Now and then a sailor will utter some fierce imprecation upon wind or sea,
but it is in the impotence of despair, and not in the conscious, boastful
mastery which the land-songs attribute to him. What, then, does the sailor
sing?--and does he sing at all?
Certainly the sailor sings. Did you ever walk through Ann Street, Boston,
or haunt the purlieus of the Fulton Market? and when there did you never
espy a huckster's board covered with little slips of printed paper of the
size and shape of the bills-of-fare at the Commonwealth Hotel? They are
printed on much coarser paper, and are by no means as typographically
exact as the aforesaid _carte_, or as this page of the "Atlantic Monthly,"
but they are what the sailor sings. I know they are there, for I once
spent a long summer's day in the former place, searching those files for a
copy of the delightful ballad sung (or attempted to be sung) by Dick
Fletcher in Scott's "Pirate,"--the ballad beginning
"It was a ship, and a ship of fame,
Launched off the stocks, bound for the main."
I did not find my ballad, and to this day remain in ignorance of what fate
befell the "hundred and fifty brisk young men" therein commemorated. But I
found what the sailor does sing. It was a miscellaneous collection of
sentimental songs, the worn-out rags of the stage and the parlor, or
ditties of highwaymen, or ballad narratives of young women who ran away
from a rich "parient" with "silvier and gold" to follow the sea.
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