How Sea Shanties Kept the Royal Navy Sailing

Today, most people can hum along to the tune of “Drunken Sailor,” but the grim origins behind the lyrics are often overlooked. In this episode Martin Jakeman from Historical Huzzahs reveals the truth. 

You will also discover how the shanties kept morale high at sea, how they changed with the invention of steam ships, and how the tradition is kept alive. You may be surprised by the latter!

For more information, including a transcript of the episode and our show-notes, go to our website: www.winchesterheritageopendays.org/introduction-histbites

Transcript

How Sea Shanties Kept the Royal Navy Sailing

Intro: Hello and welcome to Hampshire HistBites. Join us as we delve into the past and go on a journey to discover some of the county's best and occasionally unknown history. We'll be speaking to experts and enthusiasts and asking them to reveal some of our hidden heritage, as well as share with you a few fascinating untold tales.

Ellie: Hello, and welcome to Hampshire HistBites the podcast focused on Hampshire history.   My name is Ellie and I'm here today with Martin Jakeman of Historical Huzzahs who will be telling us a little bit about sea shanties. Hello Martin.

Martin: Hello, Ellie.

Ellie: How are you today?

Martin: I'm very well. Getting through lockdown one day at a time or one sea shanty at a time, I should probably say.

Ellie: Well, this is why we've done this episode because you on your professional page or your company page, Historical Huzzahs, every Sunday you've been doing a sing-along.  

Martin: I have indeed. I've missed the whole collaboration aspect in which being in lockdown took away. And I thought I'd start collaborating with myself.  So there's an app that you can download and it allows you to record different tracks and overlap them in videos. So, it started out as just me having a muck around on my personal page and then I thought oh, actually, let's get some costumes involved, let's do sea shanties and other songs that people sort of know. And let's do that every Sunday.

Ellie: I have spent every Sunday, eagerly awaiting each song and finding out what it's going to be, and there's plenty of other people out there who have also been enjoying them. Have you been enjoying getting dressed up and how long does an episode take to put together?  

Martin: Well on the dressing up front, I need next to no excuse to get my dressing up props out, because most of the time I have more dressing up clothes in my wardrobe than actual clothes. And fun fact, I don't think I've owned a pair of jeans in about five years. So, I'm that type of person. So, I tend to break them into two days. I'll do a tech run as it were,  where they look absolutely hideous because they tend to just be my face with no passion whatsoever, just trying to get the harmonies right and trying to roughly work out what sort of theme I can do. So that tends to be on a Tuesday and then I'll do a dress run and actually record the thing on probably a Thursday or Friday. And that's then with all of the passion and dressing up.

Ellie: And you're currently in the lockdown measures with your mum and dad. Aren't you? Have they been helping at all?

Martin: I am, my long-suffering parents.  They have been helping in not making too much noise when I'm recording, and not complaining too much.

Ellie: Ah that's good. No cups of tea.

Martin: Oh, no, I definitely bribe them with tea and biscuits and whatnot. Then of course I'll play it to them, and they'll give it a listen and their honest feedback.

Ellie: Have you thought about getting them involved? Can they sing?

Martin: My mother is famous for saying that she cannot sing and then does it anyway. And then everyone agrees with her. And my father, where I get my theatrical tendencies from, I would be quite scared that he would upstage me. So, I'm going to leave the spotlight on myself.

Ellie: Oh It's a matter of pride.

Martin: Oh, absolutely.

Ellie: Where did the inspiration come from for you to pick up on sea shanties and start using them?

Martin: Well, I'm lucky enough to be a Costumed Interpreter down at the National Museum of the Royal Navy, which is in Portsmouth Dockyards, and we do sort of endurance performances, where it can last all day. Other people have different names for it. I call them endurance because you just have to keep pushing with energy you potentially do not have. So it would arrive and be out on the floor by about 10 o'clock and then would come off the floor at about four o'clock.  You have your short lunch break in between, but apart from that, you're performing. And we have these things called bits where they might be just three or four lines, an argument that the audience can watch you have, and then we  began to look at sea shanties and we'd start singing some really well known ones. As you come into the dock yard, you start walking down towards Victory and there's a figurehead of Admiral Benbow, people love having photographs taken with it, and I remember one day it was absolutely pouring down with rain. Everybody was just sort of trying to run either into a museum or run to the bus stop. And we stood there in our costumes, in the pouring rain, just singing A Drop of Nelson's Blood. And for some reason it was just so much fun. And that's what sparked my love for them because I realized that no matter how horrid having to stand there it was actually good fun singing. And actually it reminds me  what they were like back when they were being sung originally, having to do these grueling tasks that no one really enjoyed doing, but it gave a little bit of a, well,  a little bit of a silver lining to the task.

Ellie: So you've kind of outlined for us there, why the sea shanty started. So what period did they really come into prominence for men aboard ships? Or have they always been about in some form or other?

Martin: I mean, you have your folk songs. Sort of a storytelling.  There are some records.  I think there's some that talk about Tudor era, but if you say sea shanties, the ones you tend to think about is the Georgian Navy. It's the one that's quite heavily romanticised. You have I think a Hornblower, and you'll hear them singing as well.

And they were working songs for working men, because it was all manpowered these ships. There was no sort of mechanized machinery back then, in the Georgian era, so, the men would receive what was about 5,000 calories a day, about half a pint of Naval strength, rum. It was so strong; they could pour it on gunpowder and it would still light it was that strong. Which is where we get the term proof for alcohol. If you thought that your rum had been watered down, pour it on a bit of gunpowder, and if it's still lit then it was proof it was over a certain percentage. But where were we?

Yes, so the Georgian era, that's when they came about and really became rather prominent.

Ellie: What are the most famous ones that we know and probably sing every day without realising where they come from?

Martin: Well, you've got probably the most famous one, which is "What Should We do with the Drunken Sailor?".  It's one of my favourites because loads of people know it, they know the lyrics, they sing along to it, but they don't really know what it's about. Yes, it's what should we do with the drunken sailor?

But every single verse is a punishment for a sailor. And so, it starts off with "Put him in the long boat until he's sober". Well that's a quite straightforward one. You've then got "Put him in the scuppers with a hosepipe on him". So you're pumping freezing cold seawater onto him to try and sober him up.

Then you turn into the more grim part. So you "Hit him with the cat till his back is bleeding". Now the cat, doesn't refer to the one that goes meow. The cat is the cat-o-nine tails. So this is nine whips in one. You have what's called blood knots going down each strand. And these are so that really, if you hit a man hard enough, you can let go of the whip and it would stay in his back. Yeah, not overly nice.  Also, part of your punishment might be to actually make your own cat-o-nine tails because carrying one on board the ship could be seen as bad luck because it's tempting fate that you're going to need it. So some people would have to sit there and actually make it themselves, and then it'd be used on them and then thrown overboard.

Sometimes they'd been kept in a bag, and if you're found out then "The cat would be out of the bag", and then it would be used on you. So you've got "Hit him with a cat till his back is bleeding". I think it's around 70 lashes, or so, you could get. So you'll be strung up on the upper deck because if you did it below deck there's not much room, and you could say "There's not enough room to swing a cat". So all the punishments happened on the upper deck, in the open, and all the crew would have to come around and watch that. You've then also got "Put him in the bed with the captain's daughter". Now it sounds, well, it doesn't sound too bad a punishment depending on what the captain's daughter looks like, but it's not really that, and I'll tell you why. So for those listeners who are a bit squeamish, I suppose stop listening about 30 seconds ago, but this is after you'd been hit with the cat-o-nine tails, your back is all bloody because I think from about 10 lashes, you're beginning to see bits of deep flesh, maybe even some bone. You're then placed in your hammock, which is like a really rough canvassy type of material, it's filled with salt, and then you're sewn up and then you're jostled around. And it does in a way, help with the healing process, but it does "Rub salt in the wound". So after all of that, of course, then you'd hope that he'd be sobered up if not, he should have learned his lesson by then. So that's the one that I like to explain to people and quite a lot of the time they then go away going "Well, I didn't know that". Well, you've been singing it for this many years. You should have known. 

Ellie: Absolutely. We've got a clip of you singing What Should we do with the Drunken Sailor? We'll give that a quick, listen now. Remind our listeners of what it is.

 Okay, so we've covered their origins. Musically each song is very similar, isn't it? They don't stray too far from a standard melody or chord placement, if that's the right word?

Martin: No, they don't really. I'm sure anybody who knows anything musically will be wincing away at the type of language we're using to try and describe it. But they're not very complicated because just like sort of folk stories, they had to be passed from one person to the next.

So you don't want them to be too complicated. I mean, drunken sailor and another one called a drop of Nelson's Blood, which comes from after the battle of Trafalgar, are actually the exact same chords. They're just E minor and D, and you just bounce between the two. And that again, it keeps it nice and simple and memorable as well. Others use maybe three chords. So you've got over the Hills and Far Away, which is G and then you bounce to a C, come down through a G and then a D.  So that's just, again, three chords and though it's not strictly a sea shanty, it's always a great one to get people clapping along. We've got wild Rover as well. And again, that's just a G and C and then for the chorus, you chuck in that D as well. Because, as I've said, they're simple songs for working, you don't want to have to be really concentrating on what comes next. It should flow naturally. And these people aren't trained singers so it needs to be easy, and you don't really have to have the lessons of singing behind it.

Ellie: No, quite.  I think I heard somewhere that, similar to many sorts of songs in these kinds of departments, it was all about working to the song's beat.

Martin: Yes. There's loads of different types of shanties that fit to different jobs, but I've got three different types of shanties just to tell you that. So, the rhythms, you have a short drag shanty, which is another meaning for something like a short haul. So it's that regular beat. So "A drop of Nelson's blood wouldn't do us any harm, a drop of Nelson's blood", and that's for something like, shortening or unfurling sail, something that has a good rhythm, that all you have to do is pull on the line, readjust, pull on the line. Now a line is rope.  As soon as it's given a name or a use, it's then called a line. Then you've got long drag shanties. These are for a task that isn't quite as straightforward as just pull readjust pull. You might have a little bit more of a readjustment to do before you go on next. So you tend to have a little bit of a verse and then at the end of a verse, you have, what's like, a pre-chorus, something that then everybody can join in on, when they then pull to haul up. So an example of that is Haul Away Joe, where you have short little bit, and then right at the end you've then got Haul Away Joe, that then everybody can strangely enough, haul away. Then you've got Capstan shanties. Capstans are basically like the old-fashioned donkey engines and it's all going to be manpowered. Now this isn't the Georgian era so I'm going to talk about HMS Warrior, which is where I mainly work, and that is 1860. So it's a strange one because we're looking at the beginning of the steam-powered ships and also capstans but the captain, Captain Cochrane, decided that he didn't want the steam-powered capstan because it would make the men lazy. So it took four hours to raise the anchors and eight men for each bar. So I think it was about 170-180 men to actually raise the anchors. And that would be done on the capstan. Now, when at sea, you tend to work in watches and they tend to be four hours long. And so you work for four hours, then you rest for four hours. And the ship split into two, so you have the starboard watch and the port watch, or back in Victory's days it would be the larboard and the starboard watch. They hadn't invented the port, as it were, until slightly later. So the capstan, if you start your watch, raising the anchor, that's all you're going to be doing for the whole of your four hours is just constantly turning and turning and turning, and it really does get boring.

So you have these shanties and they are a sustained rhythm, and it's a task that can last, as I've said, for hours on end, because it's not just as straightforward as putting a line or a piece of rope or a chain or cable onto a capstan and turning, it works like a conveyor belt. So you have a messenger cable, which is just going round and round and round and you have to attach, move it up and then unattach it.

So it's called nipping. And actually that's the job of a small boy aboard the ship, and that's why we call them nippers. And so you've got those that are sustained. So those are the three that I've told you about.  

Ellie: It must be a real killer if you don't like one of them and you're working on the ship and you have to sing that for hours on end.

Martin: Absolutely. But I mean, by the time you get onto warrior, they've actually got a ship's band, that will be set up whilst they're doing all of the work on the capstan, just to try and keep the men going.

Ellie: So you mentioned that you work on Warrior, which is 1860 at the start of the steam-powered era .Is this when sea shanties lose their impact, is this when the work becomes a little bit easier for those onboard the ship?

Martin: In a sense, yes. Because everything's being moved then to steam-power, so Warrior actually had a donkey engine fitted afterwards. So with that, you tend to start to lose shanties. Some people refer to the Victorian era or the age of steam as the death of shanties. Obviously, that's not quite the case because we still sing them today, but yeah. So that was the beginning of the end, as it were, for shanties whilst working.

Ellie: You're doing fabulous work to keep the sea shanties alive and remind people of them. I know that a couple of them, I sang as a child. What Should we do with the Drunken Sailor? I spent a lot of time thinking, what's the drunken sailor doing in bed with the captain's daughter? So to have that cleared up is quite good.  I suppose what we were really interested in and why we're learning about these things is, how do we remember English history and the narrative of it all? How do we keep these sea shanties alive and remember their origins?

Martin: I think like with most things historical, you have to find a balance between looking at them in their original context and how you can make them relevant for today, or in fact, highlight the fact that they're not relevant for today. Sea shanties, I think are quite easy, because as I've said, people know them or they kind of know them.

So to present it to them in some of its semi original context, like onboard a ship or in a harbour or even like busking, it works quite well. And they moved on and sort of going up then into the Great War you then had different kind of versions of shanties. But it's always a fine balance between showing them in their original context and then trying to slightly modernize them for today.

There was a game out, I can't remember how many years ago it was, Assassin's Creed: Black Flag. It was a piratical installation of their saga and their soundtrack was shanties. And part of your mission is that you could go around and collect these scrolls and then your crew could sing different sea shanties, and then they released an album with them all.

So there's something like an hour and a half, two hours’ worth of shanties and quite a lot of them I've never heard before, so it was really quite nice to sort of hear new ones. And then of course you've got actual shanty bands nowadays that seem really popular.  We were filming with Children in Need at the dockyard, and I was a drunken sailor, which was fantastic with me and Pudsey, but they had a shanty band there who'd come along to the dockyard and they performed. So you've got that type. And of course, the very famous Fisherman's Friends, not the sweets, but the people that actually sing. 

Ellie: Well thank you, Martin. This has been really, really interesting and hopefully, a lot more people now will be able to find out a bit more about life on the seas. We will include a link to Historical Huzzahs Facebook page, Twitter page, Instagram page in our show notes, just below the link on our website to this podcast, and hopefully we will talk to Martin again soon. Thank you, Martin.

Martin: You're very welcome. It was lovely to be back.

Ellie: Lovely. Thank you for listening to Hampshire HistBites This has been Ellie and we'll see you again soon. Goodbye.

Outro: We hope you enjoyed listening to today's episode. If you'd like to find out a little bit more about what we've been talking about, then please visit the website, winchesterheritageopendays.org, click on Hampshire HistBites, and there you'll find today's show notes as well as some links to more information. 

Thank you for listening.