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Updated: June 2, 2025
Then we had a mouth-organ solo or two, which naturally led on to songs. My turn came. I struck up the first verse of a sailor chantey as possessing at least the interest of novelty: Oh, once we were a-sailing, a-sailing were we, Blow high, blow low, what care we; And we were a-sailing to see what we could see, Down on the coast of the High Barbaree.
Perchance, even yet, we should awake some fellow-creature from the nameless sleep in the woods whose beauty veiled the living death. Now, I say that Czerny's men were firing rifle-shots at the anchored schooner, and that sound was a true chantey for our ears. What eyes would they have for us when their salvation lay aboard the yacht? We were nothing to them; the ship was all.
A kedge anchor was let go, and a dozen sailors tramped around the capstan while the chantey man piped up a tune, but again fortune seemed against him for the hawser snapped, and the wind began to blow the frigate into deeper water.
"And it's blow, ye winds, heigh-ho, For Cal-i-for-ni-o; For there's plenty of gold so I've been told, On the banks of the Sacramento!" It was only a little boy, singing in a shrill treble the sea chantey which seamen sing the wide world over when they man the capstan bars and break the anchors out for "Frisco" port.
Weirdly, echoing back from the wall of the jungle and hollowly from the hillside, the improvised chantey was raised by Barker, and the chorus line taken up by the other seamen as though they were jerking aloft the schooner's topsails. "Oh, Bug-eye's dead an' gone below, Oh, we says so, an' we hopes so; Oh, Bug-eye's dead an' he'll go below Oh, poor ol' man!
An innocent song, the strain of which, more decorous than any modern chantey, inspires the sailors as they pull at the ropes, and gives voice to the delights of the peaceful voyage: Yet it stirs up a tempest in the soul of Isolde. She is the daughter of an Irish queen, a sorceress, and she now deplores the degeneracy of her race and its former potency.
Rough calls of rough men sounded above the crash and pound of logs and the roar of the rushing waters. Now and then a scrap of rude chantey reached her ears, a hoarse oath, or a loud, clear order in a voice she knew so well. It was like some eery fantasy, born of an overwrought brain. And yet she knew it was real intensely real.
She was not looking at the music before her, but up at nothing, while her hands ran over the keyboard, playing an old sailor's "chantey" which Lowell has taught us. It carries with it all the sweep and murmur of the sea at night. She could not see me, she had forgotten that I was even in the room, and I was at liberty to gaze at her and dream of her undisturbed.
She had the aspect of a vessel getting ready for sea, and the last of her cargo was being put into her hold. It was then that I was attracted to a knot of natives and sailors clustered about an organ, in front of the decrepit building which I knew for the Sailors' Home, roaring out the chorus of "Rock of Ages" as though it were a chantey.
When supper was over, and pipes filled and lighted, some one would strike up a "chantey" one of those interminable, monotonous ballad-songs which are peculiar to the lumber camps. These "chanteys," however robust their wordings or their incidents, are always sung in a plaintive minor which goes oddly with the large-moulded virility of the singers.
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