Tag: History

The migrations of an American boat type

Sharpie drawing

Sharpies have rather gone out of fashion since they were the talk of the boating forums a decade ago, but I still think it’s worth reminding ourselves about these strikingly elegant North American craft.

This drawing of a typical New Haven sharpie comes from a Project Gutenberg eBook of Howard Chappelle’s classic study of the sharpie, The Migrations of an American Boat Type, which I first read on paper long ago.

I vividly remember the excited anticipation of waiting for it to arrive in an exotic foreign – but thanks to the Gutenberg Project  folks you, dear reader, can obtain access to this stuff in a moment, and completely free of charge.

PS – I picked this up through reading the excellent US website Duckworksmagazine.com.

La Pique



It’s of a flash packet, La Pique is her name
All in the East Indies she bears great fame
For cruel bad usage of every degree
Like slaves in the galleys we plough the salt sea

This is another song I first heard many years ago on a Topic album. The melodeon here is my ancient Koch CF box, which I haven’t had long but really like using for this kind of thing. I think it dates from the 1920s before the Koch company became part of Hohner, and it’s funny to remember that dates back to a time when the crews of sailing ships still sang this song for their own entertainment.

I’m sorry to say I know very little about the origins of the song or the ship named La Pique that it describes – the references on the Internet seem to conflict. What’s more, to illustrate the song itself, I had to ‘borrow’ a photo of a completely different – though appropriately smart – packet ship from the mid-19th century.

Sea songs from Gavin Davenport’s new CD

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Gavin Davenport concertina and sea songs

My musician and singer friend Gavin Davenport has kindly agreed to let me publish a couple of MP3s of two sea songs from his new album Brief Lives, which is available from the shop section of his website. In each he accompanies himself using a beautiful old ebony-ended Wheatstone anglo concertina.

The songs, British Man Of War and On Board Of A Ninety-Eight come from the Navy’s wooden walls era, are striking and are really two sides of the same coin.

In the first, a swaggering and excited young tells his worried lover that he’s joining the Navy and will return covered in glory; in the second an old sailor tells the story of his heroic career as a sailor in the Navy, and finishes by explaining that he has been well looked after, and is now nearly 98. The ninety-eight of the title is a ship with 98 guns, by the way.

Neither really engage with the downsides of war and, like many sea songs, contain strong elements of boasting and wishful thinking. Well, I guess they had to have something to keep them going.