Leaving San Francisco in the Morning

John Sparrow, who will be leading our shanty sing in October, shared this fascinating video with us, produced by John Sabella from Port Angeles, WA. One of Sparrow's songs is in the documentary.

Leaving San Francisco in the Morning is a vignette from the documentary Sockeye and the Age of Sail 

About - "At the turn of the 20th Century, the Alaska Packers Association assembled the largest fleet of privately owned square rigged ships in the world to service the Alaska canned salmon trade. The vessels set sail for the north each spring. On departure day, the men gathered on the docks of San Francisco. It was a festive occasion. The Italians arrived with jugs of wine and the Scandinavians brought moonshine. Wives and sweethearts came to bid their men farewell. There were tears and laughter. Aboard ship the carpenters secured the anchors, locked the windlass, plugged the hawse pipes and fired up the donkey engine. It was important to have the donkey engine ready to handle the heavy work of raising sail in case the men were too drunk or too seasick. The voyage to Alaska was a difficult journey through uncharted waters often shrouded in fog and lashed by storms. Sometimes the ships took a coastwise route, calling on Puget Sound ports for lumber and coal, or ferrying supplies to and from the APA canneries at Point Roberts and Semiahamoo. Other ships bound for Alaska took the direct route through open ocean. For roughly a month, they beat northward against the westerly wind and current. Climb aboard, in this vignette from John Sabella's documentary Sockeye and the Age of Sail. View the full documentary on Pay Per View for as little as $4.95." -  John Sabella

Echo's Voice

When Every Thumb was a Marlinespike

The Longwinded Shantyman

A Spontaneous Song Circle.
Copyright 2012 by Cheryl Jones

     My dog Echo’s first experience with a crab was when one latched onto her upper lip after her inquisitive nose brought it within range of the crustacean’s snapping pincers. Echo’s frantic barking alerted me to her predicament. The sight of the crab bobbing with the rhythm of her baying was made even more hilarious by the repeat of Echo’s indignant yelping echoing off the cliffs bordering the opposite shore. The silly girl thought the sound was another dog, and split her attention between barking at the distant hound mocking her and the evil red rock that had reared up and bit her.

      What was a great laugh then was actually quite instructive when you stop to think about it. What if Echo’s situation had occurred during the age of sail? What if it had been fully dark out? Or foggy? What could Echo’s voice have accomplished for a mariner of old? Back then, the demise of most ships wasn’t the sea, it was the shore. A sailing instructor I once trained under was fond of saying, “Rocks are hard, water is wet, and the wind will blow where it will”. With those three truths in mind we can begin to form a picture of what the past sailors had to contend with in order to keep their vessels afloat. A traditional sailing ship didn’t have radar, or a spotlight, so what to do to pierce the gloom? Many tricks were employed, but the most common was to use echo’s voice to literally hear the distant shore.

Sonic Ranging in the Age of Sail

      In dry air, sound travels approximately one mile every five seconds. With that in mind, if a loud enough noise was created aboard a fogbound vessel that lay two miles from a rocky shore, the resulting sound waves would radiate outward, echoing off the danger ten seconds later, and then arrive back at the ship ten seconds after that. A navigator hearing an echo after twenty seconds, even if blindfolded would say, “The shore is two miles away.” But how could that sailor first produce a sound loud enough to remain audible for more than a quarter of a minute on a foggy night?

Firing blanks from the privateer Lynx's carronades.
Copyright 2012 Cheryl Jonesion

      It is an interesting historical fact that cannons and swivel guns were used for navigational sonic ranging more often than they were for hostilities. There was no need to expend shot. The gunner would fire a blank charge; just as the sail training vessels do now during mock battles. The shape of the echo would tell a great deal about the invisible object. Imagine the audible difference between a tree-lined shore, a sheer cliff, and a rugged mountain. All produce different reflections - and a sweeping shoreline produced them at different intervals. This proved a highly accurate method of gathering navigational data and is how the original charts of Puget Sound were created. If a vessel were close enough to the object of concern/interest then there was no need to expend black powder. A found object, such as a conch shell, could trumpet a cry loud enough to produce the necessary echo. In closer quarters hand clapping and even human voice were resorted to.

  
      In modern times I have tried all of these methods and found that they work astonishingly well. You can try it for yourself. Go from room to room in your house and in each close your eyes and clap your hands. Listen to the different size of each room - the hard, bright walls in the bathroom and kitchen, the soft quiet of the bedroom. Watch and listen intently during the next thunderstorm, or better yet, the next time you are boating close your eyes and sing a shanty. Perhaps a voice will join you from far away - echo’s voice. Perhaps that is what the sailors of old heard singing back from the rocks, and in their desperate loneliness spun the tales of the sirens. 

Mark Olson