Ask Dr. DW: Pirate version

[tahnan]

Recently, for reasons I dare not even try to understand never mind explain, I found myself singing "What Do We Do With a Drunken Sailor?". Rare as this is, it's even rarer when I'm at a computer, which meant that for the first time I had the presence of mind to try to check something about it.

One of the things that we do with a drunken sailor is "Put him into bed with the captain's daughter". It's a well-known fact that the "captain's daughter" is another name for the cat-o'-nine-tails, which is why this is a punishment for a drunken sailor. Of course, the correlation between things that are well-known and things that are true isn't very strong. So I thought: at last! A chance to actually check this fact!

Wikipedia, of course, confirms it, which does nothing whatsoever to convince me. Actually, I was hoping it would have a reference, but no, it doesn't. The web is similarly willing to confirm it, similarly without any actual convincingness. Google Books seemed like a good place to look, but the fact that Pushkin wrote a short story called "The Captain's Daughter" somewhat overwhelms the search; you can add "whip", but that's more or less the websearch equivalent of begging the question—of course if you add "whip" to the search, you get hits confirming that it's a whip. As it happens, those books are things like 2010's The Book of Pirates and 2002's Pirattitude!: So You Wannna Be a Pirate? Here's How!, which rank somewhere below Wikipedia on sources I'd trust. (Also a page in Anticraft: Knitting, Beading and Stitching for the Slightly Sinister, which tells me "These days, however, a taste of the Captain's Daughter can be quite sexy (assuming everyone is a consenting adult)", just before instructions on how to crochet one. I'm also taking this to be less than authoritative.) What's very much lacking from Google Books is any kind of authentic reference to "the captain's daughter" as a flogging device of any sort.

(I was starting to doubt that the song itself was even authentic, but there are indeed results from the late 1800s for "What Shall We Do With The Drunken Sailor"—for instance, in The Water-Babies, serialized in the early 1860s; and seems to be mentioned with the same title by Dickens in 1856. But I digress.)

My readers being either well-educated in the ways of historical sea shanties, or else as vile a mob of scurvy dogs as ever raised a mug of rum, seem likely to be able to answer with certainty. Why was "the captain's daughter" considered punishment—assuming that that line is as authentically 19th-century as the rest of the song? (Not obviously the case; Google Books only returns one hit for the combination of "What Shall We Do..." and "captain's daughter", and it's from 2010.) I've seen theories—a captain's daughter was simply that unattractive; being found in bed with his daughter by the captain was a guaranteed flogging—but someone out there must know the actual fact of the matter, or know someone who knows.

Comments

[greenlily]

I poked around the forum threads on mudcat.org, my usual source for such things, and didn't come up with anything definitive. There's one quote that looks promising, but it turns out to lead to a Quartermaster's Union page, which is apparently an SCA thing and therefore not a reliable citation in and of itself.

The thread's here: http://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=22895 and lists related threads at the top, if you're interested. I didn't read all the related threads, just the ones that persuaded me that no one involved in the discussions has any citations more reliable than 'My friend told me'. There are some good sources on the related practice of "kissing the gunner's daughter", which may lead you someplace.

[greenlily]

btw, following the link for the Latin lyrics takes me here: http://ingeb.org/songs/whatshal.html which also references the cat-o-nine-tails thing...this also appears to be a commercial/fansite rather than a scholarly site, but the homepage is so appallingly hideous that I didn't stick around to investigate.

[tahnan]

The "kiss the gunner's daughter" is definitely authoritative; it's cited in books of slang of the late 19th century, and used in a Bret Harte story with the "flogging" meaning. As for the rest of the thread...yeah, "I've heard this" seems to be the common theme, including I'm willing to believe this, as I've seen a "Bosun's Daughter", which was a studded club about 2' long—but "Bosun's Daughter" gets nothing but literal hits in Google Books.

They offer a similar theory about a "captain's starter"—no hits at all; "bosun's starter" does only slightly better, all of the references post-dating 1990. (Admittedly, including Patrick O'Brien, who I'm actually willing to trust on these things; and yet Merriam-Webster doesn't have that sense of "starter"....) The 19th century section of Google Books has heard of a club called a "bung-starter", used to knock out a bung, though it doesn't reference it as a tool of discipline, and "bung-starter" seems as likely as anything to apply to an assistant on-board ("The man dealing out the grog is called a 'bung-starter'", writes one non-sailor of his journeys on a ship). So plausible, but still somewhat unsupported.

But, yeah, the consensus there really does seem to be "No, I've totally heard this line before!".

[q-pheevr.livejournal.com]

Of the three versions of "Drunken Sailor" that happen to be in my iTunes library, no two agree on this line:

Artist	Genre	Country	Line
Captain Tractor	folk rock	Canada	"Throw him in the hold* with the captain's daughter"
Cylob	electronic	U.K.	"Put him in bed with the captain's daughter"
De Marconisten	shanty choir	Netherlands	[line does not occur]

*Or maybe hole; there's no [d] there that I can hear.

I don't know whether this says anything about the age or authenticity of the lyric, but the answers that the three versions do agree on, such as "Shave his belly with a rusty razor," I'm inclined to think are canonical.

Even assuming that the "captains' daughter" line turns out to be one of the original (or at least early) ones, I don't know that there necessarily would be a definitive answer to the question of why it's something you'd do with a drunken sailor. It's funny, and it scans right; beyond that, different singers might well have had different ideas about exactly how the scenario would play out, even right from the beginning of the history of the song.

[tahnan]

The latter point is a good one. On the other hand, there probably ought to be actual historical facts that suggest one explanation or another—lacking any reference at all to a "captain's daughter" being a cat-o'-nine-tails, that explanation is out; a line in H.M.S. Pinafore about how Josephine is so much prettier than the usual daughter of a naval captain would suggest that the "it's a punishment because she's ugly" is likely. (Actually, Pinafore has both a captain's daughter and puns on cat-o'-nine-tails; you'd think they would have combined the two if they could have.)

"It's funny and it scans right" is an answer, but it seems to me it only goes so far. There are a lot of things that scan right—"Take away his hat and call him David", "Send him to a college in Ohio", "Give him tea and crumpets on a platter", to take three I literally just made up—but why the captain's daughter line would be funny, and why it would have stuck, ought to be based in some fact about the captain's daughter. Note, too, that other oft-quoted lines are all clearly punishments: "Put him in a long boat, make him bail 'er", "Put him in the boathouse till he's sober", "Hang him by the leg in a running bowline", "Put him in the scuppers with a hose pipe on him" (actually, I have no idea what that means, but I'm sure it sounds unpleasant), the razor line, and so forth. The idea of a random funny non-punishment line sneaking in seems a little off.

[q-pheevr.livejournal.com]

Oh, and apparently the Drunken Sailor is a hazardous rock outside the port of Colombo. But that's probably not the drunken sailor that the song is about.

[jadelennox]

What You Do with the Drunken Sailor: Unexpurgated Sea Shanties seems to be available at the Boston public library. The review I found reads:

This is not your maiden aunt's sea chanty collection. But it could be your great grandmother's, considering the age of some of these songs. Longtime Naval officer, scholar, and novelist Douglas Morgan has put together a hilariously bawdy collection of twenty-two "unexpurgated" chanties and fo'c'stle songs drawn from the days of sail, the Navy, and the early merchant service.

In his introduction, editor Leigh Grossman says, "There have been many collections of sea chanties, but very few of them print the chanties the way they are actually sung, or put them into context of the Naval and maritime traditions in which they were created." This collection does just that. Each of these songs was actually heard at sea by Doug Morgan, who has sailed, in his own words "the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Med, and round the Horn;" and we can imagine that most of them were heard in their original context: as work songs.

From the familiar "Haul Away Joe" and "The Maid of Amsterdam," to the Cold War era song "Guantanamo Bay," Morgan provides all the verses, as well as the history of each chanty, and full glosses of the naughtier bits for the innocent among us. This collection serves to remind us that chanties arose out of the imaginations of working men isolated at sea for months at a time, and not those of the participants in your folk song club sing-around.

More than sixty illustrations make this a book that's fun to peruse. You'll learn, for example that the port of Baltimore, appears in so many chanties chiefly because it rhymes with "whore." You will, I guarantee, learn other useful tidbits of information, too.

The music, alas, is not included, but what else is the folk process for?--MDR

DesRosiers, Mary. "What Do You Do with a Drunken Sailor?" Sing Out! Winter 2003: 122. General Reference Center GOLD. Web. 24 Sep. 2011.


There's nothing in that review to indicate whether or not it attempts to do a scholarly analysis, or whether he cites his sources for the original chanteys. But it's easy enough to order by interlibrary loan, if you want to check it out.

[cyllan]

OMG I MUST HAVE THIS BOOK!

*pause*

Okay. Better now.

Given that What Shall We Do was a work song, it's highly likely that there is no "authoritative" and canonical song -- it likely changed from ship to ship and from year to year as people modified it to make it suit their needs. As such, Captain's Daughter may have been both "The daughter of the captain who is so ugly as to be a punishment" and "cat of nine-tails" or something in between, but is most likely a more modern edition. Sea Shanties never had their "Childe as far as I know -- a great pity, really.

[tahnan]

It's certainly true that there's not likely a "canonical" version. Still, the variations are going to vary within certain parameters, and if the "captain's daughter" line was added much later, it ought to be within the realm of possibility to track that addition, as well as to decide what the range of possible meanings of "captain's daughter" actually were.

[tahnan]

It's possible that it has no useful information, but it's also possible that I need to read this book because why not.

[jedusor.livejournal.com]

I have no clue, but thanks for the vicious earworm. :P