Animals in Sea History by Richard King
ames H. Williams grew up in Rhode Island in the 1870s. His father, a sailor and a loving dad, died when James was only seven, but it was always clear that he had wanted his son to go to college. Yet James fell in love with the sea as a child, so his mother allowed him to apprentice to a merchant ship captain as soon as he could. Young James was aboard a ship in Barbados when that captain—his guardian—died, leaving the fourteen-year-old boy working aboard another ship far from home and among strangers. So began his decades as a merchant ship sailor and whaleman. Over time he established himself as a writer about life at sea, which included an important record of a ceremony involving a “poor old horse.” In January of 1888, at 23 years old, James Williams was in Philadelphia when he signed onto a ship bound for Calcutta. As was customary, he was given an advance in pay for signing on board as crew, but just before the ship was scheduled to depart, he learned of the death of his beloved James H. Williams mother. The captain refused to grant him time off to go the funeral, accusing him of planning to take off with the advance pay and claiming that the letter he showed them was forged. Williams protested and the captain called the police, who showed up and proceeded to beat him with clubs, throw him in jail, and charge him with desertion! “So I sailed away with a heavy heart,” Williams wrote later, having never been able to pay respects to his mom. That advance in pay, their debt to the shipowners, had to be earned back at sea before the crewmembers could begin earning money for themselves. Williams wrote that after two months out at sea, the crew’s “dead horse” was “worked up.” He described his shipmates hauling a horse up to the yardarm while singing a sea chantey with SEA HISTORY 173, WINTER 2020–21
the refrain: “Oh, poor Old Man, your horse must die! And I think so; and I hope so!” Williams wrote that they then cut the halyard and “let the old ‘dead horse’ drop into the sea.”
Stan Hugill made this sketch of the “Dead Horse Halyard Shanty” to illustrate his 1961 book, Shanties from the Seven Seas.
Thankfully, this was not a real horse, but an effigy, a large puppet, that the crew likely crafted with old sailcloth, worn-out rope, a spare barrel, and maybe pieces of scrap wood to form the legs. If the advance pay caused so much grief, then why did they accept it in the first place? Once a ship left port, the men would not be paid until the end of the voyage, which was of no help to them if they had families
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