The Concertina at Sea - The Anglo-German Concertina

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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,
and some were excellent dancers. These the sailors seemed to appreciate, as they never allowed them to sit down for an instant.’ 31 Figure 13. The two-masted brig Lucinde, basking in the Aurora Borealis off Greenland, 1884. From Two Summers in Greenland, A. Riis Carstensen, 1890.) These interchanges left lasting effects. An article on Eskimo music in the Journal of American Folklore (1941), from ethnological research three quarters of a century after the peak whaling days, lists several square dance tunes for violin and concertina which have been introduced by sailors. 32 In the remote islands in Alaska’s Bering Sea, seal-hunting Aleuts had similar interchanges with whaling and seal-hunting ships, and likewise picked up both concertina and songs learned from the sailors, as this report from 1886 demonstrates: The great feminine solace in a well to do native hut is recourse to a concertina or accordion, as the case may be. These instruments are especially adapted to the people. … The appreciation of good music is keen. Many of the women can easily pick up strains from our own operas, and repeat them correctly after listening a short while to the traveler or his wife playing and singing. They are most pleased with sad, wailing tunes, such as Lorena, the Old Cabin Home and the like. 33 In another such encounter, Libby Beaman, the wife of a government agent on the remote Pribilof Islands in the Bering Sea, wrote of the following Aleut Christmas in the islands’ tiny village, St. Paul, in 1879: The dancing and festivities have been going on ever since Christmas. The first night after Christmas, the school hall was thrown open for a masquerade dance …. As the week passed, more and more clever maskers appeared in the streets and at the evening dances …. Last night, a few of the maskers stopped at the house. They came with the two concertina players and the fiddler and danced for about fifteen minutes for us, then went elsewhere. 34 There are many other such accounts of concertina playing amongst the remote Inuit and Aleut villages of Alaska, the Northwest Territories of Canada and Greenland, and a general consensus that it was interchange with whaling ships that brought the concertinas to the natives—strong evidence of the nearly ubiquitous occurrence of concertina playing amongst the whaling crews themselves in the late th 19 century. The following is from a present-day Inuit website in Nunavut, the newly-named northern province of Canada: Although most whaling in Hudson Bay was by American ships, there were also Scottish whaling ships, and some with crews from Portugal and the Azores. Whale hunting in Hudson Bay had a tremendous effect on Inuit. ….They learned to play the fiddle, concertina, and accordion, learned Scottish round dancing that evolved and is enthusiastically embraced today as "square dancing". …. there are many opportunities to square dance, especially at community events during Christmas and Easter. …. Square dances may be done to pre-recorded music, but there are also many skilled accordion or concertina players in the community and the region. And, there are many people who play the fiddle. This music has its roots in traditions brought to the Arctic by the Scottish and American whalers who hunted the bowhead whales in Hudson Bay in the mid- 1800s. People obtained the musical instruments by trading with the whalers and have passed the traditions down in their families. Square dances here are not quite the same as those danced in the American west or in the prairie provinces; they also have roots in the old English or Welsh “round dances”. Whatever the roots, they are great exercise as one dance can go on for 40 minutes to an hour or more! 35 Most Inuit musicians today play the button accordion 36 rather than the concertina, reflecting the same shift in popularity from concertina to accordion that occurred in the rest of global society, from about 1890 on. Such dancing of sailors with native peoples to the music of concertinas was not confined to Alaska, as this 1876 account of a dance in the Samoan Islands of the south Pacific indicates: f dusky beauties. Here a sedate foreigner is pirouetting with a pair of tappa’d plebeians, and there Jack tar is scrambling through a polka with an untappa’d princess. 37 In the evening, the Samoans envelope themselves in tappa, as the dews are very heavy, and stalk down like great ghosts from their own town to the vicinity of the saloons in the white quarter. There they sit or stand about in groups under the trees listening to the music—accordion and concertina—and watching the dancing, which is the certain accompaniment to sailor-life on shore. Strange and fantastic sights are to be witnessed at these revelries. At one end of the room German sailors will be indulging in their favourite ‘hop’ waltz with flower-decked damsels, and at the other the native ‘dove dance’ will be ‘coo’d’ through by a bevy o 11
Page 1 and 2: . The Concertina at Sea: A History
Page 3 and 4: Table 1. Index of ships where sailo
Page 5 and 6: II. A Compendium of Occurrences The
Page 7 and 8: As passenger ships became larger, t
Page 9: nder the awning, to the music of a
Page 13 and 14: The 1870s The Levina was a commerci
Page 15 and 16: Figure 18. Impromptu sailor’s ‘
Page 17 and 18: Greenland. They made several attemp
Page 19 and 20: …we rewarded ourselves with a lit

The Concertina at Sea - The Anglo-German Concertina

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