Du Runer von Hamborg

From Songs of the Sea:

This is a Plattdeutsch (dialect spoken on the north coast of Germany) version of “Roll the Cotton Down” and was known to every Jan Maat of the old sailing days, when Segelschiffhafen, Hamburg, was chock-a-block with masts and yards. I myself have heard it raised many times aboard a Bremen Cape-Horner. The runners of Hamburg were a notorious lot. A runner was usually a man who took a ship out of port while the crew was sobering up. In Hamburg the term covered boarding-house runners and ships’ tailors. Sneider is the Plattdeutsch word for tailor (German Schneider).

Such men would meet incoming ships, armed with kümmel and schnapps, offering the homeward-bounder a “sub” of money, prior to being “paid off.” When outward bound they would offer these chaps cheap “togs” and during their stay in port supply them with booze and women. They claimed the seaman’s advance-note to pay them for this trouble. There were few cases of shanghaiing in Hamburg, but there were numerous sailor pubs, all bearing English names - “Falmouth for Orders,” “Channel for Orders,” “Liverpool Bar,” the “Homeward Bound” - as well as many German Tanz-halls and Bier-halls, such as the “Cosmopolitan,” “El Dorado,” “International,” “Metropolitan,” and the “Hippodrome.”

Kümmel is a colorless caraway seed liquor known especially in the Netherlands and Germany.