THE SOUND OF MUSIC

When I was a young man I sailed with the rest / on a Liverpool packet bound out for the west…’ These are lines that won’t be found in John Masefield, or any other official poetry book, yet the story that unravels as the lines roll on encapsulate to a tee the life of the deckhand on a 19th-century deepwater sailing ship.

‘For thirty-two days we was ’ungry and sore / for the winds they was against us and the gales they did roar…’ It isn’t long before our man is beached in New York, where he soon falls into the hands of the keeper of a sailors’ boarding house to whom, with the wisdom of hindsight, he refers to as ‘a fat old crimp’. From these dens of iniquity, seamen either lacking in moral fibre