny and Mary Read were among the most famous of that final group, particularly after “Captain Charles Johnson’s” mythical portrayals in A General History of the Pyrates (1724). The two were dressed as boys from an early age; for Bonny as she was hidden from her mother, and for Read to maintain an inheritance and later to gain work as a sailor/soldier. Similar stories are told in Handsome Cabin Boy, and of a female captain in The Female Warrior.
As for their crimes, Bonny and Read found themselves on board Calico Jack Rackham’s ship. The crew terrorized the waters around Jamaica for a short reign until a sloop commissioned by the Governor brought the pirates to justice. The trio was specifically identified in the stealing of seven fishing boats, three merchant sloops, and a schooner, as well as the robbery of a canoe. Rackham was quickly tried and hanged, and the fate of the two women was to be the same until they revealed they were each with child (an act common enough to be termed “pleading the belly”). Clemency was granted and while Read died within months of fever, Bonny appears to have quietly lived out her days. Full details of the trials can be found in the UK’s National Archives.
The steamer Cedar Grove had a short career under Capt. Fritz that began in August 1881. Her second voyage departed from London carrying 2700 tons of cargo. The ship was 60 miles from its Halifax, Nova Scotia destination when a tempestuous 3 a.m. gale and snow storm threw the crew into Walker’s reef. The 30-man crew and two passengers abandoned the sinking ship aboard three boats, braving the frigid seas for six hours to arrive at St. John, New Brunswick. One boat was lost — last seen at dawn, and reports give four or five casualties. The events are captured in various newspaper reports and memorialized in the ballad The Loss of the Cedar Grove.
Two years after the wreck, a diver was surprised to discover another wreck nearby. The ship New Dominion had been lost in December 1872 without word. It is presumed that the ship collided with the same rock as the Cedar Grove.
Ratcliffe Highway ran east from the Tower of London through Wapping and Shadwell, a few streets back from the Thames and the new London Docks. It was the main street of London’s sailortown. Sailors coming ashore with months of wages in their pockets found it lined with pubs, lodging houses and shops, and with crimps and landlords waiting to strip them of their pay.
Around midnight on Saturday, December 7, 1811, Timothy Marr, a young draper at 29 Ratcliffe Highway, sent his servant Margaret Jewell out to buy oysters for a late supper. When she came back, the door was locked. Inside, Marr, his wife Celia, their baby son and their apprentice had all been beaten to death. A reward poster printed the next day described “a Ship Carpenter’s Pæn Maul, broken at the point” found on the premises. On December 19, the publican John Williamson, his wife and their servant were killed the same way at the King’s Arms in nearby New Gravel Lane, though a lodger escaped down a rope of knotted sheets. The maul belonged to a sailor who lodged at the Pear Tree, a Wapping public house, and had left his tools there while he was away at sea. Suspicion fell on another lodger, John Williams, a 27-year-old seaman lately paid off from the East Indiaman Roxburgh Castle. He hanged himself in prison on December 28 before he could be tried, and his body was carted through the streets and buried at a crossroads with a stake through its heart. Whether he was guilty is still argued.
The murders made the Highway notorious, but sailors kept going there for the rest of the century. In As I Went A-Walking Down Ratcliffe Highway, a sailor home from Hong Kong spies “a flash-lookin’ packet,” a woman who takes him in tow and helps him spend his pay. The same verses turn up in Blow the Man Down and Paddy West, and Kipling’s The Ballad of Bolivar opens with seven sailors “Rolling down the Ratcliffe Road, drunk and raising Cain.”
The Thomas W. Lawson set sail in 1902 as the only 7-mast schooner ever built. The steel-hulled ship, named for a Boston copper baron, had no auxiliary engine with which to haul coal and oil along the East Coast of the United States. The ship’s extreme weight made her sluggish and difficult to maneuver in port and she was recommissioned several times, leading to her final assignment tankering oil from the US to London.
Two days into her ill-fated voyage, six unable crewmen were brought on to replace those who quit over payment disputes. The journey across the Atlantic was further plagued by storms, and despite having lost most sails and all but one lifeboat, a breached hatch, and clogged pumps, the ship anchored off the Isles of Scilly, England, to weather one last gale.
The urgent warnings of the St. Agnes and St. Mary’s lifeboat crews could not convince Captain George Washington Dow to abandon the ship or its freight. The ship took on a harbor pilot, set anchor, and prepared for the storm. Around 1:15am on December 14, 1907, the anchor chains broke. Captain Dow instructed the crew to climb the rigging for safety, but all seven masts snapped as the ship crashed into the rocks and capsized. 58,000 barrels of paraffin oil flooded into the sea in the world’s first major oil spill. Seventeen of the nineteen men on board died in the wreck, though the captain and engineer were rescued by the pilot’s son, who came by rowboat looking for his father.
The Flannan Isles Lighthouse protects ships along the Western Isles of Scotland. In 1900, it was staffed by three men: James Ducat, Thomas Marshall, and Donald McArthur. Just one year after it was first lit, the country was captivated by their mysterious disappearance. On December 15, the ships began noting that the light was unlit. When the Northern Lighthouse Board arrived to investigate, they found the premises in good order but no sign of the crew. An official investigation determined the men were swept away by an enormous rogue wave, but for years, there has been rampant speculation about sea serpents, ghosts, foreign spies, new identities, or violent altercations. Later research uncovered that “Marshall was previously fined five shillings when his equipment was washed away during a huge gale. It is likely, in seeking to avoid another fine, that he and Ducat tried to secure their equipment during a storm and were swept away as a result. The fate of McArthur, although required to stay behind to man the lighthouse, can be guessed to be the same.”
The word beacon is laden with symbolism, and the sight of a familiar lighthouse was usually accompanied by joy as in En Gammal Brigg. The lonely plight of a lighthouse keeper is captured in Brasswork.
The rough and lonely life of a sailor was probably never more lamentable than on Christmas. Some crews would cobble together a celebration involving decorations, food, libations, and music. Several such accounts come from Cape Horn captain and historian Fred K. Klebingat (1889-1985). Klebingat’s articles were published in Christmas at Sea (1974, Bernice P. Bishop Museum).
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) captured the season in his poem Christmas At Sea which describes the toil of a square-rigged sailing ship, caught between two headlands and unable to make windward to escape. The crew fights all day, forgotten by those on shore and coming so close to land that they feel they can see the burning fireplaces and smell the Christmas dinners. Finally, the captain gambles on adding extra sails, saving the ship, but the homesick sailor finds celebration difficult.
The ship Joseph Walker of the Black Star Line was moored along the west side of Pier 29 of the East River in New York City for several days as workers loaded a cargo of cotton, resin, and grain. On December 26, 1853, a destructive fire broke out at a bakery, expanding to destroy three ships and several buildings. Joseph Walker was left scuttled in the harbor, disrupting wharfage for nearly a year as efforts were made to salvage the ship. A long court case involving various insurance companies followed, and the justices agreed that the parties involved in attempting to raise the wreck were not at fault for their failure.
The ship appears to have a second distinction: being named in the humorous song Yellow Meal. In this song, a naive sailor signs aboard with the famed Liverpool broker William Tapscott. Tapscott describes bags of “mail” and the young sailor pictures a speedy Atlantic packet-ship, but in fact the unscrupulous boarding-house master is exploiting the pronunciation of the dismal mush called “meal”. The unfortunate sailor seems to enlist on the bulky, ill-fated Joseph Walker as a result.
The Ellen Munn was a Newfoundland schooner lost in a December storm. According to History of King’s Cove, the ship was to be repaired over the winter of 1866. They set sail on Christmas day amid inclement weather and promptly set to wait it out. Two days later, the hull was breached by ice. The crew of five men worked frantically in waist-deep water to save the ship but she succumbed to the icy vortex. The wreck happened near land and all survived, but the loss of vital supplies was worrying. Twenty-three men, women, and children abandoned the ship and were taken into the local log huts by several families where they were sheltered until spring. Jimmy Flynn, the skipper, recounted the tale in The Wreck of the Ellen Munn with cautionary conclusion: “And when a sea voyage you begin, don’t sail on Christmas Day”. His son, M. T. Flynn, was on the Ellen Munn at age 14 and never forgot the generosity and communal spirit of that Christmas season.
On the afternoon of December 28, 1836, some 550 colonists gathered on the shore of Holdfast Bay, near present-day Glenelg, to hear Captain John Hindmarsh read the proclamation authorizing his commission as Governor of the new Province of South Australia. The colony had been established by act of Parliament in 1834, but this was the moment it became real on the ground. Hindmarsh asked the settlers to prove themselves “worthy to be the Founders of a great free colony.”
That word “free” was not decoration. By 1836, Britain had been shipping convicts to Australia for nearly fifty years, first to New South Wales, then to Van Diemen’s Land. English sailors knew the Australian run as a convict route. South Australia was founded on a different principle entirely: no transported prisoners, no penal labor. Settlement would be funded by land sales, attracting free emigrants. It was an experiment in colonization by commerce rather than punishment.
What followed was a wool boom. By the 1850s and 1860s, clipper ships were running regularly between London and the Australian ports of Melbourne and Sydney, carrying emigrants out and wool back. These voyages put South Australia into the repertoire of English sailors, and the capstan shanty South Australia likely dates from this period. According to Roll and Go, the song “probably belongs to the days of British wool-clippers.” In Harlow’s version, the sailors make straight for Mother Shilling’s inn at the head of Sandridge Railroad pier, where sheoak (a rough local beer) flows freely and the girls are waiting to dance.
In 1759, the fourth year of the Seven Years’ War, France planned to invade Britain. Troops gathered on the French coast, and flat-bottomed barges were built to carry them across the Channel. In July, Admiral Rodney bombarded Le Havre for two days and destroyed many of the barges. British forces then won a run of victories: Minden on August 1, Lagos on August 19, Quebec on September 13. On November 20, Admiral Hawke chased the French fleet from Brest into Quiberon Bay in a gale and destroyed or scattered it among the rocks and shoals, ending the invasion threat. Britons called 1759 the “wonderful year.”
December 31, 1759, was the opening night of Harlequin’s Invasion, a holiday play by David Garrick at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in London. Its most popular song was Heart of Oak, with words by Garrick and music by William Boyce, first sung that night by Samuel Champnes. It begins with the year itself: “Come, cheer up, my lads! ‘tis to glory we steer, / To add something more to this wonderful year.” A later verse mocks the French invasion barges: “But should their flat bottoms in darkness get o’er, / Still Britons they’ll find to receive them on shore.”
The song outlived the war. In 1768 John Dickinson set his American Liberty Song to Boyce’s tune, and Heart of Oak is still the official march of the Royal Navy, the Royal Canadian Navy and the Royal New Zealand Navy.