The Sailor's Hornpipe

The Sailor’s Hornpipe is an English dance tune, first printed in the 1750s, that became the musical shorthand for sailors everywhere, from the stage hornpipe to the opening bars of the Popeye cartoons.

It is mostly played rather than sung, but sailors did put words to it. The single verse here was printed by William Main Doerflinger in Shantymen and Shantyboys (1951), and it is a sailor’s farewell to the shore: one more round before the boat shoves off to carry the crew out to their ship, paid for by pawning a monkey jacket (the short, close-fitting jacket sailors wore at sea). Bawdier words to the tune turn up in 20th-century collections such as Ed Cray’s The Erotic Muse.

The tune is older than its nautical name. It was first printed as “The Colledge Hornpipe” in Charles and Samuel Thompson’s London collection of 30 Favourite Hornpipes around 1757, a book of tunes “as performed at the Public Theatres,” and it appears in William Vickers’s Tyneside tune book of 1770, the same manuscript that holds an early The Keel Row. It spread to Edinburgh, where Alexander McGlashan printed it in 1781, and to America, where it became a fiddlers’ standard. Elias Howe printed it as “College Hornpipe” in Boston in 1863, and Ryan’s Mammoth Collection (1883) gave it as “Sailor’s, or College Hornpipe.” By the 19th century “the sailor’s hornpipe,” which had once meant any hornpipe danced in a sailor’s costume, had come to mean this one tune.

The sailor’s hornpipe as a dance began on the stage. At Drury Lane in 1740 a dancer named Yates performed a hornpipe “in the character of a Jack Tar,” and the sailor dance soon became a standard turn between the acts of plays in London and New York. Real sailors of the 18th century did dance hornpipes too. Janet Schaw, sailing from Scotland to the West Indies in 1774, wrote that “the sailors dance horn pipes and Jigs from morning to night,” and naval captains encouraged dancing as exercise for men cooped up on long voyages. William Bligh recorded that on the Bounty he “directed the Evenings from 5 to 8 O’Clock to be spent dancing,” and later writers told the same story of Captain Cook.

By the age of the merchant shanty, roughly the 1830s to the 1880s, dancing at sea had no part in the work. Shanties were for the capstan and the halyards; dancing belonged to the evening dog watch or a day in port, and depended on someone aboard having a fiddle. Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast (1840) describes the mate of the Alert calling up the carpenter with his fiddle and setting all hands to “a regular sailor’s shuffle” between decks, while a Cape Cod boy danced “the true fisherman’s jig, barefooted.” Herman Melville’s White-Jacket (1850) lists “hornpipes, fandangoes, Donnybrook-jigs, reels, and quadrilles” danced on a frigate’s quarter-deck, but only on a rare day when the crew were ordered to skylark. What sailors danced was a loose, improvised step dance to whatever tune was at hand. The polished solo hornpipe, with its mimed hauling and climbing, lived on in the theater, the music hall, and naval cadet displays.

On land, the tune kept its sailor associations. Arthur Sullivan worked it into H.M.S. Pinafore (1878), Henry Wood’s Fantasia on British Sea Songs (1905) made it a fixture of the Last Night of the Proms, where the audience blows foghorns and party horns along with it as it speeds up, and from 1933 the Fleischer studio’s Popeye the Sailor cartoons opened with it. Recordings include Shanty Man, and the tune is paired with other hornpipes on Roast Beef of Old England and Whiskey Johnny.