To commemorate the bicentenary, the National Maritime Museum has worked with the New Scorpion Band and the New Testament Church of God – Charlton Tabernacle Gospel Choir to rediscover some of the links between eighteenth and nineteenth century sea shanties and contemporary and modern spiritual and gospel music.

In tracing this shared musical heritage it has been possible to shed light on the many links between the eighteenth century sailors’ shanties and the modern gospel sound.

The National Maritime Museum’s extensive manuscripts collection covers all aspects of British seafaring from the 14th to the 20th centuries, illustrating themes of Britain and the sea, empire and cultural interchange, sea power, maritime technology, exploration and navigation.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, London’s ports would have been buzzing with sounds and voices from around the world.

Some of the documents from the museum’s Henley archive in the manuscripts collection give a sense of the global exchanges taking place in and around London’s docks at the time of the transatlantic slave trade. Crew lists in the archive show us that sailors came to London from all around the world. Yet the stories of ordinary sailors and what they encountered on their voyages are rarely recorded in these archives, and so have been lost.

One of the few ways in which the stories of ordinary sailors can be traced is through the legacy of sea songs and shanties that have been passed down from generation to generation as oral tradition. Oral traditions fuse diverse cultures, and the sea shanties are a prime example of this. This musical legacy allows us to hear evidence of thoughts and opinions from the time of the transatlantic slave trade.

Sea shanties were work songs or chants sung onboard ships in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The rhythm of the shanties helped to co-ordinate heavy work required on the ship, and different tasks onboard required songs of different rhythms and tempos.

A feature of many shanties is the use of call-and-response. The call-and-response tradition is thought to have originated in West African culture, and was a feature of the work songs of enslaved peoples. British sailors involved in the triangular trade would have heard these work songs in the ports of the Caribbean and the Americas as slaves packed up the cargo for the ships to sail back to Britain, carrying goods such as cotton, sugar and rum.

The songs heard in these circumstances would have been taken on by the shantymen and sailors and adapted during their voyages, leaving us with some of the call and response shanties we still know today, an example of which is the song Essequibo River:

Call: ‘Essequibo River is the queen of rivers all’

Response: ‘Buddy tan na na, we are somebody oh’

From Essequibo River

This song is not only an example of call and response, but also hints at resistance to enslavement, through the rousing chorus of ‘we are somebody oh’.

Many of the lyrics in the songs chosen by the band give a sense of the brutality of the trade. Often proving uneasy listening, the songs show us the opinions of sailors complicit in the trade:

‘It was in Valparaiso I fell in with Captain Moore.

He commanded the clipper Flying Cloud, sailing out of Tramore.

‘Twas there I did agree with him on a slavery voyage to go,

To the burning shores of Africa where the sugarcane do grow.’

From The Flying Cloud

In addition to work songs, sailors would have sung for leisure. Popular at the time, broadside ballads were cheaply printed comments on contemporary events, available widely and sung to popular tunes.

Abolitionists used ballads to reach the widest possible audience to publicise their cause. The abolitionist ballads were sometimes graphic to alert listeners to the brutal reality of the trade. An example of this can be found in the following shanty, which includes unambiguous references to the irons and shackles used by slavers:

‘Here’s padlocks and bolts, and screws for the thumbs,

That squeeze them so lovingly till the blood comes’

From Sweet Meat has Sour Sauce, or, The Slave Trader in the Dumps, 1788, by William Cowper (published 1836)

Many of the original shanties have been lost, as they were not written down. Those that have survived give us a unique window on a shared history. Hearing the shanties sung alongside the gospel and spiritual songs of the choir gives us a stark example of the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade on modern music, and more broadly, on our lives today.