Songs

From Best, George. 1578. A True Discourse of the Late Voyages of Discoverie, for the Finding of a Passage to Cathay (https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A09429.0001.001?view=toc)

Summer 1577, Inuit leader Eloudjuarng composes a song wishing Frobisher’s men happiness and good passage, and they sailed away.

1-5 August 1577 ‘The woman (Arnaq) at the first very suddenly, as though she disdained or regarded  not the man, turned away, and began to sing, as though she minded another matter.’ On ship, Best writes that the captured Inuit express ‘their grief of mind, when they part one from another, with a mournful song and dirges.’

11 August 1577 Twenty Inuit climb to the top of a hill and spend the remainder of the day singing and dancing, with their hands joined together above their heads, until night-fall. They dispersed in alarm on hearing the boom made by a ship’s cannon – “our great ordinance,” as Best calls it, “which thundered in the hollows of the high hills.”

George Best writes “They will teach us the names of each thing in their language, which we desire to learn, and are apt to learn anything of us. They delight in music above measure, and will keep time and stroke to any tune which you shall sing, both with their voice, head, hand, and feet, and will sing the same tune aptly after you.”

Back in Bristol:

8 November, 1577 the physician Edward Dodding writes as he attends to the Inuk:

he summoned up to a certain extent all the energies and faculties which he had abandoned, came back to himself as if from a deep sleep and recognised us as people he knew. But I turned my attention to medication, and he spoke those words of ours which he had learned, the few that he could, and in turn replied quite relevantly to questions. And he sang clearly that same tune with which the companions from his region and rank had either mourned or ceremonially marked his final departure when they were standing in the shore (according to those who heard them both): just like the swans who foresee what good there is in death, and die happily with a song. I had scarcely left him when he moved from life to death, forcing out as his last words, given in our language, “God be with you.”

While Inuit songs are shared and kept alive across time, and while there there is a lot of information about 19th-century British sea shanties, it’s more difficult to know what the 16th-century sailors’ songs sounded like. Before the 19th-century European whalers, the sailors on the ships would have sung ‘forecastle’ shanties (http://bbprivateer.ca/?q=shanty). These songs were about places visited that reminded the sailors of home. Sailors enjoyed singing songs of love, adventure, pathos, famous men, and battles. These are referred to in Best’s account, and in Edward Hayes’s account of the 1580 journey of the Golden Hinde, in Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s Voyage to Newfoundland. Francis Drake had professional musicians on board his ship in 1589. Instruments referred to in the accounts include fiddles, drums and trumpets. The earliest recorded work songs (1549) are in The Complaynt of Scotland https://archive.org/details/complayntofscotl01henruoft/page/xl.

Before this, when the Norse came to Nunavut, there is mention of a ‘Sea-Roller’s Song’ composed by Heriulf Heriulfsson in The Voyages To Vinland [1000 A.D.] (Harvard, 1909). ‘Upon the ship with Heriulf was a Christian man from the Hebrides; he it was who composed the Sea-Roller’s Song, which contains this stave:’

                                                            Mine adventure to the Meek One,                                 Monk-heart-searcher, I commit now;                                 He, who heaven’s halls doth govern,                                 Hold the hawk’s-seat ever o’er me!”