A certain song recently had me captivated, much like the song “We Didn’t Start The Fire” by Billy Joel, “The Last Shanty” written by Tom Lewis in 1987 on his album Surfacing!. Is a song that overviews a long history, but is more focused than Joel’s song, as “The Last Shanty” focuses instead on the ages of sailing.

The very starting verse is about the fact the young man was brought up to expect sailing to be terribly hard, eating hardtack, sleeping on hammocks, hauling the mast, and that stokers don’t really exist anymore.

By verse three, it is covering that sailing ships no longer even catch the wind, they gave them an engine that ” first went up and down
Then with more technology, the engine went around,” referencing reciprocating engines and rotary engines respectively.

When steamships started to augment and replace sail ships first steam boilers were fired by coal. Ships needed stokers to shovel the coal to fire the boilers. Back then a ship only could travel as fast as its stokers could shovel coal. In the 1920s coal fired boilers widely got replaced by oil fired boilers and diesel engines so a stoker to shovel the coals was not longer necessary. Hence the line: “A stoker ain’t a stoker with a shovel anymore”

Verse four covers the adiss lamp and the usage of Morse code to communicate between ships, as well as mentioning radios and cyphers.

All in all, while it is a fun song, it also feels oddly somber, describing that if you see a sailin’ ship, it might be your last. That the sailors we once knew are a dead breed.