The Concertina at Sea - The Anglo-German Concertina

and on going on deck I found it was in the forecastle, so, of
course, I went fore. There they were all singing hymns,
accompanied
by the concertina. It was truly pleasant, and
it did the heart good to see it. 25
As the concertina became more and more commonly found
amongst sailors, it was perhaps inevitable that a ship would
be named after it. The three-masted bark Concertina
visited Boston in February of 1862, and Philadelphia in
August of 1876, among other ports of call; it was active in
merchant trade with Italy. able to find
ther ships named after fiddles, banjos or accordions; the
oncertina was fast becoming a marine icon.
26 I have been un
o
c
The concertina in the whaling trade
The concertina was commonly used by sailors in the
whaling trade. The Merlin, a whaling bark from New
Bedford Massachusetts, was one of several whaling ships
where the wife of the captain sailed with her husband;
these were known by sailors as ‘hen frigates’. Helen Allen
kept a diary during a four year-long voyage (1868-1872),
and as nautical writer and musician Robert L. Webb has
recounted, she paid a fair amount of attention to musical
details onboard the Merlin and other ships they
encountered. During a close encounter at sea with the crew
of the 300-man crew of the British steam-sail corvette
Cossack at a stop in the Comoro Islands off the east
African coast, she heard ‘fine singing and flute playing last
night. We are so near we can see and hear it plainly’. After
that encounter, interest in music on board the Merlin seems
to have heightened, and Allen recounts the musical efforts
of the crew in some detail. During the following month,
she records that her husband ‘has given the smallest
accordion to Brazil, who is acting Cook at present, &
Henry
has sold his Concertina to Walter for three
dollars….Our men sing evenings.’ 27
The usage of concertinas by whaling crews seems to have
been both very frequent and long-lived, judging from the
effects these whalers had on the Eskimo and other native
Indian groups they encountered in Arctic Alaska and
Canada. Whaling vessels spent a great deal of time near
Inuit (Eskimo) and Aleut villages in the wintertime, when
the whalemen were frozen in, awaiting the spring breakup
of ice and resumption of whaling. As recently
noted by
anthropologist
John David Hamilton in a study of social
change in Canada’s Northwest Territories,
The peak of the whaling industry came in the middle of the
19
xual
lationships between the races, and the Inuit adopted
th century, and Americans dominated it. Their
relationship with the eastern Inuit was, on the whole,
happy, and there were few instances of the debauchery that
marked the Herschel Island whalery at the end of the
century. As in the Delta, there were many se
re
fiddle and concertina music as part of their culture. 28
10
Anthropologists found the same cultural influences in
Eskimo villages in eastern Greenland, as a 1923 study of
the Ammassalik group noted:
It is of frequent occurrence on the whole, that the Eskimo
compose
texts for the dance tunes they have learned from
foreign seamen. The dances are accompanied as a rule by
Eskimo players, who show considerable skill in the use of
the violin and concertina. 29
A first-hand account of that cultural interchange, is
provided
by the accounts of the 1899 voyage of the British
whaling steamer Esquimaux through the Davis Straits to
Greenland. At the end of a visit to an Inuit village along
the west coast,
y themselves immensely.
he sun was behind the hill at midnight, and there were
four degrees of frost while they were dancing on the ice.
The natives have provided us with seven brace of
ptarmigan, which are excellent. 30
…the crew were allowed to go onshore for a final
dance….The crew returned to the ship at 10pm, with all
the fair sex of the settlement at their heels. Something went
wrong with the condenser (on the ship), so a concertina
and violin were speedily at work on the ice, and dancing in
full swing. I got up some races amongst the men and
women, and gave scrambles for ginger nuts, tobacco,
chocolate, etc….All seemed to enjo
T
Figure 12. The three-masted British steam whaler
Esquimaux along the Greenland coast. From The
Cruise of the Esquimaux, by A. Barclay Walker,1899.
Another account is by a traveler on the Danish brig
Lucinde in 1884, visiting the Eskimo village at
Holstenborg, Greenland:
…in the evening I saw the Lucinde’s sailors come on shore
and make straight for the schoolhouse, which in an instant
was filled with young and old, women and men…With the
exception of three musicians—two violins and a
concertina—the men were rather a superfluous element,
for they were not wanted by the young girls, who now were
supplied with Danish partners, who kept swinging them
about to the tune
of ‘O Susannah!’ till late in the evening.
Among
the girls there were several of considerable beauty,