Once a month, you can hear the Alaska Fish House in Ketchikan from blocks away. The cozy little room is packed. People are thumping on the long wooden tables and singing. A man named Greg Thomas is usually in the back standing by the wood stove, singing the loudest. He leads these sea shanty nights. He’s been doing it for a long time.
Sea shanties have been around for centuries. But in recent years, they’ve made a pop culture comeback. You can hear them all over TikTok or in the video game Assassin’s Creed 4. But Thomas has been leading generations of people in swashbuckling song for over 30 years.
_________
The next day, Thomas was down at the Ketchikan Yacht Club, a little floating clubhouse on the docks in Thomas Basin.
Thomas grew up in Sydney, Australia. He spent some time in St. Louis, Missouri before coming up to Ketchikan.
“I came up here on a whim 30 years ago to go kayaking,” Thomas said . “Never left.”
Thomas brought the shanty tunes with him. It seems like he can’t help it.
That’s how he met the woman who would become his wife. He was singing sea shanties one night at the New York Cafe.
“And my wife – who wasn’t my wife then – said she’d heard the loudest voice singing she’d ever heard, so she had to go in and see it,” Thomas said. “And she’s also from Australia.”
That was two decades ago. He said sea shanties are the mutual love of their lives. He’s traveled all over Southeast Alaska singing them.
“You know how sometimes you get a song stuck in your head? I’ve had a song stuck in my head for 55 years,” Thomas said.
That song is “The Maid of Amsterdam” from the 1956 film adaptation of Moby Dick. The song is also known as “A-Roving.”
I’ll go no more a-rovin’ with you, fair maid
A-roving, A-roving, since roving’s been my ru-i-in
I’ll go no more a-roving with you, fair maid
“In the opening scene, Richard Basar goes into the inn to get his room, and he gets sucked into a sea shanty,” Thomas said. “The sailors are in the bar. They all get up, and they’re doing what you always think of a traditional sailor dancer. They’re all doing that and singing. He gets sucked in. And that has stuck with me forever.”
“A-Roving” is what’s called a “four stroke pump shanty.” Old wooden merchant sailing ships leaked almost constantly. So to keep them buoyant, sailors spent hours on the deck pulling water up out of the inside of the ship with a big levered pump.
The tempo of the song matched the rhythm of four guys pushing and pulling that lever over and over again. Thomas said a lot of sea shanties are like that: work songs that match the tempo of the repetitive work to be done on the high seas.
But for Thomas, sea shanties aren’t just about hauling levers and what one could possibly do with a drunken sailor. They were about class struggle and labor exploitation. Like the classic “According to the Act,” an ode to an English politician named Samuel Plimsoll.
“He could see the injustice of thousands of sailors dying because these huge companies would load up a ship so you couldn’t fit anything else on it, and they would over-insure it, because they knew there was a good chance it would sink,” Thomas said.
But those corporations didn’t really care if the ships sank. They collected either way. So Plimsoll fought the corporate machine by introducing the Merchant Shipping Act, which gave merchant mariners new rights and cargo limits. Thomas said Plimsoll was practically booed out of politics and died penniless.
“I always introduce that song to let people know that a man did this. Thousands of people were dying, and people didn’t care. The rich people of the world didn’t care,” Thomas said.
Thomas said a lot of the songs they sing are hundreds of years old. Many originated on the East Coast in places like Nantucket.
“The whole whaling history is, to me, where the sea songs all came from,” Thomas said. “Singing was a big part of their lives. Not only the work songs up on the deck, but songs down below. People would sing their things that were familiar to them about home.”
If you’re on social media, the sea shanty you probably know best is “The Weller Man.” The song is inspired by one of the biggest whaling companies in the South Pacific in the 1800’s. It was owned by the Weller brothers. Thomas said every six months or so, the company would send the whalers supplies. The company man with the supplies was called the “Wellerman.” The song is an intense ballad about killing a whale but Thomas said that probably wasn’t the original intent.
“The guy with the supplies never really harpooned whales,” he said.
Thomas always ends his sea shanty singalongs at the Alaska Fish House with a ballad called “Leave Her, Johnny.”
Frederick Pease Harlow, a sailor in the 1800s, wrote that they’d sing the song on the last day of a voyage, often as a way to complain about everything that went wrong.
It’s a long, hard pull to the next payday
And it’s time for us to leave her
Thomas said the important part of sea shanties is the camaraderie; everyone singing together.
“It’s important that everybody sings, and I think that’s the fun part of it,” Thomas said. “People say, ‘Oh God… sing?’ But they do.”
For Thomas, what makes sea shanties so universal is that they’re simple songs. You can sing them anywhere, with or without instruments. And perhaps they say something about humanity’s pursuit of a port in the storm.
