St. Helena Soldier

Whall (Sea Songs and Shanties) gives this as “a popular shanty for last sweating-up hauls which I have never seen in print.” The melody he prints does not resolve to an F, but one wonders if it should!

The same shanty did reach print a few years before Whall’s book. In 1903 the Christchurch Star ran a series of nautical yarns, Deep Sea Sailormen, by a seafaring writer signing himself “El Hombre.” The first story, “Shanghaied”, opens with the shanty as its epigraph, set out for solo and chorus. Here the target of the song is a Shanghai boarding-master, one of the crimps who supplied ships with crews and often robbed sailors of their kit and advance pay, which suits a story about a man shanghaied aboard a ship at East London, South Africa. The epigraph labels it a bunt shanty, the kind sung when tossing a furled sail up onto the yard, so it may have done duty aloft as well as for sweating up.