Madeleine

The early twentieth century saw the birth training ships, a new system for educating sailors on the diminishing science of square-rigged ships. The crews on these training ships had access to the earliest published shanty collections, but they often supplemented their repertoire with songs of their own creation.

This is one such shanty, coming to Stan Hugill from Commandant LeMaître of the Belgian four-masted training bark L'Avenir. The song was the capstan shanty of the Navire-Ecole Belge Company's short-lived ship, Comte de Smet de Naeyer. The lifespan of this ship would seem to place the shanty between 1904-1906. Hugill mentions that there are more verses but they had to be eliminated due to their "bawdy content". As is often the case, Hugill's translation has some minor hiccups.

The magizine Neptunus (no. 206, December 1984) has an additional stanza and several other songs which seem to come directly from LeMaître. Due to "lack of space," the magazine did not publish the remaining songs in this issue or the next, and it is uncertain whether they can still be found. The additonal stanza, just after Madeleine introduces herself, is rather direct:

Je lui pelotte les nichons
A en avoir les mains plaines