Chantey and Limey

THE ORIGIN OF chantey or shanty meaning a song sung by seamen working together, for the purpose of synchronizing their manual exertions, has been somewhat obscure. A good summary of knowledge of the subject was made by L. G. Carr Laughton in the Mariner's Mirror for 192 3,' but he could find no convincing etymology for the term and no instance of its use earlier than the OED's I869, where the form is shanties. In the course of reading several nineteenth-century narratives of life in the American merchant marine, it has become apparent to me that songs of this nature were first employed on ships by longshoremen who loaded baled cotton at Mobile and New Orleans, using the cadence as they operated powerful screwjacks with which they forced bales into place in ships' holds. The work was seasonal, most of the crop being shipped during the winter, and so the longshoremen worked as seamen in the summer, continuing their custom of singing as they worked and being imitated by other seamen. The following series of quotations will amplify these statements, provide an etymology, and furnish lexical evidence for the American origin of chantey. The first is from Some Recollections, by Captain C. P. Low. Writing of the New York packet ship Toronto in I843, he says

Linguistics · Maritime and Coastal Archaeology · History · Philosophy

• The Execrable Term

  Gibb Schreffler•American Speech•2017

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