Shanty boat

“ Happening to be on Fox River at the ferry one day he found a young man standing on Pixie's float, looking up and down with wide-eyed interest. Tappan landed against the float, quite as though that had been his intention, and seeing his uniform, the young man walked up to him eagerly, asking:
"Isn’t the life in these house boats wonderful?"
"Yes, sir," Tappan replied, gravely and with sincerity. "There’s nothing more wonderful down thisaway than shanty boating." ”

“ LARRY POLRAY'S shanty-boat was tied in an eddy where a northwest wind sweeping diagonally up the Ohio River above Cairo could not hit it. The wind was raw and cold, so that when Polray went out to look at his bow lines, he shivered from head to foot.
"It's an awful day to be out!" he shook his head. "A man that's got a good little shanty-boat sure is plumb comfortable! ”

“ A small, low house is built upon the boat, and covers about two- thirds of it, leaving a cockpit at each end, in which the crews work the sweeps, or oars, which govern the motions of the shanty-boat. If the proprietor of the boat has a family, he puts its members on board,—not forgetting the pet dogs and cats,—with a small stock of salt pork, bacon, flour, potatoes, molasses, salt, and coffee. An old cooking-stove is set up in the shanty, and its sheet-iron pipe, projecting through the roof, makes a chimney a superfluity. ”

“ Throughout the whole livelong day the little shanty-boat continued to sweep along with the current, which was something like four miles an hour at this point though it exceeds that considerably when the river rises, or the wind comes out of the north and east. ”

“ For several days the detectives worked up and down the water front and had Tappan take them up the river for miles, trying to find some one who had seen the boat, but the shanty boaters, fishermen, drifters and others up the bends and along the banks all denied any knowledge whatever of the boat. Two or three hundred people went to the morgue and viewed the victim. ”

“ Diamonds, silks and furs can be hidden in a small space.”
The boys visited with the strangers for an hour or more and then went on down the river, sailing a very little faster than the shanty boat, which depended entirely on the current, and which was obliged to tie up at intervals to avoid wreckage.
“I’ve got a notion,” Alex. said, as the boys left the shanty boat in the distance, “that the newspaper story is the right one. That boy never took part in that robbery of his own free will, though. I am sure of it! And the man? That was Red he described, eh?” ”

“ A skiff was lying there scarcely discernible in the vague light. It belonged to the shanty-boater, and into it the owner threw himself, grasping the oars, the other two with less practiced feet tumbled into the space left available, and the craft shot out from the land under the swift, strong strokes of the shanty-boater, rowing as if for a purse. There was a belt of pallor along the horizon. A sense of dreary wistfulness, of sadness, lay on the land, coming reluctantly into view. The clouds hung low and menacing, although the wind still was high. ”

“ So they floated down, sometimes within a few hundred feet of other boats, sometimes in merry fleets tied together by ropes and common joyousness, sometimes alone in the midst of the vacant waters. The migration of the shanty-boaters was watched with mingled hate, envy, and admiration by Up-the-Bank folks, who pretend to despise those who live as they please. ”

“ By the end of the seventies steam had driven the sailing ship from the seas. A number of sailing vessels lingered on through the eighties, but they retained little of the corporate pride and splendour that was once theirs. The old spirit was gone never to return.
When the sailing ship ruled the waters and the shanty was a living thing no one appears to have paid heed to it. To the landsman of those days—before folk-song hunting had begun—the haunting beauty of the tunes would appear to have made no appeal. ”

“ The ropes are manned by as many hands as their length will admit. A 'shantyman' mounts the roof of the hut and sits astride it. He sings a song which has a chorus, and is an exact musical parallel of a seaman's 'pull-and-haul' shanty. The crowd below sings the chorus, giving a pull on the rope at the required points in the music, just as sailors did when hauling at sea. Each pull on the rope draws the hut a short distance forward, and the process is continued till its final resting-place is reached, when the shantyman descends from the roof. ”

“ In my then ignorance I naturally asked: 'Why couldn't you have sung shanties without hoisting the topsail?' and the reply was: 'How could we sing a shanty without having our hands on the rope?' Here we have the whole psychology of the labour-song: the old woman could not keen without the 'body,' and the young apprentices could not sing shanties apart from the work to which they belonged. The only truly satisfactory results which I ever get nowadays from an old sailor are when he has been stimulated by conversation to become reminiscent, and croons his shanties almost subconsciously. ”

“ The crew had till then been moving leisurely about, but, in an instant, all were in a state of the greatest excitement. Three boats were sent away in pursuit. No one, by rule, goes in the boats except those who row or steer; but just as Sandy Dow’s boat was shoving off I slipped in, and so eager was everybody to be off that they did not stop to put me on board again. Away we dashed, the water foaming up at our bows. Sandy’s practised eye had marked the spot where the whale had gone down, and well he knew where it would come up again. ”

“ I used to hear this tune constantly on the Tyne. It is one of the few shanties which preserved a definite narrative, but each port seems to have offered variants on the names of the ships that were 'bound for Amerikee.' 'Mr. Tapscott' was the head of a famous line of emigrant ships. The last word in verse 5 was always pronounced male. This has led to many shantymen treating it not as meal, but as the mail which the ship carried. As the shanty is full of Irish allusions, the probabilities are that the word was meal, to which the sailor gave what he considered to be the Irish pronunciation. ”

“ Hauling shanties were usually shorter than capstan ones, and are of two types: (a) those used for 'the long hoist' and (b) those required for 'the short pull' or 'sweating-up.' Americans called these operations the 'long' and the 'short drag.' The former was used when beginning to hoist sails, when the gear would naturally be slack and moderately easy to manipulate. It had two short choruses, with a double pull in each. ”

“ FOREWORD By SIR WALTER RUNCIMAN
IT is sometimes difficult for old sailors like myself to realize that these fine shanty tunes—so fascinating to the musician, and which no sailor can hear without emotion—died out with the sailing vessel, and now belong to a chapter of maritime history that is definitely closed. They will never more be heard on the face of the waters, but it is well that they should be preserved with reverent care, as befits a legacy from the generation of seamen that came to an end with the stately vessels they manned with such skill and resource. ”

“ The Water Witch pitched and tossed in a moment or two as the wide “V” of the speedboat’s wake crossed the course of the sailboat. The rigging and sails of the black-hulled boat slatted and swayed drunkenly, then she steadied in the strong southwest breeze sweeping up the bay and continued her easy dip and roll through the waves of the open bay. The speedboat sped off towards the islands, almost silently, save for a low humming.
“More than one thing odd about that boat, John!” Stan remarked. “Extra speed, gray paint, and an underwater exhaust! If this were prohibition times I’d say—rum-runner!” ”

“ Whenever I find a sailor willing to declaim shanties in the style of a song I begin to be a little suspicious of his seamanship. In one of the journals of the Folk-Song Society there is an account of a sailor who formed a little party of seafaring men to give public performances of shanties on the concert platform. No doubt this was an interesting experience for the listeners, but that a self-conscious performance such as this could represent the old shanty singing I find it difficult to believe. ”

“ Come, Shane, come. Look, the sea has gone down, and you and I with your boy Patrick, though he may have less sense than other lads, will go off to the ship.”
The widow’s exhortations made Shane promise to accompany her. Her boat was ill-fitted for the task, yet for some distance they could pull out under shelter of a point which projected north of the cove. As the wind had hauled round somewhat more to the north also, it might be possible to set a sail, and with less difficulty reach the frigate. Patrick was summoned, and with his father and the fishwife, the boat was launched. ”

“ We try to secure the buoy, tacking to and fro; just at the wrong moment our main halyards part, and the sail comes crashing to the deck. To avoid being cast on the inhospitable shore, we put to sea under jib and foresail, and are five miles away before damages are repaired and we dare venture to return; head about, and make fast this time. Hurrah! After several trips of the small boat, succeed in landing luggage and provisions above high-water mark on the Farallones; each trip of the boat is an event, for it comes in on a big breaker, and grounds in a torrent of foam and sand. ”

“ If she ships two or three seas in the operation she becomes (p. 147) hopelessly submerged, and the advantages gained are very slight, as such a boat will scarcely sail closer to the wind than a broad reach—even then making considerable leeway and being very slow and uncertain in stays.
It was to improve on this state of affairs on the beach of this description that is to be found at Shankill, in the county of Dublin, that the 'Water Wag' was evolved from a Norwegian pram, into which a boiler-plate was fitted for a centreboard as an experiment. ”

“ Before the days of factories and machinery, all forms of work were literally manual labour, and all the world over the labourer, obeying a primitive instinct, sang at his toil: the harvester with his sickle, the weaver at the loom, the spinner at the wheel. Long after machinery had driven the labour-song from the land it survived at sea in the form of shanties, since all work aboard a sailing vessel was performed by hand.
The advent of screw steamers sounded the death-knell of the shanty. ”

“ Work has been steadily pushed on the schooner. The keel has been hewed out of the Saginaw's late topmast and is blocked up on the beach. We are ripping the old deck planks in two with our old bucksaw and one handsaw, and while it is slow work we can see our boat planking ahead of us when the frame is ready. The schooner is to be forty feet long, of centre-board, flat-bottomed type, and the captain has settled upon her shape and dimensions after experimenting with a small model in company with the contractor's carpenter, who has had experience in boat-building. ”

“ The men, except the watch, crouched and huddled in the bottom of the boat, getting what little warmth they could from the soaking sleeping-bags and each other’s bodies. Harder and harder blew the wind and fiercer and fiercer grew the sea. The boat plunged heavily through the squalls and came up to the wind, the sail shaking in the stiffest gusts. Every now and then, as the night wore on, the moon would shine down through a rift in the driving clouds, and in the momentary light I could see the ghostly faces of men, sitting up to trim the boat as she heeled over to the wind. ”

“ In addition to hearing them in West Indian seaports, aboard Yankee sailing ships and sugar droghers, I also heard them sung constantly on shore in Antigua under rather curious conditions. West Indian negro shanties are movable wooden huts, and when a family wishes to change its venue it does so in the following manner: The shanty is levered up on to a low platform on wheels, to which two very long ropes are attached. ”

“ Shann glanced now and then over the side of the boat, hoping in these shallows to sight the sea bed or some of the inhabitants of these waters. But there was no piercing that green murk. Here and there nodules of rock projected inches or feet above the surface, awash in the wavelets, to be avoided by the voyagers. Shann's shoulders ached and burned, his muscles were unaccustomed to the steady swing of the paddles, and the fire of the sun stabbed easily through only two layers of ragged cloth to his skin. ”

“ Before we had pulled a couple of strokes it rose completely above the surface, and, rapidly turning, down came its enormous flukes on the very centre of our boat, cutting it in two, as if a giant’s hatchet had descended upon it. Those who were able sprang overboard and swam in all directions for our lives. Two poor fellows in the centre of the boat had been struck by those ponderous flukes, and, without uttering a cry, sank immediately. While Sandy, with a spear in his hand, still clung to the bows until jerked off by a second blow, which sent that part of the boat flying into the air. ”

“ The gig was carried [45] well up on the beach to-day and set in a cradle, to be prepared for a voyage to the Sandwich Islands. It is the intention to raise her sides a few inches, to construct a light deck over all, and to fit her with two masts and sails. (Part of the sails were saved with the boat.) In the deck there are to be four square small hatches (with covers in case of bad weather) , in which the men can sit and row when the wind is too light or contrary for sailing. From this it may be seen that the perilous trip has been decided upon by the captain. ”