ally found one of three things to be the case: the
man was a 'sea lawyer,' or had not done much deep-sea sailing; or his
seamanship only dated from the decline of the sailing vessel.

It is doubtless interesting to the folk-songer to see in print
shanties taken down from an individual sailor with his individual
melodic twirls and twiddles. But since no two sailors ever sing the
same shanty quite in the same manner, there must necessarily be some
means of getting at the tune, unhampered by these individual
idiosyncrasies, which are quite a different thing from what folk-song
students recognize as 'variants.' The power to discriminate can only
be acquired by familiarity with the shanty as it was in its palmy
days. The collector who comes upon the scene at this late time of day
must necessarily be at a disadvantage. The ordinary methods which he
would apply to a folk-song break down in the case of a labour-song.
Manual actions were the soul of the shanty; eliminate these and you
have only the skeleton of what was once a living thing. It is quite
possible, I know, to push this line of argument too far, but every one
who knows anything about seamanship must feel that a shanty nowadays
cannot be other than a pale reflection of what it once was.

That is why I deprecate the spurious authenticity conferred by print
upon isolated versions of shanties sung by individual old men. When
the originals are available it seems to me pedantic and academic to
put into print the comic mispronunciations of well-known words by old
and uneducated seamen.

And this brings me to the last difficulty which confronts the
collector with no previous knowledge of shanties. As a mere matter of
dates, any sailors now remaining from sailing ship days must
necessarily be very old men. I have found that their octogenarian
memories are not always to be trusted. On one occasion an old man sang
quite glibly a tune which was in reality a _pasticcio_ of three
separate shanties all known to me. I have seen similar results in
print, since the collector arrived too late upon the scene to be able
to detect the tricks which an old man's memory played him.

One final remark about collectors which has an important bearing upon
the value of their work. There were two classes of sailing vessels
that sailed from English ports--the coaster or the mere collier that
plied between the Tyne or Severn and Boulogne, and the Southspainer,
under which term was comprised all