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Johnnie Kendrick, of all folks in the world!" "The very same, Captain." "And you knew me right off! Well done for you, John! Why, it's all of twenty odd year since you used to set on a nail keg in my boathouse and tease me into singing the Dreadnought chanty. I remember that. Good land! I ought to remember the only critter on earth that ever ASKED me to sing.
They make shameless use of "commonplaces," that is, stock phrases, lines or stanzas which are conveniently held by the memory and which may appear in dozens of different ballads. They are not afraid of repetition, indeed the theory of choral collaboration implies a constant use of repetition and refrain, as in a sailor's "chanty."
At length the father took to calling him "Dusenberry," and this nickname was adopted under protest. Captain Hiram sang the baby to sleep every night. There were three songs in the Captain's repertoire. The first was a chanty with a chorus of John, storm along, storm along, John, Ain't I glad my day's work's done. The second was the "Bowline Song."
These men, these shambling carcasses at the windlass I looked, and looked, and vainly I strove to conjure the vision of them swinging aloft in rack and storm, "clearing the raffle," as Kipling puts it, "with their clasp knives in their teeth." Why didn't they sing a chanty as they hove the anchor up?
And so I feel safe in saying that if any man were so good and perfect an animal that he had the hound's sense of smell, the cat's eyesight, the rabbit's sense of hearing, the horse's sense of taste, and the homing pigeon's "locality," he would not be one whit better prepared to appreciate Kipling's "Dipsy Chanty," and not a hair's breadth nearer a point where he could write a poem equal to it.
His fingers touched a cool smooth arm that shrank convulsively at contact while the possessor of it cried sharply with the startle of fright. He held on tightly and began to laugh, and Paula laughed with him. A line from "The First Chanty" flashed into his consciousness "Hearing her laugh in the gloom greatly I loved her." "You did frighten me when you touched me," she said.
For five hours the company has been sitting round the table singing lustily; we haven't much talent, but everyone has contributed more or less, 'and the choruses are deafening. It is rather a surprising circumstance that such an unmusical party should be so keen on singing. On Xmas night it was kept up till 1 A.M., and no work is done without a chanty.
We sang that classic chanty, as we went out with all our canvas spread to a lively northeast breeze and I realised once more how good the sea was for all manner of men, whatever their colour, for we all livened up and shook off our land-laziness again, spry and laughing, and as keen as the jib stretching out like a gull's wing into the rush and spray of the sea.
Then the chanty rises from the swaying men, rises and falls, in wavering bursts of sound, as if the gale was whirling it about: Blow the man down, blow the man down, 'Way-ho! Blow the man down. Blow the man down from Liverpool town; Give us some wind to blow the man down. And so the gallant ship goes outward-bound; and homeward-bound the same.
"She's my boat, and I've had eight months to think in." No man saw the Haliotis depart, though many heard her. She left at two in the morning, having cut her moorings, and it was none of her crew's pleasure that the engines should strike up a thundering half-seas-over chanty that echoed among the hills. Mr. Wardrop wiped away a tear as he listened to the new song.
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