ur and
emphasis. Like the Britisher of to-day, he would put up with any
hardship so long as he were permitted to grouse about it. The
shantyman gave humorous expression to this grousing, which deprived it
of the element of sulks. Steam let off in this way was a wholesome
preventive of mutiny.

The choruses were usually jingles, with no relevance save maintenance
of the rhythm.

One feature of the words may be noted. The sailor's instinct for
romance was so strong that in his choruses, at least, no matter how
'hair-curling' the solo might be, he always took the crude edge off
the concrete and presented it as an abstraction if possible. For
example, he knew perfectly well that one meaning of 'to blow' was to
knock or kick. He knew that discipline in Yankee packets was
maintained by corporeal methods, so much so that the Mates, to whom
the function of knocking the 'packet rats' about was delegated, were
termed first, second, and third 'blowers,' or strikers, and in the
shanty he sang 'Blow the man down.' 'Knock' or 'kick,' as I have
recently seen in a printed collection, was too crudely realistic for
him. In like manner the humorous title, 'Hog's-eye,' veiled the coarse
intimacy of the term which it represented. And that is where, when
collecting shanties from the 'longshore' mariner of to-day, I find
him, if he is uneducated, so tiresome. He not only wants to explain to
me as a landsman the exact meaning (which I know already) of terms
which the old type of sailor, with his natural delicacy, avoided
discussing, but he tries where possible to work them into his shanty,
a thing the sailor of old time never did. So that when one sees in
print expressions which sailors did not use, it is presumptive
evidence that the collector has been imposed upon by a salt of the
'sea lawyer' type.

Perhaps I ought to make this point clearer. Folk-song collecting was
once an artistic pursuit. Now it has become a flourishing industry of
high commercial value. From the commercial point of view it is
essential that results should be printed and circulated as widely as
possible. Some knowledge of seamanship is an absolute necessity where
folk-shanties are concerned. The mere collector nowadays does not
possess that knowledge; it is confined to those who have had practical
experience of the sea, but who will never print their experiences. The
mere collector _must_ print his versions. What is unprinted must
remain unknown; what is printed is