Lyr Req: Vague query regarding sea shanties..

Subject: Vague query regarding sea shanties...
From:
Date: 18 Aug 01 - 10:38 AM

Posting from the Library at Cecil Sharp House... Usually I've got most of the resources I need to answer this sort of question, but I've been utterly stumped here and wondered if anyone out there might know anything?

Looking for words and tune to a song which features Nelson returning from the dead at a climactic moment in the battle, the only line the lady can remember is: "Out popped the admiral..."

And a sea shanty about the slave trade featuring the words, "The Ebony Trade".

It's tenuous, I know - but can anyone help me?

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Vague query regarding sea shanties..
From: Charley Noble
Date: 18 Aug 01 - 10:48 AM

Here's what's in the Mudcat DT for "ebony trade":

Song said to be sung by Slavers, picked up in Philadelphia and published by C.G. Leland, 1879. Here from reprint in 'Roxburghe Ballads', VIII, p. 448. [I one had, but lost, the title of Leland's book]

Time for us to Go.

With sails let fall and sheeted home,
and clear of the ground were we,
We pass'd the bank, stood round the Light,
and sail'd away to sea;
The wind was fair, the coast was clear,
the brig was noways slow,
For she was built in Baltimore, and 'twas time for us to go.

[Chorus] Time for us to go; time for us to go,
For she was built in Baltimore, and 'twas time for us to go.

A quick run to the West we had,
and when we made the Bight [of Benin]
We kept the offing all day long,
and crossed the Bar at night:
Six hundred niggers in the hold
and seventy we did stow;
And when we'd clapp'd the hatches on,
'twas time for us to go!

We hadn't been three days at sea
before we saw a sail,
So we clapp'd on every stich she'd stand,
altho' it blew a gale;
And we walk'd along full fourteen knots,
for the Barkie she did know,
As well as ever a soul on board,
'twas time for us to go!

We carry'd away the royal yards,
and the stun's'l boom was gone;
Says the Skipper: "They may go or stand;
I'm darn'd if I don't crook on.
So the weather braces we'll round in,
and the tr-s'l set also,
And we'll keep the brig three p'ints away:
for 'tis time for us to go!

Oh, yard-arm under did she plunge,
in the trough of the deep seas,
And her masts they thrashed about like whips,
as she bow'd before the breeeze;
And every yard did buckle up,
like to a bending bow,
But her spars were tough as whalebone,
and 'twas time for us to go!

We dropp'd the Cruiser in the night,
and our cargo landed we,
And ashore we went, with our pockets full of dollars,
on the spree:
And when the liquor it is out,
and the locker it is low,
Then, to sea again, in the Ebony Trade,
'twill be time for us to go!
Time for us to go; time for us to go!
Then to sea again, in the Ebony Trade,
'twill be time for us to go!
^^^

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Vague query regarding sea shanties..
From: GUEST,leeneia
Date: 19 Aug 01 - 12:00 AM

I don't know anything for sure, but "Out popped the admiral" sound flippant enough to be a vaudeville or parlour song, not a sea shanty. Perhaps the same school as "With Her Head Tucked Underneath Her Arm" or "Unfortunate Miss Bailey."

Where and what exactly is Cecil Sharp House? Of course, I know who Cecil Sharp was.

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Vague query regarding sea shanties..
From: Malcolm Douglas
Date: 19 Aug 01 - 12:48 AM

English Folk Dance and Song Society

The song Charley copied-and-pasted from an earlier thread was originally posted by Bruce Olson, with whom our correspondent from the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library will be familiar.

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Vague query regarding sea shanties..
From: Snuffy
Date: 19 Aug 01 - 10:59 AM

"Out popped the admiral" - if I remember correctly, after Nelson's death at Trafalgar, his body was stored in a barrel of rum (or brandy) to preserve it on the voyage back to England for a state funeral. I believe that some chemical reaction caused the barrel to burst and Nelson magically re-appeared.

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Vague query regarding sea shanties..
From: GUEST,leeneia
Date: 19 Aug 01 - 01:48 PM

Snuffy, I find that hard to believe. Surely rum and brandy were too precious to waste like that.

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Vague query regarding sea shanties..
From:
Date: 19 Aug 01 - 03:55 PM

Rum was a staple of the British (and possibly others) ships. The Tot was given to British sailors until recent memory. Tom Lewis' Last Shanty mentions that. What's one barrel of rum vs all the others.

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Vague query regarding sea shanties..
From: Barry Finn
Date: 19 Aug 01 - 04:31 PM

When the sailors tapped the barrel that held Nelson (not knowing he was stored within) the practice became known as "bleeding the Admiral". Barry

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Vague query regarding sea shanties..
From: Mr Red
Date: 19 Aug 01 - 05:54 PM

Barry - at the risk of the obvious - Hence the shanty "A Drop of Nelsons Blood"
Wasn't Benbow carried back the same way? It was general (pun intended) practice to carry high ranking naval commanders back to Britain this way.
The rum in question was pretty thick and was usually watered down for consumption so the sugar and alcohol concentration made it a good preservative.

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Vague query regarding sea shanties..
From:
Date: 19 Aug 01 - 07:13 PM

The rum was indeed very thick, and was an excellent preservative. A barrel large anough to hold the body would be made up (to save space barrels were taken apart and stored flat) and then rum would be poured in to fill the barrel before the top was put on. 'tapping the Admiral' was the term used for easing a thin metal tube between the strakes of a rum barricoe and sucking out the contents.

'Bleeding the monkey' was a similar trick, but done by drilling a hole into the barricoe.

The rum was diluted down for consumption by a sailor attached to the Supply department for special victualing duties. He was called a 'tanky'. The usual dilution was two parts water to one of rum. A 'Nor-wester'is a dilution of one to one, and the more northerly the direction the stronger the mixture - presumably a 'Norther' would be undiluted.

Anne

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Vague query regarding sea shanties..
From: Charley Noble
Date: 19 Aug 01 - 07:58 PM

Where, oh where, has our original guest gone?

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Vague query regarding sea shanties..
From: Cobble
Date: 19 Aug 01 - 08:04 PM

This thread was asking for a song not the merits of naval rum, come on try harder.

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Vague query regarding sea shanties..
From: Amos
Date: 20 Aug 01 - 12:02 AM

Apparently Nelson's fate has become a bit of an urban legend. The following snippet is from a site that specializes in tracking down urban legends:

Legend: Imbibers drink the liquor from a barrel used to preserve a dead body.

Examples:

[Dale, 1978]

Some years ago, the father of a friend of mine brought a fairly enormous house in the middle of Bodmin Moor, a sort of Georgian/Regency house built on the site of an older farmhouse.

In the capacious cellars they found half a dozen very large barrels. 'Oh, good!' said mother. 'We can cut them in half and plant orange trees in them.'

So they set to work to cut the barrels in half, but they found that one of them was not empty, so they set it up and borrowed the necessary equipment from the local pub. The cellar filled with a rich, heady Jamaican odour.

'Rum, by God!' said the father. It was indeed, so they decided to take advantage of some fifty gallons of the stuff before cutting the barrel in half.

About a year later, after gallons of rum punch, flip and butter had been consumed, it was getting hard to get any more rum out of the barrel, even by tipping it up with wedges. So they cut it in half, and found in it the well-preserved body of a man.

[Iserson, 1994]

British sailors used makeshift enbalming when Lord Nelson died at Trafalgar. Surviving officers decided to return the body to England rather than bury this famous admiral at sea. Reportedly his body was immersed in the ship's brandy stores, the only preservative available. The sailors, though, not wanting to go without their alcohol, siphoned out portions for drinking through a piece of macaroni, eventually draining the brandy dry.

[Smith, 1996]

During the winter of 1861, the conductor of a train received for transport a huge parcel addressed to a professor of the College of France. It had been sent from Java. On the way to Paris, the trains was held up on a siding waiting for an express to pass, and during the wait, the conductor and his assistant noticed the parcel was leaking. As the story puts it, it trickled ". . . un liquide ambre, de gout tres fine at tres particulier." Naturally, he called in his mates, including the driver and fireman, and they boozed on until the express had passed. Wiping their moustaches, they hurriedly went on to their destination to be greeted by the professor who informed them that the parcel held the body of a "great ape of Borneo."

Variations:

Besides humans in their final repose, liquor-filled casks of this legend have been said to contain the bodies of monkeys being shipped from Africa to museums in the USA and Britain.

Although tales from all branches of the legend usually conclude with the drinkers either just realizing what they've been ingesting or becoming ill over it, some end with the tipplers dying of a dread illness brought on by ingesting something a corpse had been stewing in.

Origins: Versions of the basic legend have been around for centuries. The most famous of these older tales features the transported remains of Admiral Nelson, but numerous stories dating as far back as 1861 about casks containing liquor-preserved monkeys going astray have also been meticulously recorded. And as we'll see later, a kissing cousin of this legend was all the rage in the thirteenth century.

The why of this legend goes a bit beyond the expected "person unknowingly ingests yucky foodstuff" theme, which carries the implied message that it is always better to look before leaping (or in this case, peek before quaffing). Folklorist Jan Brunvand states:

Surely there is a strain of poetic justice in almost all of these stories, since regularly the contaminated alcohol is either drunk by someone who more or less deserves his fate, or else the corpse is that of someone who outranked the drinkers. Thus, gentiles (according to the story) eat the hated Jew; common sailors drink the admiral's brandy; Americans party on the defeated English general's wine, and those who have merely bought into the lordly manor drink up the rum left there by its past rightful owner.

Supplementing that idea is the oldest tale of this ilk, a gem from eight hundred years ago which features tomb despoilers who feed themselves their just deserts:

[Morgan & Tucker, 1987]

The Arab historian Abd el Latif wrote in the thirteenth century of a group of treasure hunters who found an ancient sealed jar of honey while exploring the tombs beneath the Egyptian pyramids. They settled down to a delicious lunch, dipping their bread into the jar, until one of the diners pulled out a human hair. A quick investigation revealed the preserved body of a child curled up at the bottom of the jar. The historian credits the story to "an Egyptian worthy of belief." If he had checked further, we suspect he would have encountered the familiar chain of friends of friends of friends.

Unlike a closely-related legend about workers who fall into vats and whose unnoticed, decomposing bodies go on to form part of a potable or foodstuff sent on to consumers, "casked corpse" tales lack modern analogues and do not reflect current societal concerns. The explanation for these legends lies in a combination of hazily-remembered facts about famous bodies shipped in liquor, embellished with a bit of old-fashioned storytelling about sailors determined to have their daily tot or homeowners who make "fortuitous" finds. Yet before the storytelling can be added to the mix, there has to be a foundation of fact to build upon.

In the days before refrigeration and embalming, folks who died far away were sometimes transported home preserved as best they could be in a barrel of alcohol. (Embalming as we know it came into being at the time of the American Civil War, when the efforts of mortician Thomas Holmes, the first American to develop and use embalming fluid, resulted in the preserved bodies of fallen soldiers being returned to their families for burial. Prior to Holmes, all one could do was pack a body in ice and hold the funeral as soon as possible.)

The most famous instance of preservation by immersion in alcohol was the casking of the remains of Lord Nelson in the ship's brandy stores after his death during the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. That much is true -- Nelson was, in effect, pickled to get as much of him home in as decent a state as possible. But not in rum, as would later be claimed in lore. No, Nelson had been immersed in brandy for shipment home. At Gibralter the fluid was replaced with wine.

According to baseless hearsay, when the barrel was opened in England, it was considerably less than full. (In reality, Nelson arrived fairly topped up.) This gave rise to the story that sailors aboard the Victory had been unwilling to let a little thing like a decomposing dead Admiral get between them and their daily swigging and thus had been siphoning off generous helpings, eventually draining the funerary cask dry. Thanks to this bit of lore, the British Navy has come to use the term "tapping the Admiral" for getting an unauthorized drink of rum via a surreptitious straw.

Nelson wasn't the only famous Brit whose remains were casked in booze to get them home. When Prince Henry of Battenberg died from malaria on a British expeditionary force to West Africa in 1895, his body was transported back to England for a royal burial in an improvised tank made from biscuit tins and filled with navy rum.

The remains of less-famous personages have also been transported in this manner. In 1857, Nancy Martin of Wilmington, North Carolina, was on a year-long cruise with her father and brother when she died at sea. The menfolk put her body into a large cask after first tying it to a chair and nailing the chair to the bottom of the barrel to prevent her from floating or sloshing. Whiskey, rum, and wine were poured in, then the barrel was sealed and stored belowdecks. Upon return to dry land, Nancy was buried -- still in her booze-filled cask -- in Oakdale Cemetery.

Regards,

A.

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Vague query regarding sea shanties..
From: Charley Noble
Date: 20 Aug 01 - 09:26 AM

Anyone for some more "Dead Dog Cider"?