r back as
the family history can be traced, and sailor uncles and grand-uncles
have sung shanties to me from my childhood upwards. During boyhood I
was constantly about amongst ships, and had learnt at first hand all
the popular shanties before any collection of them appeared in print.
I have in later years collected them from all manner of sailors,
chiefly at Northumbrian sources. I have collated these later versions
with those which I learnt at first hand as a boy from sailor
relatives, and also aboard ship. And lastly, I lived for some years in
the West Indies, one of the few remaining spots where shanties may
still be heard, where my chief recreation was cruising round the
islands in my little ketch. In addition to hearing them in West Indian
seaports, aboard Yankee sailing ships and sugar droghers, I also heard
them sung constantly on shore in Antigua under rather curious
conditions. West Indian negro shanties are movable wooden huts, and
when a family wishes to change its _venue_ it does so in the following
manner: The shanty is levered up on to a low platform on wheels, to
which two very long ropes are attached. The ropes are manned by as
many hands as their length will admit. A 'shantyman' mounts the roof
of the hut and sits astride it. He sings a song which has a chorus,
and is an exact musical parallel of a seaman's 'pull-and-haul' shanty.
The crowd below sings the chorus, giving a pull on the rope at the
required points in the music, just as sailors did when hauling at sea.
Each pull on the rope draws the hut a short distance forward, and the
process is continued till its final resting-place is reached, when the
shantyman descends from the roof. The hut is then levered off the
platform on to _terra firma_ and fixed in its required position.

WHAT A SHANTY IS

Shanties were labour songs sung by sailors of the merchant service
only while at work, and never by way of recreation. Moreover--at
least, in the nineteenth century--they were never used aboard
men-o'-war, where all orders were carried out in silence to the pipe
of the bo'sun's whistle.

Before the days of factories and machinery, all forms of work were
literally _manual_ labour, and all the world over the labourer,
obeying a primitive instinct, sang at his toil: the harvester with his
sickle, the weaver at the loom, the spinner at the wheel. Long after
machinery had driven the labour-song from the land it survived at sea
in the form of shanties, s