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Updated: June 29, 2025
He was up always an hour before the sun and missed very little that was worth recording with his artistic touch. Wilson took Cherry-Garrard under his wing and brought him up as it were in the shadow of his own unselfish character. We had no adventures to record until the last week in July beyond the catching of flying-fish, singing chanties at the pump, and Lillie getting measles.
Often he sang an old sea-song, which always ended, "Forty-five fadom, and a clear sandy bottom!" He knew most of the sea chanties of the old days, one of which went something in this way "Heave away Rio! Heave away Rio! So fare thee well, my sweet pretty maid! Heave away Rio! Heave away Rio! For there's plenty of gold so we've been told On the banks of the Sacrament o!"
There are only two passengers besides ourselves, a Mr and Mrs S. With the master and mate we make six at dinner, and the concert after, in which the first mate plays piano accompaniments to all the chanties we can scrape together "Stormy Long," "Run, let the Bulgine Run," "Away Rio:" cheerful chanties like "The Anchor's Weighed," with its "Fare ye well, Polly, and farewell Sue," and sad, sad songs of ocean's distress, like "Leave her, Johnnie; Its time to leave her."
The seaman's working songs are chanties, a kind of homespun poetry which, once heard to its rolling music and the sound of wind and wave, will always bring back the very savour of the sea wherever it is heard again. There are thousands of chanties in scores of languages, which, like the men who sing them, have met and mingled all round the world.
No southern nation, with the exception of Carthage, has ever dominated the sea; partly for the simple reason that the best fisheries are always located in temperate zones, where the glacial silt of the icebergs feeds the finny hordes with minute infusoria; and the fisherman's smack the dory that rocks to the waves like a cockleshell, with meal of pork and beans cooking above a chip fire on stones in the bottom of the boat, and rough grimed fellows singing chanties to the rhythm of the sea the fisherman's smack is the nursery of the world's proudest merchant marines and most powerful navies.
He handed his tobacco pouch to the guide and then filled his own pipe, while the Canadian, nothing loth, sent his light voice across the lake in one of those plaintive, almost melancholy chanties with which lumbermen and trappers lessen the burden of their labor.
"The folk songs of the Seven Seas!" How that phrase took hold of me! I went for information to an old dock watchman who had been a sailor. "Songs? Why sure!" he answered. "It must be the chanties ye mean." "Chanties?" "That's it. I've been told the word's French." "Oh! Chanter!" "No chanty. An' the man that sings the verses, he's called the chantyman.
It was a weird' night's work with the howling gale and the darkness and the immense seas running over the ship every few minutes and no engines and no sail, and we all in the engine-room, black as ink with the engine-room oil and bilge water, singing chanties as we passed up slopping buckets full of bilge, each man above' slopping a little over the heads of all below him; wet through to the skin, so much so that some of the party worked altogether naked like Chinese coolies; and the rush of the wave backwards and forwards at the bottom grew hourly less in the dim light of a couple of engine-room oil lamps whose light just made the darkness visible, the ship all the time rolling like a sodden lifeless log, her lee gunwale under water every time.
Behind him in the stern seat, singing fragments of his native chanties, Défago steered the craft of birch bark like a thing of life, answering cheerfully all his companion's questions. Both were gay and light-hearted. On such occasions men lose the superficial, worldly distinctions; they become human beings working together for a common end.
The motion of the boat, the wind in the sails, the "chanties" of the sailors as they went about their work, and the evident content and happiness around him made Harry laugh and sing and toss away his cap and let the fresh salt wind blow on his hot brain in which he fancied the clack and clamor of the looms still lingered.
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