Our Singing Country

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Our Singing Country
ROUND THE BAY OF MEXICO
F> a. No. 516. Henry Lundy, Nassau, Bahamas, 1935. See Co, pp. 84, 91 j Boa, p. 129j Co, p. 261 j also "Santy Anno," this volume, p. 206.
Bahaman Negro men are reputed to be the finest small-boat sailors in the world. Certainly, when one sees a twenty-five-foot boat, with one tat­tered and rotten sail, bringing oranges, bananas, corn, sugar cane, sponges, twenty goats, a cow, and six or eight human beings into Nassau harbor, after a journey across several hundred miles of open sea, one tends to believe this. The men spend half their lives on the sea, navigating their reef-filled courses at night with catlike calm and sureness, and their demeanor aboard their little craft is full of the grave beauty and the quiet dignity of the blue sea itself.
In August, when the hurricane season approaches, they pull their sloops up on the beach out of reach of the storms. The whole village descends to the beach, lays hold of the rope, and, as the "launching song55 is raised, heaves together. These songs are fragmentary variants of well known sea shanty tunes, and sung as they are, in harmony, substantiate Joanna Col-cord's statement that "first among the shanty singers55 were the American Negroes.