Famous Single Poems
rest depending on the imagination of the man who sang the solo part, and usually this imagination was of the most limited description. The pull was always on the accent of the chorus, as, for example:
Rendso was no sailor—
Rendso, boys, Rendso;
He shipped on board a whaler—
Rendso, boys, Rendso.
And finally the nautical references in the poem leave much to be desired. As a sailorman pointed out in the Scoop of Chicago, it would be about as easy to wrap a man in sheet-iron as in a piece of the mainsail, which is of canvas heavy and stiff enough to stand alone; and as for tying him up “with twice ten turns of a hawser’s bight”—well, a hawser is the largest rope on board a ship, and to make a bight or loop in it would require a Samson or a Hercules.
“We of the sea,” continued this old salt, “locate the scene of the verse at Dead Chest Island, half-way between the S. W. and S. E. points of Porto Rico, four and a half miles off-shore, which was used as a pirate rendezvous and later as the haven of wreckers and smugglers. It was first named by the Spanish ‘Casa de Minos’—the coffin.”
Mr. Allison acknowledged cheerfully that
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