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We are not out of the wood, but hope dawns, as indeed it should for me, when I find myself so wonderfully served. Officers and men are singing chanties over their arduous work. Williams is working in sweltering heat behind the boiler to get the door made in the bulkhead. Not a single one has lost his good spirits.
The piano was the drawing card, and combined with Ranger Winess' large guitar manufactured strange music. When the other rangers joined in and sang they managed to make quite a racket. Perhaps the songs they sang would not have met with enthusiasm in select drawing-rooms, but they had a charm for all that. Cowboy songs, sea chanties, and ballads many years old were often on call.
But though you can no more wrest a chanty from its surroundings and then pass it off as a seaman's folk-song than you can take the blue from the water or the crimson from the sunset, yet, as some chanties have become so well known ashore, as others so richly deserve to be known there, and as all are now being threatened with extinction, perhaps a few may be mentioned in passing.
They brought with them color and care-free prodigality and a capacity for abandonment to pleasure that ran the whole gamut of emotions, from raucous-roared chanties to sudden, swift encounters which were as silent as they were deadly. And they spent their money without stopping to count it. The younger generation of the older Morrison was quick to point out the virtues of this vice.
The rest of it I forget; but I remember that after Bill had sung one of his chanties, like "Messmates hear a brother sailor sing the dangers of the seas," or, "We sailed from the Downs and fair Plymouth town," telling how "To our surprise, The storms did arise, Attended by winds and loud thunder; Our mainmast being tall Overboard she did fall, And five of our best men fell under,"
Now I am at home. We dined and as there was no moon, went to bed rather early after listening to the Sudanese singers as they sang one of their weird chanties. "My wife and her mother slept together in the state cabin of the dahabeeyah, which was at the stern of the boat. My cabin, a small one, was on one side of this, and that of the trained nurse on the other.
There are no, or very few, regular sailors on board; so much of the work is now done by steam. There are no "chanties" or sailors' songs, which help the work to go easily. In a steamer there is no interest in noting the course they go straight on, and the distance covered does not vary, or only slightly, from day to day.
A furtive woman comes up the hatchway and gazes with shaded eyes at passing steamers; but the men are out in the clumsy black dories that rock like a cradle to the swell of the sea, drawing in drawing in the line; or singing their sailor chanties "Come all ye Newfoundlanders" as meal of pork and cod simmers in a pot above a chip fire cooking on stones in the bottom of the boat.
We have music in our heritage, we have Folk Songs by land and Chanties that smack of the seas: in these there lies a wealth of melody and sentiment of which we have made too little. But it is entirely charming to see the way in which small children in the schools will sing these songs with complete natural verve and appreciation.
"Well, did ye find the chanties?" he asked. "Yes," I said. "They can't be printed." His old eyes twinkled merrily: "Of course they can't. An' most songs an' stories can't. But I'll give ye a nice little song ye can print. It's the oldest chanty of 'em all. I'll try to remember an' write it down." Here is the song he gave me: ROLLING HOME
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