Come Roll Him Over

Come Roll Him Over is a halyard shanty that counts its way around the ship: one man to strike the bell, two to take the wheel, three on the topgallant braces. It left only a thin trail in print, but it has found a large new audience as one of the songs a pirate crew sings in the video game Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag (2013).

The song first turns up in an odd way. In “Sea-Songs,” an article in the magazine Temple Bar in January 1906, John Masefield wrote that he had known “a Danish sailor who passed his spare moments in inventing chanties,” and quoted one “half-finished specimen of which he was very proud”: a single “Oho, why don’t you blow?” verse with the refrain “come roll him over.” It “was not a literary chanty,” he added, “nor was the tune very remarkable,” and he gave no tune. Later the same year he printed it as a halyard shanty with three counting verses in A Sailor's Garland. Since the magazine had called the song unfinished, the shanty scholar Gibb Schreffler suspects Masefield wrote the new verses himself.

Stan Hugill printed a longer version, “High O, Come Roll Me Over,” in Shanties From the Seven Seas (1961), with the first known tune. He said he had it from a Barbadian sailor named Harding, who told him in 1932 that it was still sung in the West Indies for rolling logs, with the roll coming where the pull on the rope would come at sea. If that is right, the song was more than one Dane’s invention. Hugill’s count runs on past Masefield’s: four men to board the tack, five to heave the lead, six to furl the topgallant sails, seven to “bunt-a-bo.” No one is sure what that last line means. The bunt is the middle of a sail, gathered up and heaved onto the yard when the sail is furled.

There is only one pull in each chorus, and Hugill thought the song better suited to tacks and sheets (the ropes at a sail’s lower corners, hauled taut with a few heavy pulls) than to the long hoist of a halyard. His notation of the tune is irregular, and singers since have smoothed it out in different ways. Jim Mageean recorded it in steady 4/4 on The Capstan Bar (1978), and Caryl Weiss and friends at Mystic Seaport have fitted it to a waltz-like 3/4. Seán Dagher, who researched and sang the shanties for Black Flag, covered it in his Shanty of the Week series.