Today historians and musicologists collect and catalog original work songs and their antecedents and write very dry papers about the difference between coastwise and longshore chanties (both performed by stevedores loading and unloading ships at shore), but their work has little impact on people who want to gather to sing about the vengeful whales on a lovely Sunday afternoon. And so, sailors and slaves become pirates, and work songs become drinking songs. Popular history sails blithely around the harbor with an eye patch and plaster parrot, while real history sits on the muddy bottom, sifting little shards of truth from the silt of the past.
But sailors were self-mythologizing even in their own time, their songs casting a life of unremitting toil as one of dashing adventure. Sitting aboard the Star of India, I was reminded of the Jimmy Buffett song “A Pirate Looks at Forty,” in which he sings, “Yes, I am a pirate, two hundred years too late/The cannons don’t thunder, there’s nothing to plunder/I’m an over forty victim of fate/Arriving too late, arriving too late.” (Again, chantey singers were not pirates, but this is distinction no one at a sea shanty convention is keen on making.) Today, sailors, one of the most racially heterogenous communities of the 19th-century, are reimagined as stalwart white men (and a few white women in low-cut bodices), and the songs of slaves, indentured servants, immigrants, and laborers as anthems for office workers longing to be free. It’s not just Jimmy Buffett: everyone wants to be a pirate. Pirates wanted to be pirates, too.
I want to believe good things can come from a romantic reimagining of the past. I love Victorian-era medievalists and fake ornamental castle ruins. I still enjoy the goofy anachronisms of folk revivalists and Parrotheads, but even harmless nostalgia doesn’t feel so harmless now. The spectacle of neo-Nazis in polo shirts carrying party-store tiki torches in defense of Confederate statues erected in the 20th century is a twisted form of ahistorical cosplay. The noble Confederate soldier is a more insidious and wicked lie than the dashing, chantey-singing pirate, but it’s not hard to see the parallels between criminals recast as quixotic romantics, a dying breed of real men. Nor is it hard to draw parallels between white-washing African work songs and imagining an all-white America that never was (or ought to be). Accountants in eyepatches hoisting margaritas to “Rolling Down to Old Maui,” long for an imaginary era of “greatness” and they won’t let the facts stand in their way. It’s dangerous to treat history like a toy chest filled with plastic broad swords and pirate hats. I don’t know how to enjoy Renaissance Faires and steampunk corsets and sea chantey conventions in the time of MAGA, but perhaps we start by interrogating the myths and motives behind our nostalgia, and by honoring the unglamorous work of uncovering the muddy truth.