The Sailor Likes His Bottle O

From Cicely Fox Smith:

This must be a real old stager. It was sung in the Blackwallers three quarters of a century ago, but it was probably an old song then. I have never come across a modern sailing ship man who knew it.

One of the oldest documented shanties on record. In 1831, Captain James Edward Alexander recorded African-American oarsmen in Guyana singing a version with the words “de neger like the bottley oh.” By 1839, Tahitian women at Point Venus had picked up the sailor version, showing how rapidly it spread along trade routes. It turns up again in an 1849-50 account aboard the Philadelphia packet ship Samson during a Cape Horn voyage, an 1850-51 Arctic search narrative, an 1856 whaling barque journal from Western Australia, and an 1842 American concert party aboard ship.

The shanty did double duty aboard ship, used at both the halyards and the pumps, and was especially associated with the West India trade. Cecil Sharp collected his version from John Short in 1914 and classified it as a pulling (halyard) shanty. Fox Smith states it was “sung only at pumps” in the Blackwall ships. Richard Runciman Terry, who included it in Part II of The Shanty Book (1926) as a halliard shanty, noted he had known it “almost as long as I can remember” but had never heard it aboard ship. The earliest commercial recording was made in 1928 by John Goss and the Cathedral Male-Voice Quartet, using Terry’s arrangement (HMV B2381).

Sailors' Songs or "Chanties", English Folk-Chanteys, and A Book of Shanties each give slightly different versions. Stan Hugill in Shanties From the Seven Seas documents three variants: a Liverpool-Irish version, a Nova Scotian version (from singer Ezra Cobb), and a West Indian trade version.