ince all work aboard a sailing vessel was
performed by hand.

The advent of screw steamers sounded the death-knell of the shanty.
Aboard the steamer there were practically no sails to be manipulated;
the donkey-engine and steam winch supplanted the hand-worked windlass
and capstan. By the end of the seventies steam had driven the sailing
ship from the seas. A number of sailing vessels lingered on through
the eighties, but they retained little of the corporate pride and
splendour that was once theirs. The old spirit was gone never to
return.

When the sailing ship ruled the waters and the shanty was a living
thing no one appears to have paid heed to it. To the landsman of those
days--before folk-song hunting had begun--the haunting beauty of the
tunes would appear to have made no appeal. This may be partly
accounted for by the fact that he would never be likely to hear the
sailor sing them ashore, and partly because of the Rabelaisian
character of the words to which they were sung aboard ship. We had
very prim notions of propriety in those days, and were apt to overlook
the beauty of the melodies, and to speak of shanties in bulk as 'low
vulgar songs.' Be that as it may, it was not until the late
eighties--when the shanty was beginning to die out with the sailing
ship--that any attempt was made to form a collection.

ORIGIN OF THE WORD

Here let me enter my protest against the literary preciosity which
derives the word from (_un_) _chante_ and spells it 'chanty'--in other
words, against the gratuitous assumption that unlettered British
sailors derived one of the commonest words in their vocabulary from a
foreign source. The result of this 'literary' spelling is that
ninety-nine landsmen out of every hundred, instead of pronouncing the
word 'shanty,' rhyming with 'scanty' (_as every sailor did_),
pronounce it 'tchahnty,' rhyming with 'auntie,' thereby courting the
amusement or contempt of every seaman. The vogue of '_ch_anty' was
apparently created by the late W.E. Henley, a fine poet, a great man
of letters, a profound admirer of shanty tunes, but entirely
unacquainted with nautical affairs. Kipling and other landsmen have
given additional currency to the spelling. The 'literary' sailors,
Clark Russell and Frank Bullen, have also spelt it '_ch_anty,' but
their reason is obvious. The modest seaman always bowed before the
landsman's presumed superiority in 'book-larnin'.' What more natural
than that Russell and Bul