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Updated: June 17, 2025
We were at the windlass heaving up the anchor, at the time, and had just struck up a sailor's chanty, which made a good deal of noise, but nothing seemed to disturb Granfa. He slumbered peacefuly through all the rattle of chains, and shouting of commands, so, somewhat subdued, we decided there was nothing for it but to seek our berths.
The Nigger became more sullen; Perdosa more snake-like; Pulz more viciously evil; Thrackles more brutal; while Handy Solomon staggering from his seat to the open keg and back again, roaring fragments of a chanty, his red headgear contrasting with his smoky black hair and his swarthy hook-nosed countenance he needed no further touch.
And there was a great noise of a lively chanty, that the sailors sang all the time, without stopping. It wasn't worth while to stop; for then, as soon as they had stopped singing, they would have to begin again, so they kept on all the time. And there was the soft noise of their bare feet stamping on the deck but they didn't stamp very hard because that would hurt their feet.
And the talk, the wonderful talk flowed on or was it speech entirely, or did it pass at times into song chanty of the sailors weighing the dripping anchor, sonorous hum of the shrouds in a tearing North-Easter, ballad of the fisherman hauling his nets at sundown against an apricot sky, chords of guitar and mandoline from gondola or caique?
A moment later, as the hawsers were cast off, the little crowd on the wharf called out "Three cheers for the Gara barquentine," which the Gara's crew acknowledged with three cheers for Pierhead, in the sailor fashion. We were moving slowly under the influence of the oared boats ahead of us, when a seaman at the forward capstan began to sing the solo part of an old capstan chanty.
Sharkey could hear the hoarse voices of his rovers singing their chanty over the water. Where is the trader of Stepney Town? Wake her up! Shake her up! Every stick a-bending! Where is the trader of Stepney Town? His gold's on the capstan, his blood's on his gown, All for bully Rover Jack, Reaching on the weather tack Right across the Lowland Sea.
He seemed groping for the meaning of a joke at which he knew he ought to laugh. Suddenly from his lips in surprising volume, raucous, rasping, yet with a certain rollicking deviltry fit to set the head a-tilt, burst a chanty: "Oh, their coffin was their ship, and their grave it was the sea: Blow high, blow low, what care we!
But we will leave Catharine for a short season, among the lodges of the Indians, and return to Hector and Louis. "Cold and forsaken, destitute of friends, And all good comforts else, unless some tree Whose speechless chanty doth better ours, With which the bitter east-winds made their sport And sang through hourly, hath invited thee To shelter half a day.
Grey sang an English song about the north-country maid who came to London, and a bit of the chanty of the Devon men who sacked Santa Fe and stole the Almirante's daughter. As for Elspeth, she sang to a soft Scots tune the tale of the Lady of Cassilis who followed the gipsy's piping. In it the gipsy tells of what he can offer the lady, and lo! it was our own case!
Which was the occasion, says Mr Vincent, of the composing by a boatswain of that rollicking chanty: Pope Peter's but a pissabed. A man's a man for a' that.
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