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Updated: June 19, 2025
"You have forgotten, I dare say, the old-fashioned sea-songs that he used to be so fond of teaching you. It was the strangest and prettiest contrast, to hear your small piping child's voice singing of storms and shipwrecks, and thunder and lightning, and reefing sails in cold and darkness, without the least idea of what it all meant.
She has a kind of nixie, tantalising, bewitching charm that would drive a crowd mad. She has a fresh, sympathetic voice, penetrating, too, as a clarion. Her folk-songs and her sea-songs go down to the bottom of a man's heart and into every corner of it.
Beside the ballads of warlike and amorous adventures, there are sea-songs, songs of captivity, and songs of the galley slave.
Whistling, and humming, by fits, one of the sea-songs of his country, he wore the time away while peeling some potatoes, which, one by one, as his large knife, slung from his belt by a piece of yarn, deprived of their jackets, he threw into an iron pot, having rinsed them previously in the flowing river.
As soon as she found that Bob really could not sing, she tried me; and, as I was considered to have a very tolerable voice, I immediately complied, giving her "Tom Bowling" and a few more of Dibdin's fine old sea-songs, as well as one or two more frequently heard in a drawing- room, which I had learnt under my sister's able tuition.
Although the heat was great, our spirits felt lighter in the belief that we should meet with no enemies: and we continued paddling along, Chico standing as before in the bows of the canoe; the boys, as usual, joking with each other; while Jack every now and then burst into one of his sea-songs, an entertainment with which he had not indulged us since we were engaged in building the canoes.
Talking of the ocean with him one day, he revealed this curious fact: although he is the author of one of the most stirring and popular sea-songs in the language, "The sea, the sea, the open sea!" he said he had rarely been upon the tossing element, having a great fear of being made ill by it. I think he told me he had never dared to cross the Channel even, and so had never seen Paris.
There were nights when he took a deal more rum and water than his head would carry; and then he would sometimes sit and sing his wicked, old, wild sea-songs, minding nobody; but sometimes he would call for glasses round, and force all the trembling company to listen to his stories or bear a chorus to his singing.
He loved and esteemed the manikin, and valued his ready wit and his extreme honesty. He was also gratified by the Ranger's skill in penmanship and book-learning, and took marvellous delight in his wild sea-songs; but, that he could look to be the husband of his daughter, had never for a moment entered his thoughts.
"Ah," said he, "they were all sea-songs; but now I will give you something better." After a little thought, he commenced singing a very beautiful and plaintive one, and certainly much better than he had sung the night before; for he now was sober.
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