The Concertina at Sea - The Anglo-German Concertina

The 1870s
The Levina was a commercial schooner from nearby Wales
that was tied up in Dublin harbor in January 1870 while a
murder inquest took place. An Irish sailor named Denis
Kelly had died of suffocation in his quarters in the
forecastle, and had also suffered a broken nose. A ship’s
officer, who had been the last to see the sailor alive,
recounted that
…when I went to tell them the night before to go to bed
they said they would, as soon as they played out their tune
on the concertina. 38
Figure 15. The Young Australia, built 1853 and
shipwrecked in 1872. The image is courtesy of the
Brodie Collection, La Trobe Picture Collection, State
Library of Victoria, Australia.
On the other side of the globe, the year 1870 was a hard
one in the crown colony of Australia, and a number of
Australians voyaged to the Fiji Islands to seek their
fortune, colonizing it in turn. The three-masted ship Young
Australia was one of the ships used in this venture. At
harbor in Rotumah, Fiji,
There happened fortunately to be a concertina on board
the ship, and this was brought ashore every evening by one
of the sailors. First of all, the white men would dance a
hornpipe or ‘break-down’, then the natives would dance
their own dances to their own wild music. Sometimes both
parties would take hands and dance together, and then
assuredly the measure would be one of the strangest ever
stepped by sane people. 39
All was not well, however. The new colonists needed
laborers to do their work, and were not above enslaving
native Fijians. This reportedly occurred with the assistance
of a concertina-playing crew member, in one of the worst
abuses of the instrument ever recorded:
Masters and crews would not always be proof against the
temptation of securing a large number of men at one
‘haul.’ What, for example, could be easier than to put the
hatches on when a number of natives were eating beef and
biscuit in the hold? Or, if some natives were too wary to
come off, might there not be found ways to induce them to
do so? If there was a concertina on board, it might be
played as the vessel coasted along certain islands, and its
Siren notes would be sure to attract a crowd of delighted
and astonished natives. ….Perhaps a dozen islanders
would now come off-some swimming, some on surfboards,
some in canoes. Meanwhile, the men would be busy in their
own way. …the captain stands at the wheel, with a twinkle
in his eye, and anon asks aloud, ‘Are you ready, men?’
‘Aye, aye,sir,’ is the universal response. Then, in a voice
that rings through the ship, comes the laconic order,
‘Grab!’ 40
What goes around often comes around, however. In San
Francisco, California in 1873, the concertina was used in a
similar fashion to secure workers, but this time the sailors
themselves became the hunted ones, by runners whose
employment involved providing a steady supply of sailors
to ships:
The sailor runner’s principal inducement to Jack is a billet
ashore where he can have all play and very little work. The
bark Kelso, which sailed a few days ago, had all her men
captured by runners, and among them a boatswain who
played remarkably well on the concertina…. The
boatswain got $10 a week for playing the concertina to
amuse the sailors in a (runner-owned) boarding house.
…But the boatswain became disgusted with his occupation,
and gave his ‘boss’ the slip, shipping aboard a vessel
bound for Liverpool. 41
The practice of ‘shanghaiing’ sailors was a sizeable
industry along the San Francisco waterfront from 1850-
1910, and occurred with a nod and a wink from corrupt
public officials there. Targeted sailors were usually
drugged in a waterfront tavern, boarding house, or brothel,
and brought aboard unconscious. Their captors signed
them on, and would typically receive a signing bonus of
three month’s pay from the ship’s captain. 42
By 1871, the concertina was considered part of the kit of
the average sailor. Witness this description of ‘Our Seamen
and Sea Captains’, from a period British maritime
magazine:
In the foreign trades, in fine weather, during his day and
dog-watch below, when his ship is well clear of land, he
has many leisure hours which, if he can read, he wastes in
the perusal of trashy novels, too often the only books to be
found in a forecastle, save the tracts and magazines which
the seaman’s chaplain has put on board. Not infrequently
the seaman is totally uneducated, and then playing at
cards, building and rigging miniature ships, painting
curious devices upon the inside of the lid of his clothes
chest, tattooing his arms, making mats, practicing on his
flute or concertina, idle talk and grumbling, occupy all of
his spare time…. 43
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