My Jolly Sailor Bold: update

A pointer to an update. On further reading, I have a theory that the previously-mentioned shanty My Jolly Sailor Bold (documented in 1891, and featuring in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides) is actually a London-tailored ripoff - quite probably a late 19th century one - of the traditional Irish ballad The Banks of Claudy, since the first verses have close textual similarity. See the addendum to My Jolly Sailor Bold, 1891.

- Ray

Gangaldinn and Meduoteran

More musical coolness. I've just been listening to a couple of musical duos: Gangaldinn and Meduoteran.

Gangaldinn comprises Christian Holter (horn and electronics) and Craig Farr (percussion). I guess their style is experimental jazz fusion. It doesn't all grip me, but I very much like Syncopated Tune (above), an arrangement of a Norwegian folk song arranged for percussion and electronically multi-tracked horn.


 
Meduoteran comprises Taylan Arikan and Srdjan Vukasinovic. The former plays bağlama, which a guess could be described as an Anatolian lute; the latter plays chromatic button-key accordion, but one tuned to be able to play the quarter-tones of Middle Eastern music. Their style could, I guess be classed as jazz-folk fusion.  My favourite at this instant is Mediterran (above), but check out Fuga and Jazziana. For more details, see their website: meduoteran.com

My Jolly Sailor Bold, 1891

Don't you hate it when that happens ...

Still on the maritime theme: there's a deal of discussion online about the authenticity or otherwise of the widely-circulated song My Jolly Sailor Bold, which featured as a shanty in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides.

The short answer is that it does pre-date the movie, but the sole source of the lyrics appears to be an 1891 collection, Real Sailor-Songs by John Ashton ("author of A Century of Ballads, Romances of Chivalry, &c, &c, &c."), Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., Ltd, London. Here are the lyrics from the book:

My Jolly Sailor Bold

Upon one summer's morning, I carelessly did stray,
Down by the Walls of Wapping, where I met a sailor gay,
Conversing with a bouncing lass, who seem'd to be in pain,
Saying, William, when you go, I fear you will ne'er return again.

His hair it does in ringlets hang, his eyes as black as sloes,
May happiness attend him wherever he goes,
From Tower Hill, down to Blackwall, I will wander, weep and moan,
All for my jolly sailor bold, until he does return.

My father is a merchant—the truth I now will tell,
And in great London City in opulence doth dwell,
His fortune doth exceed £300,000 in gold,
And he frowns upon his daughter, 'cause she loves a sailor bold.

A fig for his riches, his merchandize, and gold,
True love is grafted in my heart; give me my sailor bold:
Should he return in poverty, from o'er the ocean far,
To my tender bosom, I'll fondly press my jolly tar.

My sailor is as smiling as the pleasant month of May,
And oft we have wandered through Ratcliffe Highway,
Where many a pretty blooming girl we happy did behold,
Reclining on the bosom of her jolly sailor bold.

Come all you pretty fair maids, whoever you may be,
Who love a jolly sailor bold that ploughs the raging sea,
While up aloft, in storm or gale, from me his absence mourn,
And firmly pray, arrive the day, he home will safe return.

My name it is Maria, a merchant's daughter fair,
And I have left my parents and three thousand pounds a year,
My heart is pierced by Cupid, I disdain all glittering gold,
There is nothing can console me but my jolly sailor bold.

Ashton's notes give no indication of the tune or the provenance, although he claims all the songs in the book to be authentic.

In collecting these Sailor-Songs I have had to reject very many not only for want of space, but that they were too obviously the manufacture of—that despised of Jack—the land-lubber: and I have omitted the whole of Dibdin's, as they were songs for Sailors, but not necessarily Sailors' Songs.

Nevertheless, the lyrics recycle a lot of stock folksong and shanty phrases; along with the archaic formalisms, the flavour is of a broadsheet of the late 1700s or early 1800s, as-published rather than filtered through oral tradition. The POTC: On Stranger Tides credits describe it as "Jolly Sailor Bold Arranged by John DeLuca, Dave Giuli and Matt Sullivan", but the actual tune may be that sung by Sandra Kerr on the 1967 folk album of London songs Sweet Thames Flow Softly.

Addendum: I'll look into this when I have more time, but Googling key phrases, I just ran into what I think could be the origin of this song, the trad Irish ballad The Banks of Claudy (aka Clody):

It was on a summer's morning all in the month of May
Down by the Banks of Claudy I carelessly did stray.
And there I heard a pretty maid, in sorrow did complain
All for her absent lover that sailed the ocean main.
- one version of The Banks of Claudy

Upon one summer's morning, I carelessly did stray,
Down by the Walls of Wapping, where I met a sailor gay,
Conversing with a bouncing lass, who seem'd to be in pain,
Saying, William, when you go, I fear you will ne'er return again.
- My Jolly Sailor Bold

Similar or what? Interestingly, The Banks of Claudy has a large family of variants within the range you expect from a song floating around on the oral tradition. That My Jolly Sailor is a complete isolate makes me suspect strongly that it's a version of The Banks of Claudy rewritten for a London context, but which never actually got into the oral tradition.

- Ray.

Nelson by Gillray

The farthest removed of my memories carries me back to the period of the most glorious of Britannia's sea-fights—immortal Trafalgar. I remember it distinctly, partly because of the following incident : At Topsham, in Devonshire (where my father then resided) in common with all the cities, towns, and villages, of the United Kingdom, there was a general illumination. My father's house was, of course, lit up from cellar to attic ; in each pane of glass there was a candle—the holder being a potato, in which a hollow had been scooped, to supply the place of a candlestick. The universal joy was blended with mourning: Nelson was dead, and in losing him the nation had paid dearly for victory. My father had, therefore, twisted a binding of black crape round each candle—emblematic of the grief that had saddened the triumph. Few are now living who shared with me the sight of the rejoicings blended with mourning that commemorated the 21st of October, 1805.
- Retrospect of a long life: from 1815 to 1883, Samuel Carter Hall, 1883, D. Appleton and company.

This being Trafalgar Day, it's an excuse to unearth some bookmarks: the above recollection by the writer Samuel Carter Hall, and some links relating to the caricaturist James Gillray. Lord Nelson's heyday and death were within Gillray's working career. The sentimental The death of Admiral Lord Nelson - in the moment of victory! is well-known, and Gillray also drew Nelson as a national hero in Extirpation of the plagues of Egypt; - destruction of revolutionary crocodiles; - or - the British hero cleansing ye mouth of ye Nile (which showed Nelson, literally single-handed, fighting and capturing tricolour French crocodiles.

Nevertheless, these jingoistic prints weren't characteristic of Gillray's take on Nelson topics. The French crocodile appeared also in The Gallant Nellson bringing home two Uncommon fierce French Crocadiles from the Nile as a Present to the King; but the barb was pointed at the politicians Charles Fox and Richard Sheridan, shown as weeping crocodile tears as they celebrated Nelson's victory despite being pro-republican. Others took a dig at Nelson's personal life, including A Cognocenti contemplating ye Beauties of ye Antique ("An elderly Sir William Hamilton inspecting his antiquities, all of which refer to his wife, Lady Emma Hamilton and her lover, Lord Horatio Nelson") and Love-à-la-mode, or Two dear friends (depicting a rumoured lesbian affair between Emma, Lady Hamilton, and Queen Maria Carolina of Naples).

Possibly the sharpest of the lot was John Bull taking a Luncheon: – or – British Cooks, cramming Old Grumble-Gizzard, with Bonne-Chere, which took a dig at the British public or national ethos. It shows a gluttonous John Bull being served up victories by a long-suffering Nelson, who is depicted with the head wound incurred at the Battle of the Nile that cost him his sight in one eye. It's actually on the wrong side: his right eye was the blinded one. I'm not sure if the hook is authentic either. The characters behind Nelson are the distinguished Admirals Duncan, Howe and Warren (front row) and Gardner, Hood, 1st Viscount Bridport and Jervis, 1st Earl of St Vincent (back row).

- Ray

Petty gripes

More on the late Walsall author, John Petty (see previously John Petty: The Face and The Last Refuge). I just found this 1958 article by Petty, which starts with an attack on another writer, briefly digresses to a description of his writing schedule, then concludes with a lengthy anti-intellectual diatribe hostile to, well, every writer of the time more successful than, or who had it easier than, Petty. Enjoy ...

John Petty: The Face

You are afraid.

Do you know of what you are afraid? Afraid of the face of a dream? Of the face of reality?

John Clare wrote: 'I long for scenes where man has never trod.' This was has testament, his expressed longing for release. But release from what?

In this intensely human, haunting and often humorous autobiography, John Petty contends that most men want nothing very much from life—beyond the obvious material things; that to know and have these things; they will shutter their eyes against ... The Face.

This is a cry for the weak, the afflicted, the over-perceptive, for the sane who are not insane, for the forgotten children, for the lost. For, in the last analysis, the brave ...

Brigham Young corpus tools

I've a lot of use of Google Books Ngram Viewer since it was launched: an excellent system for searching the whole Google Books corpus (for example, for finding when a word first came into the language). It has some limitations: occasionally poor metadata and OCR errors; the inability to select context (e.g. a search comparing the verb forms "smelled" and "smelt" will be contaminated by the fish called "smelt"); the purely graphical interface; the not-very-useful automated choice of time slots for the search links it generates; and the failure to show words at all if the frequency is too low.

Many of these problems have been overcome in the extremely nice unofficial interface to the Google corpus designed by Mark Davies, Professor or Corpus Linguistics at Brigham Young University: the Google Book American English Corpus ("155 billion words, 1810-2009"). It's very powerful and versatile:

This improves greatly on the standard n-grams interface from Google Books. It allows users to actually use the frequency data (rather than just see it in a picture) ...
...
This interface allows you to search the Google Books data in many ways that are much more advanced than what is possible with the simple Google Books interface. You can search by word, phrase, substring, lemma, part of speech, synonyms, and collocates (nearby words). You can copy the data to other applications for further analysis, which you can't do with the regular Google Books interface. And you can quickly and easily compare the data in two different sections of the corpus (for example, adjectives describing women or art or music in the 1960s-2000s vs the 1870s-1910s).

It's disappointing that it's currently limited to US English, but this is early days.

Note however that what you see here is just a very early version of the corpus (interface), and many features will be added and corrections will be made over the coming months. Also, in June 2011 we applied for a grant to integrate other Google Books collections into our interface, including British English, English texts from the 1500s-1700s, and texts from Spanish, German, and French. If funded (we'll receive word on this in December 2011), each of these additional corpora will be at least 50 billion words in size.

The other corpora by Professor Davies are, despite being considerably smaller, nevertheless still worth exploring. They include: Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), TIME Magazine Corpus of American English, BYU-BNC: British National Corpus, Corpus del Español, and Corpus do Português. See the main entry page: CORPUS.BYE.EDU.

- Ray (via Language Log)

Inland

Kent - 7m sea level rise - flood.firetree.net

Further to the Floodland post and Felix Grant's Not trawling, but drowning, I thought Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker was worth a purely geographical revisit. Set in a post-apocalyptic England and written in a plausibly-imagined future dialect, the novel tells of a young shaman, Riddley Walker, who finds himself central to his culture's struggle back toward knowledge (a struggle hampered by the taboo on the "clevverness" that's reviled as the cause of the nuclear apocalypse, and by the fogged and mystical thinking that's its legacy). The book has deservedly cult status.

Although not central to the story, a flooded England - in this case, the setting is Kent - is nevertheless part of the scenario. London is submerged, recalled in a dirge-like working song ...

London Town is drownt this day
Hear me say walk a way
Sling your bundel tern and go
Parments in the mud you know
Greaf and woe dont you know
Pick it up its time to go

... and Kent is governed by a regional government ("the regenneril guvner men") from "The Ram", its eastern headland that's now an island. Its separation is recalled in legend as a catastrophic event:

"... there come a jynt wave it wer like a wall of water hyer nor a mountin. Dint it come tho. It come rushing it come roaring it come roaling down it cut acrost the lan right thru from Reakys Over down to Roaming Rune. It cut the Ram off sepert from the res of Inland that wer the day the Ram be come a nylan."

Russell Hoban did his homework on the geography. The map of Riddley's part of "Inland" at the beginning of the book matches very well the projected coastal profile (see above) from a sea level rise of 7m or so: the excellent Riddley Walker Annotations site has a nice version of Hoban's map by Barbara J Becker - Map of Inland - superimposed on a present-day map.  The annotations note that "Reaky's Over" is Reculver, and "Roaming Rune" is Richborough Castle (i.e. a Roman ruin); all of the placenames in Riddley Walker are, like the language itself, plausibly mutated through what appears to be a grimly comic and rather scatological mindset.

- RG

Nauscopy

Talking of oceanic matters: MetaFilter just had an interesting post, The Nauscopy Wizard of Mauritius, with some links concerning Étienne Bottineau, an engineer in the late 1700s who developed what he called nauscopie, a technique for seeing when ships were over the horizon, several days before their arrival.

The Smithsonian Magazine's Naval Gazing: The Enigma of Étienne Bottineau provides a good overview. It was a brief craze on the scientific circuit at the time: obviously if it worked, it would have been of massive tactical advantage - an 18th century over-the-horizon radar. Google Books finds a number of contemporary descriptions, including the following sceptical one from Encyclopædia Britannica.

NAUSCOPY, the art of discovering the approach of ships or the neighbourhood of land at a considerable distance. This pretended art was invented by a M. Bottineau, employed in the King and Company's service in the island of France, from the year 1782 to 1784; and the account of it is given by the inventor as follows:

"This knowledge is not derived either from the undulation of the waves, or from the subtilty of sight, nor from any particular sensation; but merely from observation of the horizon, which discovers signs indicating the proximity of ships or of land

"On the approximation of a ship towards the land, or towards another ship, there appears in the atmosphere a meteor of a particular nature, visible to every one without any painful attention. It is not by any kind of accident that this meteor appears under these circumstances; on the contrary, it is the necessary result of the approximation of one vessel towards another, or towards the land. The existence of the meteor, and the knowledge of its different modifications, are what constitute the certainty and the precision of my informations.

"If I am asked, how it is possible that the approach of a ship towards land should give birth to any meteor whatsover in the atmosphere, and what connexion there can be between two objects at such a distance from each other? I reply, that I am not obliged to give an account of the hows and the wherefores: that it is sufficient for me to have discovered the fact, without being obliged to account for its principle."

The writer concludes, by desiring to be called on for experimental proofs, and by promising in future a complete treatise of Nauscopy, with maps, plates, &c.

This complete treatise, as far as we know, has not yet been published, nor do we expect ever to see such a treatise on the subject as will satisfy the minds of those who are persuaded that every effect must have an adequate cause. The administrators of the island, who gave to M. Bottineau what he calls a report, containing the most authentic and most explicit testimony of the reality of the discovery, seem to be of our opinion ; and yet they speak of this discovery with doubt, and with a degree of respect to which we think it can lay no claim. Their report is in the form of a letter directed to the Marechal de Castries: and that our infidelity may not deprive the public of what, inthe immense catalogue of possibilities, may lead to a useful discovery, we shall here subjoin a copy of it.

Port Louis, Island of France, the 18th February 1784.
"My Lord, A letter which you have written on the 6th of April to M. Bottineau, employed in the King and Company's service in this colony, obliges us not to refuse him one for you, os which he proposes being himself the bearer. The desire only of being useful to his country, is (as he says) the motive which determines him to take this step. He would be angry with himself were he to conceal a discovery which hath hitherto escaped the most enlightened persons, and of which he only is in possession. This, discovery is the art of announcing the presence of one or several ships, at 100, 150, and as far as 200 leagues distance. This is by no means the result of his studies, nor the fortunate application of the principles of any particular science; his science is in his eyes only, and he can have no other: what we call penetration and genius cannot make up to him what he is deficient in from education. He perceives (as he says) in nature, some signs which indicate to him the presence of the vessels, as we know that there is a fire in a place when we perceive the smoke which comes from it. This is the comparison which he .makes use of himself to those who have conversed with him about his art: this (though he has kept his secret to himself) is the plainest thing he has said, in order to make it be understood that he hath not made this discovery by the knowledge of any art or science, which had been the object of his application, or his former studies.

"It is according to him the effect of chance : he hath taken nature in the act, and hath discovered his secret ; so that his science, or rather the first elements of it, hath not cost him the least trouble; but the thing which hath cost him a great deal of labour, and which may be really called his own, is the art of judgeing of the exact distance.

"According to him, the signs very clearly indicate the presence of ships ; but none but those who can well read these signs can draw any conclusions from them with regard to distances; andthis art of reading them well, is according to him, a true and a very laborious study: for this reason he hath himself, for a very long time, been the dupe of his science. It is at least 15 years since he first foretold here the arrival of ships. At first this was regarded only as a frolic. Wagers were laid on both sides. He often lost, because the ships did not arrive at the time prescribed by him. From thence came his application to find out the cause of these mistakes ; and the perfection of his art is the result of this application.

"Since the war, his informations have greatly increased, and probably were sufficiently exact to excite the attention of the public. The noise of them reached us with the degree of enthusiasm which is always excited by the marvellous. He himself spoke of the reality of his science with a tone of a man convinced. It would have been too cruel to have dismissed him as a visionary.

"Besides, every thing depended upon proofs, and we required that he should produce some: in consequence, he hath regularly sent us, for eight months, the informations which he thought he might venture to send us; and the result is, that several of the ships he announced are arrived at the time he foretold, after several days of information.

"Others have come later than was expected, and some have not appeared at all.

"With regard to some of these, it hath been ascertained, that their delay had been occasioned by calms or by currents. M. Bottineau is persuaded, that those which never appeared were foreign vessels which went on; and accordingly we have learned, that some English ships were arrived in India, which might perhaps have been in sight of the island at the time indicated. But this is no more than a conjecture, which our occupations have not allowed us to investigate. What we can ascertain is, that in general it appears that M. Bottineau hath made just observations: whether it is owing to chance or to his abilities, it might be, perhaps, imprudent to determine. It is however certain, that the fact is so extraordinary, under whatever light it is.considered, that we have not  thought ourselves able either to affirm or deny it; and we have wished the Sieur Bottineau to compel us to take one or the other side of the question, by trusting his secret to some trusty and able person. But this he hath refused, being probably afraid that he should not acquire by the discovery all the benefit which he imagines he may reap from it.

"Supposing the reality of the discovery, we do not believe that its utility can be as important as M. Bottineau persuades himself it is; but it might perhaps throw a great light upon natural history. In order to be useful it would be necessary that the discovery should be confined to one nation, and remain unknown to all others. This will be impossible, if every fleet, every vessel, and every privateer, is obliged to carry a man on board who is in possession of this secret.— We remain, with respect, my Lord, yours, &c. Le Vte. de Soulliac, Chevreau."

- "Nauscopy", pp 776-777, Encyclopædia Britannica: or, A dictionary of arts, sciences, and miscellaneous literature, Volume 12, 1797

In hindsight the evidence for the success of nauscopy looks heavily subject to confirmation bias. If ships arrived as predicted, nauscopy had worked. If they arrived later than predicted, there was the excuse that they'd been temporarily becalmed: nauscopy had worked. If they didn't arrive as predicted, they'd changed course (and would be identified with ships arriving elsewhere that - unprovably - might have been in the vicinity): nauscopy had worked! 

Note that "meteor" doesn't have the modern meaning; in its older use, it applied to any kind of atmospheric phenomenon:

Atmospheric phenomena were formerly often classed as aerial meteor or airy meteors (winds), aqueous meteor or watery meteors (rain, snow, hail, dew, etc.), luminous meteors (the aurora, rainbow, sun halo, etc.), and igneous meteor or fiery meteors (lightning, shooting stars, etc.)
- OED

Bottineau's Extrait du mémoire de M. Bottineau sur la nauscopie (available in full via Google Books) postulates a mechanism for these "meteors":

The waters of the ocean form an immense gulf, in which in which substances of all kinds are swallowed up.

The innumerable multitudes of animals, fish, birds, vegetable, and productions, which decay, and are decomposed in that vast basin, produce a fermentation abounding in spirits, salt, oil, sulphur, &c. &c. The existence of these is sufficiently apparent by the disagreeable smell and flavour of sea water, which can only be rendered drinkable by distillation and by the evaporation of those heterogeneous particles which infect it.

The spirits intimately united to the sea waters, continue undisturbed, a long as those waters remain in a state of tranquillity; or, at least, they experience only an internal agitation, which is slightly manifested externally.

But when the waters of the sea are set into motion by storms, or by the introduction of an active mass which rides upon their surface, with violence and rapidity, the volatile vapours contained in the bosom of the sea escape, and rise up a fine mist, which forms an atmosphere round the vessel.

This atmosphere advances with the vessel, and is increased every moment by fresh emanations rising from the bottom of the water.

These emanations appear like so many small clouds, which, joining each other, form a kind of sheet projecting forward, one extremity of which touches the ship, whilst the other advances into the sea, to a considerable distance.

But this train of vapours is not visible to the sight. It escapes observation by the transparency of its particles, and is confounded with the other fluids which compose the atmosphere.

But as soon as the vessel arrives within a circumference, where it meets with other homogeneous vapours, such as those which escape from land, this sheet, which till that time had been so limpid and subtil, is suddenly seen to acquire consistence and colour, by the mixture of the two opposite columns.

Tliis change begins at the prolonged extremities, which by their contact are united, and acquire a colour and strength; afterwards, in proportion te the progression of the vessel, the metamorphosis increases and reaches the centre. At last the phenomenon becomes the more manifest, and the shin makes its appearance.

- translation on page 351, The Monthly Anthology, and Boston Review, Volume 6, 1809

Hmm.

- Ray

Floodland

"Imagine that England is covered by water, and Norwich is an island ..." begins the cover blurb of Marcus Sedgwick's young-adult novel Floodland (Dolphin Paperbacks / Orion Children's Books, 2000, ISBN 1 85881 763 3).