Alarmed Skipper, The (The Nantucket Skipper)

DESCRIPTION: Claims that Nantucket skippers were able to tell where their ships are by tasting the sounding lead. A sailor plays a trick by running the lead through a box of parsnips; the skipper thinks that Nantucket has sunk and they're sailing over a garden.
AUTHOR: James Thomas Fields
EARLIEST DATE: 1845 (_Scientific American_)
KEYWORDS: talltale ship trick gardening humorous
FOUND IN: US
REFERENCES (4 citations):
Harlow-ChantyingAboardAmericanShips, pp. 192-194, "The Nantucket Skipper" (1 text)
Shay-AmericanSeaSongsAndChanteys, pp. 198-199, "The Nantucket Skipper" (1 text)
Huntington-TheGam-MoreSongsWhalemenSang, pp. 151-152, "Marm Haucket's Garden (The Nantucket Skipper)" (1 text, 2 tunes)
ADDITIONAL: Scientific American, volume 1, number 4 (1845), "The Ballad of the Alarmed Skipper" (1 text)
Roud #9172
ALTERNATE TITLES:
The Ballad of the Alarmed Skipper
NOTES [104 words]: Definitely not a folk song; it's included in a couple of song collections as a gag. But it is a popular poem; Granger's Index to Poetry lists the piece in three anthologies apart from Shay, and I have seen it in at least two other books besides those four.
It apparently also occurs as a folktale, and the folktale appears to have been influenced by oral tradition. A. B. C. Whipple, Yankee Whalers in the South Seas, Doubleday & Company, 1954, pp. 167-168, has the same tale, but instead of the skipper thinking Nantucket has sunk, he tells the crew to get back to work lest he shove the flowerpot down their throats. - RBW
Last updated in version 5.1
File: ShaSS198

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