Come Down with the Killock

DESCRIPTION: "Come down with the killock And out with the line; Of fish about here, boys, There is a good sign." The ship sails; it's "not like the fools Who are hunting for fat." The singer decides fishing is better than sealing: "Off to the ice Go fools in a rush."
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1916 (Murphy, The Seal Fishery)
KEYWORDS: ship hunting fishing nonballad
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (2 citations):
Ryan/Small-HaulinRopeAndGaff, p. 26, "Come Down with the Killock" (1 text)
ADDITIONAL: Briton Cooper Busch, _The War Against the Seals: A History of the North American Seal Fishery_, McGill-Queen's University Press, 1985, p. 57, "(no title)" (1 text)
Roud #V44634
NOTES [335 words]: Sealing was almost like gambling: some years a ship and her sailors would make a (literal) killing, others they would come back with almost nothing. This was hard on both ship owners (who still had to pay the expenses of outfitting the ship) and sealers (who might not get paid anything and would have had to pay the expenses of getting to port; prior to 1902, the sealers also had to pay just to get on a ship; see the notes to "The Sealer's Strike of 1902 (The Sealers Gained the Strike)"). And sealers were at significant risk of death or injury; hunting seals ("hunting for fat"), although it was held in awe in Newfoundland, was frankly an occupation for those who liked to take silly risks.
Most would not have admitted that fact. The writer of this piece seems to have been an exception. He apparently preferred to go for cod (at that time, still a reliable harvest) rather than risk going bust as a sealer.
According to StoryKirwinWiddowson, pp. 285-286, "killock" is a variant of "killick," an anchor with a stone supplying the weight. This became proverbial in several ways: "If you lose your killick, you'll find it in the fall [on your bill from the merchant]"; a woman who was pregnant "had a rock in her killick"; "killick-stones" were, of course, the stones placed in the wooden cage of a killick. In this case, it would seem, the singer is saying, "Lower the anchor so we can take the fish around here."
The word "killick" was also known in the Royal Navy; according to Bradford, pp. 51-52, "a leading seaman [was] known as a 'killick' (little anchor) from the badge on his arm." Uden/Cooper, p. 247, note that this meaning led to two verb forms: to "ship the killock" was to be promoted to leading seaman, and to "up killock" was to leave the ship (often by deserting), from the image of raising the anchor. So, in a sense, the singer of this song has upped killock from the whole business of fishing. Probably, though, the singer did not know this usage, which was apparently navy-specific. - RBW
Bibliography

Bradford: Ernle Bradford, The Mighty Hood, 1959 (I use the 1977 Coronet paperback)
StoryKirwinWiddowson: G. M. Story, W. J. Kirwin, and J. D. A. Widdowson, editors, Dictionary of Newfoundland English, second edition with supplement, Breakwater Press, 1990
Uden/Cooper: Grant Uden and Richard Cooper, A Dictionary of British Ships and Seamen, 1980 (I use the 1981 St. Martin's Press edition)

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