A Hundred Years Ago

A Hundred Years Ago is a halyard shanty with verses that could be almost anything. Some versions are somber, remembering a sweetheart left behind or the misery of rounding Cape Horn. Others are comic, poking fun at what people believed a century earlier.

It is a close cousin of A Long Time Ago, built on the same pattern of solo lines and short replies, and A. L. Lloyd suggested it might be a sailors’ remake of a mid-19th-century minstrel song of that name. Joanna Carver Colcord called it “the only shanty which can be identified with the Baltimore clippers,” though she gave no evidence for the claim. Her version, like the one Cecil Sharp printed in English Folk-Chanteys (1914), sings of “a hundred years on the Eastern Shore” and of “Bully John from Baltimore.” Yet the song was just as well known on British ships. Sharp had it from John Short of Watchet, Richard Runciman Terry wrote that it “was known to nearly every British seaman,” and Lloyd concluded that English and American folklorists “fail to agree whether this shanty was first made under the Stars and Stripes or the Red Ensign.”

Captain W. B. Whall wrote that the song was “originally ‘Time for us to go,’” with no set words “beyond the inevitable ‘I thought I heard our old man say / That we were homeward bound to-day.’” Many versions still close with a verse like it. Richard Henry Dana heard a shanty called “Time for us to go” on the California coast in the 1830s and wrote that when the crew needed “a heavy, ‘raise-the-dead’ pull,” there was “nothing like” it. Stan Hugill believed Dana meant this song, while allowing that it might have been a version of Leave Her, Johnny.

The comic verses about flying pigs, a moon made of cheese, and a man hanged for making steam are not in the early printed versions. Colcord’s extra verses are about Bully John, “a bucko on land and a bully at sea,” and other singers use the chorus for a sailor’s sweetheart or for the work itself: “Up aloft this yard must go, for mister mate has told us so.”

Lloyd recorded the song several times, beginning with The Black Ball Line (1957) and including Blow Boys Blow (1967). Ewan MacColl sang lead on it for the 1962 film soundtrack Whaler Out of New Bedford, and Other Songs of the Whaling Era, and Jeff Warner recorded John Short’s version on Short Sharp Shanties, Vol. 1 (2011).